scholarly journals Did local civil rights protest liberalize whites’ racial attitudes?

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 205316802091475
Author(s):  
Michael Biggs ◽  
Christopher Barrie ◽  
Kenneth T. Andrews

Mazumder investigates the long-term effect of protest on political attitudes. He finds that whites have more liberal views on race and are more likely to be Democrats in counties where Civil Rights protest was reported in the early 1960s. The analysis omits a crucial predictor of protest and of racial attitudes: college education. We include the proportion of adults with a college degree and the number of college students at the county level. The inclusion of these variables, along with some other contextual variables from the original dataset, cuts the effect of protest by about half. Protest is no longer statistically significant in eight out of nine combinations of outcome variables and protest measures. The size of the effect remains trivial when we shift analysis from the county to the individual level. Even accounting for the individual’s own education, the county’s proportion of college graduates is strongly associated with racial liberalism. This finding emphasizes the importance of education as a contextual variable. Our conclusion highlights two methodological lessons. First, causal inference should be paired with sustained historical inquiry that specifies plausible mechanisms. Second, statistical tests for sensitivity can induce complacency about the risk of confounding.

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Raffaella Zanuttini ◽  
Jim Wood ◽  
Jason Zentz ◽  
Laurence Horn

AbstractThe Yale Grammatical Diversity Project approaches the empirical domain of North American English from the perspective of generative microcomparative syntax. In addition to eliciting judgments from speakers of particular varieties, we also conduct large-scale surveys, map the results of those surveys geographically, conduct statistical tests taking geography and other social variables into account, and look for theoretically significant linguistic correlations. In all cases, we do this with the primary goal of understanding variation between speakers at the individual level. While our goals and methodologies are informed by our theoretical perspective, we expect that our work and results will be of interest to linguists working in other frameworks and even to the public more generally. This article outlines the goals and methodologies of the project and describes in broad strokes some of the results obtained so far, as well as some of the ways we have shared our findings with others, inside and outside academia.


Author(s):  
Gizem Arikan ◽  
Pazit Ben-Nun Bloom

In research on religiosity and support for democratic norms, two major debates stand out: The first concerns whether some religious traditions, such as Islam or Orthodox Christianity, are inherently undemocratic, and hence whether supporters of these traditions have antidemocratic orientations. The second debate is about whether religious orientations beyond religious identification foster or hinder support for democratic norms. Both debates may be resolved by conceptualizing both individual religiosity and support for democratic norms as multidimensional orientations. At the individual level, religiosity consists of belief, behavior, and belonging dimensions. Support for democratic norms consist of overt approval of democracy as the ideal system of governing the country and intrinsic support, which refers to an understanding of democracy as being primarily associated with liberal-democratic norms and institutions such as popular sovereignty, political equality, civil rights, and free elections. Religious belief is negatively associated with over support, and religious social behavior is positively associated with overt support. Yet, there is some evidence that the effect of religious social behavior on intrinsic support for democracy may not be positive. Recent scholarship is also interested in identifying the psychological mechanisms through which different religiosity dimensions affect support for democratic norms, as well as establishing the causal effects of religiosity dimensions by experimentally manipulating different facets of religiosity. Although the multidimensional approach to religiosity provides a general framework that explains the effect of religiosity on support for democratic norms, there is still substantive variation across time and different contexts to be explained. Avenues exist for future research in terms of theorizing and identifying the moderating effects of different factors, most obviously the religious context and the influence of religious elites and social networks.


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 183-198
Author(s):  
Wiktor Soral ◽  
Mirosław Kofta

Abstract. The importance of various trait dimensions explaining positive global self-esteem has been the subject of numerous studies. While some have provided support for the importance of agency, others have highlighted the importance of communion. This discrepancy can be explained, if one takes into account that people define and value their self both in individual and in collective terms. Two studies ( N = 367 and N = 263) examined the extent to which competence (an aspect of agency), morality, and sociability (the aspects of communion) promote high self-esteem at the individual and the collective level. In both studies, competence was the strongest predictor of self-esteem at the individual level, whereas morality was the strongest predictor of self-esteem at the collective level.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-137
Author(s):  
Roxanne Christensen ◽  
LaSonia Barlow ◽  
Demetrius E. Ford

