More Royalist Than the King? Immigration Policy Attitudes Among Naturalized Citizens

Social psychological research has analyzed immigration attitudes mostly from the perspective of natives without an immigrant background. Nevertheless, an increasing number of migrants obtain national citizenship and take a stance towards immigration policies. By studying immigration policy attitudes reported by naturalized citizens, this article develops a dual-pathway model of immigrant political incorporation featuring pathways of either absorption or transformation. Based on a unique sample of immigrants who just accomplished the naturalization procedure (N = 566), we investigate participants' preferences for permissive or restrictive immigration policies as a function of their naturalization motives and expectations about how immigrants should acculturate in the receiving society (i.e., acculturation orientations). Our findings provide evidence for both processes of political absorption and transformation. On the one hand, belongingness motives underlying naturalization were connected to orientations towards host culture adoption, which in turn predicted support for restrictive immigration policies. On the other hand, instrumental motives were connected to orientations towards heritage culture maintenance, which in turn predicted support for permissive immigration policies. To conclude, we discuss the social psychological dynamics involved in the transition from national outsiders to national insiders and highlight the effects of naturalization on power relations between national majority and immigrant minority groups.     

Decision-makers use social information to update their preferences but choose for others as they do for themselves

People's risky decisions are susceptible to the social context in which they take place. Across three experiments using different paradigms, we investigated the influence of three social factors upon participants' decisions: the recipient of the decision-making outcome (self, other, or joint), the nature of the relationship with the other agent (friend, stranger, or teammate), and the type of information that participants received about others' preferences: none at all, general information about how previous participants had decided, or information about a specific partner's preference. We found that participants' decisions about risk did not differ according to whether the outcome at stake was their own, another agent's, or a joint outcome, nor according to the type of information available. Participants did, however, adjust their preferences for risky options in light of social information.     

Pairing People with Products: Anthropomorphizing the Object,Dehumanizing the Person

We present the first empirical integration of anthropomorphism and dehumanization, two intrinsically linked processes representing the extent to which the concept of humanness is activated for a given target. Across several experiments, we demonstrate that pairing a person and object in an ad, while focusing respondent attention on the object, leads to its being anthropomorphized and evaluated better compared to presenting it alone. However, compared to presenting a person alone, the same pairing leads to inferior evaluations of the person through a process of dehumanization. We rule out two alternative explanations for these effects, namely the transfer of an object's qualities to the person and consumption associations, and conduct a post‐test that provides additional support for our proposed activation/inhibition of humanness account. Finally, we inspect several moderators, finding that anthropomorphism only occurs with moderately and highly functional objects and dehumanization occurs irrespective of the person's gender or fame. By incorporating the literature on dehumanization, we propose new research questions to motivate future inquiry.     

Corporate Social Responsibility Practices of Colombian Companies as Perceived by Industrial Engineering Students

Science and Engineering Ethics - This work describes the perceptions that Industrial Engineering students have regarding Colombian firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. It...     

Ethical Decision Making in Autonomous Vehicles: The AV Ethics Project

Science and Engineering Ethics - The ethics of autonomous vehicles (AV) has received a great amount of attention in recent years, specifically in regard to their decisional policies in accident...     

The role of midfrontal theta oscillations across the development of cognitive control in preschoolers and school‐age children

The development of cognitive control enables children to better resist acting based on distracting information that interferes with the current action. Cognitive control improvement serves different functions that differ in part by the type of interference to resolve. Indeed, resisting to interference at the task‐set level or at the response‐preparation level is, respectively, associated with cognitive flexibility and inhibition. It is, however, unknown whether the same neural mechanism underlies these two functions across development. Studies in adults have revealed the contribution of midfrontal theta (MFT) oscillations in interference resolution. This study investigated whether MFT is involved in the resolution of different types of interference in two age groups identified as corresponding to different latent structures of executive functions. Preschool (4–6 years) and school children (6–8 years) were tested with a task involving interference at the response level and/or the task‐set level while (electroencephalogram) EEG was recorded. Behaviorally, response time and accuracy were affected by task‐set. Both age groups were less accurate when the interference occurred at the task‐set level and only the younger group showed decreased accuracy when interference was presented at the response‐preparation level. Furthermore, MFT power was increased, relative to the baseline, during the resolution of both types of interference and in both age groups. These findings suggest that MFT is involved in immature cognitive control (i.e., preschool and school‐ages), by orchestrating its different cognitive processes, irrespective of the interference to resolve and of the level of cognitive control development (i.e., the degree of differentiation of executive functions).     

Does classroom social comparison bias students’ evaluation of their own competence?

Social Psychology of Education - Overestimation and underestimation of students’ own competence result from social comparison in the classroom. There is some evidence that secondary school...     

Time estimation: does the reference memory mediate the effect of knowledge of results?

This study presents evidence for the role of knowledge of results (KR) in the estimation of medium time intervals (4-12 s durations). Experiment 1 tested the hypothesis that KR operates at the same stage of temporal processing as attention. The absence of an interaction of attention and KR is taken as evidence against this hypothesis. Experiments 2 and 3 further studied the effects of KR in a reproduction and a production task, respectively. The effects of KR were small in the reproduction and substantial in the production task. The results are interpreted in terms of a clock-based timing model and the findings taken together converge on the interpretation that KR affects the reference memory (RM), rather than the other components of the model.