Lives versus Livelihoods? Perceived economic risk has a stronger association with support for COVID-19 preventive measures than perceived health risk

This paper examines whether compliance with COVID-19 mitigation measures is motivated by wanting to save lives or save the economy (or both), and which implications this carries to fight the pandemic. National representative samples were collected from 24 countries (N = 25,435). The main predictors were (1) perceived risk to contract coronavirus, (2) perceived risk to suffer economic losses due to coronavirus, and (3) their interaction effect. Individual and country-level variables were added as covariates in multilevel regression models. We examined compliance with various preventive health behaviors and support for strict containment policies. Results show that perceived economic risk consistently predicted mitigation behavior and policy support—and its effects were positive. Perceived health risk had mixed effects. Only two significant interactions between health and economic risk were identified—both positive

Identifying important individual‐ and country‐level predictors of conspiracy theorizing: a machine learning analysis

Psychological research on the predictors of conspiracy theorizing—explaining important social and political events or circumstances as secret plots by malevolent groups—has flourished in recent years. However, research has typically examined only a small number of predictors in one, or a small number of, national contexts. Such approaches make it difficult to examine the relative importance of predictors, and risk overlooking some potentially relevant variables altogether. To overcome this limitation, the present study used machine learning to rank-order the importance of 115 individual- and country-level variables in predicting conspiracy theorizing. Data were collected from 56,072 respondents across 28 countries during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. Echoing previous findings, important predictors at the individual level included societal discontent, paranoia, and personal struggle. Contrary to prior research, important country-level predictors included indicators of political stability and effective government COVID response, which suggests that conspiracy theorizing may thrive in relatively well-functioning democracies

Creep-constitutive behavior of Sn-3.8Ag-0.7Cu solder using an internal stress approach

The experimental tensile creep deformation of bulk Sn-3.8Ag-0.7Cu solder at temperatures between 263 K and 398 K, covering lifetimes up to 3,500 h, has been rationalized using constitutive equations that incorporate structure-related internal state variables. Primary creep is accounted for using an evolving internal back stress, due to the interaction between the soft matrix phase and a more creep-resistant particle phase. Steady-state creep is incorporated using a conventional power law, modified to include the steady-state value of internal stress. It is demonstrated that the observed behavior is well-fitted using creep constants for pure tin in the modified creep power law. A preliminary analysis of damage-induced tertiary creep is also presented

Detection and prediction of errors in EPCs of the SAP reference model

Up to now there is neither data available on how many errors can be expected in process model collections, nor is it understood why errors are introduced. In this article, we provide empirical evidence for these questions based on the SAP reference model. This model collection contains about 600 process models expressed as Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs). We translated these EPCs into YAWL models, and analyzed them using the verification tool WofYAWL. We discovered that at least 34 of these EPCs contain errors. Moreover, we used logistic regression to show that complexity of EPCs has a significant impact on error probability