Motivation to call police: The exploration of racial and risk averse motivation

When calls are made to the police, the magnitude of their impact is often overlooked. When calls are made to the police and there is no crime, police resources, time, and energy could be wasted (Sampson, 2002); however, when no call is made to the police and there is a crime, human lives could be put in danger (e.g., Felson, Messner, Hoskin, & Deane, 2002). Based on highly publicized news reports, it appears that being a racial minority is enough motivation to call the police in some situations (e.g., napping or humanitarian work; Griggs, 2018; Williams, 2018b). Aversive racism theory (Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986) suggests that when racial prejudice can be rationalized to another factor aside from race, then aversive racists may act in discriminatory ways. Thus, a person may rationalize a call to the police based on someone yelling rather than their skin color. Risk averse motivation (Kahneman & Tversky, 1982) suggests that individuals prefer a certain choice compared to an uncertain choice. Thus, individuals who call the police could be risk averse and choose to call the police to provide a sense of certainty in an uncertain situation. In this study, I tested these two possible motivations using an ambiguous risk scenario. Participants (N = 295) from an online data collection platform read a scenario and reported their likelihood to call the police, whether they would call the police (yes/no), and whether they agreed with someone else’s decision to call the police based on the scenario. Then participants completed a risk perception scale. The race of the perceived suspect was not influential in the reported likelihood to call the police, whether a participant would call the police, or their agreement with someone else’s decision to call the police; however, participants who were risk averse, as well as women and political conservatives reported a greater likelihood to call the police, were more likely to report that they would call the police, and agreed more with someone else’s decision to call the police. Despite the results of the current study, there are still news reports that suggest racial minorities are the source of motivation for calls to the police. Thus, race as a potential motivation to call the police should be continued to be examined

MARK MY WORDS: THE LINGUISTIC COMPLEXITY OF THE JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY ABSTRACTS AND SUBSEQUENT CITATIONS

Through language, scientific communication can positively impact the progression and advancement of science. Given the value of scientific communication, it is important to explore what factors might be associated with influential scientific communication. Surprisingly, relatively little research has examined the linguistic properties of influential scientific communication. In effort to overcome this gap in the literature, I used integrative complexity, a well-validated linguistic variable, to assess the relation between article abstracts and subsequent number of citations from one of the most highly-cited social psychology journals (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology). In an analysis of over 1.4 million words from 9,884 abstracts, results reveal that elaborative complexity predicts number of citations, whereas dialectical complexity does not. These findings are further highlighted by the predictive power of defensive complexity (elaborative-dialectical complexity). In other words, complexity used to multifacetedly defend a singular perspective, absent of complexity used to evaluate alternative perspectives, is predictive of subsequent citations of articles from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. I conclude by discussing implications for the construct of integrative complexity, limitations of the current findings, and directions for future research

How culturally unique are pandemic effects? Evaluating cultural similarities and differences in effects of age, biological sex, and political beliefs on COVID impacts

Despite being bio-epidemiological phenomena, the causes and effects of pandemics are culturally influenced in ways that go beyond national boundaries. However, they are often studied in isolated pockets, and this fact makes it difficult to parse the unique influence of specific cultural psychologies. To help fill in this gap, the present study applies existing cultural theories via linear mixed modeling to test the influence of unique cultural factors in a multi-national sample (that moves beyond Western nations) on the effects of age, biological sex, and political beliefs on pandemic outcomes that include adverse financial impacts, adverse resource impacts, adverse psychological impacts, and the health impacts of COVID. Our study spanned 19 nations (participant N = 14,133) and involved translations into 9 languages. Linear mixed models revealed similarities across cultures, with both young persons and women reporting worse outcomes from COVID across the multi-national sample. However, these effects were generally qualified by culture-specific variance, and overall more evidence emerged for effects unique to each culture than effects similar across cultures. Follow-up analyses suggested this cultural variability was consistent with models of pre-existing inequalities and socioecological stressors exacerbating the effects of the pandemic. Collectively, this evidence highlights the importance of developing culturally flexible models for understanding the cross-cultural nature of pandemic psychology beyond typical WEIRD approaches

Conservatives and Liberals Differing Perceptions of Items on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire: Maybe We\u27re Flot So Different After All

Research using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ; Graham et al., 2011) suggests that political liberals and conservatives have different moral foundations (Graham, 2009). This instrument has been criticized for items that may differentially appeal to liberals vs. conservatives (Janoff-Bulman, 2013). Thus, it is unclear whether differing scores between liberals and conservatives are due to actual differences in moral foundations or the particular items used. For this study, we created conceptually-comparable, yet semantically-different, unbiased new items. We then compared the relationship between these items and the original MFQ and political orientation. We also included several other measures to test the validity of our items. Participants (N=434) completed an online Qualtrics survey which included questions related to demographics (e.g., political affiliation and orientation, gender), the MFQ (Graham, et al, 2011), our new, modified items (some adapted from the Three Domains of Disgust Scale (Olatunji, 2012)), five moral foundations vignettes (Clifford, 2015), and the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ-21; Schwartz, 2001). Reliabilities were slightly lower on our subscales than on the original MFQ, but the pattern of correlations between our and the original MFQ subscales with the PVQ-21 and moral foundation vignettes were generally similar. All of the original MFQ subscales were correlated with political orientation, but only authority and harm were correlated with political orientation using our modified items. Our results suggest that at least part of the reason that liberals and conservatives score differently on the MFQ may have to do with the particular content of the item

