Backlash against the #MeToo Movement: How Women’s Voice Causes Men to Feel Victimized

Three studies examined whether perceived increase in women’s “voice” (i.e., being heard and taken seriously about sexual assault) contributes to perceptions of bias against men. In Study 1, both men and women who perceived women to have a greater voice related to sexual assault, perceived greater victimization of men. This relationship was stronger for relatively conservative participants. In Study 2, relatively conservative (but not relatively liberal) participants who read about #MeToo perceived greater men’s victimization than those in the control condition. Study 3 examined responses to perceiving that men are victimized by #MeToo. For relatively conservative (but not liberal) men, perceptions of men’s victimhood led to less willingness to work alone with a woman and less willingness to combat sexual assault (relative to a control condition). Thus, while the #MeToo movement brings awareness of issues of sexual assault, it also generates a backlash among the more conservative, and may accentuate gender disparities

Position paper: The potential role of optical biopsy in the study and diagnosis of environmental enteric dysfunction

Environmental enteric dysfunction (EED) is a disease of the small intestine affecting children and adults in low and middle income countries. Arising as a consequence of repeated infections, gut inflammation results in impaired intestinal absorptive and barrier function, leading to poor nutrient uptake and ultimately to stunting and other developmental limitations. Progress towards new biomarkers and interventions for EED is hampered by the practical and ethical difficulties of cross-validation with the gold standard of biopsy and histology. Optical biopsy techniques — which can provide minimally invasive or noninvasive alternatives to biopsy — could offer other routes to validation and could potentially be used as point-of-care tests among the general population. This Consensus Statement identifies and reviews the most promising candidate optical biopsy technologies for applications in EED, critically assesses them against criteria identified for successful deployment in developing world settings, and proposes further lines of enquiry. Importantly, many of the techniques discussed could also be adapted to monitor the impaired intestinal barrier in other settings such as IBD, autoimmune enteropathies, coeliac disease, graft-versus-host disease, small intestinal transplantation or critical care

We're good people: Moral conviction as social identity

Moral convictions—attitudes that people construe as matters of right and wrong—have unique effects on behavior, from activism to intolerance. Less is known, though, about the psychological underpinnings of moral convictions themselves. I propose that moral convictions are social identities. Consistent with the idea that moral convictions are identities, I find in two studies that attitude-level moral conviction predicts (1) attitudes’ self-reported identity centrality and (2) reaction time to attitude-related stimuli in a me/not me task. Consistent with the idea that moral convictions are social identities, I find evidence that participants used their moral convictions to perceive, categorize, and remember information about other individuals’ positions on political issues, and that they did so more strongly when their convictions were more identity-central. In short, the identities that participants’ moral convictions defined were also meaningful social categories, providing a basis to distinguish “us” from “them.” However, I also find that non-moral attitudes can serve as meaningful social categories. Although moral convictions were more identity-central than non-moral attitudes, moral and non-moral attitudes may both define social identities that are more or less salient in certain situations. Regardless, social identity may help explain intolerance for moral disagreement, and identity-based interventions may help reduce that intolerance

The Selective Communication of Political Information

People seek out and interpret political information in self-serving ways. In four experiments, we show that people are similarly self-serving in the political information they share with others. Participants learned about positive and negative effects of increasing the minimum wage (in Studies 1-3) or of banning assault weapons (Study 4). They then indicated how likely they would be to mention each effect to close others. Participants were more inclined to share information that was consistent with their political orientation than information that was not. This effect persisted even when participants believed the information, suggesting that selective communication is not just a reflection of motivated skepticism. We also observed ideological differences. Liberals were most biased with their political opponents, whereas conservatives were most biased with their political allies. This biased information sharing could distort the flow of political information through social networks in ways that exacerbate political polarization