Finding Someone to Blame: The Link Between COVID-19 Conspiracy Beliefs, Prejudice, Support for Violence, and Other Negative Social Outcomes

One of the appeals of conspiracy theories in times of crises is that they provide someone to blame for what has happened. Thereby, they increase distrust, negative feelings, and hostility toward implicated actors, whether those are powerful social outgroups or one’s own government representatives. Two studies reported here examine associations of COVID-19 conspiracy theories with prejudice, support for violence, and other and negative social outcomes. In Study 1 (N = 501), the endorsement of the more specific conspiracy theories about the alleged role of China was associated with more prejudiced views of Chinese and Italian people. In Study 2 (N = 1024), lowered trust in government regulations and increased hostility associated with the COVID-19 and generic conspiracy beliefs were correlated with justification of and willingness to engage in non-compliance with regulations, violent attacks on 5G masts, and anti-government protests. Across both of the studies, higher exposure to news about COVID-19 was associated with lower endorsement of conspiracy theories, but also with increased feelings of anxiety and lack of control, which in turn were correlated with higher COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs endorsement. We highlight the potential social problems which are associated with the wide-spread endorsement of COVID-19 conspiracy theories.

Sociality of Future Outcomes Moderates The Effects Of Warmth And Competence On Social Optimism Bias - A Pre-Registered Study

People are overoptimistic about the future of those they like or admire (social optimism bias), expecting significantly more desirable than undesirable outcomes. By contrast, they are pessimistic about those they don’t like. To operationalize the (dis)like of social targets, warmth and competence are used as two universal dimensions of social perception. In this pre-registered study, we replicate previous findings while adding two new levels of complexity. First, we make the distinction between the sociality of future outcomes: “alone” outcomes (e.g., enjoying a quiet afternoon by oneself) and “social” outcomes (e.g., enjoying a vacation with the significant other). Second, we investigate the effect of attachment styles on one’s expectations for alone and social outcomes towards the social targets. In line with our hypotheses, the sociality of outcomes moderates both the additive and the multiplicative effects of the warmth and competence of social targets on social optimism bias. Diverging from our hypotheses, we find that attachment anxiety and avoidance do not influence the effects of warmth and competence on social optimism bias. However, exploratory analyses revealed that attachment dimensions buffer the magnitude of social optimism bias for highly self-relevant social targets but do not impact a social pessimism bias for irrelevant targets.

Understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on a socially deprived UK coastal town: a preliminary exploratory analysis of health and socioeconomic data

Introduction In addition to the direct impact of COVID-19 infections on health and mortality, a growing body of literature indicates there are wide-ranging indirect impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated public health measures on population health and wellbeing. Exploring these indirect impacts in the context of a socially deprived UK coastal town will help identify priority areas to focus COVID-19 recovery efforts on. Methods Data on primary care diagnosis, hospital admissions, and several socioeconomic outcomes between 2016 and Spring 2021 in the UK town of Fleetwood were collected and analysed in an exploratory analysis looking at pre- and post- COVID-19 patterns in health and social outcomes. Weekly and monthly trends were plotted by time and differences between periods examined using Chi-squared and t-tests. Results Initial falls in hospital admissions and diagnoses of conditions in primary care in March 2020 were followed by sustained changes to health service activity for specific diagnostic and demographic groups, including for chronic kidney disease and young people. Increases in the number of people receiving Universal Credit and children eligible for free school meals appear to be greater for those in the least deprived areas of the town. Discussion These exploratory findings provide initial evidence of the sustained impact of the pandemic across several health and social outcomes. Examining these trends in multivariate analyses will further test these associations and establish the strength of the medium term impact of the pandemic on the population of this coastal town. Advanced modelling of this data is ongoing and will be published shortly.

Gender-based characteristics of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises in an emerging country: is this a man’s world?

