Knowledge About Individuals’ Interracial Friendships Is Systematically Associated With Mental Representations of Race, Traits, and Group Solidarity

Individuals with other-race friends are perceived to identify less strongly with their racial in-group than are individuals with same-race friends. Using the reverse-correlation technique, we show that this effect goes beyond perceptions of social identification, influencing how people are mentally represented. In four studies with Black and White American participants, we demonstrate a “racial assimilation effect”: Participants, independent of their own race, represented both Black and White targets with other-race friends as phenotypically more similar to the respective racial out-group. Representations of targets with racial out-group friends were subsequently rated as more likely to engage in social action supportive of the racial out-group. Out-group targets with other-race friends were represented more favorably than out-group targets with mostly same-race friends. White participants had particularly negative representations of in-group members with mostly Black friends. The present research suggests that individuals’ social networks influence how their race and associated traits are mentally represented.

Essays in policy evaluation and labor economics

This dissertation contains three chapters. The first chapter evaluates the effect of a gun control act in California. State legislators in the U.S. are striving to curb gun violence. A common approach is to extend the existing firearms ban list. This paper examines the effect of legislation restricting sales of selected firearms in California using the synthetic control method. This case study method forms a synthetic unit using a linear combination of other states in the U.S. as the control group. The results show substantial increases in firearm sales in California from the point of passage until the law becomes effective. After the surge ends when the law becomes effective, the sale of firearms is only moderately affected thereafter. This paper also creates robustness checks to confirm that the synthetic control method is working properly with low firearm density in California, which calls into question some of the assumptions underlying the synthetic control method. The Difference-in-Difference regression reaches the same conclusion. The second chapter focuses on immigrant assimilation in the U.S. Assimilation is the process in which immigrants improve earnings as they become more adapted to the host country society. Cross-sectional studies show that immigrants have lower earnings upon arrival and faster earnings growth compared to natives. Longitudinal studies conclude that estimates based on cross-sectional data are positively biased due to decreasing cohort quality and negatively selected outmigration. I reproduce such estimates with recent U.S. data. The estimates would appear to show "bias," as inclusion of cohort fixed effects alter estimates. However, in contrast to expectations based on the current literature, decreasing cohort quality and outmigration do not explain the difference. Next, I apply a non-parametric method to make the wage distributions visually comparable across cohorts and time. I find that the linear specification of assimilation is misleading. Finally, I revisit the classic model with a quadratic assimilation term and expand it to explore the assimilation process's heterogeneity. I find that the "bias" disappears with a quadratic assimilation effect. The assimilation effect is sensitive to age at arrival and country of origin. The third chapter considers an unexplained puzzle in one of the most widely used public datasets in the U.S. The American Community Survey (ACS) replaced the Decennial Census as the primary data source for identifying immigrants' socioeconomic characteristics. This paper focuses on cohort analysis, in which a cohort combines immigrants arriving in a given year from surveys in multiple years. Tracking the sizes of cohorts from 2006 to 2019 using the ACS, we observe an abnormal increase in cohort size in the 10th and 20th years since arrival. Two hypotheses are tested, population estimate structural break and the renewal of green card. Neither appears to explain the puzzle.

Assimilation in networks promoting common pool resource conservation

This study investigates how assimilation in social comparison (i.e., changing behaviors in order to fit in with a group) impacts individual behaviors in the extraction of a common pool resource in different network structures (i.e., empty network, star, circle, and complete network). Our results suggest that over-exploitation is more likely to happen when there is a presence of assimilation in comparison. However, it is possible to incentivize resource conservation since the assimilation effect on individual conservation behavior highly depends on the network structures. Thus, promoting assimilation to a centralized network or networks with fewer connections is a good way to encourage resource conservation. More particularly, in a decentralized network with fewer connections (e.g., a circle network), assimilation in social comparison (e.g., feedback on their behaviors and the average behaviors of their neighbors) could help to promote resource conservation. A centralized network is useful in diffusing information and promoting assimilation in comparison by incentivizing the resource conservation of the central agents.

How do Good and Bad News Impact Mood During the Covid-19 Pandemic? The Role of Similarity

How do media reports about the Covid-19 pandemic influence our mood? Building on the social comparison theory, we predicted that reading negative news affecting a similar group would result in an impaired mood. In contrast, reading negative news about a dissimilar group should lead to improved mood. To test this, 150 undergraduate students read positive or negative news about the well-being of a similar or dissimilar group during the pandemic. As predicted, a mood assimilation effect occurred for similar groups, whilst a contrast effect occurred for a dissimilar group. This pattern went so far that undergraduates reported the best mood after learning that the elder generation suffered from Covid-19. This finding seems worrying and calls for future research.

