Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences
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Public Attitudes toward Candidate Gender and Immigration Policy Framing in Japan
No full textStudies in political science have found evidence that voters have gendered views on electoral candidates’ policy platforms. Voters tend to expect that female candidates are better at education and childcare policies but not at national security and economic policies. However, although Japan and other East Asian democracies are considering expanding immigration to address aging and shrinking populations, we know less about how voters’ responses to candidates’ immigration issue positions are impacted by candidate gender. In order to address this deficiency, we will conduct a survey experiment in Japan. In contemporary Japanese politics, even politicians from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (a conservative, traditionally anti-immigration party) have increasingly advocated expanded immigration. How might we expect Japanese voters to respond to this new context, and how might Japanese voters’ responses to pro- or anti-immigration stances from male and female candidates differ? Will voters punish female candidates who, for example, support immigration for economic rather than humanitarian reasons? Or will voters reward such candidates for demonstrating a willingness to be “hard nosed” and “rational?” To answer these questions, our survey experiment presents voters with Liberal Democratic Party candidates whose gender and stances on immigration are randomly assigned. Careful analysis of the results of this survey experiment will help us understand the constraints that politicians in Japan face as they discuss immigration policy, and it will also contribute to debates from comparative politics about the determinants of public opinion on immigration as well as the relationship between gender and politics
Investigating Meta Ad Delivery Algorithm
No full textTo inform and organize potential voters, political campaigns are increasingly resorting to tailored advertising using social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. These platforms claim to allow advertisers to target ads to the most "relevant" audience for a political campaign including by inferring interests and political affiliations. However, previous research has demonstrated that targeting may not perform as envisioned since ad delivery algorithms, not just the intentions of the advertiser, play an important role in deciding who sees which ad.
Some very recent research indeed finds that the Facebook (now Meta) ad delivery algorithm is steering ads towards certain audiences without the explicit intention or knowledge of the advertiser themselves. Ali et al. (2019) find that ads that ran at the same time, with the custom same audience, and the same budget can be heavily skewed along gendered and racial stereotypes. In the realm of political advertising, researchers have also found that ads are more likely to be delivered to ideologically congruent audiences (Ali et al., 2021). Moreover, Ali et al. (2021) find evidence for an increased cost for reaching ideologically incongruent audiences: for example, when placing a liberal ad to a liberal audience they had to pay 21 Dollars per 1000 reached users, whereas a conservative ad delivered to a liberal audience cost almost twice as much with 40 Dollars per 1000 users.
Studies that investigate the skew of ad algorithms in the realm of politics have focused on the United States and to our knowledge, there has been no similar effort to uncover whether and to which degree ad algorithms are influencing online political ad delivery in a European multi-party context. To fill this gap in the literature we plan to investigate whether skews in ad delivery occur in the European context and we will focus in particular on the Dutch case.
We seek to answer three research questions with this project:
RQ1: How does the Meta ad delivery algorithm influence the pricing & distribution of political ads in the Netherlands?
RQ2: To what degree does Meta adjust ad price depending on its predicted match between characteristics of the target audience (like interests and demographics) and the political advertiser?
RQ3: Is Meta distributing political ads preferentially to users who it predicts will be more closely aligned with a political party's core supporter group?
To answer the research questions we are partnering with three political parties in the Netherlands to place a total of 135 political ads on Facebook and Instagram before the upcoming, country-wide, local elections that will take place on March 16th, 2022. We will thoroughly investigate any skew in pricing or delivery that occurs for targeting or excluding certain audiences.
This research was approved by the Ethics Review Board of the Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Amsterdam:
ERB number 2021-PCJ-1426
Can physical activity boost vocabulary learning?