Are American Presidents Becoming Less Rhetorically Complex? Evaluating the Integrative Complexity of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Historical Context

Are American political leaders becoming simpler in their rhetoric? To evaluate, in the present study we place the two most recent U.S. presidents’ integrative complexity against a historical context for three different types of comparable materials: Presidential Debates, Inaugural Addresses, and State of the Union (SOTU) speeches. Results overwhelmingly suggest that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump are historically simple when compared to the typical president, and that is true both across parties and within their own political party. Further, segmented regression analyses suggest that part of the reason for Biden’s and Trump’s low complexity is the continuation of an ongoing historical decline in complexity among Presidents that began in 1960. However, each president uniquely defies this trend on one material type: Biden is a historical outlier for his low-complexity debates, and Trump is a historical outlier for his low-complexity inauguration speech. Taken as a whole, these data suggest that although American presidents have been declining in complexity, both Biden and Trump are nonetheless uniquely low in complexity in some ways – possibly for reasons that are different for each president

Depletion of Cognitive Resources May Not Affect Conservatives’ Endorsement of Binding Moral Foundations

Moral Foundations Questionnaire research (MFQ; Graham, Nosek, Haidt, Iyer, Koleva, & Ditto, 2011) suggests that political liberals and conservatives have different moral foundations (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009), however, the MFQ has been criticized for its validity within various sub-groups (Davis, Dooley, Hook, Choe, & McElroy, 2017), possibly due to biased items (e.g., references to “God”). Modified items without these references were less related to political orientation (PO; Lewey, Zubrod, & Harton, 2018). In this study, we examined whether Lewey et al’s items would also be less affected by cognitive busyness. Online participants (N= 207) kept a mental count of their eye blinks during a filler questionnaire or during the entire study (randomly assigned; Ulkumen, Thomas, & Morwitz, 2008) to manipulate cognitive busyness. After the filler questionnaire, participants completed the MFQ (Graham et al, 2011), our modified MFQ items, and demographic questions. In the low cognitive busyness condition, all five original MFQ subscales were correlated with PO, whereas only authority from our modified subscales was. In the high cognitive busyness condition, loyalty, authority, and purity from the original MFQ correlated with PO, and fairness, authority, and purity from our modified subscales did. The original MFQ was more related to PO than the modified MFQ for most subscales. Our results provide further support for our revised scale as well as evidence of conservatives endorsing the binding moral foundations even under cognitive load, contradictory to previous research, suggesting that the default may not be liberal after all (cf., Greene et al., 2008)

Social Psychological Measurements of COVID-19: Coronavirus Perceived Threat, Government Response, Impacts, and Experiences Questionnaires

Major journals have sounded the call for social psychologists to do research on the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). Such research is only as good as the measurements used. Across three studies (total n = 984), we developed a battery of social psychology-relevant questionnaires to measure COVID-19 phenomena: (1) Perceived Coronavirus Threat Questionnaire, (2) Governmental Response to Coronavirus Questionnaire, (3) Coronavirus Impacts Questionnaire, and (4) Coronavirus Experience Questionnaire. Exploratory (Study 1) and Confirmatory (Studies 2 and 3) Factor Analyses revealed excellent factor structures for the one-factor Perceived Coronavirus Threat, the six-factor Governmental Response Questionnaires, and the three-factor Coronavirus Impacts Questionnaire. The three-factor Coronavirus Experience Questionnaire yielded poorer psychometric properties overall. Given that brevity is often desired for online studies, we further recommend psychometrically sound short versions of each questionnaire. Taken in total, this work offers social psychology researchers a battery of questionnaires to measure Coronavirus-related phenomena for the duration of the pandemic in U.S. participants

Constructing a Four-Item Left-Wing Authoritarianism Scale

Left-Wing Authoritarianism (LWA) is an increasingly popular psychological construct, and yet to date the shortest general questionnaire available to measure it is thirteen items. In the present project, we develop a four-item LWA scale that is available for free academic use. We evaluated items for the scale using two broad criteria: (1) Item-level ratings of authoritarian content and (2) expected validity relationships. The final four-item LWA-Short scale showed excellent properties across eight samples (total n = 4240): The scale showed good internal reliability (average alpha = .83), correlated highly with both Conway et al.’s LWA scale (r = .78) and Costello et al’s LWA scale (r = .78), negatively correlated with political conservatism (r = -.37), and showed similar effects to the full LWA scale across eleven additional validity criteria (average full LWA scale effect size = .42; average short-form LWA effect size = .39). We further show that a parallel four-item RWA scale using the same base items performs well in validity tests. In summary, not only do participants rate our new four-item LWA scale as measuring authoritarianism, the new short scale has good internal reliability, good validity, a readily-available parallel RWA scale, and is highly correlated with (and shows similar effects to) both of the major LWA measures currently available. Thus, for researchers interested in measuring LWA but who do not have space in their research projects for a longer scale, the LWA-short scale is a viable alternative