Three personal reflections provided by doctoral students of the Michigan School of Professional Psychology (Farmington Hills, Michigan) address identification of individual perspectives on the tragic events surrounding Trayvon Martin’s death. The historical ramifications of a culture-in-context and the way civil rights, racism, and community traumatization play a role in the social construction of criminals are explored. A justice orientation is applied to both the community and the individual via internal reflection about the unique individual and collective roles social justice plays in the outcome of these events. Finally, the personal and professional responses of a practitioner who is also a mother of minority young men brings to light the need to educate against stereotypes, assist a community to heal, and simultaneously manage the direct effects of such events on youth in society. In all three essays, common themes of community and growth are addressed from varying viewpoints. As worlds collided, a historical division has given rise to a present unity geared toward breaking the cycle of violence and trauma. The authors plead that if there is no other service in the name of this tragedy, let it at least contribute to the actualization of a society toward growth and healing.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-34
Author(s):  
Edward C. Warburton

This essay considers metonymy in dance from the perspective of cognitive science. My goal is to unpack the roles of metaphor and metonymy in dance thought and action: how do they arise, how are they understood, how are they to be explained, and in what ways do they determine a person's doing of dance? The premise of this essay is that language matters at the cultural level and can be determinative at the individual level. I contend that some figures of speech, especially metonymic labels like ‘bunhead’, can not only discourage but dehumanize young dancers, treating them not as subjects who dance but as objects to be danced. The use of metonymy to sort young dancers may undermine the development of healthy self-image, impede strong identity formation, and retard creative-artistic development. The paper concludes with a discussion of the influence of metonymy in dance and implications for dance educators.


Author(s):  
Pauline Oustric ◽  
Kristine Beaulieu ◽  
Nuno Casanova ◽  
Francois Husson ◽  
Catherine Gibbons ◽  
...  

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher James Hopwood ◽  
Ted Schwaba ◽  
Wiebke Bleidorn

Personal concerns about climate change and the environment are a powerful motivator of sustainable behavior. People’s level of concern varies as a function of a variety of social and individual factors. Using data from 58,748 participants from a nationally representative German sample, we tested preregistered hypotheses about factors that impact concerns about the environment over time. We found that environmental concerns increased modestly from 2009-2017 in the German population. However, individuals in middle adulthood tended to be more concerned and showed more consistent increases in concern over time than younger or older people. Consistent with previous research, Big Five personality traits were correlated with environmental concerns. We present novel evidence that increases in concern were related to increases in the personality traits neuroticism and openness to experience. Indeed, changes in openness explained roughly 50% of the variance in changes in environmental concerns. These findings highlight the importance of understanding the individual level factors associated with changes in environmental concerns over time, towards the promotion of more sustainable behavior at the individual level.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith Payne ◽  
Heidi A. Vuletich ◽  
Kristjen B. Lundberg

The Bias of Crowds model (Payne, Vuletich, & Lundberg, 2017) argues that implicit bias varies across individuals and across contexts. It is unreliable and weakly associated with behavior at the individual level. But when aggregated to measure context-level effects, the scores become stable and predictive of group-level outcomes. We concluded that the statistical benefits of aggregation are so powerful that researchers should reconceptualize implicit bias as a feature of contexts, and ask new questions about how implicit biases relate to systemic racism. Connor and Evers (2020) critiqued the model, but their critique simply restates the core claims of the model. They agreed that implicit bias varies across individuals and across contexts; that it is unreliable and weakly associated with behavior at the individual level; and that aggregating scores to measure context-level effects makes them more stable and predictive of group-level outcomes. Connor and Evers concluded that implicit bias should be considered to really be noisily measured individual construct because the effects of aggregation are merely statistical. We respond to their specific arguments and then discuss what it means to really be a feature of persons versus situations, and multilevel measurement and theory in psychological science more broadly.


2019 ◽  
pp. 78-106
Author(s):  
Aruna Dayanatha ◽  
J A S K Jayakody

Information system (IS) projects have been seen to be failing at an alarmingly high rate. The prevailing explanations of IS failure have had only a limited success. Thus, the time may be right to look at the reasons for IS failure through an alternative perspective. This paper proposes that IS success should be explained in terms of managerial leadership intervention, from the sensemaking perspective. Managers are responsible for workplace outcomes; thus, it may be appropriate to explain their role in IS success as well. The sensemaking perspective can explain IS success through holistic user involvement, a concept which critiques of existing explanations have stated to be a requirement for explaining IS failure. This paper proposes a framework combining the theory of enactment and leadership enactment to theorize managerial leadership intervention for “IS success.” The proposed explanation postulates that the managerial leader’s envisioning of the future transaction set influences the liberation of the follower and cast enactment, while liberating followers and cast enactment constitute manager sensegiving. The managerial leader’s sense-giving influences follower sensemaking. Follower sensemaking, under the influence of managerial sensegiving, will lead to followers’ IS acceptance, and that constitutes IS success at the individual level. Further, collective level IS acceptance constitutes IS adaption/success, and this will influence the leader’s sensegiving, for the next round of sensemaking.


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