Author: engeladmin

A social network contagion theory of risk perception

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Author: Scherer, Clifford W.; Cho, Hichang Description: Risk perceptions have, to a great extent, been studied exclusively as individual cognitive mechanisms in which individuals collect, process, and form perceptions as atomized units unconnected to a social system. These individual-level theories do not, however, help explain how perception of risk may vary between communities or within a single community. One alternative approach is based on a network theory of contagion. This approach, emerging largely from organizational and community social network studies, suggests that it is the relational aspects of individuals and…

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The Mechanics of Motivated Reasoning

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Author: Epley, Nicholas; Gilovich, Thomas Description: Whenever we see voters explain away their preferred candidate’s weaknesses, dieters assert that a couple scoops of ice cream won’t really hurt their weight loss goals, or parents maintain that their children are unusually gifted, we are reminded that people’s preferences can affect their beliefs. This idea is captured in the common saying, “People believe what they want to believe.” But people don’t simply believe what they want to believe. Psychological research makes it clear that “motivated beliefs” are guided by motivated reasoning–reasoning in…

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Preferences and beliefs in ingroup favoritism

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Author: Everett, J.; Faber, N.; Crockett, M. Description: Ingroup favoritism–the tendency to favor members of one’s own group over those in other groups–is well documented, but the mechanisms driving this behavior are not well understood. In particular, it is unclear to what extent ingroup favoritism is driven by preferences concerning the welfare of ingroup over outgroup members, vs. beliefs about the behavior of ingroup and outgroup members. In this review we analyze research on ingroup favoritism in economic games, identifying key gaps in the literature and providing suggestions on how…

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Increasing frequency and intensity of the most extreme wildfires on Earth

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Author: Cunningham, Calum X.; Williamson, Grant J.; Bowman, David M. J. S. Description: Climate change is exacerbating wildfire conditions, but evidence is lacking for global trends in extreme fire activity itself. Here we identify energetically extreme wildfire events by calculating daily clusters of summed fire radiative power using 21 years of satellite data, revealing that the frequency of extreme events (>99.99th percentile) increased by 2.2-fold from 2003 to 2023, with the last 7 years including the 6 most extreme. Although the total area burned on Earth may be declining, our…

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Direct and indirect influences of political regimes on corruption

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Author: Goel, R.; Nelson, M. A. Description: Objective: This paper studies the direct and indirect impacts of political regimes on corruption. Whereas the interplay of government is fundamental to corrupt acts, the present research sheds new light by showing the direct and indirect influences of dimensions of government structure on corruption. Methods: We employ two different estimation techniques. First, we use OLS regressions, with year and regional dummies. Second, we employ mediation analysis to account for the intermediate role of government size in the relation between government structure and corruption…

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Sociophonetics and language prejudice: Accent matters: a socio-psychological perspective on sociophonetics

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Author: Witkowska, M., Filippi, S., Formanowicz, M., & Suitner, C. Description: People communicate substantial information about themselves with their accents. Through a social psychological lens, this chapter reviews first that people pay attention and react to different accents due to their evolutionary (signal of potential threat), social (signal of group membership), and cognitive (signal that is difficult to process) relevance. Second, this chapter discusses various effects related to the difficulty of comprehension of accented speech, the activation of social categories by vocal and other concomitant cues, and the stereotypes and…

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Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination

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Author: Fiske, S. T. Description: Examines why stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination are enduring phenomena. Social psychological research, reviewed here in 4 major sections, explains that stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination have (1) some apparently automatic aspects and (2) some socially pragmatic aspects, both of which tend to sustain them. But, as research also indicates, change is possible, for (3) stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination seem individually controllable, and consequently, (4) social structure influences their occurrence. Past and present theoretical approaches to these issues are also discussed. Subject headings: Stereotypes; Prejudice; Discrimination; Psychology…

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Neurocognitive Basis of Racial Ingroup Bias in Empathy

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Author: Han, Shihui Description: Racial discrimination in social behavior, although disapproved of by many contemporary cultures, has been widely reported. Because empathy plays a key functional role in social behavior, brain imaging researchers have extensively investigated the neurocognitive underpinnings of racial ingroup bias in empathy. This research has revealed consistent evidence for increased neural responses to the perceived pain of same-race compared with other-race individuals in multiple brain regions and across multiple time-windows. Researchers have also examined neurocognitive, sociocultural, and environmental influences on racial ingroup bias in empathic neural responses,…

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The Psychology of Sexual Prejudice

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Author: Herek, Gregory M. Description: Sexual prejudice refers to negative attitudes toward an individual because of her or his sexual orientation. In this article, the term is used to characterize heterosexuals’ negative attitudes toward (a) homosexual behavior, (b) people with a homosexual or bisexual orientation, and (c) communities of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people. Sexual prejudice is a preferable term to homophobia because it conveys no assumptions about the motivations underlying negative attitudes, locates the study of attitudes concerning sexual orientation within the broader context of social psychological research on…

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Prejudice: From Allport to DuBois

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Author: Gaines, S.; Reed, E. Description: The differences between the accounts of Gordon Allport (1954/1979) and W. E. B. DuBois (1903/1969) regarding the origins of prejudice and the impact of discrimination on the personality and social development of African Americans are examined. The authors contend that even though Allport’s universalist approach to the causes and consequences of prejudice essentially has gone unchallenged in the mainstream social-psychological literature, DuBois’s social-historical approach to personality psychology questions the assumptions that have guided theory and research on prejudice since the time of Allport. The…

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