Social Norms and Prejudice against Homosexuals

2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 576-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annelyse Pereira ◽  
Maria Benedicta Monteiro ◽  
Leoncio Camino

Different studies regarding the role of norms on the expression of prejudice have shown that the anti-prejudice norm influences people to inhibit prejudice expressions. However, if norm pressure has led to a substantial decrease in the public expression of prejudice against certain targets (e.g., blacks, women, blind people), little theoretical and empirical attention has been paid to the role of this general norm regarding sexual minorities (e.g., prostitutes, lesbians and gays). In this sense, the issue we want to address is whether general anti-prejudice norms can reduce the expression of prejudice against homosexual individuals. In this research we investigate the effect of activating an anti-prejudice norm against homosexuals on blatant and subtle expressions of prejudice. The anti-prejudice norm was experimentally manipulated and its effects were observed on rejection to intimacy (blatant prejudice) and on positive-negative emotions (subtle prejudice) regarding homosexuals. 136 university students were randomly allocated to activated-norm and control conditions and completed a questionnaire that included norm manipulation and the dependent variables. A multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) as well as subsequent ANOVAS showed that only in the high normative pressure condition participants expressed less rejection to intimacy and less negative emotions against homosexuals, when compared to the simple norm-activation and the control conditions. Positive emotions, however, were similar both in the high normative pressure and the control conditions. We concluded that a high anti-prejudice pressure regarding homosexuals could reduce blatant prejudice but not subtle prejudice, considering that the expression of negative emotions decreased while the expression of positive emotions remained stable.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Delafield-Butt

Panpsychism is a metaphysical framework around which science can understand the nature of subjective experience. Panpsychism affords a scientific view of mind and body as a coherent mind–body unity, with agentive purpose. Fundamental to minds is motor control, a core aspect that combines sensory experience, its evaluation in choice of agent action, and extension into the public expression of intentional movement. This primary mind–body process appears disturbed in autistic individuals. Empirical analysis of the spatiotemporal properties of intentional movement in autism shows a disruption to the efficient prospective integration and control of movement, a core aspect of mind. This paper examines the capacity of a panpsychist metaphysic to explain mind as fundamentally constituted by units of mind–body sensorimotor agency, which can be understood as the basic building blocks of embodied experience. The implications of a post-Cartesian metaphysic in scientific understanding of minds allows for deeper consideration of the role of movement in subjective experience, and its disturbance in autism as a disturbance to the organization of conscious sensorimotor experience and agency. It’s impact on modes of cognition and neural substrates is discussed.


Epidemiologia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-94
Author(s):  
Mst. Marium Begum ◽  
Osman Ulvi ◽  
Ajlina Karamehic-Muratovic ◽  
Mallory R. Walsh ◽  
Hasan Tarek ◽  
...  

Background: Chikungunya is a vector-borne disease, mostly present in tropical and subtropical regions. The virus is spread by Ae. aegypti and Ae. albopictus mosquitos and symptoms include high fever to severe joint pain. Dhaka, Bangladesh, suffered an outbreak of chikungunya in 2017 lasting from April to September. With the goal of reducing cases, social media was at the forefront during this outbreak and educated the public about symptoms, prevention, and control of the virus. Popular web-based sources such as the top dailies in Bangladesh, local news outlets, and Facebook spread awareness of the outbreak. Objective: This study sought to investigate the role of social and mainstream media during the chikungunya epidemic. The study objective was to determine if social media can improve awareness of and practice associated with reducing cases of chikungunya. Methods: We collected chikungunya-related information circulated from the top nine television channels in Dhaka, Bangladesh, airing from 1st April–20th August 2017. All the news published in the top six dailies in Bangladesh were also compiled. The 50 most viewed chikungunya-related Bengali videos were manually coded and analyzed. Other social media outlets, such as Facebook, were also analyzed to determine the number of chikungunya-related posts and responses to these posts. Results: Our study showed that media outlets were associated with reducing cases of chikungunya, indicating that media has the potential to impact future outbreaks of these alpha viruses. Each media outlet (e.g., web, television) had an impact on the human response to an individual’s healthcare during this outbreak. Conclusions: To prevent future outbreaks of chikungunya, media outlets and social media can be used to educate the public regarding prevention strategies such as encouraging safe travel, removing stagnant water sources, and assisting with tracking cases globally to determine where future outbreaks may occur.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helder Gusso

This article highlights the duty of the public employee to oppose any government policy that goes against constitutional principles and objectives. The defence of this position is made from an organizational analysis of the State. Theoretical contributions such as the understanding of State and Domination in M. Weber, Organization in D. Katz and R.L. Khan, and Control Agency in B.F. Skinner have been used. The analysis of contingencies that control the behavior of the public employee and the understanding of the notions of State and Organizations enable greater clarity about what constitutes the role of workers in the public sector. It also highlights the importance of existing mechanisms to reduce the imbalance in power relations between governors, servants and the population.


