Inverting the Object of Study: Recalibrating the Frame of Reference in Study Abroad Experiences

This essay is concerned with study abroad experiences as opportunities for student cognitive development, using the interpretive lens of educational psychologist William G. Perry. A standard and often valuable assignment in courses on world religions is a site visit to a religious institution in one's local area. This may concretize otherwise abstract materials and help students reflect on ways in which the lived experience of religion differs from its presentation in course texts and other academic materials. Increasingly, study abroad trips are being offered as extended and more intensive ways of bringing this material to life, offering students opportunity to see lived religion within another cultural framework. At the heart of this paper is the contention that such study abroad experiences function not simply as longer, more intense versions of site visits but, rather, as experiences that invert the subject and object of study. The worldview of the student becomes a primary object of study, which is examined, as it were, by the particulars of the religion(s) under investigation and the cultures of which said religion(s) are a part. Where site visits offer students an opportunity to visit the strange amidst the familiar, study abroad trips provide opportunities for students to become the strange within a recalibrated familiar. The subject becomes the object and is interrogated by the context of study. While local, stateside site visits can offer a degree of such dislocation, their brevity, together with some degree of assimilation to the larger culture flows on the part of the local religious institution being visited, most often mitigates any significant inversion. Students generally see such institutions as either mildly or wildly exotic, but always within their frame of reference, which constitutes the norm. When abroad, the normative experience of students is often subverted in ways that lay bare the assumptions behind such views and makes possible another world in which to live. Simply put, the subject and object of study change places. If this inversion is carefully attended to, it can provide rich insight into not only the topics nominally being studied but also occasion opportunity for real cognitive development on the part of the student. This essay is published alongside of six other essays, including a response from John Barbour, comprising a special section of the journal (see Teaching Theology and Religion 18:1, January 2015).     

Racial bias in driver yielding behavior at crosswalks

Psychological and social identity-related factors have been shown to influence drivers’ behaviors toward pedestrians, but no previous studies have examined the potential for drivers’ racial bias to impact yielding behavior with pedestrians. If drivers’ yielding behavior results in differential behavior toward Black and White pedestrians, this may lead to disparate pedestrian crossing experiences based on race and potentially contribute to disproportionate safety outcomes for minorities. We tested the hypothesis that drivers’ yielding behavior is influenced by pedestrians’ race in a controlled field experiment at an unsignalized midblock marked crosswalk in downtown Portland, Oregon. Six trained male research team participants (3 White, 3 Black) simulated an individual pedestrian crossing, while trained observers cataloged the number of cars that passed and the time until a driver yielded. Results (88 pedestrian trials, 173 driver-subjects) revealed that Black pedestrians were passed by twice as many cars and experienced wait times that were 32% longer than White pedestrians. Results support the hypothesis that minority pedestrians experience discriminatory treatment by drivers at crosswalks.     

A Typology of Ideological Attitudes Towards Social Solidarity and Social Control

Research on ideological attitudes has identified two main dimensions that refer to two fundamental features of group organization: social solidarity and social control. In response to prior research that has studied their relationship mainly from a correlational perspective, this paper introduces a social reality model based on psychological functionality of ideological attitudes. Social position variables (education, income and material vulnerability) and insecurity variables (fear of crime and distrust) are used to predict the interplay between ideological attitudes towards social solidarity and social control. Using K‐means cluster analysis, a typology with four patterns of support for solidarity and control (‘socials’, ‘repressives’, ‘minimalists’ and ‘social‐repressives’) was created, on the basis of representative survey data for the UK, France and Germany (N = 7034). Results from logistic regression analyses show that the proposed social reality model explains membership in typology categories, with similar results across the three countries. Overall, the model underscores the social origins of ideological attitudes as functional responses to perceived social reality. The paper illustrates how the social psychological study of ideological attitudes may be enriched by a typological approach that examines patterns of attitudes rather than single dimensions. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Judgment is not color blind: The impact of automatic color preference on product and advertising preferences

This research examines the colors white and black and highlights the importance of automatic preference for the color white over black in product choice and advertising contexts. Across three studies, we incorporate multiple Implicit Association Tests to assess automatic preferences for colors, products, races, and advertisements. In Study 1, we demonstrate an automatic color preference for white over black, show that this preference holds for Caucasian-Americans and African-Americans, and find that automatic color preference predicts automatic product preference of white over black-colored products. Study 2 extends these findings by showing that actual behavioral product choice is best predicted by a combination of automatic and explicit color preferences. In the advertising domain, Study 3 demonstrates how automatic color preference influences advertising responses and how it explains the lack of in-group preference by African-Americans in previous implicit studies of racial preference. Collectively, our research draws attention to the need to disentangle white and black as designation of colors versus racial groups, and offers significant and novel contributions to the work on color and race in consumer psychology.     

