Unobtrusive measures of prejudice: Estimating percentages of public beliefs and behaviours

This study was concerned with how accurate people are in their knowledge of population norms and statistics concerning such things as the economic, health and religious status of a nation and how those estimates are related to their own demography (e.g age, sex), ideology (political and religious beliefs) and intelligence. Just over 600 adults were asked to make 25 population estimates for Great Britain, including religious (church/mosque attendance) and economic (income, state benefits, car/house ownership) factors as well as estimates like the number of gay people, immigrants, smokers etc. They were reasonably accurate for things like car ownership, criminal record, vegetarianism and voting but seriously overestimated numbers related to minorities such as the prevalence of gay people, muslims and people not born in the UK. Conversely there was a significant underestimation of people receiving state benefits, having a criminal record or a private health insurance. Correlations between select variables and magnitude and absolute accuracy showed religiousness and IQ most significant correlates. Religious people were less, and intelligent people more, accurate in their estimates. A factor analysis of the estimates revealed five interpretable factors. Regressions were calculated onto these factors and showed how these individual differences accounted for as much as 14% of the variance. Implications and limitations are acknowledged.

Westerners Underestimate Global Inequality

Most global inequality is between-countries, but inequality perceptions have mostly been investigated within-country. Five studies (total N = 2149, four preregistered) show that Westerners (U.S. American, British, and French participants) believe that developing and middle-income countries’ GDP per capita is much closer to developed countries’ than it actually is, and that people in developing and middle-income countries have higher rates of car ownership, larger houses, and eat out more frequently than they actually do, meaning that Westerners underestimate global inequality. This misperception is underpinned by a convergence illusion: the belief that since the 1990s, poorer countries have closed the economic gap with richer countries to a larger extent than they have. Further, overestimating GDP per capita is negatively correlated with support for aid to the target country and positively correlated with a country’s perceived military threat. We discuss implications for inequality perception and for global economic justice.

(S)cars: Exploring America's Automotive Self

The article opens with an autoethnographic account of its author's encounter with the American sense of space in the context of the clash of his own and American cultural norms related to car ownership and car use. The initial anecdotes, in which the negative experiences of the authors lack of knowledge of the essentials of the car culture in the US prove to be instrumental in the process of learning and adaptation, lead to a more profound, historiosophic reflection upon the cars as vehicles of ethics across American cultural history.

Driving turnout: the effect of car ownership on electoral participation

Inequalities in voter participation between groups of the population pose a problem for democratic representation. We use administrative data on 6.7 million registered voters to show that a previously-ignored characteristic of voters—access to a personal automobile—creates large disparities in in-person voting rates. Lack of access to a car depresses election day voter turnout by substantively large amounts across a variety of fixed-effects models that account for other environmental and voter characteristics. Car access creates the largest hindrance to voting for those people who live farther from the polls. These effects do not appear for absentee voting, suggesting a simple policy solution to solve large disparities in political participation. This study contributes to the theoretic understanding of political participation as well as the impact of potential policy reforms to solve participatory gaps.

“License Plate Lottery”: Why Are People So Keen to Participate in It?

Vehicle purchase restriction policies greatly influence people’s behavior, especially their participation in the license plate lottery. This paper focuses on the socioeconomic characteristics and psychological factors of citizens participating in the license plate lottery, which can serve as a reference for policy makers aiming to guide rational participation in the lottery. A Multi-Index and Multi-Causal model were established based on social psychology, combined with the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB). Perceived car necessity, perceived behavioral control, car ownership attitude and subjective norms were regarded as four latent psychological variables. Furthermore, the behaviors of license plate lottery participants in cities with purchase restriction policies were statistically analyzed from the perspectives of personal socioeconomic characteristics and psychological factors. The empirical research results reveal that the socioeconomic attributes of citizens have different degrees of influence on latent variables. Perceived car necessity is observed to have a significant direct impact on a citizen’s behavioral intention to participate in the lottery, which is also affected by perceived behavioral control. Car ownership attitude has the strongest impact on citizen behavior towards participating in the license plate lottery, followed by subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, and perceived car necessity. More specifically, the economic benefit associated with perceived behavioral control is identified as the critical factor in further promoting participation in the license plate lottery.