Author(s):  
E. Voronin

Facts backed up by documents and contemporary testimonies must serve as a basis for the consequencies of the events of 1917, as a verification of any impartial estimation and indiscriminate view on the most brutal revolt in history, and its consequences.The Russian society needs an impartial, just and deep analysis of these events. Foremost this would require a clear civilised understanding of the real essence of any coup d’etat, whatever name it takes (revolution, classjustified struggle, etc) and whatever banners it bears in history, and whatever propaganda and ideological falcifications determine it.The Constitution of any state ruled by law acknowledges any evolution in the development of the sociaty based on legal principles. Any change of institutes or social system in a state can be realised through the force of laws, which comply with the public expression of will (referendum). In national legislation of the present-day states there are no norms, which establish revolutionary convulsions as legal, which are based on illegitimate take-over with the use of force.


PLoS ONE ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (12) ◽  
pp. e0259473
Author(s):  
Marrissa D. Grant ◽  
Alexandra Flores ◽  
Eric J. Pedersen ◽  
David K. Sherman ◽  
Leaf Van Boven

The present study, conducted immediately after the 2020 presidential election in the United States, examined whether Democrats’ and Republicans’ polarized assessments of election legitimacy increased over time. In a naturalistic survey experiment, people (N = 1,236) were randomly surveyed either during the week following Election Day, with votes cast but the outcome unknown, or during the following week, after President Joseph Biden was widely declared the winner. The design unconfounded the election outcome announcement from the vote itself, allowing more precise testing of predictions derived from cognitive dissonance theory. As predicted, perceived election legitimacy increased among Democrats, from the first to the second week following Election Day, as their expected Biden win was confirmed, whereas perceived election legitimacy decreased among Republicans as their expected President Trump win was disconfirmed. From the first to the second week following Election Day, Republicans reported stronger negative emotions and weaker positive emotions while Democrats reported stronger positive emotions and weaker negative emotions. The polarized perceptions of election legitimacy were correlated with the tendencies to trust and consume polarized media. Consumption of Fox News was associated with lowered perceptions of election legitimacy over time whereas consumption of other outlets was associated with higher perceptions of election legitimacy over time. Discussion centers on the role of the media in the experience of cognitive dissonance and the implications of polarized perceptions of election legitimacy for psychology, political science, and the future of democratic society.


2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (5) ◽  
pp. 534-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carla Ruiz-Mafe ◽  
Jose Tronch ◽  
Silvia Sanz-Blas

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of emotions and social influences on loyalty formation towards online travel communities. Design/methodology/approach The individual (perceived risk) and social (subjective norm and social presence) antecedents of emotions as well as the impact of emotions on attitude and loyalty towards online travel communities are tested through structural equation modelling techniques. The sample consists of 385 active users of online travel communities in Spain. Findings Data analysis shows that perceived privacy and security risk elicit negative emotions such as stress, frustration and fear towards the online travel community. Normative influences (subjective norm) and feeling the presence of other community members (social presence) boost positive emotions towards the online travel community. Interpersonal influences have a positive effect on subjective norm but not external influences. Positive and negative emotions affect preferences towards the online travel community (attitudes) as proposed by social impact theory. Subjective norm and attitude have a direct influence on loyalty towards an online travel community, confirming previous research grounded on theory of reasoned action models. Originality/value Despite the crucial impact of consumers’ affective states on loyalty formation, research on social media is mainly focused on the technological nature of consumer information exchanges, neglecting other drivers of consumer behaviour beyond the technology employed. This paper develops a model that integrates the relationships between consumer emotions and their individual (perceived risk) and social (social presence and subjective norm) antecedents and outcome variables (attitude and loyalty). The role of social influences is analysed, assessing the conjoint impact of one-way communication (interpersonal influences and mass media) and Web 2.0 communications (social presence) on positive emotions and loyalty formation towards the online travel community.


2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 309-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jordan Paradise

Perpetual debate regarding the delicate balance between access and innovation and the protection of the public health and safety dominate discussions of the United States Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”). Established chiefly as a command and control federal administrative agency, iterative changes in legislation have shaped the FDA's activity in drug, biologic, and medical device regulation over the course of the last one hundred plus years. The most recent fundamental reframing of the agency's authority and directive presented itself in the 21st Century Cures Act, reflecting an important role for patient perspectives in the regulatory process. This Article explores recent developments in patient-focused product development efforts at the FDA and offers modest insights on the increasing role of patients, and patient advocacy groups, in agency decision-making. The Article terms this era “21st century citizen pharma.”


