Three hypotheses were derived from research on vicarious revenge and tested in the context of the assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011. In line with the notion that revenge aims at delivering a message (the "message hypothesis"), Study 1 shows that Americans' vengeful desires in the aftermath of 9/11 predicted a sense of justice achieved after bin Laden's death, and that this effect was med...

1330 Attending college, without the right to vote, I had little or no interest in national politics (or state or local, for that matter). In the fall of 1960, John Kennedy arrived in Dayton to give a morning campaign speech from the courthouse steps. Cutting classes, I zigzagged through the crowd to watch and hear Kennedy speak to everyone, regardless of age, race, religion, or gender. That spe...

This paper argues that politicians are overprotected. The costs of political assassination differ systematically depending on whether a private or a public point of view is taken. A politician attributes a very high (if not infinite) cost to his or her survival. The social cost of political assassination is much smaller as politicians are replaceable. Conversely, the private cost of the securit...

The bullet evidence in the JFK assassination investigation was reexamined from metallurgical and statistical standpoints. The questioned specimens are comprised of soft lead, possibly from full-metal-jacketed Mannlicher-Carcano (MC), 6.5-mm ammunition. During lead refining, contaminant elements are removed to specified levels for a desired alloy or composition. Microsegregation of trace and min...

We have revisited the acoustic evidence in the Kennedy assassination--recordings of the two Dallas police radio channels upon which our original NRC report (Ramsey NF et al., Report of the Committee on Ballistic Acoustics. National Research Council (US). Washington: National Academy Press, 1982. Posted at http://www.nap.edu/catalog/10264.html) was based--in response to the assertion by DB Thoma...

This paper studies whether national leadership shocks affect a country’s economic growth. Jones and Olken [2005] find that national leaders’ accidental death affects growth. In subsequent work, Jones and Olken [2009] find that different outcomes of assassination attempts, successful attempts versus unsuccessful ones, matter for countries’ institutions. This paper considers whether the outcome o...