Expressive Survey Responding: A Closer Look at the Evidence and Its Implications for American Democracy

Concerns about public opinion-based threats to American democracy are often tied to evidence of partisan bias in factual perceptions. However, influential work on expressive survey responding suggests that many apparent instances of such bias result from respondents insincerely reporting politically congenial views in order to gain expressive psychological benefits. Importantly, these findings have been interpreted as “good news for democracy” because partisans who knowingly report incorrect beliefs in surveys can act on their correct beliefs in the real world. We presently synthesize evidence and commentary on this matter, drawing two conclusions. First, evidence for insincere expressive responding on divisive political matters is limited and ambiguous. Second, when experimental manipulations in surveys reduce reports of politically congenial factual beliefs, this is often because such reported beliefs serve as flexible and interchangeable ways of justifying the largely stable allegiances that guide political behavior. So when circumstances render it costly to endorse a partisan belief, assessments of that belief become less diagnostic of the political predispositions that matter most, not more diagnostic of sincere views that will override partisan commitments. The expressive value of acting on political commitments should be viewed as a central feature of the American political context rather than a methodological artifact of surveys.

Gay Bars and the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study investigates the impact of COVID-19 pandemic public closure orders on business listings for gay bars. Recent studies have shown gay bars to be quite vulnerable, with listings showing a 36.6% decline between 2007 and 2019. To supplement historic data from comprehensive printed listings, the Damron Guide, we conducted a census of online business listings. We verified each listing in the 2019 edition, also searching for new bars that were not included in that version. Results show that gay bar listings declined by 15.2% between 2019 and Spring 2021. This compares, however, to a 14.4% decline for 2017 and 2019, indicating a surprisingly stable rate of decline. This stability may be a methodological artifact, but may also reflect the relative resources of surviving gay bars going into pandemic, and/or their continuing vulnerability and precarity.

Spurious empirical support for the p-factor arises with the inclusion of undiagnosed cases

Background: The p-factor is thought to cause a positive manifold in psychopathology data, and many researchers presume that it is a substantive mechanism as opposed to a methodological artifact. Limited research suggests that including completely undiagnosed cases (i.e., cases without a single diagnosis) affects the dimensionality of psychological constructs, so we examined whether empirical support for the p-factor arises with their inclusion in structural models of psychopathology.Methods: We drew on data from three large, nationally representative samples of US community members, the: National Epidemiologic Study on Alcohol and Related Conditions Wave 1 (N=43,093), National Comorbidity Survey (N=5,877), and National Comorbidity Survey- Replication (N=5,692). We systematically culled undiagnosed cases from the data in increments of 10% and re-estimated structural models of psychopathology.Results: The correlation between latent externalizing and internalizing factors varied considerably as a function of the proportion of undiagnosed cases, with the correlation dropping to zero or even slightly negative when all undiagnosed cases were excluded. Also, as undiagnosed cases were removed, general factors of psychopathology explained less variance in psychopathology and weakened in terms of the extent to which it was well-represented by its indicators.Conclusions: Including undiagnosed cases in structural models of psychopathology induces a homogeneous, unidimensional structure. Ultimately, our findings raise questions about the nature of the p-factor, including whether it reflects a methodological artifact or arises due to the inclusion of cases with absence of diagnosed psychopathology.

Individual Differences in Updating are not related to Reasoning Ability and Working Memory Capacity

Updating is the executive function (EF) previously found to most strongly relate to higher cognitive abilities such as reasoning. However, this relationship could be a methodological artifact: Measures of other EFs (i.e., inhibition and shifting) usually isolate the contribution of EF, whereas updating is measured by overall accuracy in working memory (WM) tasks involving updating. This updating accuracy-score conflates updating-specific individual differences (e.g., removal of outdated information) with variance in WM maintenance. Re-analyzing data (N = 111) from von Bastian et al. (2016), we separated updating-specific variance from WM maintenance variance. Updating contributed only 15% to individual differences in performance in the updating tasks, and it correlated neither with reasoning nor with independent WM measures reflecting storage and processing or relational integration. In contrast, the WM maintenance component of the updating task correlated with both abilities. These findings challenge the view that updating contributes to variance in higher cognitive abilities.

Decision comprehensiveness and the outcomes of firms: Reinterpreting and extending a recent meta-analysis

Disagreement and debate are the lifeblood of any scientific field. With that truth in mind, we express our disagreement with some of the conclusions drawn by Samba et al. in a generally well-conducted meta-analysis recently published in Strategic Organization. We carefully reexamine several aspects of their study and suggest that two of their key conclusions are flawed because of misinterpretations of data and analyses. We present new findings that call into question their conclusion that observed positive relationships between decision comprehensiveness and firm outcomes are likely a methodological artifact of researchers’ use of subjective outcome measures. In addition, we question Samba et al.’s conclusion regarding the unimportance of proper lag structures in assessments of comprehensiveness and outcomes. Because meta-analyses are vital tools for consolidating and extending research, our work is important for informing future directions of both science and practice. Because the value of systematic, extensive decision processes has been the focus of a decades-long debate in organizational science and strategic management, our goal is particularly important.

Resumptive Pronouns Can Ameliorate Illicit Island Extractions

Syntax literature reports that resumptive pronouns (RPs) ameliorate island violations, but much psycholinguistics literature has found RPs to be no more acceptable than straightforwardly island-violating gaps, even though island production tasks consistently elicit RPs. However, psycholinguistic studies have typically compared RP and illicit gap conditions indirectly. We posit that RP island amelioration in comprehension is undetectable when participants cannot compare alternative sentences, and thus that the apparent production/comprehension split arises from methodological differences between perception and production experiments. We present six experiments crossing three island types in two tasks (full-sentence forced choice and forced-choice fill-in-the-blank), manipulating gap location (island vs. nonisland). We find that RPs are preferred in islands and gaps in nonislands ( p = .0001). This suggests that RPs do ameliorate island violations and that the production/comprehension split is a methodological artifact.

Theory and Method in Public Administration

Despite widespread agreement about goals of knowledge development in public administration, there is imbalance in efforts directed at these goals. The overlap between the domains of theory and practice is not substantial. Important concerns in public administration theory and practice are outweighed by naïve quantitative bias (NQB), an unfortunate methodological artifact. This symposium seeks to highlight this imbalance and to nudge the public administration scholarly community toward paying attention to theoretical and practical matters, recognizing NQB and mitigating its undesirable effects on knowledge development. Broadly speaking, two recommendations emerge from symposium contributions. The first recommendation emphasizes paying attention to theoretical goals. The second recommendation is to promote reflexivity about how the domains of theory and method interact to counter the methodological artifact of NQB. A brief overview of each article in the symposium and its contribution to advancing knowledge development is provided.