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuhuan Zhou ◽  
Yi Wang

BACKGROUND During the COVID-19 outbreak, social media served as the main platform for information exchange, through which the Chinese government, media and public would spread information. At the same time, a variety of emotions interweave, and the public emotions would also be affected by the government and media. OBJECTIVE This study aims to investigate the types, trends and relationships of emotional diffusion in Chinese social media among the public, the government and the media under the pandemic of COVID-19 (December 30,2019, to July 1,2020) . METHODS In this paper, Python 3.7.0 and its data crawling framework Scrapy 1.5.1 are used to write a web crawler program to search for super topics related to COVID-19 on Sina Weibo platform of different keywords . Then, we used emotional lexicon to analyze the types and trends of the public, government and media emotions on social media. Finally cross-lagged regression was applied to build the relationships of different subjects’ emotions. RESULTS The highlights of our study are threefold: (1) The public, the government and the media mainly diffuse positive emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic in China; (2) Emotional diffusion shows a certain change over time, and negative emotions are obvious in the initial phase of the pandemic, with the development of the pandemic, positive emotions surpass negative emotions and remain stable. (3)The impact among the three main emotions with the period as the time point is weak, while the impact of emotion with the day as the time point is relatively obvious. The emotions of the public and the government impact each other, and the media emotions can guide the public emotions. CONCLUSIONS This is the first study of comparing pubic, government and media emotions on the social media during COVID-19 pandemic in China. The pubic, the government and the media mainly diffuse positive emotions during the pandemic. And the government and the media have better effect on short-term emotional guidance. Therefore, when the pandemic suddenly occurs, the government and the media should intervene in time to solve problems and conflicts and diffuse positive and neutral emotions. In this regard, the government and the media can play important roles through social media in the major outbreaks. At the theoretical level, this paper takes China's epidemic environment and social media as the background to provide one of the explanatory perspectives for the spread of emotions on social media. At the some time, because of this special background, it can provide comparison and reference for the research on internet emotions in other countries.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Liu ◽  
Jing Wei Li ◽  
Qi Wei Zhou

Purpose From a functionalist perspective, this study aims to examine empirically how positive and negative emotions can exert influence on creativity in the workplace. This study built and tested a theoretical framework that delineates the effect of emotions on employee creativity through different learning mechanisms. Design/methodology/approach Field surveys were conducted in a Chinese company and data were collected from 340 employee-supervisor dyads. Findings The results indicate that positive emotions were positively related to task-related learning and interactional learning, both of which promote employee creativity. Task-related learning mediated the association between positive emotions and creativity. Nevertheless, negative emotions hindered employees from interactional learning and were negatively associated with creativity. Interactional learning mediated the association between negative emotions and creativity. Moreover, the interaction between positive and negative emotions was negatively associated with task-related learning. Originality/value This study contributes to the literature on emotions and employee learning by demonstrating the value of using a functionalist perspective through different procedural mechanisms for employee outcomes and exploring the mediation effects of different learning behaviors in promoting creativity.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose Luis Saavedra Torres ◽  
Monika Rawal ◽  
Ramin Bagherzadeh

Purpose This paper aims to examine the role of brand attachment as a relevant construct in customers’ evaluation after they face a service failure which impacts future consumer behaviors. It mainly answers the research question: does brand attachment cushion or amplify the effect of service failure on customers’ negative emotions? Design/methodology/approach A 2 × 2 × 2 experimental design was conducted. Data analysis was performed with ANOVA and moderated mediation. Findings Customer’s feelings toward a brand (brand attachment) that existed before a service failure occurred can regulate customer’s negative emotions especially when consumer attribute service failure to a controllable cause. This process minimizes the effect of service failure in customer’s satisfaction and consequently increase customer behaviors like word of mouth and loyalty intentions. Research limitations/implications Adding perceived intentionality as a service failure’s attribution could provide another layer of explanation of customer behavior. Also, an expanded study using a sector characterized by higher cost of change and permanent consumption could provide result’s generalizability. Practical implications Brand attachment should be included in the customer service strategy. In a service failure situation, brand attachment becomes part of the “service customer policy” helping customers to regulate their negative emotions. Originality/value This study fills the knowledge gap regarding the role of customers’ positive emotions toward brands when a service failure occurs. The current study extends branding literature by differentiating brand attachment role from coping tactics.


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