Investigating Right Wing Authoritarianism With a Very Short Authoritarianism Scale

Authoritarianism has been an important explanatory concept for more than 60 years and a powerful predictor of social, political, and intergroup attitudes and behaviour. An important impediment to research on authoritarianism has been the length of the measures available, particularly with the contemporary emphasis on the need for social research to use larger, more representative samples and measure multiple constructs across multiple domains. We therefore developed a six-item Very Short Authoritarianism (VSA) scale that equally represented the three content subdimensions and two directions of wording of Altemeyer’s widely used Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale. Over four samples (N = 1,601) from three countries the VSA scale showed satisfactory internal consistency and the expected hierarchical factor structure with three primary factors loading on a single higher-order factor. Additionally, the scale predicted variables such as nationalism, ethnocentrism, political orientation, political party/candidate support, attitudes towards ingroups or outgroups and anti-minority bias at moderate to strong levels with effects very close to those obtained for much longer established measures of RWA (including Altemeyer’s scale). The VSA scale also showed clearly better reliability and validity than a short measure of authoritarian parental values that has been used to measure authoritarianism

Item response theory approach to ethnocentrism

IntroductionAlthough ethnocentrism is one of the fundamental concepts in the social sciences, its study has been impeded by a diversity of conceptualizations and measures. In recent years, a growing number of political scientists and psychologists have undertaken in-depth research into ethnocentrism. In addition, researchers have recently proposed a comprehensive reconceptualization of ethnocentrism and developed a new Ethnocentrism scale. There is strong evidence for this scale's reliability and validity in indexing ethnocentrism, but like most measures in psychology and political science, this scale is based on classical test theory. Item response theory (IRT) is a powerful psychometric technique that can provide a much more sophisticated test of test performance and is currently under-utilized in research.MethodsWe performed IRT to assess the psychometric properties of the Ethnocentrism scale on a sample of 4,187 participants.ResultsThe scale's items had strong psychometric properties to capture the ethnocentrism latent construct, particularly in the below average to above average range. Men required marginally lower levels of ethnocentrism to endorse less socially acceptable items than women (items relating to superiority, purity, or exploitativeness). When compared to liberals, conservatives responded more readily to nearly all ethnocentrism items. Given this variation, the IRT approach highlighted that future measurements must adjust for differential item functioning, albeit more for political orientation than gender identity.DiscussionThe findings detail how IRT can enhance measurement in political science and demonstrate the implications for how gender and political ideology may affect the differential performance of items

The Prejudice towards People with Mental Illness (PPMI) scale: structure and validity

Background Although there is a substantial body of research on the stigma associated with mental illness, much of the extant research has not explicitly focused on the concept of prejudice, which drives discriminatory behaviour. Further, research that has investigated prejudice towards people with mental illness has conceptual, theoretical and psychometric limitations. To address these shortcomings, we sought to develop a new measure, the Prejudice towards People with Mental Illness (PPMI) scale, based on an improved conceptualisation and integration of the stigma and prejudice areas of research. Methods In developing the new scale, we undertook a thematic analysis of existing conceptualisations and measures to identify a pool of potential items for the scale which were subsequently assessed for fidelity and content validity by expert raters. We tested the structure, reliability, and validity of the scale across three studies (Study 1 N = 301; Study 2 N = 164; Study 3 N = 495) using exploratory factor, confirmatory factor, correlational, multiple regression, and ordinal logistic regression analyses using both select and general community samples. Results Study 1 identified four factors underlying prejudice towards people with mental illness: fear/avoidance, malevolence, authoritarianism, and unpredictability. It also confirmed the nomological network, that is, the links of these attitudes with the proposed theoretical antecedents and consequences. Studies 2 and 3 further supported the factor structure of the measure, and provided additional evidence for the nomological network. Conclusions We argue that research into prejudice towards people with mental illness will benefit from the new measure and theoretical framework.This research was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award, funded by the Australian Federal Government, to Amanda Kenn

Contrasting Computational Models of Mate Preference Integration Across 45 Countries

