scholarly journals Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-307 ◽  
Author(s):  
John R. Hibbing ◽  
Kevin B. Smith ◽  
John R. Alford
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Physiological Responses ◽  
Negativity Bias ◽  
Direct Connection ◽  
Psychological Resources ◽  
Political Views ◽  
New Information ◽  
Political Orientations ◽  
The Many ◽  
Point Of Departure

AbstractDisputes between those holding differing political views are ubiquitous and deep-seated, and they often follow common, recognizable lines. The supporters of tradition and stability, sometimes referred to as conservatives, do battle with the supporters of innovation and reform, sometimes referred to as liberals. Understanding the correlates of those distinct political orientations is probably a prerequisite for managing political disputes, which are a source of social conflict that can lead to frustration and even bloodshed. A rapidly growing body of empirical evidence documents a multitude of ways in which liberals and conservatives differ from each other in purviews of life with little direct connection to politics, from tastes in art to desire for closure and from disgust sensitivity to the tendency to pursue new information, but the central theme of the differences is a matter of debate. In this article, we argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them. Operating from this point of departure, we suggest approaches for refining understanding of the broad relationship between political views and response to the negative. We conclude with a discussion of normative implications, stressing that identifying differences across ideological groups is not tantamount to declaring one ideology superior to another.

Political Professors and the Perception of Bias in the College Classroom

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Scott Liebertz ◽  
Jason Giersch
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
College Classroom ◽  
Political Opinion ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Survey Experiments ◽  
National Universities

ABSTRACT This article addresses three related questions. Does voicing a political ideology in class make a professor less appealing to students? Does voicing an ideology in class make a professor less appealing to students with opposing views? Does the intensity of professors’ ideology affect their appeal? We conducted survey experiments in two public national universities to provide evidence of the extent to which students may tolerate or even prefer that professors share their political views and under which conditions these preferences may vary. Results from the experiments indicate that expressing a political opinion did not make a professor less appealing to students—and, in fact, made the professor more appealing to some students—but the perception that a professor’s ideology is particularly intense makes the class much less favorable for students with opposing views. Students are indifferent between moderately political and nonpolitical professors.

scholarly journals Aspectos de la desaparición

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Enric Bou
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Many ◽  
Point Of Departure

This essay discusses issues related to disappearances in urban space, in particular cases that affect streets and subways, the mismatched equivalences of lines on the surface of urban space and what lays underground. Taking as a point of departure David Pike’s concept of threshold, which is key to defining a topography of the “vertical city”, a reading of plans and literary texts and films is proposed. This will illustrate the ways in which surface and other underground spaces overlap and the many differences that exist.

scholarly journals Fuzzy-based Description of Computational Complexity of Central Nervous Systems

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 57-66
Author(s):  
Piotr Prokopowicz ◽  
Dariusz Mikołajewski ◽  
Krzysztof Tyburek ◽  
Piotr Kotlarz
Keyword(s):  
Applied Sciences ◽  
Complex Analysis ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Valuable Insight ◽  
Subjective Beliefs ◽  
Uncertainty Model ◽  
New Information ◽  
Central Nervous Systems ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Point Of Departure

Computational intelligence algorithms are currently capable of dealing with simple cognitive processes, but still remain inefficient compared with the human brain’s ability to learn from few exemplars or to analyze problems that have not been defined in an explicit manner. Generalization and decision-making processes typically require an uncertainty model that is applied to the decision options while relying on the probability approach. Thus, models of such cognitive functions usually interact with reinforcement-based learning to simplify complex problems. Decision-makers are needed to choose from the decision options that are available, in order to ensure that the decision-makers’ choices are rational. They maximize the subjective overall utility expected, given by the outcomes in different states and weighted with subjective beliefs about the occurrence of those states. Beliefs are captured by probabilities and new information is incorporated using the Bayes’ law. Fuzzy-based models described in this paper propose a different – they may serve as a point of departure for a family of novel methods enabling more effective and neurobiologically reliable brain simulation that is based on fuzzy logic techniques and that turns out to be useful in both basic and applied sciences. The approach presented provides a valuable insight into understanding the aforementioned processes, doing that in a descriptive, fuzzy-based manner, without presenting a complex analysis

scholarly journals Are Echo Chambers Based on Partisanship? Twitter and Political Polarity in Poland and Hungary

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630511983767 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paweł Matuszewski ◽  
Gabriella Szabó
Keyword(s):  
Network Analysis ◽  
Quantitative Research ◽  
Political Information ◽  
Heterogeneous Clusters ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Computer Aided ◽  
Echo Chambers ◽  
Hungarian Case ◽  
Point Of Departure

In this study, we investigate how Twitter allows individuals in Hungary and Poland to experience different political views. To comprehend citizens’ exposure to political information, “who’s following who?” graphs of 455,912 users in Hungary (851,557 connections) and 1,803,837 users in Poland (10,124,501 connections) are examined. Our conceptual point of departure is that Twitter follower networks tell us whether individuals prefer to be members of a group that receives one-sided political messages, or whether they tend to form politically heterogeneous clusters that cut across ideological lines. Methodologically, such connections are best studied by means of computer-aided quantitative research complemented by the sociocentric approach of network analysis. Our data date from September 2018. The findings for Poland do not support the hypothesis of clusters emerging along partisan lines. Likewise, the Hungarian case reveals sharp group divisions on Twitter, the nodes however are diverse and overlapping in terms of political leaning. The data suggest that exposure and segregation in follower networks are not necessarily based on partisanship.

