scholarly journals Moral reframing of messages about mask-wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Kaplan ◽  
Anthony Vaccaro ◽  
Max Henning ◽  
Leonardo Christov-Moore

Despite evidence in support of the benefits of wearing masks, attitudes about mask-wearing during the COVID-19 pandemic became politicized, and therefore tied with political values and group identities. When communicating about political issues, messages targeted to resonate with the core values of the receiver may be effective, an approach known as moral reframing. We first tested the relationships between moral values and mask-wearing in a sample (N=540) of self-identified liberals, conservatives, and moderates in the United States. Anti-mask attitudes were stronger in conservatives, and were associated with increased concerns for in-group loyalty, national identity, and personal liberty. We then crafted messages about the benefits of mask-wearing framed to resonate with these moral concerns, and in a pre-registered study of N=597 self-identified U.S. conservatives, tested the effect of moral reframing on anti-mask attitudes and behaviors. We found that messages framed in terms of loyalty, with appeals to the protection of the community and America, were effective in reducing anti-mask beliefs, compared with unrelated control messages and messages delivering purely scientific information, and that these changes in belief persisted for at least one week. Exploratory analyses showed that participants who saw loyalty-framed messages reported wearing masks in public more frequently in the subsequent week. These data provide evidence that moral reframing of messages about politicized issues can be effective, and specifically that framing messages about health behaviors in terms of group loyalty may be the most productive way of communicating with conservative audiences.

Author(s):  
Andrea Harris

The introduction presents the core historiographical problem that Making BalletAmerican aims to correct: the idea that George Balanchine’s neoclassical choreography represents the first successful manifestation of an “American” ballet. While this idea is pervasive in dance history, little scholarly attention has been paid to its construction. The introduction brings to light an alternative, more complex historical context for American neoclassical ballet than has been previously considered. It places Lincoln Kirstein’s 1933 trip to Paris, famous for bringing Balanchine to the United States, within a transnational and interdisciplinary backdrop of modernism, during a time when the global art world was shifting significantly in response to the international rise of fascism. This context reverberates throughout to the book’s examination of American ballet as a form that was embedded in and responsive to a changing set of social, cultural, and political conditions over the period covered, 1933–1963.


Author(s):  
Norman Schofield

A key concept of social choice is the idea of the Condorcet point or core. For example, consider a voting game with four participants so any three will win. If voters have Euclidean preferences, then the point at the center will be unbeaten. Earlier spatial models of social choice focused on deterministic voter choice. However, it is clear that voter choice is intrinsically stochastic. This chapter employs a stochastic model based on multinomial logit to examine whether parties in electoral competition tend to converge toward the electoral center or respond to activist pressure to adopt more polarized policies. The chapter discusses experimental results of the idea of the core explores empirical analyses of elections in Israel and the United States.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Irus Braverman

Our special issue provides a first-of-its kind attempt to examine environmental injustices in the occupied West Bank through interdisciplinary perspectives, pointing to the broader settler colonial and neoliberal contexts within which they occur and to their more-than-human implications. Specifically, we seek to understand what environmental justice—a movement originating from, and rooted in, the United States—means in the context of Palestine/Israel. Moving beyond the settler-native dialectic, we draw attention to the more-than-human flows that occur in the region—which include water, air, waste, cement, trees, donkeys, watermelons, and insects—to consider the dynamic, and often gradational, meanings of frontier, enclosure, and Indigeneity in the West Bank, challenging the all-too-binary assumptions at the core of settler colonialism. Against the backdrop of the settler colonial project of territorial dispossession and elimination, we illuminate the infrastructural connections and disruptions among lives and matter in the West Bank, interpreting these through the lens of environmental justice. We finally ask what forms of ecological decolonization might emerge from this landscape of accumulating waste, concrete, and ruin. Such alternative visions that move beyond the single axis of settler-native enable the emergence of more nuanced, and even hopeful, ecological imaginaries that focus on sumud, dignity, and recognition.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 205630512110088
Author(s):  
Colin Agur ◽  
Lanhuizi Gan

Scholars have recognized emotion as an increasingly important element in the reception and retransmission of online information. In the United States, because of existing differences in ideology, among both audiences and producers of news stories, political issues are prone to spark considerable emotional responses online. While much research has explored emotional responses during election campaigns, this study focuses on the role of online emotion in social media posts related to day-to-day governance in between election periods. Specifically, this study takes the 2018–2019 government shutdown as its subject of investigation. The data set shows the prominence of journalistic and political figures in leading the discussion of news stories, the nuance of emotions employed in the news frames, and the choice of pro-attitudinal news sharing.