Humans express a wide array of ideal mate preferences. Around the world, people desire romantic partners who are intelligent, healthy, kind, physically attractive, wealthy, and more. In order for these ideal preferences to guide the choice of actual romantic partners, human mating psychology must possess a means to integrate information across these many preference dimensions into summaries of the overall mate value of their potential mates. Here we explore the computational design of this mate preference integration process using a large sample of n = 14,487 people from 45 countries around the world. We combine this large cross-cultural sample with agent-based models to compare eight hypothesized models of human mating markets. Across cultures, people higher in mate value appear to experience greater power of choice on the mating market in that they set higher ideal standards, better fulfill their preferences in choice, and pair with higher mate value partners. Furthermore, we find that this cross-culturally universal pattern of mate choice is most consistent with a Euclidean model of mate preference integration.The work of Truong Ti Khanh Ha was supported by grants 501.01–2016.02 from the Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED). Anna Oleszkiewicz was supported by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (#626/STYP/12/2017). Tis study was conducted in line with project NIR No. 01201370995 “Cross-cultural and interdisciplinary researches. Biosocial and cross-cultural analysis of models of tolerance and basic values of culture in modern society” (Marina Butovskaya and Daria Dronova). Agnieszka Sorokowska and Piotr Sorokowski were supported by the National Science Center—Poland (2014/13/B/HS6/02644). Petra Gyuris, András Láng, and Norbert Meskó were supported by the Hungarian Scientifc Research Fund — OTKA (K125437). Feng Jiang was supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China, grant No. 71971225

Love and affectionate touch toward romantic partners all over the world

Touch is the primary way people communicate intimacy in romantic relationships, and affectionate touch behaviors such as stroking, hugging and kissing are universally observed in partnerships all over the world. Here, we explored the association of love and affectionate touch behaviors in romantic partnerships in two studies comprising 7880 participants. In the first study, we used a cross-cultural survey conducted in 37 countries to test whether love was universally associated with affectionate touch behaviors. In the second study, using a more fine-tuned touch behavior scale, we tested whether the frequency of affectionate touch behaviors was related to love in romantic partnerships. As hypothesized, love was significantly and positively associated with affectionate touch behaviors in both studies and this result was replicated regardless of the inclusion of potentially relevant factors as controls. Altogether, our data strongly suggest that affectionate touch is a relatively stable characteristic of human romantic relationships that is robustly and reliably related to the degree of reported love between partners.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Reasons for facebook usage: Data from 46 countries

Seventy-nine percent of internet users use Facebook, and on average they access Facebook eight times a day (Greenwood et al., 2016). To put these numbers into perspective, according to Clement (2019), around 30% of the world\u2019s population uses this Online Social Network (OSN) site. Despite the constantly growing body of academic research on Facebook (Chou et al., 2009; Back et al., 2010; Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010; McAndrew and Jeong, 2012; Wilson et al., 2012; Krasnova et al., 2017), there remains limited research regarding the motivation behind Facebook use across different cultures. Our main goal was to collect data from a large cross-cultural sample of Facebook users to examine the roles of sex, age, and, most importantly, cultural differences underlying Facebook use

Affective interpersonal touch in close relationships: a cross-cultural perspective

Interpersonal touch behavior differs across cultures, yet no study to date has systematically tested for cultural variation in affective touch, nor examined the factors that might account for this variability. Here, over 14,000 individuals from 45 countries were asked whether they embraced, stroked, kissed, or hugged their partner, friends, and youngest child during the week preceding the study. We then examined a range of hypothesized individual-level factors (sex, age, parasitic history, conservatism, religiosity, and preferred interpersonal distance) and cultural-level factors (regional temperature, parasite stress, regional conservatism, collectivism, and religiosity) in predicting these affective-touching behaviors. Our results indicate that affective touch was most prevalent in relationships with partners and children, and its diversity was relatively higher in warmer, less conservative, and religious countries, and among younger, female, and liberal people. This research allows for a broad and integrated view of the bases of cross-cultural variability in affective touch

Sex differences in mate preferences across 45 countries: A large-scale replication

Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives—an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective—offer alternative explanations for these findings. However, the original data on which each perspective relies are decades old, and the literature is fraught with conflicting methods, analyses, results, and conclusions. Using a new 45-country sample (N = 14,399), we attempted to replicate classic studies and test both the evolutionary and biosocial role perspectives. Support for universal sex differences in preferences remains robust: Men, more than women, prefer attractive, young mates, and women, more than men, prefer older mates with financial prospects. Cross-culturally, both sexes have mates closer to their own ages as gender equality increases. Beyond age of partner, neither pathogen prevalence nor gender equality robustly predicted sex differences or preferences across countries