Purpose Worldwide, Ecuador is one of the countries with the most entrepreneurial activity from micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). However, the effect of adopting the US dollar (dollarization), over which the central bank has no control, combined with being mainly an exporter of primary products, as well as strategic currency devaluation by neighboring economies, has created a difficult situation, especially for Ecuadorian women’s MSMEs. This paper aims to study the relationship between female ownership and Ecuadorian MSMEs’ financial, economic and social outcomes. Design/methodology/approach The authors compile a near-population panel of 617,804 firm-year observations representing an unbalanced panel of 112,917 MSMEs during the 2007–2016 sampling window. Panel (fixed effects) regression is used to test the hypotheses concerning the antecedents to firm financial performance, economic and social outcomes. Cox proportional hazards modeling is used to assess the impact of antecedents on firm survival. Findings First, firms providing more social benefits (e.g. employment and higher wages) have higher survival rates. Second, female ownership is negatively related with microenterprise financial performance, but positively associated with small-enterprise financial performance. Third, female-owned enterprises tend to provide higher wages per employee for all firm sizes. Fourth, although female-owned microenterprises are less efficient, they tend to provide more for their employees and possibly communities, through the economic stimulus they provide, in terms of the size of the financial outcomes. Originality/value This paper shows that, although this is a “man’s world,” women are learning earlier, developing faster professionally and overcoming stereotypes to focus on activities that generate both economic performance and social outcomes. Governmental policies that have contributed to MSMEs’ growth and women’s participation are identified. The findings suggest ways to improve and support both the creation of more women-owned MSMEs in emerging countries, such as Ecuador, and the survival of existing male- and female-owned MSMEs.

Conceptualizations of Knowledge in Structuring Approaches to Moral Development: A Process-Relational Approach

Like other aspects of child development, views of the nature and development of morality depend on philosophical assumptions or worldviews presupposed by researchers. We analyze assumptions regarding knowledge linked to two contrasting worldviews: Cartesian-split-mechanistic and process-relational. We examine the implications of these worldviews for approaches to moral development, including relations between morality and social outcomes, and the concepts of information, meaning, interaction and computation. It is crucial to understand how researchers view these interrelated concepts in order to understand approaches to moral development. Within the Cartesian-split-mechanistic worldview, knowledge is viewed as representation and meaning is mechanistic and fixed. Both nativism and empiricism are based in this worldview, differing in whether the source of representations is assumed to be primarily internal or external. Morality is assumed to pre-exist, either in the genome or the culture. We discuss problems with these conceptions and endorse the process-relational paradigm, according to which knowledge is constructed through interaction, and morality begins in activity as a process of coordinating perspectives, rather than the application of fixed rules. The contrast is between beginning with the mind or beginning with social activity in explaining the mind.

Social Outcomes of School Leavers With Cerebral Palsy Living in Victoria

Objective: In Australia, the National Disability Strategy provides a framework to guide actions and investment to achieve equity in social inclusion and economic participation for people with disability. We investigated the social outcomes of school leavers with cerebral palsy (CP) in Victoria, Australia and explored the determinants of desirable outcomes.Methods: We used the Victorian CP Register to invite all adults with CP aged 18–25 years (n = 649). On-line and/or paper-based surveys explored participation in education, employment, community activities, living situation, relationships and life satisfaction. Functional and health status data were collected. Social outcomes were summarized descriptively and compared between individuals with CP and non-disabled peers aged 18–25 years from the Household Income and Labor Dynamics in Australia dataset. Within the CP cohort we explored whether physical and mental health and level of functioning were associated with social outcomes. In addition, a descriptive comparison was undertaken between the social outcomes of the current CP cohort with that of a previously reported 2007 cohort.Results: Ninety participants (57% male; mean age 22.4 years (SD: 2.2) in 2020; 61.1% self-reported) provided data for analyses; response rate 16.9%. CP characteristics were similar between respondents and non-respondents. In comparison to similar aged peers, 79.8% had completed secondary school (compared to 83.2%); 32.6% (compared to 75.8%) were in paid work; 87.5% (compared to 48.2%) were living in their parental home; and 3.4% (compared to 31.6%) were married or partnered. Individuals with CP and higher levels of functional capacity and better physical health were more likely to undertake post-secondary education. Higher levels of functional capacity and physical health, as well as lower mental health status were associated with being employed.Conclusions: While foundational education completion rates were similar to non-disabled peers, significant gaps in social outcomes remain, including residence in the parental home and single status. While addressing these issues is challenging, substantial efforts are needed to reduce these disparities—work that needs to be done in collaboration with people with CP and their families.

