Inviting questions

Consumers are frequently invited to ask questions in everyday life. The current research provides an initial examination of how inviting consumers to ask questions influences their attitudes and intentions. Two experiments show that inviting questions can have a positive or negative effect depending on whether consumers actually ask them. Experiment 1 shows that merely inviting questions has a positive effect, but that this effect reverses when consumers actually ask questions. Following a similar logic, Experiment 2 shows that inviting questions has a positive effect under low involvement conditions, but a negative effect under high involvement conditions where the likelihood of generating questions is higher.     

Coordinated affect with mothers and strangers: A longitudinal analysis of joint engagement between 5 and 9 months of age

The coordination of affect in joint attention was assessed in a longitudinal study of 5- to 9-month-old infants as they interacted with mothers and strangers. Results showed that the coordination of affect with joint attention looks increased reliably with age. In addition, context effects were found such that joint attention looks increased while interacting with strangers but not with mothers. The study demonstrates the emergence of joint engagement before the end of the first year, and suggests that affect may play a key role in aspects of joint attention that may be unique to humans.     

Playing the fool: Activists' performances of emotion in policy making spaces

This paper draws upon dramaturgical concepts from performance studies scholarship to examine how situated performance and context enmesh with the emotional content of the practices of policy making. Drawing on sociological dramaturgical perspectives, the cultural and literary criticism that inspired them, and in particular Bahktin's concepts of the grotesque and heteroglossia, I investigate the subversive use of humour in policy work as a way of revealing “emotional knowledge” about the issues under discussion. First I set out the way “emotion” was understood by participants in an NGO's programme of policy activities as a mode of knowing the world, and how emotion and rationality were embodied in the forums by activists and civil servants respectively. I take as a case study activists “playing the Fool” within a programme of policy work in which I conducted ethnographic research. These performances, once set within a mise-en-scène that includes furniture, smells, lighting and the physicality of the people involved, create complex, unsettling and intersecting networks of meaning about power and knowledge in policy work. I argue that such a dramaturgical approach to interpreting the work of making policy challenges scholars to accurately represent the multiplicity of meanings of “emotion” at play in any context.     

Effects of biological determinist and interactionist causal explanations on undergraduate students' stigma of children with attention deficits hyperactivity disorders: An experimental investigation

This experimental study examined the effects of biological explanations on individuals' stigma against children with ADHD. We randomly assigned 174 undergraduate students to read one of the three fictitious articles: the first article focused on the determining role of biology in affecting children's ADHD symptoms (biological determinist), the second article highlighted the interplay between biological and environmental factors (interactionist), and the third article was unrelated to ADHD (control). Analyses of variance showed that participants who read the biological determinist message, relative to the control group, were (a) less likely to blame the children for their problems, but (b) more likely to endorse fixed beliefs about the nature of ADHD (entity beliefs). Thus, the overall direct effect of biological determinist message on desire for social distance was not significant. By contrast, participants who read the interactionist message showed (a) less blame attribution and (b) lower levels of entity beliefs, which contributed to less desire for social distance. These findings suggest that (a) presenting biological information regarding ADHD in a deterministic way may not be an effective way to reduce stigma, whereas (b) providing an interactionist account of ADHD may undermine the potential negative effect of an exclusively biological explanation.     

Sustainable transportation in Argentina: Values,beliefs, norms and car use reduction

Most Latin American countries face important environmental and societal problems associated with an increase in car traffic, and only recently, transport policies aimed at reducing these harmful consequences of car use have begun to be discussed and put on the public agenda of these countries. Surprisingly, little is known about the factors influencing the acceptability of transport policies and intentions to reduce car use in Latin America, as studies on acceptability of transport policies have typically been conducted in Europe. Previous evidence from European samples – where reducing car used had been widely discussed – showed that the Value-Belief-Norm (VBN) theory of environmentalism was an adequate theoretical framework to predict the acceptability of a transport pricing policy, as well as the intention to reduce car use when this policy would be implemented. But can these results be generalised to non-European samples? In this paper, we report results of a questionnaire study among 160 participants from Buenos Aires, Argentina, aimed to test the VBN theory. We found that the VBN theory was indeed also successful in explaining policy acceptability and intention to reduce car use in Argentina. In addition, we found support for the causal structure of the variables in VBN theory. Interestingly, biospheric and hedonic values were also directly and significantly related to feelings of moral obligation when intermediate variables were controlled for. These results suggest that normative considerations, activated by values, indeed predict policy acceptability and the intention to reduce car use in Argentina and that these considerations should be taken into account to increase the acceptability of policies aimed at reducing car use.     

The correlates of religion and state: an introduction

ABSTRACT

This volume examines the Religion and State Round 3 (RAS3) dataset which includes information of State Religion Policy (SRP) for 183 countries and self-governing territories between 1990 and 2014. This collection includes a general discussion of the dataset but most of the contributions take these data and use them to analyse the intersections between SRP and a wide range of phenomena including civil wars, terrorism, international conflict, attitudes towards religion and state, constitutional promises of religious freedom, and religious mobilisation. While this volume constitutes the formal primary presentation and analysis of the RAS3 dataset, it is intended to be the beginning of an ongoing discussion.     

Changing prejudiced attitudes,promoting egalitarianism,and enhancing diversity through fundamental processes of persuasion

ABSTRACT

We review work from persuasion science relevant to reducing prejudiced attitudes. We begin by introducing the idea that the thoughts people generate – their number and valence – are critical for understanding when responding to persuasive attempts will result in egalitarian attitudes. A focus on thinking highlights the importance of understanding short and long-term attitude change in promoting diversity. How much people think is also consequential for spreading of initial change to more distal attitudes and generalization of change to other judgments. The second section describes a process of thought validation that emphasizes the importance of considering what people think and feel about their own thoughts. This meta-cognitive process is shown to make a difference in producing consequential changes in reducing prejudiced attitudes toward African Americans, immigrants, refugees, individuals with disabilities, and beyond. The conditions under which variables such as minority status and stigmatized sources affect elaboration and validation are also specified. The fourth section explores how these two processes are relevant for understanding explicit and implicit ambivalence and change in the domain of prejudiced attitudes. We highlight the utility of a process-oriented approach for designing future research and promoting more inclusive attitudes and actions.