Helmholtz Centre Potsdam - GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences
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On the Removal of Confederate Monuments and White Americans’ Support for Racial Equity
No full textExamines the relationship between community decisions around Confederate monuments and White Americans support for future public policies. We examine both explicitly racial equity emphasizing and non-racial-equity emphasizing policies and the extent to which White Americans feel communities should and will prioritize these policies in the near future
Teamwork makes the dream work: Leveraging telehealth and APN/LPC alliance to mitigate anxiety for youth diagnosed on the autism spectrum
No full textRequired Coronavirus quarantining provided a unique opportunity for clinicians to grow professionally. This study examines use of HIPAA compliant telehealth technologies in two ways. First, telehealth offered a chance for professionals like APNs (advanced practice nurses) and LPCs (licensed professional counselors) to team up, trade referrals and to work together as virtual caring teams. Secondly, this study highlights several ways a caring professional team can mitigate ASD youth (and caregiver) anxiety through improved treatment delivery via telehealth, and ways added functionality can serve this vulnerable population. This study provides information clinicians can use at once to enhance alliances with one another and with ASD youth as well as caregiver(s) using richer multimedia, multimodal treatment delivery
What constrains food webs? A maximum entropy framework for predicting their structure with minimal biases
No full textFood webs are complex ecological networks whose structure is both ecologically and statistically constrained, with many network properties being correlated with each other. Despite the recognition of these invariable relationships in food webs, the use of the principle of maximum entropy (MaxEnt) in network ecology is still rare. This is surprising considering that MaxEnt is a renowned and rigorous statistical tool precisely designed for understanding and predicting many different types of constrained systems. Precisely, this principle asserts that the least-biased probability distribution of a system’s property, constrained by prior knowledge about that system, is the one with maximum information entropy. MaxEnt has been proven useful in many ecological modelling problems, but its application in food webs and other ecological networks is limited. Here we show how MaxEnt can be used to derive many food-web properties both analytically and heuristically. First, we show how the joint degree distribution (the joint probability distribution of the numbers of prey and predators for each species in the network) can be derived analytically using the number of species and the number of interactions in food webs. Second, we present a heuristic and flexible approach of finding a network’s adjacency matrix (the network’s representation in matrix format) based on simulated annealing and SVD entropy. We built two heuristic models using the connectance and the joint degree sequence as statistical constraints, respectively. We compared both models’ predictions against corresponding null and neutral models commonly used in network ecology using open access data of terrestrial and aquatic food webs sampled globally (N = 257). We found that the heuristic model constrained by the joint degree sequence was a good predictor of many measures of food-web structure, especially the nestedness and motifs distribution. Specifically, our results suggest that the structure of terrestrial and aquatic food webs is mainly driven by their joint degree distribution
Conflict, Compatibility, Crisis: Undergraduate Sample
No full textThe aims of this study are (a) to examine how a sample of U.S. undergraduates views the relationships between science and religion and (b) to determine whether U.S. undergraduates with different views about these relationships have different attitudes toward current crises facing the world (COVID-19 and climate change)
Who Needs More Help? Need-Based Evaluations of Helping in 16-Month-Old Infants
No full textIn the present experiment, we will investigate whether 16-month-old infants prefer an agent who helps a weak individual over an agent who helps a strong individual.
In related experiments, we have found that 16-month-old infants prefer to reach for and look at helpers who help with harder tasks. This past work suggests that infants’ evaluations of helpers are sensitive to need that is based on task difficulty, a form of need that relates to the external environment. Here, we hope to examine whether infants’ evaluations are sensitive to strength, a form of need that may vary across agents.
Please see our preregistration document ("PreregHard-210306.docx") for full details
Optimal Communication: Communication modes, opinion formation complexity of thinking in the Covid-19 crisis (health vs freedom)
No full textTo date, we know little about the exact role of different communication modes on opinion formation and the complexity of thinking. Psychological research (Schweiger et al. 1986) found that while contestatory communication formats (e.g. devil´s advocacy) produce higher validity recommendation than consensual formats, the latter lead to higher decision acceptance and procedural satisfaction. In a recent study, Erisen/Redlawsk/Erisen (2018) found that exposure to congruent information increases the integrative complexity of opposing thoughts. This population-based survey experiment compares the effects of different communication modes - „contestatory“ vs „appreciative inquiry“ vs „free communication“ – and two control conditions - information-only and Placebo - on opinion formation (polarization, depolarization, opinion stability), argument quality (breadth and depth of argument), ambivalence and procedural satisfaction in the context of the Covid-19 crisis (with a focus on the prioritization of health vs freedom)
Hypotheses formulating in crime investigations - consider the opposite
No full textThe purpose of this study is to examine whether instructing investigating officers to actively consider-the-opposite (of guilt) will increase their ability to identify alternative scenarios. We will test this with within-study design
Can professional fact-checkers' techniques advance users' understanding of scientific content on social media?
