Replacement-Based Cultural Threat and Immigration Attitudes

With the influx of nonwhite migrants into white-majority states across the Global North, right-wing political actors have used populism to shape public perception of immigration and immigrants themselves. Warnings against the acceptance of outgroup populations can be traced back to the dawn of human social behavior, though a recent shift in rhetoric by xenophobic actors has taken place. Moving away from claims of impending security, economic or cultural threats of migrant populations, contemporary anti-immigrant rhetoric has shifted toward claims that migrant populations will replace existing western cultures altogether. Through both a survey experiment and an Immigration Threat Measurement Study, this thesis explores the novel replacement threat—a previously overlooked and distinct form of immigration threat. Replacement threat—based in the psychological framing of the impending minority status of a white majority—proves to be an innovative tool for identifying the socio-political consequences of replacement-based rhetoric on immigration attitudes.The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research ScholarshipNo embargoAcademic Major: Political Scienc

The acquisition of questions with long-distance dependencies

A number of researchers have claimed that questions and other constructions with long distance dependencies (LDDs) are acquired relatively early, by age 4 or even earlier, in spite of their complexity. Analysis of LDD questions in the input available to children suggests that they are extremely stereotypical, raising the possibility that children learn lexically specific templates such as WH do you think S-GAP? rather than general rules of the kind postulated in traditional linguistic accounts of this construction. We describe three elicited imitation experiments with children aged from 4;6 to 6;9 and adult controls. Participants were asked to repeat prototypical questions (i.e., questions which match the hypothesised template), unprototypical questions (which depart from it in several respects) and declarative counterparts of both types of interrogative sentences. The children performed significantly better on the prototypical variants of both constructions, even when both variants contained exactly the same lexical material, while adults showed prototypicality e¤ects for LDD questions only. These results suggest that a general declarative complementation construction emerges quite late in development (after age 6), and that even adults rely on lexically specific templates for LDD questions

A Continuous Opinion Dynamics Model Based on the Principle of Meta-Contrast

We propose a new continuous opinion dynamics model inspired by social psychology. It is based on a central assumption of self-categorization theory called principle of meta-contrast. We study the behaviour of the model for several network interactions and show that, in particular, consensus, polarization or extremism are possible outcomes, even without explicit introduction of extremist agents. The model is compared to other existing opinion dynamics models.Opinion Dynamics, Self-Categorization Theory, Consensus, Polarization, Extremism

Using recognition-induced forgetting to assess forgetting of racial minority faces

Recognition-induced forgetting is a forgetting effect whereby items held in visual long-term memory are forgotten as a consequence of recognizing other items of the same category. Previous research has demonstrated that recognition-induced forgetting occurs for White faces but not Black faces. Specifically, while recognizing one White face leads to the forgetting of another, memory for Black faces is undisturbed in the same situation. In the real world, the immunity of Black faces to recognition-induced forgetting could cause disproportionately more positive eyewitness identifications of Black suspects than White suspects. Are racial minority faces immune to recognition-induced forgetting? Here we tested recognition-induced forgetting of Asian faces. Despite replicating the immunity of Black faces to recognition-induced forgetting, Asian faces were susceptible to recognition-induced forgetting. These findings suggest that racial minority status of the face does not create immunity to recognition-induced forgetting.No embargoAcademic Major: Psycholog

Book review: Psychology and politics: a social identity perspective

"Psychology and Politics: a Social Identity Perspective." Alexa Ispas. Psychology Press. December 2012. --- This book covers a wide range of political topics, such as the way in which categorising ourselves into groups influences how we perceive the social world, the implications of categorisation for social influence, and the mechanisms underlying obedience under authoritarian regimes. Yves Laberge thinks this book serves as an excellent update on the social identity perspective

Questions with long-distance dependencies: a usage-based perspective

Attested questions with long-distance dependencies (e.g., What do you think you’re doing?) tend to be quite stereotypical: the matrix clause usually consists of a WH word, the auxiliary do or did, the pronoun you, and the verb think or say, with no other elements; and they virtually never contain more than one subordinate clause. This has lead some researchers in the usage-based framework (Da˛browska 2004; Verhagen 2005) to hypothesise that speakers’ knowledge about such constructions is best explained in terms of relatively specific, low level templates rather than general rules that apply ‘‘across the board’’. The research reported here was designed to test this hypothesis and alternative hypotheses derived from rule-based theories

Birds of a feather: leader-follower similarity and procedural fairness effects on cooperation

The present paper examines to what extent leader-follower similarity moderates the effect of procedural justice on followers’ cooperation. Using subjective operationalizations of similarity in a vignette study, a field study and an experimental lab study, we demonstrated that the enactment of fair procedures elicits the highest levels of cooperation when followers perceive the leader as similar. This was true when similarity was framed in broad, deep-level terms (Study 1 and 2) or in terms of a single, specific characteristic, i.e., the need to belong (Study 3). In the discussion we elaborate on possible explanatory mechanisms and on the broader context of an integrative approach to leadership research

Public confidence in policing: a neo-Durkheimian perspective

Public confidence in policing has received much attention in recent years, but few studies outside of the United States have examined the sociological and social–psychological processes that underpin trust and support. This study, conducted in a rural English location, finds that trust and confidence in the police are shaped not by sentiments about risk and crime, but by evaluations of the values and morals that underpin community life. Furthermore, to garner public confidence, the police must be seen first to typify group morals and values and second to treat the public with dignity and fairness. All these findings are consistent with the perspective that people are Durkheimian in their attitudes towards crime, policing and punishment—a perspective developed here in this paper