American Idol
Lile Jia, Samuel Karpen & Edward Hirt
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Americans' opposition toward building an Islamic community center at Ground Zero has been attributed solely to a general anti-Muslim sentiment. We hypothesized that some Americans' negative reaction was also due to their motivation to symbolically pursue a positive U.S. group identity, which had suffered from a concurrent economic and political downturn. Indeed, when participants perceived that the United States was suffering from lowered international status, those who identified strongly with the country, as evidenced especially by a high respect or deference for group symbols, reported a stronger opposition to the "Ground Zero mosque" than participants who identified weakly with the country did. Furthermore, participants who identified strongly with the country also showed a greater preference for buildings that were symbolically congruent than for buildings that were symbolically incongruent with the significance of Ground Zero, and they represented Ground Zero with a larger symbolic size. These findings suggest that identifying group members' underlying motivations provides unusual insights for understanding intergroup conflict.
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Kalev Leetaru
First Monday, September 2011
Abstract:
News is increasingly being produced and consumed online, supplanting print and broadcast to represent nearly half of the news monitored across the world today by Western intelligence agencies. Recent literature has suggested that computational analysis of large text archives can yield novel insights to the functioning of society, including predicting future economic events. Applying tone and geographic analysis to a 30-year worldwide news archive, global news tone is found to have forecasted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, including the removal of Egyptian President Mubarak, predicted the stability of Saudi Arabia (at least through May 2011), estimated Osama Bin Laden's likely hiding place as a 200-kilometer radius in Northern Pakistan that includes Abbotabad, and offered a new look at the world's cultural affiliations. Along the way, common assertions about the news, such as "news is becoming more negative" and "American news portrays a U.S.-centric view of the world" are found to have merit.
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Andreas Kastenmüller et al.
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, September 2011, Pages 604-616
Abstract:
Based on terror management theory, previous research has shown that terrorism threat increases prejudice against Muslims and is mediated by death-related thoughts. Because this effect was found on a correlational level, it remains unclear whether terrorism threat increases prejudice against Muslims because of enhanced death-related thoughts or the opposite: terrorism threat increases death-related thoughts because of stronger prejudice against Muslims. To disentangle this shortcoming, we varied death-related thoughts by systematically manipulating the belief in literal immortality. Using two studies, we found that participants exposed to terrorism pictures (vs. controls) had increased prejudice against both Muslims (Study 1) and immigrants (Study 2) when they were led to believe that literal immortality does not exist but not when they were led to believe that it does exist. Mediation analysis indicated that this effect was mediated by death-related thoughts. This provides further evidence that terrorism threat increases prejudice because of death-related thoughts.
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Whence Differences in Value Priorities? Individual, Cultural, or Artifactual Sources
Ronald Fischer & Shalom Schwartz
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, October 2011, Pages 1127-1144
Abstract:
To what extent do value priorities vary across countries and to what extent do individuals within countries share values? We address these questions using three sets of data that each measure values differently: the Schwartz Value Survey for student and teacher samples in 67 countries (N = 41,968), the Portrait Values Questionnaire for representative samples from 19 European countries (N = 42,359), and the World Value Survey for representative samples from 62 countries (N = 84,887). Analyses reveal more consensus than disagreement on value priorities across countries, refuting strong claims that culture determines values. Values associated with autonomy, relatedness, and competence show a universal pattern of high importance and high consensus. Only conformity values show patterns suggesting they are good candidates for measuring culture as shared meaning systems. We rule out reference-group and response style effects as alternative explanations for the results and discuss their implications for value theory, cross-cultural research, and value-based intergroup conflict.
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Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?
