Undergraduate Scholarship in the College of Arts and Sciences 2006 Book of Abstracts

The College of Arts and Sciences proudly presents our fourth issue of Undergraduate Scholarship in the College of Arts and Sciences: Book of Abstracts, which highlights the work conducted by students in collaboration with faculty mentors. This collection of abstracts represents many hours of scholarly activity in which students further developed their research, critical thinking, and writing skills and engaged in learning well beyond the classroom.https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/undergradresearch_abstractbooks/1008/thumbnail.jp

Undergraduate Scholarship in the College of Arts and Sciences 2004 Book of Abstracts

In his work entitled The Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon expresses the need for students and their teachers to push beyond current knowledge by testing accepted theories, developing new paradigms, and discovering new information. The abstracts in this booklet are clear examples of how students and faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences are advancing knowledge in a variety of disciplines. From the analysis of particular proteins to the examination of various literary themes, the students whose scholarly endeavors are represented in this booklet pursued research projects that have explored new ideas; and their teachers have helped them to achieve their goals by providing expert guidance in the field of study, by challenging students to excel, and by encouraging them as they developed their ideas. Students and faculty should be very proud of the work reflected in these abstracts. These individual efforts and collaborations reveal what is best about Winthrop University as a learning community.https://digitalcommons.winthrop.edu/undergradresearch_abstractbooks/1010/thumbnail.jp

Examining Polarized COVID-19 Twitter Discussion Using Inverse Reinforcement Learning

In this work, we model users\u27 behavior on Twitter in discussion of the COVID-19 outbreak using inverse reinforcement learning to better understand the underlying forces that drive the observed pattern of polarization. In doing so, we address the largely untapped potential of inverse reinforcement learning to model users\u27 behavior on social media, and contribute to the body of sociology, psychology, and communication research seeking to elucidate the causes of socio-cultural polarization. We hypothesize that structural characteristics of each week\u27s retweet network as well as COVID-19 data on cases, hospitalizations, and outcomes are related to the Twitter users\u27 reward function which leads to polarized discussion of COVID-19 on the platform. To derive the state space of our inverse reinforcement learning model, we compute the relative modularity of retweet networks formed from retweets about COVID-19. The action space is determined by the distribution of mask-wearing sentiment in tweets about COVID-19. We build a fine-tune a BERT text classifier to determine mask-wearing sentiment in tweet. We design state features which reflect both structural characteristics of the retweet networks and COVID-19 data on cases, hospitalizations, and outcomes. Our results indicate that polarized Twitter discussion about COVID-19 weighs more heavily on features relating to the severity of the COVID-19 outbreak and less heavily on features relating to the structure of retweet networks. Overall, our results demonstrate the aptitude of inverse reinforcement learning in helping understand user behavior on social media

Partisan media exposure, polarization, and candidate evaluations in the 2016 general election

Objective This study aims to examine the influence of Republican and Democratic partisan television news on attitudes toward candidates for president immediately following the 2016 general election. Method Using two waves of the 2016 American National Election Study, we examine feelings toward Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton before and after the election. Results Exposure to Republican partisan media did have a significant negative effect on feelings toward Hillary Clinton, even when controlling for party identification, ideology, and feelings toward Clinton before the election. Consumption of Democratic partisan television, however, had no influence on feelings toward Donald Trump. Conclusion Further fragmentation and the expansion of partisan media has—and will continue to—benefit Republicans over Democrats.Wiley Open Access Accoun