Neighborhoods and Cities as Arenas of Social Influence

This chapter examines the relationship between political discussion and the geography of the vote. Social influences induce many citizens to cast votes that differ from the ones they would have cast if they lived elsewhere. The chapter considers neighborhood effects on vote choice in two Brazilian cities. Nearly two-thirds of discussion partners in the two cities are residents of the same neighborhood. Neighborhoods with a stable and relatively homogeneous partisan leaning assimilate, over the course of a campaign, initially disagreeing residents toward that leaning. The chapter then shows that this effect occurs through discussion between neighborhood coresidents in the politically polarized city of Caxias do Sul. In other words, the clustering of political preferences by neighborhood in Caxias is partly due to social influences and not, as in the case of the United States, mere self-sorting . By contrast, the same level of political discussion in Juiz de Fora, a less polarized city where the partisan leanings of neighborhoods are amorphous, yields no assimilation effect.

Cognitive sequential dependencies in the wild: Sentiment analysis approach

Social networks data as naturally occurring data, are nowadays freely available toresearchers, and can constitute a unique source for exploring many theories in psychology andcognitive sciences. This paper investigates an effect known as cognitive sequential dependencein decision making, using five-point rating in term of review polarity index (RPI) of each user'sreviews by natural language processing about a services or businesses in YELP. In the presentstudy, the criteria for cognitive dependency in decisions is the degree of deviation of the presentRPI from the average of each user's RPIs. The statistical population consists of all user's reviewspublished by the YELP site, which contains over 6 million reviews. After some initialpreprocessing and filtering on textual reviews by Stanford CoreNLP tools in java, the linearregression analysis was performed on the reviews. Regression coefficients between deviationfrom mean of RPIs, with the RPI corresponded to different distances from current review up to 7distances against baseline, represented a statistically significant and strong relationships as wellas they revealed by going farther from current user decision, a subtle change from contrast effectto assimilation effect in users' decisions. While there are not usually a subtle matches betweenpolarity of explicit ratings (stars) and provided textual data in business websites , The promisingresults of this study suggest utilizing textual content of reviews as implicit ratings to trackcognitive sequential dependencies in the wild data and application of it for debasing algorithmand designing efficient online recommendation systems.

Temporal persistence of after-effects in the n-1 replication task

In line with the theory of event coding, many studies on tool use show that perceived visual and haptic information interacts with action execution. In two experiments, we investigated the temporal persistence of after-effects within an event file, and after-effects in temporally overlapping event files with the n-1 replication task. Each trial consisted of two phases: In phase 1, participants moved a cursor with a pen on a covered tablet while a gain varied the relation between hand and cursor amplitude (Experiment 1). In phase 2, participants replicated the hand amplitude of phase 1 of the previous trial without visual feedback. Any systematic over- and undershoot would be indicative for after-effects. When the cursor amplitude varied and the hand amplitude remained constant, we did not find any after-effects but adjustment of the internal model. For varying hand amplitudes, after-effects appeared in terms of a contrast and assimilation effect between temporally overlapping event files and within an event file, respectively. In Experiment 2, we confirmed that the observed pattern of over- and undershoots fully reflect assimilation/contrast due to perception-action interaction. The findings extend the current view on the temporal stability of short-term binding in sensorimotor transformation tasks: In the n-1 replication task, after-effects appeared only in trials with varying hand amplitudes. We replicated the contrast effect and assimilation effect, and the assimilation effect persisted for up to approximately 20 s.

Coarticulation with alveopalatal sibilants in Mandarin and Polish: Phonetics or phonology?

Previous work has shown that vowels following alveopalatal sibilants typically exhibit raised second formant (F2) values, typically attributed to coarticulatory vowel fronting (e.g. Stevens, 2004 in Mandarin; Bukmaier & Harrington, 2016 in Polish). This paper re-examines the palatalizing coarticulatory effects of the alveopalatal sibilant in Mandarin and Polish. While previous studies have focused on differences in F2 transitions or values at vowel onset, I find that the raised F2 values following alveopalatal sibilants frequently persist through the entire duration of following vowels in Mandarin. This raises the question of whether this is a phonetic coarticulation effect or a phonological assimilation effect. I review diagnostics for such a distinction and provide evidence from speech rate which suggests that the raised F2 effect should be analyzed as phonological assimilation in Mandarin, but phonetic coarticulation in Polish. These results have implications for phonological representations and perception in both languages.

Knowledge About Individuals’ Interracial Friendships is Systematically Associated with Mental Representations of Race, Traits, and Group Solidarity

Individuals with other-race friends are perceived to identify more strongly with racial out-groups than individuals with same-race friends. We show that this effect goes beyond perceptions of social identification, influencing how individuals are mentally represented. In three studies with Black and White American participants, we demonstrate a “racial assimilation effect”: Participants, independent of their own race, represented both Black and White targets with other-race friends as phenotypically more similar to the respective racial out-group. Representations of targets with racial out-group friends were subsequently rated as more likely to engage in social action supportive of the racial out-group. Out-group targets with other-race friends were represented more favorably (e.g., as warm, competent, trustworthy) than targets with mostly same-race friends. However, White participants had particularly negative representations of in-group members with mostly Black friends. The present research thus demonstrates how individuals’ social environments influence how their race and associated traits are mentally represented.