Responding to negative social identity: a taxonomy of identity management strategies

Taken from literature on social identity theory and social comparison theory, 12 strategies of identity management were identified as possible responses to negative social identity. A taxonomy with two orthogonal axes is proposed as theoretical organization of these diverse strategies. While the first axis considers responses as being either individual or collective, the second axis refers to the distinction between behaviours and cognitions. It is assumed that the German unification process implied a lower status position of East Germans relative to West Germans on relevant comparison dimensions, and that East Germans have to deal with this threat to their identity. Hence, data of an East German sample are used to empirically systematize identity management strategies, and, thus, to test the proposed taxonomy. Results support the expected four-factor solution only for those strategies taken from social identity theory, while the responses derived from social comparison research build a fifth factor. In addition, the empirical assignments of strategies to cells of the taxonomy are only partly in line with the expected pattern. The empirical findings suggest some clarification and modifications of the proposed response taxonomy. The most important refers to a re-interpretation of the taxonomy's first axis, which now differentiates between responses according to the specific changes of the comparison parameters they imply. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The relation of formal education to ethnic prejudice: Its reliability,validity and explanation

This paper examines three issues concerning the frequently documented negative correlation between formal education and ethnic prejudice, namely its reliability, its validity and the manner in which it is mediated. Reliability is demonstrated across three indices of ethnic attitudes in seven representative samples drawn from four European countries (West Germany, Netherlands, France, Great Britain; total N=3788). The hypothesis that this correlation reflects only the tendency of more highly educated respondents to give more socially desirable answers and not true attitude differences was inconsistent with the finding from the survey data that educational level also correlated negatively with responses to an index of subtle prejudice. Results from an experiment employing the bogus pipeline procedure similarly refute this hypothesis, indicating that significant education-related differences in expressed prejudice remain under conditions in which the tendency to give socially desirable responses is reduced. Finally, path analysis based on the survey data show that part but not all of the association between low education and ethnic prejudice is mediated by social psychological variables, particularly group relative deprivation, perceived belief incongruency, political conservatism, and acceptance of inter-ethnic contact.     

Towards end-to-end likelihood-free inference with convolutional neural networks

Complex simulator-based models with non-standard sampling distributions require sophisticated design choices for reliable approximate parameter inference. We introduce a fast, end-to-end approach for approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) based on fully convolutional neural networks. The method enables users of ABC to derive simultaneously the posterior mean and variance of multidimensional posterior distributions directly from raw simulated data. Once trained on simulated data, the convolutional neural network is able to map real data samples of variable size to the first two posterior moments of the relevant parameter's distributions. Thus, in contrast to other machine learning approaches to ABC, our approach allows us to generate reusable models that can be applied by different researchers employing the same model. We verify the utility of our method on two common statistical models (i.e., a multivariate normal distribution and a multiple regression scenario), for which the posterior parameter distributions can be derived analytically. We then apply our method to recover the parameters of the leaky competing accumulator (LCA) model and we reference our results to the current state-of-the-art technique, which is the probability density estimation (PDA). Results show that our method exhibits a lower approximation error compared with other machine learning approaches to ABC. It also performs similarly to PDA in recovering the parameters of the LCA model.     

Causation in terms of production

Philosophical Studies - In this paper, we analyse actual causation in terms of production. The latter concept is made precise by a strengthened Ramsey Test semantics of conditionals: $$A \gg C$$...     

Phylo- and ontogenetic fears and the expectation of danger: differences between spider- and flight-phobic subjects in cognitive and physiological responses to disorder-specific stimuli

To compare specific phobias with an assumed phylogenetic or ontogenetic origin in responses to fear-relevant (FR) stimuli, 17 spider- and 17 flight-phobic participants were exposed to pictures of spiders, flight accidents, or mushrooms randomly followed by either a startling noise or nothing else. While both groups showed a disorder-specific expectancy bias, only spider-phobic participants exhibited a disorder-specific covariation bias. Spider-phobic participants also showed enhanced skin conductance responses (SCRs), event-related brain potentials (ERPs), and startle responses triggered by disorder-specific FR pictures while flight-phobic participants showed only disorder-specific enhanced SCRs. In sum, our direct comparison between ontogenetic and phylogenetic phobias revealed that the former is characterized by biased and enhanced responses triggered by disorder-specific FR stimuli presumably based on a biological preparedness.     

An examination of indexes for determining the number of clusters in binary data sets

The problem of choosing the correct number of clusters is as old as cluster analysis itself. A number of authors have suggested various indexes to facilitate this crucial decision. One of the most extensive comparative studies of indexes was conducted by Milligan and Cooper (1985). The present piece of work pursues the same goal under different conditions. In contrast to Milligan and Cooper's work, the emphasis here is on high-dimensional empirical binary data. Binary artificial data sets are constructed to reflect features typically encountered in real-world data situations in the field of marketing research. The simulation includes 162 binary data sets that are clustered by two different algorithms and lead to recommendations on the number of clusters for each index under consideration. Index results are evaluated and their performance is compared and analyzed.Author names are listed in alphabetical order.This piece of research was supported by the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) under grant SFB#010 (Adaptive Information Systems and Modeling in Economics and Management Science).The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and especially the associate editor for their helpful comments and suggestions.