Ambivalent stereotypes link to peace, conflict, and inequality across 38 nations

A cross-national study, 49 samples in 38 nations (n = 4,344), investigates whether national peace and conflict reflect ambivalent warmth and competence stereotypes: High-conflict societies (Pakistan) may need clearcut, unambivalent group images distinguishing friends from foes. Highly peaceful countries (Denmark) also may need less ambivalence because most groups occupy the shared national identity, with only a few outcasts. Finally, nations with intermediate conflict (United States) may need ambivalence to justify more complex intergroup-system stability. Using the Global Peace Index to measure conflict, a curvilinear (quadratic) relationship between ambivalence and conflict highlights how both extremely peaceful and extremely conflictual countries display lower stereotype ambivalence, whereas countries intermediate on peace-conflict present higher ambivalence. These data also replicated a linear inequality-ambivalence relationship.Peer reviewe

Abundance and scarcity: classical theories of money, bank balance sheets and business models, and the British restriction of 1797‐1818.

The thesis looks through the lens of bank balance sheet accounting to investigate the structural change in the British banking system between 1780 and 1832, and how classical quantity theorists of money attempted to respond to the ensuing financialisation of the wartime economy with its growing reliance on credit funded with paper-based instruments (the ‘Vansittart system’ of war finance). The thesis combines contributions to three separate fields to construct a holistic historical example of the challenges faced by monetary economists when ‘modelling’ financial innovation, credit growth, ‘fringe’ banking, and agent incentives – at a time of radical experimentation: the suspension of the 80-year-old gold standard (“the Restriction”). First, critical text analysis of the history of economics argues that the 1809-10 debate between Ricardo and Bosanquet at the peak of the credit boom, bifurcated classical theory into two timeless competing policy paradigms advocating the ‘Scarcity’ or ‘Abundance’ of money relative to exchange transactions. The competing hypotheses regarding the role of money and credit are identified and the rest of the thesis examines the archival evidence for each. Second, the core of the thesis contributes to the historical literature on banking in relation to money by reconstructing a taxonomy of bank business models, their relationships with the London inter-bank settlement system, and their responses to the Restriction - drawing on some 17,000 mostly new data points collected from the financial records of London and Country banks. The final section contributes to the economic history of money by constructing aggregated views of total bank liabilities from the firm-level data, scaled to recently available British GDP estimates. These are examined to establish (with hindsight) the relative merits and lacuna of the competing theoretical hypotheses postulated by political economists. It was the period of deleveraging after 1810 that revealed the lacuna of both paradigms

The SBRC-190 a cryogenic multiplexer for moderate-background FIR astronomy

The SBRC 190, a cryogenic multiplexer developed for far-infrared (FIR) photoconductor detectors operating at moderate backgrounds, is described. The circuit is based on the 32-channel CRC 696 CMOS device used on SIRTF. For applications such as encountered on SOFIA or Herschel, the new device permits higher backgrounds, a wider range of backgrounds, faster sampling, and enhanced synchronization of sampling with chopping. A relationship between sampling efficiency and noise requirements needed to achieve background-limited instrument (BLIP) performance is derived. Major design differences relative to the CRC 696 which have been incorporated in the SBRC 190 are: (a) an AC coupled, capacitive feedback transimpedance unit cell, to minimize input offset effects, thereby enabling low detector biases, (b) selectable feedback capacitors to enable operation over a wide range of backgrounds, and (c) clamp and sample & hold output circuits to improve sampling efficiency, which is a concern at the relatively high readout rates required. The paper emphasizes requirements for use on SOFIA, and touches on the design, expected performance, and fabrication of the new multiplexer

(Bad) Feelings about Meeting Them? Episodic and Chronic Intergroup Emotions Associated with Positive and Negative Intergroup Contact As Predictors of Intergroup Behavior

Based on two cross-sectional probability samples (Study 1: N = 1,382, Study 2: N = 1,587), we studied the interplay between positive and negative intergroup contact, different types of intergroup emotions (i.e., episodic intergroup emotions encountered during contact and more general chronic intergroup emotions), and outgroup behavior in the context of intergroup relations between non-immigrant Germans and foreigners living in Germany. In Study 1, we showed that positive and negative contact are related to specific episodic intergroup emotions (i.e., anger, fear and happiness). Results of Study 2 indicate an indirect effect of episodic intergroup emotions encountered during contact experiences on specific behavioral tendencies directed at outgroup members via more chronic situation-independent intergroup emotions. As expected, anger predicted approaching (discriminatory) behavioral tendencies (i.e., aggression) while fear predicted avoidance. The results extend the existing literature on intergroup contact and emotions by addressing positive and negative contact simultaneously and differentiating between situation-specific episodic and chronic intergroup emotions in predicting discriminatory behavioral tendencies

Examining the structural validity of stereotype content scales – a preregistered re-analysis of published data and discussion of possible future directions

The Stereotype Content Model (SCM) plays a prominent role in social perception research when comparing the evaluation of different targets on warmth and competence dimensions. However, there is scarce information on the SCM’s measurement properties. Thus, in this article, we provide a comprehensive test of the SCM’s structural validity (i.e., reliability, dimensionality, cross-group comparability of measurement properties). We re-analysed published SCM data from English speaking participants (study 1: 78 datasets from 43 original publications, N = 20,819) and German participants (study 2: 29 datasets from 23 original publications, N = 10,854). We used confirmatory factor analyses to assess the scales’ reliability and dimensionality as well as measurement invariance assessment to examine cross-group comparability as a precondition for meaningful and valid mean-value comparison. We found on average good reliabilities of the SCM scales. In contrast, about 35% of all 1093 examined SCM measurement models presented adequate scale dimensionality, and regarding the scales’ cross-group comparability, we found (partial) scalar measurement invariance in about 11% of all cases. These findings indicate considerable validity concerns in published SCM research, as a meaningful and valid measurement of warmth and competence was not given in approximately two thirds of all cases, and mean-value comparisons were potentially biased due to lacking cross-group comparability for about eight out of nine cases. We propose future directions to improve the measurement quality and validity in SCM research and invite fellow researchers to constructively discuss these ideas

Buddhist concepts as implicitly reducing prejudice and increasing prosociality

Does Buddhism really promote tolerance? Based on cross-cultural and cross-religious evidence, we hypothesized that Buddhist concepts, possibly differing from Christian concepts, activate not only prosociality but also tolerance. Subliminally priming Buddhist concepts, compared to neutral or Christian concepts, decreased explicit prejudice against ethnic, ideological, and moral outgroups among Western Buddhists who valued universalism (Experiment 1, N = 116). It also increased spontaneous prosociality, and decreased, among low authoritarians or high universalists, implicit religious and ethnic prejudice among Westerners of Christian background (Experiment 2, N = 128) and Taiwanese of Buddhist/Taoist background (Experiment 3, N = 122). Increased compassion and tolerance of contradiction occasionally mediated some of the effects. The general idea that religion promotes (ingroup) prosociality and outgroup prejudice, based on research in monotheistic contexts, lacks cross-cultural sensitivity; Buddhist concepts activate extended prosociality and tolerance of outgroups, at least among those with socio-cognitive and moral openness