Political Ignorance and Collective Policy Preferences

2001 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Gilens
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Aid ◽  
Significant Influence ◽  
Survey Methods ◽  
Federal Budget ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
General Knowledge ◽  
Randomized Experiments ◽  
Political Views ◽  
New Information

In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public’s political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise. I also show that the effect of policy-specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research. Finally, I show that the effect of policy-specific ignorance is greatest for Americans with the highest levels of political knowledge. Rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information, general knowledge (and the cognitive capacities it reflects) appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy-specific information into political judgments.

The disaffiliative use of ‘did you know’ questions in Arabic news interviews: The case of Aljazeera’s ‘The Opposite Direction’

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 590-609
Author(s):  
Dana Shalash
Keyword(s):  
Conversation Analysis ◽  
Opposite Direction ◽  
Analytic Method ◽  
Institutional Affiliation ◽  
Standard Arabic ◽  
Specific Program ◽  
Political Views ◽  
New Information ◽  
Discursive Strategy ◽  
News Interview

This article studies the use of ‘hal taʔlaam’ (‘did you know’, hereafter) questions by the interviewer (IR) as a discursive strategy to block the interviewees’ (IEs’) agenda and stance in Aljazeera’s ‘The Opposite Direction’, a weekly news interview program that broadcasts live in Arabic on Aljazeera. The show has been on the air since Aljazeera’s inception, in the mid 1990s. The show hosts two guests with opposing political views, who are pitted against each other in a heated discussion as they represent and defend their own political and institutional affiliation. This article shows how IR uses ‘did you know’ questions to express adversarialness with his interviewees. The article argues that IR uses this type of questioning as an agenda blocking practice that the IR orients to as confrontational. The dataset examined in this article shows that ‘did you know’ questions do not provide any new information, nor does it seem to expect a response from the addressee. In fact, they are regularly used by the IR in this specific program to provide an account for previous turns that did not receive the desired response from the IE. They are lengthy, said in clear, loud Standard Arabic, and they typically embed ‘hostile presuppositions’ and confrontational messages. For the analysis presented here, 20, 50-minute episodes from ‘The Opposite Direction’ are examined following Conversation Analysis as the analytic method.

scholarly journals Voyager: A Retrospective

1992 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 33-42
Author(s):  
Bradford A. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Solar System ◽  
Giant Planets ◽  
Space Program ◽  
Remote Region ◽  
Outer Planets ◽  
New Information ◽  
Incremental Gain ◽  
The Many

AbstractWithin the brief span of a decade, from 1979 to 1989, the Voyager spacecraft visited the four giant planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – along with their satellites and their rings. The science return from these two spacecraft forever changed our views of this remote region of our solar system. Often overlooked, however, is the incremental gain in knowledge from these encounters over that which had been known in the early 1970s when the Voyager project first came into being. From a post-Voyager perspective, it is astonishing how little was known about the outer planets just a mere two decades ago. Yet, with all of the knowledge that the space program has brought us, there remain a number of unanswered questions and a great many new ones that have been posed as a result of this wealth of new information. Discussed here is summary of the results of the Voyager imaging cameras together with some of the many new questions that subsequently have been raised.

scholarly journals Lay Belief in Biopolitics and Political Prejudice

2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Suhay ◽  
Mark J. Brandt ◽  
Travis Proulx
Keyword(s):  
Political Ideology ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Political ◽  
Lay Theories ◽  
Social Avoidance ◽  
Political Arena ◽  
Control Variables ◽  
Biological Basis ◽  
Political Views

Building on psychological research linking essentialist beliefs about human differences with prejudice, we test whether lay belief in the biological basis of political ideology is associated with political intolerance and social avoidance. In two studies of American adults (Study 1: N = 288, Study 2: N = 164), we find that belief in the biological basis of political views is associated with greater intolerance and social avoidance of ideologically dissimilar others. The association is substantively large and robust to demographic, religious, and political control variables. These findings stand in contrast to some theoretical expectations that biological attributions for political ideology are associated with tolerance. We conclude that biological lay theories are especially likely to be correlated with prejudice in the political arena, where social identities tend to be salient and linked to intergroup competition and animosity.

Explaining ideology: Two factors are better than one

2014 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 326-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Robbins ◽  
Kenneth Shields
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Political Ideology ◽  
Psychological Factor ◽  
Empathic Concern ◽  
Negativity Bias ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Better Than

AbstractHibbing et al. contend that individual differences in political ideology can be substantially accounted for in terms of differences in a single psychological factor, namely, strength of negativity bias. We argue that, given the multidimensional structure of ideology, a better explanation of ideological variation will take into account both individual differences in negativity bias and differences in empathic concern.

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