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

Ultimate causes of state formation: the significance of biogeography, diffusion, and neolithic revolutions

"The timing of early state formation varies across the world. Inspired by Jared Diamond's seminal work, the authors employ large-n statistics to demonstrate how this variation has been structured by prehistoric biogeographical conditions, which have influenced the timing of the transition from hunter/ gatherer production to agriculture and, in turn, the timing of state formation. Biogeography structures both the extent to which societies have invented agriculture and state technology de novo, and the extent to which these inventions have diffused from adjacent societies. Importantly, they demonstrate how these prehistoric processes have continued to shape state formation by influencing the relative competitiveness of states until the near present." (author's abstract

Monitoring Public Behavior During a Pandemic Using Surveys: Proof-of-Concept Via Epidemic Modelling

Implementing a lockdown for disease mitigation is a balancing act: Non-pharmaceutical interventions can reduce disease transmission significantly, but interventions also have considerable societal costs. Therefore, decision-makers need near real-time information to calibrate the level of restrictions. We fielded daily surveys in Denmark during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic to monitor public response to the announced lockdown. A key question asked respondents to state their number of close contacts within the past 24 hours. Here, we establish a link between survey data, mobility data, and, hospitalizations via epidemic modeling. Using Bayesian analysis, we then evaluate the usefulness of survey responses as a tool to monitor the effects of lockdown and then compare the predictive performance to that of mobility data. We find that, unlike mobility, self-reported contacts track the immediate behavioral response after the lockdown's announcement, weeks before the lockdown's national implementation. The survey data agree with the inferred effective reproduction number and their addition to the model results in greater improvement of predictive performance than mobility data. A detailed analysis of contact types indicates that disease transmission is driven by friends and strangers, whereas contacts to colleagues and family members (outside the household) only played a minor role despite Christmas holidays. Our work shows that an announcement of non-pharmaceutical interventions can lead to immediate behavioral responses, weeks before the actual implementation. Specifically, we find that self-reported contacts capture this early signal and thus qualify as a reliable, non-privacy invasive monitoring tool to track the implementation of non-pharmaceutical interventions

Had i politiske debatter online og offline: Hvem står for hadet – og hvem rammer hadet?

Hadefuld adfærd på de sociale medier i forbindelse med eksempelvis politiske diskussioner anses for et stigende samfundsproblem. I denne artikel spørger vi: Hvem er udøverne af det politiske had på internettet – og hvem er ofrene? Og er udøverne af og ofrene for had anderledes på internettet end udenfor internettet? Analyserne viser, at de personer, som optræder hadefuldt og rammes af had i forbindelse med politiske diskussioner, i høj grad er de samme både online og offline. Aggressiv adfærd er generelt mere udbredt blandt unge mænd, og analyserne viser, at det også først og fremmest er unge mænd, der optræder hadefuldt både online og offline. I overensstemmelse med viden om aggression generelt retter hadet sig også først og fremmest mod andre unge mænd. Internethad ser således ikke ud til at være en særlig form for had eller aggressivitet. De, der er aggressive offline, er også aggressive online, og de går efter de samme ofre begge steder

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.

Constituents of political cognition: race, party politics, and the alliance detection system.

Research suggests that the mind contains a set of adaptations for detecting alliances: an alliance detection system, which monitors for, encodes, and stores alliance information and then modifies the activation of stored alliance categories according to how likely they will predict behavior within a particular social interaction. Previous studies have established the activation of this system when exposed to explicit competition or cooperation between individuals. In the current studies we examine if shared political opinions produce these same effects. In particular, (1) if participants will spontaneously categorize individuals according to the parties they support, even when explicit cooperation and antagonism are absent, and (2) if party support is sufficiently powerful to decrease participants’ categorization by an orthogonal but typically-diagnostic alliance cue (in this case the target’s race). Evidence was found for both: Participants spontaneously and implicitly kept track of who supported which party, and when party cross-cut race—such that the race of targets was not predictive of party support—categorization by race was dramatically reduced. To verify that these results reflected the operation of a cognitive system for modifying the activation of alliance categories, and not just socially-relevant categories in general, an identical set of studies was also conducted with in which party was either crossed with sex or age (neither of which is predicted to be primarily an alliance category). As predicted, categorization by party occurred to the same degree, and there was no reduction in either categorization by sex or by age. All effects were replicated across two sets of between-subjects conditions. These studies provide the first direct empirical evidence that party politics engages the mind’s systems for detecting alliances and establish two important social categorization phenomena: (1) that categorization by age is, like sex, not affected by alliance information and (2) that political contexts can reduce the degree to which individuals are represented in terms of their race

Smittebeskyttende adfærd under anden bølge af covid-19 pandemien i Danmark

Et afgørende fokus under covid-19-pandemien har været på at motivere omfattende adfærdsændringer i befolkningen. I denne artikel undersøger vi, hvilke psykologiske faktorer der var mest afgørende for danskernes adfærd under anden bølge af pandemien. Baseret på en spørgeskemaundersøgelse, der er repræsentativ for den voksne danske befolkning, viser vi, at folk, der (1) oplever coronavirusset som en personlig trussel, (2) oplever, at en ændret adfærd gør en forskel (”responseffektivitet”), (3) oplever, at en ændret adfærd ikke har høje omkostninger (”responsomkostninger”), samt (4) har høj institutionel tillid, er mere tilbøjelige til at agere i overensstemmelse med de smittebeskyttende adfærdsråd. Samtidig viser vi, at faktorerne (2)-(4) neutraliserer sammenhængen mellem trusselsfølelsen og den smittebeskyttende adfærd. Dermed anviser vi en potentiel vej til at fremme adfærdsændringer under en krise, der går udenom den frygt

High-pulse energy supercontinuum laser for high-resolution spectroscopic photoacoustic imaging of lipids in the 1650-1850 nm region

We propose a cost-effective high-pulse energy supercontinuum (SC) source based on a telecom range diode laser-based amplifier and a few meters of standard single-mode optical fiber, with a pulse energy density as high as ∼25 nJ/nm in the 1650-1850 nm regime (factor >3 times higher than any SC source ever used in this wavelength range). We demonstrate how such an SC source combined with a tunable filter allows high-resolution spectroscopic photoacoustic imaging and the spectroscopy of lipids in the first overtone transition band of C-H bonds (1650-1850 nm). We show the successful discrimination of two different lipids (cholesterol and lipid in adipose tissue) and the photoacoustic cross-sectional scan of lipid-rich adipose tissue at three different locations. The proposed high-pulse energy SC laser paves a new direction towards compact, broadband and cost-effective source for spectroscopic photoacoustic imaging