Just two statements can make Americans and Scandinavians agree about social welfare

Can just two sentences about the motivation and situation of social welfare recipients’ crowd out a life-time of cultural learning and make American and Scandinavian social agree on the issue of social welfare? Using large-scale survey experiments, Lene Aarøe and Michael Bang Petersen challenge the prevalent perception that Americans hold highly skeptical opinions about social welfare while Scandinavians, including Danes, tend to love the welfare state. Rather, Americans and Danes use similar deep-seated, social instincts to reason about who deserves social welfare despite their exposure to different welfare state cultures: If Danes and Americans perceive welfare recipients as lazy, they oppose social welfare. If the perceive social welfare recipients as making an effect to find work and contribute to society, they are likely to support it

Politisk psykologi – De næste skridt

The eld of political psychology is steadily growing. But how do researchers most fruitfully contribute to the increasing stock of knowledge about the psychological underpinnings of political behavior? In this article, we outline the scienti c ideals of political psychology and we point to the most recent key theoretical and methodical innovations in the eld. Our core message is that political psychology by nature is an interdis- ciplinary eld. e better the research re ects this interdisciplinary nature, the more powerful it will be.

Chatbots Are Not Reliable Text Annotators

Recent research highlights the significant potential of ChatGPT for text annotation in social science research. However, ChatGPT is a closed-source product which has major drawbacks with regards to transparency, reproducibility, cost, and data protection. Recent advances in open-source (OS) large language models (LLMs) offer alternatives which remedy these challenges. This means that it is important to evaluate the performance of OS LLMs relative to ChatGPT and standard approaches to supervised machine learning classification. We conduct a systematic comparative evaluation of the performance of a range of OS LLM models alongside ChatGPT, using both zero- and few-shot learning as well as generic and custom prompts, with results compared to more traditional supervised classification models. Using a new dataset of Tweets from US news media, and focusing on simple binary text annotation tasks for standard social science concepts, we find significant variation in the performance of ChatGPT and OS models across the tasks, and that supervised classifiers consistently outperform both. Given the unreliable performance of ChatGPT and the significant challenges it poses to Open Science we advise against using ChatGPT for substantive text annotation tasks in social science research

Disgust sensitivity relates to attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women across 31 nations

Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals ( N = 11,200) from 31 countries showed a small relation between pathogen disgust sensitivity (an individual-difference measure of pathogen-avoidance motivations) and measures of antigay attitudes. Analyses also showed that pathogen disgust sensitivity relates not only to antipathy toward gay men and lesbians, but also to negativity toward other groups, in particular those associated with violations of traditional sexual norms (e.g., prostitutes). These results suggest that the association between pathogen-avoidance motivations and antigay attitudes is relatively stable across cultures and is a manifestation of a more general relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice towards groups associated with sexual norm violations

Disgust sensitivity relates to attitudes toward gay men and lesbian women across 31 nations

Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals (N = 11,200) from 31 countries showed a small relation between pathogen disgust sensitivity (an individual-difference measure of pathogen-avoidance motivations) and measures of antigay attitudes. Analyses also showed that pathogen disgust sensitivity relates not only to antipathy toward gay men and lesbians, but also to negativity toward other groups, in particular those associated with violations of traditional sexual norms (e.g., prostitutes). These results suggest that the association between pathogen-avoidance motivations and antigay attitudes is relatively stable across cultures and is a manifestation of a more general relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice towards groups associated with sexual norm violations

Effect of remote ischaemic conditioning on clinical outcomes in patients with acute myocardial infarction (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI): a single-blind randomised controlled trial.

BACKGROUND: Remote ischaemic conditioning with transient ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm has been shown to reduce myocardial infarct size in patients with ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PPCI). We investigated whether remote ischaemic conditioning could reduce the incidence of cardiac death and hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months. METHODS: We did an international investigator-initiated, prospective, single-blind, randomised controlled trial (CONDI-2/ERIC-PPCI) at 33 centres across the UK, Denmark, Spain, and Serbia. Patients (age >18 years) with suspected STEMI and who were eligible for PPCI were randomly allocated (1:1, stratified by centre with a permuted block method) to receive standard treatment (including a sham simulated remote ischaemic conditioning intervention at UK sites only) or remote ischaemic conditioning treatment (intermittent ischaemia and reperfusion applied to the arm through four cycles of 5-min inflation and 5-min deflation of an automated cuff device) before PPCI. Investigators responsible for data collection and outcome assessment were masked to treatment allocation. The primary combined endpoint was cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure at 12 months in the intention-to-treat population. This trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02342522) and is completed. FINDINGS: Between Nov 6, 2013, and March 31, 2018, 5401 patients were randomly allocated to either the control group (n=2701) or the remote ischaemic conditioning group (n=2700). After exclusion of patients upon hospital arrival or loss to follow-up, 2569 patients in the control group and 2546 in the intervention group were included in the intention-to-treat analysis. At 12 months post-PPCI, the Kaplan-Meier-estimated frequencies of cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure (the primary endpoint) were 220 (8·6%) patients in the control group and 239 (9·4%) in the remote ischaemic conditioning group (hazard ratio 1·10 [95% CI 0·91-1·32], p=0·32 for intervention versus control). No important unexpected adverse events or side effects of remote ischaemic conditioning were observed. INTERPRETATION: Remote ischaemic conditioning does not improve clinical outcomes (cardiac death or hospitalisation for heart failure) at 12 months in patients with STEMI undergoing PPCI. FUNDING: British Heart Foundation, University College London Hospitals/University College London Biomedical Research Centre, Danish Innovation Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, TrygFonden

Is the Political Animal Politically Ignorant? Applying Evolutionary Psychology to the Study of Political Attitudes

As evidenced by research in evolutionary psychology, humans have evolved sophisticated psychological mechanisms tailored to solve enduring adaptive problems of social life. Many of these social problems are political in nature and relate to the distribution of costs and benefits within and between groups. In that sense, evolutionary psychology suggests that humans are, by nature, political animals. By implication, a straightforward application of evolutionary psychology to the study of public opinion seems to entail that modern individuals find politics intrinsically interesting. Yet, as documented by more than fifty years of research in political science, people lack knowledge of basic features of the political process and the ability to form consistent political attitudes. By reviewing and integrating research in evolutionary psychology and public opinion, we describe (1) why modern mass politics often fail to activate evolved mechanisms and (2) the conditions in which these mechanisms are in fact triggered

Replication Data for: "Cognitive Biases and Communication Strength in Social Networks: The Case of Episodic Frames"

This folder contains materials for reproducing the analyses reported in Aarøe, L. & Petersen, M.B. "Cognitive Biases and Communication Strength in Social Networks: The Case of Episodic Frames"

Replication Data for "Birth Weight and Adult Social Trust: Evidence for Early Calibration of Social Cognition"

This set of files contains (1) data for the Researcher Survey, Sample 3 and Sample and (2) replication files for the analyses of the Researcher Survey, Sample 2, Sample 3 and Sample 4 for the article "Birth Weight and Adult Social Trust: Evidence for Early Calibration of Social Cognition" by Michael Bang Petersen and Lene Aarøe, published in Psychological Science. Data for Sample 1 is a combination of European Social Survey data and government registry data that cannot be made publicly available. The data for Sample 2 can be accessed here: http://www.sfi.dk/about_the_research-11402.asp