No full textThis is a formal registration of a register report that was awarded In Principle Acceptance (IPA) by Cortex Journa
PEER1: Cross-sectional study of contact and CRD
No full textA large-sample cross-sectional study involving cross-race contact and several assessments of the effect of race of face-processing (1 task involving recognition, 1 task involving perceptual sensitivity to diagnostic objective information in Black faces, and 2 tasks involving expectations for a face)
Introducing the Humanity-Oriented Dimension of Self-Regulation and Mind-Wandering as Predictors of Psychological Well-being of Post-Secondary Students
No full textSelf-regulation is an individual’s capacity to override or direct self-generated thoughts, feelings, and undesired behaviour tendencies (i.e., impulses) and achieve one’s goals accordingly (DeLisi, 2014; Diamond, 2013; Hofmann et al., 2014; Kuhl, 1992). Self-regulation is a critical determinant of psychological well-being (i.e., eudaimonic well-being; Willems et al., 2019), which indicates people’s mental health and life satisfaction. Psychological well-being was defined by Ryff (1989) to comprise six factors: self-acceptance (possessing the positive attitude towards self and past life with both good and bad qualities), environmental mastery (controlling and managing complex surrounding context and external activities), positive relationships (trusting relationships with others and consideration of others), personal growth (self-development to improve and open to new knowledge and experience), purpose in life (sense of direction, goals and meaning of past and present life), and autonomy (independence and self-governance to make informed and uncoerced decisions); (Carol D. Ryff, 1989; Carol D. Ryff & Keyes, 1995).
The majority of previous studies have focused on the well-being outcomes from people lower in self-regulation. Specifically, lower self-regulation is linked to more mind-wandering (Mcvay & Kane, 2009), and more mind-wandering is related to poor psychological well-being (Mcvay & Kane, 2011; Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010; Poerio et al., 2013). Mind-wandering is a fast attentional shift away from a task or ongoing thoughts (Stan & Christoff, 2018). During mind-wandering, the mind is attending to a mental process to engage in personally relevant information without awareness (Stan & Christoff, 2018). Researchers pointed out that more personal-related higher mind-wandering content is possibly linked to lower psychological well-being, but the gap in research is to explore this association and better predict psychological well-being.
In addition, although the majority of studies indicated that lower self-regulation is linked to more mind-wandering that associated with decreased well-being, a few researchers found people with higher trait self-regulation may use the trait as a tool to manipulate others and to achieve their own goals (Bègue et al., 2015), which undermines other’s well-being (i.e., well-being undermining behaviours). For example, people high in self-regulation were more willing to harm innocent people in the name of obedience (Milgram, 1974). To date, few studies have investigated this phenomenon nor provided a psychological explanation.
A possible explanation of the link between high self-regulation and well-being undermining behaviour is a lack of humanity-oriented traits (Bègue et al., 2015) and increased self-focus. The humanity-oriented trait is a positive trait of loving-kindness, compassion (i.e., sympathetic feelings for the sufferings of others), and intention to give and receive love. The humanity-oriented trait could mitigate the increased self-focus for people high in self-regulation, which reduces the well-being undermining behaviours. The proposed project will explore this by introducing a latent variable of the humanity-oriented dimension of self-regulation and assessing whether the humanity-oriented dimension of self-regulation better predicts psychological well-being than self-regulation alone. In addition, recent studies also indicated that certain types of meditations could cultivate humanity-oriented traits, and reduce mind-wandering (Jazaieri et al., 2016) and improve their psychological well-being (Kahana et al., 2021). We will also apply the humanity-oriented trait to study mind-wandering content and assess if the humanity-oriented dimension of mind-wandering could better predict psychological well-being.
In short, this research project aims to explore the relationship between humanity-oriented traits and self-regulation or mind-wandering in predicting psychological well-being. In study 1, we will examine whether self-regulation, combined with the humanity-oriented trait, is a stronger predictor of psychological well-being than self-regulation alone. In study 2, we will assess whether mind-wandering, combined with humanity-oriented traits, is a stronger predictor of psychological well-being than mind-wandering alone. Both studies use a latent variable measurement in predictor analysis and structural equation modelling among Chinese students in post-secondary education
fMRI investigation of semantic processing in young and older adults
No full textCognitive processing in later life is associated with changes in the spatial distribution of neural activity. During performance of complex tasks, older people activate some brain regions less than young people and others to a greater extent. This study will investigate the causes and consequences of these activation shifts by testing existing hypotheses for these processes. Particularly, we will focus on one key domain of cognitive ability – verbal semantic cognition – as a window into how the ageing brain optimizes its function to capitalize on preserved areas of cognition at the same time as compensating for declines
The Nostalgic Face - Study 4.C
No full textRegistration for The Nostalgic Face Study 4.C which presents ratings of the 6 Overall CIs obtained from Study 4.
Voice Similarity: The own voice
No full textThe scope of this project is to determine whether a deep neural net, which is trained to perform a speaker validation task, can predict how dissimilar a voice is perceived compared to one's own voice