Functional Fiction to Collective Action: Speculative Participatory Serious Urban Design Gaming to Enhance Slum-upgrading Processes

<p>People who are marginalised in slum-upgrading processes can benefit from participatory design strategies. When marginalised slum communities confront and explore conflicting perspectives, values, assumptions and goals through negotiation within participatory design processes, the ability to harness the collective intelligence of people to work towards collective action can be enhanced. However, a tension exists in the participatory design literature between those participatory processes that seek to facilitate social outcomes such as social capital building, and those that seek only to implement an urban development or upgrading project (slum upgrading) as the outcome. Exploring new methods of design participation that integrate both social outcomes and design processes can help alleviate this tension by recognising a diversity of stakeholder perspectives on urban-related issues and help them work towards implementing lasting communal change that explicitly takes into account cooperative development action. The dissertation explores an innovative approach to participatory slum upgrading, which proposes bringing together speculative architecture, participatory design, and serious gaming approaches to help stakeholders to explore conflicting perspectives, assumptions and corresponding future visions surrounding architectural and urban issues. The research focusses on how these three areas can be brought together to help develop a new approach for designing participatory design tools for marginalised communities. The research explores how a “speculative, participatory, serious urban gaming” (SPS-UG) approach might be used to help marginalised communities consider past, future and present community experiences, reconcile dissimilar assumptions, and generate social outcomes and in-game design responses, while priming participants for further long-term, slum-upgrading design engagement processes. Empirical material for this research was gathered from a range of case study workshops prepared with three landfill-based communities and external partners throughout 2017, which utilised a new SPS-UG computer game I designed called Maslow’s Palace to evaluate the approach. The research shows that the SPS-UG approach was successful in guiding the design of a serious game to help reveal, develop and ground stakeholder knowledge, goals and values surrounding slum-upgrading issues. Through an exploration of social complexities involved in the participatory design process, participants were stimulated to share diverse opinions and aspirations and thus deepen their understanding of self, others, norms and institutions. The SPS-UG approach contributed to slum-upgrading outcomes for communities by aiding slum-upgrading ideation, framing the consideration of alternate views and possible futures, and scaffolding discussions about what the future might look like through visual representation of possible design alternatives. Finally, the research discusses key methodological insights, and the challenges faced when working with marginalised communities while pursuing social and slum-upgrading outcomes through a gaming approach. This is significant when considering how the approach might interface with other slum-upgrading processes outside of the scope of this research or function as a catalyst for the transformation of other physical urban environments and socio-cultural contexts.</p>

Functional Fiction to Collective Action: Speculative Participatory Serious Urban Design Gaming to Enhance Slum-upgrading Processes

<p>People who are marginalised in slum-upgrading processes can benefit from participatory design strategies. When marginalised slum communities confront and explore conflicting perspectives, values, assumptions and goals through negotiation within participatory design processes, the ability to harness the collective intelligence of people to work towards collective action can be enhanced. However, a tension exists in the participatory design literature between those participatory processes that seek to facilitate social outcomes such as social capital building, and those that seek only to implement an urban development or upgrading project (slum upgrading) as the outcome. Exploring new methods of design participation that integrate both social outcomes and design processes can help alleviate this tension by recognising a diversity of stakeholder perspectives on urban-related issues and help them work towards implementing lasting communal change that explicitly takes into account cooperative development action. The dissertation explores an innovative approach to participatory slum upgrading, which proposes bringing together speculative architecture, participatory design, and serious gaming approaches to help stakeholders to explore conflicting perspectives, assumptions and corresponding future visions surrounding architectural and urban issues. The research focusses on how these three areas can be brought together to help develop a new approach for designing participatory design tools for marginalised communities. The research explores how a “speculative, participatory, serious urban gaming” (SPS-UG) approach might be used to help marginalised communities consider past, future and present community experiences, reconcile dissimilar assumptions, and generate social outcomes and in-game design responses, while priming participants for further long-term, slum-upgrading design engagement processes. Empirical material for this research was gathered from a range of case study workshops prepared with three landfill-based communities and external partners throughout 2017, which utilised a new SPS-UG computer game I designed called Maslow’s Palace to evaluate the approach. The research shows that the SPS-UG approach was successful in guiding the design of a serious game to help reveal, develop and ground stakeholder knowledge, goals and values surrounding slum-upgrading issues. Through an exploration of social complexities involved in the participatory design process, participants were stimulated to share diverse opinions and aspirations and thus deepen their understanding of self, others, norms and institutions. The SPS-UG approach contributed to slum-upgrading outcomes for communities by aiding slum-upgrading ideation, framing the consideration of alternate views and possible futures, and scaffolding discussions about what the future might look like through visual representation of possible design alternatives. Finally, the research discusses key methodological insights, and the challenges faced when working with marginalised communities while pursuing social and slum-upgrading outcomes through a gaming approach. This is significant when considering how the approach might interface with other slum-upgrading processes outside of the scope of this research or function as a catalyst for the transformation of other physical urban environments and socio-cultural contexts.</p>