The effects of political memes : a longitudinal field experiment

Les médias sociaux sont devenus un élément incontournable des sociétés occidentales (et de plus en plus dans les autres régions du monde). Plusieurs études se sont intéressées à leurs impacts et ont trouvé qu’ils peuvent avoir une influence modeste, mais significative sur les attitudes et comportements politiques des citoyens. Sur ces plateformes sociales, les utilisateurs ont adopté divers moyens de communication notamment le mème (« Internet meme »). Ce sont des images tirées de la culture populaire agrémentées de texte qui ont comme particularité de pouvoir être imitées ou remixées et de se propager de manière virale sur le web. Bien que ces créations soient habituellement légères et humoristiques, elles sont aussi souvent utilisées par les citoyens et parfois par des acteurs politiques afin de s’exprimer politiquement. En effet, les recherches antérieures soulignent que les mèmes politiques peuvent être le reflet de l’opinion politique de certains groupes. En s’inspirant de la littérature sur l’influence des médias sur le comportement politique et de la psychologique politique, ce mémoire avance que ces images peuvent avoir un impact sur l’idéologie et les sentiments intergroupes. Pour vérifier cette affirmation, ce mémoire utilise une expérience aléatoire contrôlée, directement sur Facebook. Avec cette méthode, l’analyse révèle que les effets sont en général très limités. Cependant, elle démontre que les mèmes politiques peuvent contribuer à la polarisation des opinions, notamment chez les individus qui sont attachés à un parti politique.Social media have become a central part of western societies (and more and more in other world regions). Many studies have examined the link between social media and political behaviours and attitudes, and have found modest but significant impacts. On social platforms, users have adopted many communication styles, notably, the Internet meme. These are images drawn from popular culture with original text which have the property of being imitated or remixed and spread virally on the web. Usually, those creations consist of light humour, but they can be used by citizens and sometimes political actors to express political ideas. Recent research has shown that political memes can reflect the opinions of certain groups in society. Drawing on the literature in political behaviour and political psychology, this thesis argues that political memes can have a potent effect on ideology and intergroup feelings. To assess this claim, this thesis employs a randomized experiment, directly on Facebook. With this method, the analysis reveals that political memes generally have a limited impact. Nonetheless, it shows that memes can contribute to attitude polarization, notably among those who feel close to a political party

Opinions on the Internet: Social Influence and Political Decision Making Processes on Social Media

OSU Political Science Research Process AwardMuch scholarship has been produced to explain how one’s social identity affects political attitudes and behaviors (Phillips and Carsey, 2013). The majority of this scholarship has focused on heuristics and the party identification model to explain how people form political identities and make political decisions (Scholz and Pinney, 1995; Carmines and Huckfeldt, 1996, Mondak, 1993; Greene, 1999; Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes, 2012). But this scholarship fails to recognize that as society begins to interact more digitally through social media, acquisition of information becomes a social activity (Baek et al., 2012). This study focuses on the impact of social influence on political decision making. This study’s primary goal was to demonstrate that decisions compelled by psychological discomfort brought on by social influence motives can cause an individual to compromise politically to ease their cognitive burden. Social networking sites provide a particular setting of interest for this experiment, in that, individuals are more likely to talk about politics through an online format than through face-to-face interactions (Baek et al., 2012). The experimental design simulated an online social media environment, placing participants under a psychological strain between belonging and being distinct. This is intended to replicate the complex social reality that social media users experience on such platforms as Facebook. The results of this experiment suggest that individuals are significantly likely to conform to digital peer groups when discussing some political topics, while many moderate views disappeared, leading to a more polarized political environment.Decision Sciences CollaborativeNo embargoAcademic Major: Political Scienc

Compelling Images: The Constitutionality of Emotionally Persuasive Health Campaigns

Legislation requiring the display of emotionally compelling graphic imagery in medical and public health contexts is on the rise-two examples include the Food and Drug Administration\u27s recently abandoned tobacco labeling regulations, which would have imposed images of diseased lungs and cancerous lesions on cigarette packaging, and state laws requiring physicians to display and describe ultrasound images to women seeking abortions. This Article highlights the disconnect between the constitutional challenges to these laws, which focus on the perils of compelling speakers to communicate messages with which they may disagree, and the public\u27s primary objections, which are grounded in ethical concerns about the state\u27s reliance on emotion to persuade. This Article argues that, despite inconsistent judicial precedent in the tobacco and ultrasound contexts, concerns about the emotional impact of government mandated images on viewers can and should be incorporated in First and Fourteenth Amendment analyses. In making this argument, the Article relies on the body of First Amendment jurisprudence in which the Supreme Court suggests that images are uniquely dangerous because they are less rational, less controllable, and more emotionally powerful than textual communications

The Market for News

We investigate the market for news under two assumptions: that readers hold beliefs which they like to see confirmed, and that newspapers can slant stories toward these beliefs. We show that, on the topics where readers share common beliefs, one should not expect accuracy even from competitive media: competition results in lower prices, but common slanting toward reader biases. On topics where reader beliefs diverge (such as politically divisive issues), however, newspapers segment the market and slant toward extreme positions. Yet in the aggregate, a reader with access to all news sources could get an unbiased perspective. Generally speaking, reader heterogeneity is more important for accuracy in media than competition per se.Economic