Societies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Zeynep Correia

Airports are located at the core of the production process, but can they also be where the “revolutionary subject” is hidden? We know what airports stand for nowadays, but have we pushed for what they could possibly stand for? Can airports, as a form of urban technology, be reimagined beyond their current roles of a “space technology nexus” driving capital movement? Can we imagine, idealize, and locate them somewhere else in a period dominated by the economy of time, where speed and accessibility matter the most? In this framework, this provocative essay aims to frame airports as a protest and public expression venue. Drawing inspiration from recent examples, such as the Stansted Airport protests in the UK, the Occupy Airports protests that occurred all around the United States, and touching upon the divergent example of Turkey’s 15th of July night protests in 2016, I provide a glimpse of an alternative prospect for this key urban infrastructure.


Author(s):  
Robert J. Fetterman

As the nuclear renaissance is now upon us and new plants are either under construction or being ordered, a considerable amount of attention has also turned to the design of the first fuel cycle. Requirements for core designs originate in the Utilities Requirements Document (URD) for the United States and the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) for Europe. First core designs created during the development of these documents were based on core design technology dating back to the 1970’s, where the first cycle core loading pattern placed the highest enrichment fuel on the core periphery and two other lower enrichments in the core interior. While this sort of core design provided acceptable performance, it underutilized the higher enriched fuel assemblies and tended to make transition to the first reload cycle challenging, especially considering that reload core designs are now almost entirely of the Low Leakage Loading Pattern (LLLP) design. The demands placed on today’s existing fleet of pressurized water reactors for improved fuel performance and economy are also desired for the upcoming Generation III+ fleet of plants. As a result of these demands, Westinghouse has developed an Advanced First Core (AFCPP) design for the initial cycle loading pattern. This loading pattern design simulates the reactivity distribution of an 18 month low leakage reload cycle design by placing the higher enriched assemblies in the core interior which results in improved uranium utilization for those fuel assemblies carried through the first and second reload cycles. Another feature of the advanced first core design is radial zoning of the high enriched assemblies, which allows these assemblies to be located in the core interior while still maintaining margin to peaking factor limits throughout the cycle. Finally, the advanced first core loading pattern also employs a variety of burnable absorber designs and lengths to yield radial and axial power distributions very similar to those found in typical low leakage reload cycle designs. This paper will describe each of these key features and demonstrate the operating margins of the AFC design and the ability of the AFC design to allow easy transition into 18 month low leakage reload cycles. The fuel economics of the AFC design will also be compared to those of a more traditional first core loading pattern.


2014 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-174
Author(s):  
Caroline Gelmi

Caroline Gelmi, “‘The Pleasures of Merely Circulating’: Sappho and Early American Newspaper Poetry” (pp. 151–174) This essay examines how early national verse cultures Americanized the popular figure of Sappho. Newspaper parodies of fragment 31, which circulated widely in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, mocked English poet Ambrose Philips’s well-known translation of Sappho’s “Phainetai moi” ode in order to address concerns over the role of Englishness in the United States. The parodies achieved these political effects by allegorizing their own conditions of print circulation and deflating the cultural associations of fragment 31 and Philips’s translation with the lyric. In this way, these poems were able to address a number of political issues, from English imperialism in Ireland to the specter of English aristocracy in the U.S. federal government. This study of Sappho’s role as a figure for American print circulation in the early nineteenth century also offers a pre-history of the more familiar midcentury association of Sappho with the Poetess. As a figure for the Poetess, Sappho came to embody anxieties over female authors in the marketplace, representing concerns that the public circulation of the Poetess’ work and the promiscuous circulation of her body were one and the same. This essay tells the rich backstory to these more familiar concepts, tracing Sappho’s earlier entanglements with print circulation and the political and cultural functions she served.


2021 ◽  
pp. 073112142199840
Author(s):  
Tara D. Warner ◽  
Tara Leigh Tober ◽  
Tristan Bridges ◽  
David F. Warner

Protection is now the modal motivation for gun ownership, and men continue to outnumber women among gun owners. While research has linked economic precarity (e.g., insecurity and anxiety) to gun ownership and attitudes, separating economic well-being from constructions of masculinity is challenging. In response to blocked economic opportunities, some gun owners prioritize armed protection, symbolically replacing the masculine role of “provider” with one associated with “protection.” Thus, understanding both persistently high rates of gun ownership in the United States (in spite of generally declining crime) alongside the gender gap in gun ownership requires deeper investigations into the meaning of guns in the United States and the role of guns in conceptualizations of American masculinity. We use recently collected crowdsourced survey data to test this provider-to-protector shift, exploring how economic precarity may operate as a cultural-level masculinity threat for some, and may intersect with marital/family status to shape gun attitudes and behaviors for both gun owners and nonowners. Results show that investments in stereotypical masculine ideals, rather than economic precarity, are linked to support for discourses associated with protective gun ownership and empowerment.


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