Michael Clemens
Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011, Pages 83-106
Abstract:
What is the greatest single class of distortions in the global economy? One contender for this title is the tightly binding constraints on emigration from poor countries. Vast numbers of people in low-income countries want to emigrate from those countries but cannot. How large are the economic losses caused by barriers to emigration? Research on this question has been distinguished by its rarity and obscurity, but the few estimates we have should make economists' jaws hit their desks. The gains to eliminating migration barriers amount to large fractions of world GDP-one or two orders of magnitude larger than the gains from dropping all remaining restrictions on international flows of goods and capital. When it comes to policies that restrict emigration, there appear to be trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.
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The Decider's Dilemma: Leader Culpability, War Outcomes, and Domestic Punishment
Sarah Croco
American Political Science Review, August 2011, Pages 457-477
Abstract:
A leader's culpability for involving his state in a conflict affects both his war termination calculus and his domestic audience's willingness to punish him if he loses. I define a culpable leader as any leader who either presides over the beginning of a war, or comes to power midwar and shares a political connection with a culpable predecessor. Using a data set created specifically for this study, I find that culpable leaders are more likely than nonculpable ones to achieve favorable war outcomes. I also find that domestic audiences will be willing to punish culpable leaders who lose, yet spare nonculpable leaders who do the same. Taken together, my findings underscore the need to appreciate more fully the role individual leaders play in bringing their states to war.
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Promoting the Peace Process by Changing Beliefs About Group Malleability
Eran Halperin et al.
Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Four studies showed that beliefs about whether groups have a malleable versus fixed nature affected intergroup attitudes and willingness to compromise for peace. Using a nationwide sample (N = 500) of Israeli Jews, Study 1 showed that believing groups were malleable predicted positive attitudes toward Palestinians, which predicted willingness to compromise. Next, experimentally inducing malleable vs. fixed beliefs about groups among Israeli Jews (Study 2, N = 76), Palestinian Citizens of Israel (Study 3, N = 59), and Palestinians in the West Bank (Study 4, N = 53) (without mentioning the adversary) led to more positive attitudes toward the outgroup and, in turn, increased willingness to compromise for peace.
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Building Peace: The Impact of Aid on the Labor Market for Insurgents
Radha Iyengar, Jonathan Monten & Matthew Hanson
NBER Working Paper, August 2011
Abstract:
Employment growth could reduce violence during civil conflicts. To determine if increased employment affects violence we analyzed varying employment in development programs run by different US military divisions in Iraqi districts. Employment levels vary with funding periods and the military division in charge. Controlling for variability between districts, we find that a 10% increase in labor-related spending generates a 15-20% decline in labor-intensive insurgent violence. Overall the 10% spending increase is associated with a nearly 10% violence reduction, due to reduction in attacks which kill civilians, but increased attacks against the military. These findings indicate that labor-intensive development programs can reduce violence during insurgencies.
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Risk Tolerance and Support for Potential Military Interventions
David Eckles & Brian Schaffner
Public Opinion Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
When evaluating an ongoing military conflict, the public has the advantage of observing, at least partially, outcomes of the conflict. Because there are no outcomes to observe, by their nature, potential conflicts add an additional dimension of uncertainty to the evaluation process. This research note examines the effect of risk priming on the evaluation of potential military conflicts. Using an experiment from the 2008 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we find that priming less risk-tolerant individuals to consider risk lessened their support for a potential military intervention in Darfur, while the prime appeared to increase uncertainty among risk-tolerant individuals.
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The Cost of Empty Threats: A Penny, Not a Pound
Jack Snyder & Erica Borghard
American Political Science Review, August 2011, Pages 437-456
Abstract:
A large literature in political science takes for granted that democratic leaders would pay substantial domestic political costs for failing to carry out the public threats they make in international crises, and consequently that making threats substantially enhances their leverage in crisis bargaining. And yet proponents of this audience costs theory have presented very little evidence that this causal mechanism actually operates in real-as opposed to simulated-crises. We look for such evidence in post-1945 crises and find hardly any. Audience cost mechanisms are rare because (1) leaders see unambiguously committing threats as imprudent, (2) domestic audiences care more about policy substance than about consistency between the leader's words and deeds, (3) domestic audiences care about their country's reputation for resolve and national honor independent of whether the leader has issued an explicit threat, and (4) authoritarian targets of democratic threats do not perceive audience costs dynamics in the same way that audience costs theorists do. We found domestic audience costs as secondary mechanisms in a few cases where the public already had hawkish preferences before any threats were made.