Family Contexts: Parental Experiences of Discrimination and Child Mental Health

Research on the mental health correlates of discrimination traditionally has been intra-individual, focusing exclusively on the individual directly experiencing discrimination. A small number of studies have begun to consider the links between parental experiences of discrimination and child mental health, but little is known about potential underlying mechanisms. The present study tested the independent mediating effects of parent mental health and household socioeconomic status on the associations between parental experiences of discrimination (past-year perceived discrimination and perceptions of being unaccepted culturally) and child mental health (internalizing and externalizing symptoms) using a bootstrapping analytic approach. Data were drawn from racial/ethnic minority (n = 383) and White (n = 574) samples surveyed in an urban Midwestern county. For all measures of discrimination and child mental health, findings supported an association between parental experiences of discrimination and child mental health. Whereas parent mental health served as a significant mediator in all analyses, socioeconomic status did not. Mediation findings held for both the White and racial/ethnic minority samples. Results suggest that parental experiences of discrimination and mental health may contribute to child mental health concerns, thus highlighting the role of family contexts in shaping child development.     

Racial/Ethnic Identity and Subjective Physical and Mental Health of Latino Americans: An Asset Within?

Social Identity Theory indicates that ethnic identity could benefit minority members in a society because of its promotion of a sense of belonging, or of its buffering of the damage of discrimination. Despite growing investigation about Latinos’ overall health, few studies have simultaneously examined the influence of multiple cultural strength factors, especially racial/ethnic identity, social support, and religious attendance, on these outcomes. Using the National Latino and Asian American Study, we examine the potential predictive value of these cultural strength factors on Latinos’ Self-Rated Mental and Physical Health (SRMH and SRPH). Two separate two-step regression models revealed significant positive effects of racial/ethnic identity on both mental and physical health of Latinos, above and beyond the effect of known demographic and acculturation factors, such as discrimination. Religious attendance had a positive effect on SRMH but not on SRPH. The deteriorating roles of discrimination, in mental health only, and that of Length in the US in both outcomes, however, was primarily not altered by entry of these cultural strength factors. The independent direct effect of racial/ethnic identity among Latinos nationwide may suggest that this cultural strength is an internalized protective asset. Longitudinal data is needed to explore its underlying mechanism and long-term impact.     

Why do right-wing adherents engage in more animal exploitation and meat consumption?

Despite the well-documented implications of right-wing ideological dispositions for human intergroup relations, surprisingly little is understood about the implications for human–animal relations. We investigate why right-wing ideologies – social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) – positively predict attitudes toward animal exploitation and meat consumption. Two survey studies conducted in heterogeneous community samples (Study 1, N = 260; Study 2, N = 489) demonstrated that right-wing ideologies predict greater acceptance of animal exploitation and more meat consumption through two explaining mechanisms: (a) perceived threat from non-exploitive ideologies to the dominant carnist ideology (for both SDO and RWA) and (b) belief in human superiority over animals (for SDO). These findings hold after controlling for hedonistic pleasure from eating meat. Right-wing adherents do not simply consume more animals because they enjoy the taste of meat, but because doing so supports dominance ideologies and resistance to cultural change. Psychological parallels between human intergroup relations and human–animal relations are considered.     

心理学“知-行-信”课程思政模式的理论基础与实践路径

为了探索解决当前课程思政中专业教学内容和思政元素融合不足问题的途径,本文在分析心理学课程思政特点的基础上,基于传统的知行观、知信行理论和态度形成与改变等理论,构建出具有心理学特色的“知-行-信”课程思政实践模式,为心理学科和其他相关学科的课程思政建设提供参考。     

Linking Genetics and Political Attitudes: Reconceptualizing Political Ideology

In this paper, we trace the route by which genetics could ultimately connect to issue attitudes and suggest that central to this connection are chronic dispositional preferences for mass‐scale social rules, order, and conduct—what we label political ideology. The need to resolve bedrock social dilemmas concerning such matters as leadership style, protection from outgroups, and the degree to which norms of conduct are malleable, is present in any large‐scale social unit at any time. This universality is important in that it leaves open the possibility that genetics could influence stances on issues of the day. Here, we measure orientation to these bedrock principles in two ways—a survey of conscious, self‐reported positions and an implicit association test (IAT) of latent orientations toward fixed or flexible rules of social conduct. In an initial test, both measures were predictive of stances on issues of the day as well as of ideological self‐labeling, thereby suggesting that the heritability of specific issue attitudes could be the result of the heritability of general orientations toward bedrock principles of mass‐scale group life.     

Ideology,Fear of Death,and Death Anxiety

Ideological beliefs have long attracted the attention of social psychologists, who have investigated their genesis as well as their influence on a host of social phenomena. Conservatism, from the Motivated Social Cognition framework, stems from epistemic and existential needs of the individual, and notably the fear of death. However, Terror Management Theory proposes a view of conservatism and its contrary, liberalism, as equivalent cultural worldviews, equally fit to fulfill such needs. In the present contribution, results are presented from five studies, which test the contrasting hypotheses derived from these two perspectives. A new perspective is considered that accounts for these and previous findings.