No full textThe fight against misinformation and disinformation has developed substantially over the last decade, from the evolution of debiasing techniques (Lewandowsky, Ecker, Seifert, Schwarz & Cook, 2012) to the implementation of preventive interventions such as inoculation (McGuire, 1964; Roozenbeek, van der Linden, & Nygren, 2020) and news literacy (Vraga & Bode, 2020; Guess et al., 2020; Lutzke et al., 2019).
At the same time, attention has shifted markedly towards the dissemination of false information on social media, resulting in the adaptation of these interventions to these rapidly changing environments. Examples of social media interventions include the use of warnings or flags for unverified or debunked information (Clayton et al., 2019), the wisdom of crowds (Allen, Arechar, Pennycook & Rand, 2020) and attention priming (Pennycook, Epstein, Mosleh, Arechar, Eckes & Rand, 2019).
Recently, a new type of media literacy intervention, civic online reasoning (Wineburg & McGrew, 2017), has proven very effective in countering disinformation among high school and college students (McGrew, Breakstone, Ortega, Smith & Wineburg, 2018; McGrew, Smith, Breakstone, Ortega & Wineburg, 2019), as well as elderly citizens (Moore & Hancock, 2021).
This intervention, based on learning professional fact-checking techniques, has the advantage that it can be used when misinformation is deceptively sophisticated or difficult to detect. Despite extensive study of civic online reasoning offline, there has been little application of these techniques on social media.
The present study aims to adapt to social media some of the strategies of civic online reasoning, specifically lateral reading (leaving a website and opening of new tabs along a horizontal axis in order to use the resources of the Internet to learn more about a site and its claims) and click restraint (skipping the first search results of a browser search ). We test these strategies against scientific misinformation, which is a perfect testing ground for online interventions, as scientific content is often difficult for laypeople to access.
As a complementary hypothesis, we test whether evaluation accuracy can be increased by giving participants monetary rewards for correct answers. This incentivized condition will serve as a benchmark for fact checking techniques. In addition, the incentives will allow us to test whether motivation and attention, triggered by the presence of an incentive, are sufficient to increase accurate responses.
Participants are shown an interactive Facebook post, which links to an article presenting information related to science, and are asked to rate how scientifically valid the content of the post is.
The scientific validity of the posts is determined through a predefined procedure based on a series of quality checks, such as whether the scientific claims have been peer-reviewed, whether the authors making the claim are competent on the specific topic, and whether the media reporting is faithful to the original article.
The post will present a title in form of a scientific claim, and a caption from the article that elaborates on that claim. Participants are randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions. In the control condition, participants observe and interact with the Facebook post, and are asked to rate the scientific validity of the post on a scale from 1 to 6. The monetary incentive condition is identical to the control condition, with the difference that participants are paid a fixed sum if their answer is correct. Finally, the pop-up condition is identical to the control condition, with the difference that before reading the post participants also observe a pop-up suggesting civic online reasoning strategies such as lateral reading and click restraint. At the end of the experiment, after the participants have completed a series of control questionnaires, we debrief them on the scientific validity of the post.
In summary, the study tests whether fact checking techniques, as opposed to monetary incentives, are effective tools for understanding the scientific validity of social media content
Too Important to Ignore? When Voters Seek Clarity About Politicians' Policy Positions
No full textWhen do voters punish politicians who are unclear about their policy positions? I argue that we should focus on the issue a politician is ambiguous on: as the salience of an issue increases for voters, they demand more clarity on that issue and disapprove of politicians who are ambiguous. I test this argument using an original survey experiment run with 1600 Dutch respondents that combines Quadratic Voting measuring salience with a Conjoint that captures how voters rank parties which are ambiguous. This is an updated version of the submitted PAP after the N of the study changed and some typos were removed from the previous PAP