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Vaughn Becker et al.
PLoS ONE, September 2011, e23929
Abstract:
Detecting signs that someone is a member of a hostile outgroup can depend on very subtle cues. How do ecology-relevant motivational states affect such detections? This research investigated the detection of briefly-presented enemy (versus friend) insignias after participants were primed to be self-protective or revenge-minded. Despite being told to ignore the objectively nondiagnostic cues of ethnicity (Arab vs. Western/European), gender, and facial expressions of the targets, both priming manipulations enhanced biases to see Arab males as enemies. They also reduced the ability to detect ingroup enemies, even when these faces displayed angry expressions. These motivations had very different effects on accuracy, however, with self-protection enhancing overall accuracy and revenge-mindedness reducing it. These methods demonstrate the importance of considering how signal detection tasks that occur in motivationally-charged environments depart from results obtained in conventionally motivationally-inert laboratory settings.
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Exceptionalism in American foreign policy: Is it exceptional?
K.J. Holsti
European Journal of International Relations, September 2011, Pages 381-404
Abstract:
This article argues that exceptionalism is a type of foreign policy not exclusive to the United States. It examines other historical cases, including post-Revolutionary France and the Soviet Union. The three cases are comparable in terms of their main characteristics, which include claims of exemptions from the ordinary rules of international relations, messianic missions to ‘liberate' others, and perceptions of universalized threats. The article also explores the historical and normative foundations of exceptionalist foreign policy claims and practices. All three cases demonstrate the assumptions of social and political superiority that underlie these normative bases. The article concludes with some observations about the incompatibility of exceptionalist foreign policies with the Westphalian foundations of the international order.
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Thomas Cornelissen & Uwe Jirjahn
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
While available evidence suggests that the events of September 11th negatively influenced the relative earnings of employees with Arab background in the US, it is not clear that they had similar effects in other countries. Our study for Germany provides evidence that the events also affected the relative earnings of Muslims outside the US. However, the results show that there was no uniform effect on all types of Muslims across all types of firms. Accounting for moderating factors, a significantly negative effect can primarily be found for low-skilled Muslims employed in small- and medium-sized firms. This conforms to theoretical expectations. Moreover, we demonstrate that defining appropriate treatment and control groups is crucial for identifying the effects.
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Clifton Oyamot et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
This investigation tested whether social norms and endorsement of humanitarian values interact to influence authoritarians' attitudes toward immigrants. Oyamot, Borgida, and Fisher (2006) found correlational evidence for a model in which: (1) clear social norms for attitudes toward an outgroup (favorable or unfavorable) influence the authoritarianism-attitude relationship in the direction of the norm, and (2) in the absence of clear social norms, endorsement of humanitarian-egalitarian values attenuate the intolerant tendencies of authoritarians. The current investigation tested the model in a survey experiment conducted in a diverse adult sample (N = 388). We measured participants' levels of authoritarian predisposition and endorsement of humanitarian values. Participants were then randomly told that Americans in general had either negative, positive, or mixed opinions about immigrants and immigration (social norm condition), and then asked about their attitude toward immigrants. Consistent with the model, authoritarianism was negatively related to attitudes toward immigrants in the negative norm condition. However, authoritarians' tendency toward intolerance was attenuated when they thought that Americans in general had positive opinions about immigrants. Also as predicted, when societal norms were depicted as mixed, authoritarians' attitudes depended upon endorsement of humanitarian values: humanitarian authoritarians held positive attitudes and non-humanitarian authoritarians held the most negative attitudes toward immigrants. Implications for understanding the effects of authoritarian predispositions in varying social contexts are discussed.