{"title":"Science interrupted <i>Our attempt to study disgust sensitivity and the development of political attitudes among children and their parents</i>.","authors":"Valentina Parma, Kevin Arceneaux","doi":"10.1017/pls.2022.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2022.1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Recent research contends that the behavioral immune system, operating largely outside conscious awareness, motivates individuals to exhibit higher levels of prejudice toward unfamiliar out-groups. This research finds that individual variance in disgust sensitivity correlates with support for political policies that facilitate the avoidance of out-groups. We were interested in developing less intrusive indicators of disgust sensitivity via olfactory measures (i.e., ratings of disgusting odors) and behavioral measures (e.g., willingness to touch disgusting objects) and studying the association between measures of disgust sensitivity and in-group bias among children and adults. We submitted a registered report to conduct this research and received an in-principle acceptance. Unfortunately, unforeseen events impaired our data collection, leaving us with a limited sample (<i>n<sub>children</sub></i> = 32, <i>n<sub>adults</sub></i> = 29) and reducing our ability to draw reliable conclusions from our results. In this essay, we describe our motivation and plan of research, the events that made completing the research impossible, and our preliminary results. In doing so, we hope to offer support for studying the effects of the behavioral immune system, even in ways that we did not originally plan. We conclude with a reflection on the value of registered reports for advancing science.</p>","PeriodicalId":35901,"journal":{"name":"Politics and the Life Sciences","volume":"41 1","pages":"3-14"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9118806","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Breaking free <i>How preregistration hurts scholars and science</i>.","authors":"Rose McDermott","doi":"10.1017/pls.2022.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2022.4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Pre-registration has become an increasingly popular proposal to address concerns regarding questionable research practices. Yet preregistration does not necessarily solve these problems. It also causes additional problems, including raising costs for more junior and less resourced scholars. In addition, pre-registration restricts creativity and diminishes the broader scientific enterprise. In this way, pre-registration neither solves the problems it is intended to address, nor does it come without costs. Pre-registration is neither necessary nor sufficient for producing novel or ethical work. In short, pre-registration represents a form of virtue signaling that is more performative than actual.</p>","PeriodicalId":35901,"journal":{"name":"Politics and the Life Sciences","volume":"41 1","pages":"55-59"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9489933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Twitter as research data <i>Tools, costs, skill sets, and lessons learned</i>.","authors":"Kaiping Chen, Zening Duan, Sijia Yang","doi":"10.1017/pls.2021.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2021.19","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Scholars increasingly use Twitter data to study the life sciences and politics. However, Twitter data collection tools often pose challenges for scholars who are unfamiliar with their operation. Equally important, although many tools indicate that they offer representative samples of the full Twitter archive, little is known about whether the samples are indeed representative of the targeted population of tweets. This article evaluates such tools in terms of costs, training, and data quality as a means to introduce Twitter data as a research tool. Further, using an analysis of COVID-19 and moral foundations theory as an example, we compared the distributions of moral discussions from two commonly used tools for accessing Twitter data (Twitter's standard APIs and third-party access) to the ground truth, the Twitter full archive. Our results highlight the importance of assessing the comparability of data sources to improve confidence in findings based on Twitter data. We also review the major new features of Twitter's API version 2.</p>","PeriodicalId":35901,"journal":{"name":"Politics and the Life Sciences","volume":"41 1","pages":"114-130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9474126","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Complex faces and naïve machines <i>A commentary on facial perceptions of age, gender, and leader preferences in the age of AI</i>.","authors":"Brian R Spisak","doi":"10.1017/pls.2021.30","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2021.30","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Tasks driven by artificial intelligence (AI), such as evaluating video job interviews, rely on facial recognition systems for decision-making. Therefore, it is extremely important that the science behind this technology is continually advancing. If not, visual stereotypes, such as those associated with facial age and gender, will lead to dangerous misapplications of AI.</p>","PeriodicalId":35901,"journal":{"name":"Politics and the Life Sciences","volume":"41 1","pages":"147-149"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9489937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lisa Reuter, Jordan Mansell, Carter Rhea, Andrea Kiesel
{"title":"Direct assessment of individual connotation and experience <i>An introduction to cognitive-affective mapping</i>.","authors":"Lisa Reuter, Jordan Mansell, Carter Rhea, Andrea Kiesel","doi":"10.1017/pls.2021.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2021.31","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We introduce cognitive-affective maps (CAMs) as a novel tool to assess individual experiences and belief systems. CAMs were first presented by the cognitive scientist and philosopher Paul Thagard as a graphical representation of a mental network, visualizing attitudes, thoughts, and affective connotations toward the topic of interest. While CAMs were originally used primarily to visualize existing data, the recent release of the new software tool <i>Valence</i> has facilitated the applicability of CAMs for empirical data collection. In this article, we explain the concept and the theoretical background of CAMs. We exemplify how CAMs can be applied in research practice, including different options for analysis. We propose CAMs as a user-friendly and versatile methodological bridge between qualitative and quantitative research approaches and encourage incorporating the method into studies to access and visualize human attitudes and experience.