Threat causes liberals to think like conservatives

In Study 1, politically liberal college students’ in-group favoritism increased after a system-injustice threat, becoming as pronounced as that of conservatives. Studies 2 and 3 conceptually replicated these results with low preference for consistency [Cialdini, R. B., Trost, M. R., & Newsom, J. T. (1995). Preference for consistency: The development of a valid measure and the discovery of surprising behavioral implications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 318-328.] as a dispositional measure of liberalism. In Study 2, following a mortality salience threat, dispositionally liberal students showed as much conviction in their attitudes toward capital punishment and abortion as dispositional conservatives did. In Study 3, after a mortality salience threat, liberal students became as staunchly unsupportive of homosexuals as conservatives were. The findings that political and dispositional liberals become more politically and psychologically conservative after threats provide convergent experimental support for the [Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129 339-375.] contention that conservatism is a basic form of motivated social cognition.     

Political ideology, exploration of novel stimuli, and attitude formation

In this study, the relations among political ideology, exploratory behavior, and the formation of attitudes toward novel stimuli were explored. Participants played a computer game that required learning whether these stimuli produced positive or negative outcomes. Learning was dependent on participants’ decisions to sample novel stimuli and discover the associated valence. Political ideology correlated with exploration during the game, with conservatives sampling fewer targets than liberals. Moreover, more conservative individuals exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry, such that they learned negative stimuli better than positive. Mediational analyses revealed that the differences in learning were due to the extent of exploratory behavior during the game. Relative to liberals, politically conservative individuals pursued a more avoidant strategy to the game, which led to their development of a more pronounced valence asymmetry in learning and attitude formation.     

The effects of perceived competence and sociability on electoral outcomes

Previous research demonstrated that inferences of competence from the face are good predictors of electoral outcomes [Todorov, A., Mandisoza, A. N., Gore, A., & Hall, C. C. (2005). Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes. Science, 308, 1623-1626]. In the current work we examined the role of another key dimension in social perception, namely perceived sociability. Results showed that people considered both competence and sociability, as inferred from the face, as related to higher chances of winning the elections. A different pattern emerged in relation to the actual electoral outcomes. Indeed, perceived competence was related to higher chances of winning, whereas perceived sociability was negatively related to electoral success. It is thus shown that these two fundamental dimensions in social perception exert opposite effects on voting behaviors.     

Endorsing Obama licenses favoring Whites

Three studies tested whether the opportunity to endorse Barack Obama made individuals subsequently more likely to favor Whites over Blacks. In Study 1, participants were more willing to describe a job as better suited for Whites than for Blacks after expressing support for Obama. Study 2 replicated this effect and ruled out alternative explanations: participants favored Whites for the job after endorsing Obama, but not after endorsing a White Democrat, nor after seeing Obama’s photo without having an opportunity to endorse him. Study 3 demonstrated that racial attitudes moderated this effect: endorsing Obama increased the amount of money allocated to an organization serving Whites at the expense of an organization serving Blacks only for participants high in a measure of racial prejudice. These three studies suggest that expressing support for Obama grants people moral credentials [Monin, B., & Miller, D. T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 33-43], thus reducing their concern with appearing prejudiced.     

Presidential speechmaking style: Emotional response to micro-expressions of facial affect

Research considering the effect of Presidential speech making style shows individuals are likely to attend to and be emotionally affected by the facial expressions of leaders, especially those that are inappropriate for the context. In this study we tested how rapid and subtle expressions of facial affect (i.e., expressions of less than one-second, often termed micro-expressions) in speeches by a political leader impacts participants’ emotional state. We do this by removing seven brief expressions (less than one-second) from a nearly twelve minute televised speech by President George H. W. Bush concerning the 1990 commitment of US military in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. FACS coding identified all these expressions as containing a component of smiling (lip corner puller: AU12), in some cases with the addition of other facial movements (sometimes associated with anger and/or disgust). Experiments carried out on 206 university undergraduates showed emotional state was altered as a result of these micro-expressions when the control (unaltered speech) and experimental group (micro-expressions removed from speech) were compared. Specifically, participants who viewed the micro-expressions felt less threatened and less angry. Thus, facial expression (even very brief micro-expressions) can have a significant impact on the receiver of a political speech.

Theorizing Politics After Camus

Theorizing has been conceived historically in illuminative and ocular metaphors, and as an activity that occurs in a fixed and privileged relation to political society that permits a panoramic perspective. These elements of light, sight, and distance, are supportable existentially and ethically in post-war, post-Holocaust world. One of the first to explore the challenges to theorizing in this era was Albert Camus. He provided phenomenological and existential investigations of the obstacles to theorizing politics in his literary works, particularly his trilogy of novels: The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall. In this paper, I offer a reading of these novels that isolates theorizing as an activity performed not from a transcendent perceptual vantage of perfect light and vision, but from the immanent perspectives achieved in the city, among friends, or by exile.     

Task‐Related Factors that Influence the Spontaneous Use of Diagrams in Math Word Problems

Diagrams are effective tools for problem solving. However, previous findings indicate that students generally do not use diagrams spontaneously. This study examined task‐related factors that may influence the spontaneity of diagram use. Experiment 1 compared two possible explanations: the first, that the length‐relatedness of the story context of the problem (i.e. whether it involves the measurement of length) determines the likelihood of diagram use; and the second, that the cognitive cost of transforming the situation described in the word problem to an abstract diagrammatic representation is the more important factor. Four math word problems, differing in their story context and structure, were administered to eighth‐grade Japanese students (n = 125) to solve. The results provide support for the cognitive transformation cost explanation. The results of experiment 2, in which the problems were administered to students in both Japan (n = 291) and New Zealand (n = 323), confirm this finding. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Political conservatism and variety‐seeking

In this research, we document and explain a counterintuitive effect of political ideology on variety-seeking. Although political conservatives have a higher desire for control, which exerts a negative effect on variety-seeking, they also have a stronger motivation to follow social norms, which exerts a positive effect on variety-seeking. Three studies demonstrate that conservatism is positively related to variety-seeking due to social normative concerns and rule out an alternative explanation of heightened self-expressive motives among conservatives. This research provides preliminary evidence of how political ideology may explain differences in product choices.     

Introduction: The 2030 Agenda

This introduction notes the contributions of authors to the second (final) issue of the Journal of Global Ethics 2015 Sustainable Development Goals Forum. It briefly explains the process through which the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have developed from their receipt in 2014 to their passage in September 2015 by the UN General Assembly, and it considers their development in prospect. The Millennium Development Goals, which spanned 1990–2015, present a case study that reveals the changeability of such long-term multilateral commitments. They were enmeshed in overlapping and inconsistent national and intergovernmental commitments reaching from 1995 to 2005, and the text of those goals also evolved, stabilizing for the last time in 2007. The SDGs and attendant commitments should be expected to evolve similarly over their 15-year run. This presents a concern, for among the three committees established by the UN to create the goals, the two committees charged with public consultation were retired as planned in 2014. The process evident thereafter has displayed a shift towards a strategy of enrolling broad public endorsement that leaves such consultation and specific responsibility to those consulted in doubt. This bodes ill for public deliberation on the goals and for public accountability as the agenda proceeds towards 2030.