1,720,961 research outputs found
Role of Trust in the Link between Conspiracy Mentality and Vaccine Hesitancy
No full textCOVID-19 conspiracy rhetoric has been rampant throughout the pandemic. As a result, vaccination rates in many developed countries have not been ideal despite substantial public spending. If conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccination proliferate, it can discourage people from taking vaccines. Some experts even warned that COVID-19 vaccine hesitation may spill over to people’s unwillingness to take vaccines for other communicable diseases. Thus, conspiracism has a downstream long-term impact on people’s attitudes towards vaccines in general. Importantly, conspiracism has been linked with mistrust in expertise and authorities, with our prior data showing a consistent mediating role between conspiracy mentality and vaccine hesitation. In this proposed experiment, we aimed to establish the causal role of trust in determining outcomes of conspiracy mentality on vaccine hesitation and show that trust is malleable, providing an empirical basis for promoting trust as an intervention to conspiracism and vaccine hesitation
Self-reported Crowdedness in Local Ecology Predicts Greater Perceived Competition
No full textCrowdedness has long been theorized to influence human behavior through increased competition, but empirical investigation remains scarce. Although crowdedness refers to the subjective sense of spatial and social constraint caused by limited personal space and others’ presence or behavior, it is often proxied by actual or perceived population density. Across four studies involving 1,760 U.S. participants, we developed and validated an 8-item Crowdedness Scale to assess self-reported perceived crowdedness, and demonstrated that self-reported perceived crowdedness robustly predicted perceived competition (meta-analytic r = .40, p < .001), independent of objective population density. These findings provide direct evidence that the psychological experience of crowdedness reflects a socioecological cue of competition, rather than merely how densely populated a place is. Our results also lay the groundwork for future research on the behavioral, cultural, and societal consequences of high-density living
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Populism and Vaccine Hesitation: Some Outcomes of Conspiracy Mentality
No full textCOVID-19 conspiracy rhetoric has been rampant throughout the pandemic. As a result, vaccination rates in many developed countries have not been ideal despite substantial public spending. If conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccination proliferate, it can discourage people from taking vaccines. To address this timely issue with global health consequences, we examine if conspiracy mentality – the general tendency to adopt a conspiratorial frame of thinking, is related to populist sentiments, which drive vaccine hesitation. The finding from our exploratory supports the hypothesis that individuals high in conspiracy mentality are more likely to mistrust experts, which in turn predicts vaccine hesitancy. This finding begs another key question: What can we do to counteract mistrust?
The vaccine advocacy literature has suggested that communicating the prosocial benefits of herd immunity may buffer vaccine hesitation. The decision to vaccinate can be conceived as a trade-off between costs incurred (e.g., time and monetary resources, inconvenience, and potential side effects) and benefits of personal protection and herd immunity. With higher conspiracy mentality, individuals may perceive more vaccine risks and emphasize the costs (vs. benefits) associated with vaccination. However, research revealed that if the benefits of herd immunity are made salient, individuals may be motivated by collective benefits and reduce their reluctance to get vaccinated. In the proposed experiment, we hypothesize that highlighting the prosocial benefit of head immunity may offset the perceived cost of trusting experts due to people’s conspiracy mindset. To this prediction, we designed an experiment manipulating herd immunity communication and assessing participants’ vaccine hesitancy and intention to be vaccinated against a fictitious pathogen
Exposure to Conspiracy Narrative: A Person-Situation Interaction Analysis
No full textResearch on conspiracy theories saw remarkable progress in recent decades — the vast interdisciplinary literature documented various psychological and contextual factors of conspiracy belief and its impact on society. Nevertheless, several theoretical debates, empirical questions, and research gaps remain. One such empirical question is why some people can resist conspiracy narratives better than others. Much of the existing literature outlines specific contexts and individual characteristics that influence people’s adoption of conspiracy beliefs. However, few studies examined contextual factors in conjunction with individual factors and their interactions. To fill this gap, the present research aims to elucidate the interaction between people’s exposure to a situation that prompts conspiracy thinking (i.e., conspiracy narrative exposure) and their inclination to believe in conspiracy theories. (i.e., conspiracy mentality and beliefs). We will conduct two proposed experiments wherein participants are exposed to anti-vaccination (Study 1) and climate change conspiracy narratives (Study 2). The effects of person-situation interaction will be assessed by comparing conditional experimental differences in participants’ vaccine hesitation and vaccination intention (Study 1), climate change attitude, and behavioral intentions (Study 2)
Conspiracism, Populism and COVID-19
No full textPeriods of uncertainty correlate with the prevalence of conspiracy theories as people attempt to make sense of the unknowns. Conspiracy belief provides an intuitive and structured understanding of complex crises and events and hereby confers a sense of control. The lack of control was previously reported to be a powerful predictor of conspiracy belief, but subsequent research questioned the robustness of the relationship. The proposed research aims to build on this premise by outlining the motivational aspect of conspiracy thinking. A plausible explanation for the inconsistent findings is that conspiracy belief is only necessitated by the specific motivation to prefer conspiracy theories. As such, a sense of control does not necessarily buffer conspiracy belief, particularly if the control threat is not personally relevant. This prediction will be tested through an experiment wherein participants’ sense of control will be manipulated. Participants’ social dominance orientation will be measured to examine if the interacting effect of control manipulation and conspiracy mentality on COVID-19 attitudes varies by the motivation to preserve social hierarchy
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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