Bias for proximity and gender in the voting patterns of contestants in the TV quiz-show ‘The Weakest Link’

Field studies based on television quiz-shows are free from the kinds of demand characteristics and ethical concerns that can sometimes blight experimental work. Further, they are effectively double-blind, so providing a useful empirical test-bed for theories in social psychology, decision making and economics. The popular TV quiz-show The Weakest Link (WL) has already been used to assess the optimal banking strategy in an analysis of economic decision making (Haan, Los and Riyanto (In press)); as a test of gender and race discrimination in voting practice (Levitt, 2004; Antonovics, Arcidiacono & Walsh, 2005); to investigate the trade-off between risk and return strategies in game playing (Barmish & Boston, 2009); and to show ‘neighbour avoidance’ in first round voting (Goddard, Ashley, Fuller & Hudson, 2011). A similar procedure was used here to measure the voting behaviour of contestants as a function of the proximity of the voter to the candidate voted for and as a function of their gender. The aim was to test for proximity and/or gender biases in voting patterns

Towards an archaeology of media ecologies : the case of Italian free radios

This article looks at the contemporary reinvention of the term Media Ecologies in the work of Matthew Fuller, arguing that its provenance is less form Postman's Media Ecology Association andmore form the work of Felix Guattari. It then presents an account of free radios in Italy and France in the 1970s and contemporary pirate radio as exemplary cases of media ecologies in Fuller's sense of the term