</p>","PeriodicalId":35901,"journal":{"name":"Politics and the Life Sciences","volume":"41 1","pages":"131-139"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9324902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editor-in-Chief's introduction to the issue and volume 40 in review.","authors":"Gregg R Murray","doi":"10.1017/pls.2022.8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2022.8","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35901,"journal":{"name":"Politics and the Life Sciences","volume":"41 1","pages":"1-2"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9118808","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Editor-in-Chief's introduction to issue 41(2).","authors":"Gregg R Murray","doi":"10.1017/pls.2022.21","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2022.21","url":null,"abstract":"The editorial team is pleased to release the second issue of volume 41 of Politics and the Life Sciences. This issue adds six articles to the journal ’ s quickly growing list of open access articles. It features five articles selected with a competitive call for proposals for research to be funded by the Association for Politics and the Life Sciences (APLS) on the broad topic of “ Life Science in Politics: Methodological Innovations and Political Issues. ” The call solicited proposals for registered reports that use “ life science theory and methods to study political phenomena and the study of the intersection of science and political attitudes. ” The resulting articles address health data sharing behavior, attitudes toward environmental justice, links between physical formidability and views on the climate, racial and ethnic variation in negativity bias, and interoceptive sensitivity and political ideology. The guest editors provide an incisive overview and synthesis of the articles in their “ Introduction ” (Friesen et al., 2022). These articles continue the journal ’ s and APLS ’ s commitment to the promotion of rigorous scientific practices through registered reports (RRs). RRs require researchers to clearly state their hypotheses and detail their analysis plans before beginning data collection and completing their manuscript. In addition, they require journal editors to accept a submitted RR for publication or reject it prior to knowing the results. The objective of this approach is to minimize bias in researchers, who face myriad consequential decisions during the research process, and in journal editors, who want the positive attention for their journals that comes with the publication of “ novel ” and “ significant ” results. Credible issues for consideration have been raised about registered reports, including in this journal (McDermott, 2022). But mounting evidence suggests that compared to non-RR research, RRs are resulting in significantly fewer supported hypotheses (i.e., more null and negative results), greater computational reproducibility (i.e., improved replication of quantitative results), and greater perceived article quality (i.e., better methodological rigor and overall quality) (Chambers & Tzavella, 2022).","PeriodicalId":35901,"journal":{"name":"Politics and the Life Sciences","volume":"41 2","pages":"153-154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9115381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Matea Mustafaj, Guadalupe Madrigal, Jessica Roden, Gavin W Ploger
{"title":"Physiological threat sensitivity predicts anti-immigrant attitudes.","authors":"Matea Mustafaj, Guadalupe Madrigal, Jessica Roden, Gavin W Ploger","doi":"10.1017/pls.2021.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2021.11","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Research finds that the perception that immigrants are culturally and economically threatening is associated with negative attitudes toward immigration. In a largely separate body of work, psychophysiological predispositions toward threat sensitivity are connected to a range of political attitudes, including immigration. This article draws together these two literatures, using a lab experiment to explore psychophysiological threat sensitivity and immigration attitudes in the United States. Respondents with higher threat sensitivity, as measured by skin conductance responses to threatening images, tend to be less supportive of immigration. This finding builds on our understanding of the sources of anti-immigrant attitudes.</p>","PeriodicalId":35901,"journal":{"name":"Politics and the Life Sciences","volume":"41 1","pages":"15-27"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9489931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Xia Zheng, Annie Lang, Anthony Almond, Harry Yaojun Yan
{"title":"It takes guts to be a rebel! <i>A dynamic coordination account of the relationship between motivational reactivity, social morality, and political ideology</i>.","authors":"Xia Zheng, Annie Lang, Anthony Almond, Harry Yaojun Yan","doi":"10.1017/pls.2022.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2022.5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This study tests two sets of competing hypotheses about the relationship between trait reactivity to positive and negative stimuli (i.e., motivational reactivity), moral stances on social principles (i.e., social morality), and political ideology. The <i>classic view</i> contends that a specific political ideology or social morality results from a specific motivational reactivity pattern, whereas the <i>dynamic coordination account</i> suggests that trait motivational reactivity modulates an individual's political ideology and social morality as a result of the majority political beliefs in their immediate social context. A survey using subjects recruited from a liberal-leaning social context was conducted to test these hypotheses. Results support the dynamic coordination account. Reactivity to negativity (indexed by defensive system activation scores) is associated with the adoption of the dominant social morality and political ideology. Reactivity to positivity (indexed by appetitive system activation scores) is associated with the adoption of nondominant social moral and political stances.</p>","PeriodicalId":35901,"journal":{"name":"Politics and the Life Sciences","volume":"41 1","pages":"28-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9118807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Do pandemics spawn extremism? <i>Spanish flu deaths and the Ku Klux Klan</i>.","authors":"Adam Chamberlain, Alixandra B Yanus","doi":"10.1017/pls.2022.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2022.14","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Scholars and journalists connect pandemics to a rise in support for radical political movements. In this study, we draw on this insight to investigate the relationship between the 1918-1919 Spanish influenza pandemic and political extremism-here, the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan-in the United States. Specifically, we ask whether U.S. states and cities with higher death rates from the Spanish flu also had stronger Ku Klux Klan organizations in the early 1920s. Our results do not provide evidence of such a connection; in fact, the data suggest greater Klan membership where the pandemic was less severe. This provides initial evidence that pandemic severity, as measured by mortality, is not necessarily a cause of extremism in the United States; power devaluation as a result of social and cultural change, however, does appear to spur such mobilization.</p>","PeriodicalId":35901,"journal":{"name":"Politics and the Life Sciences","volume":"41 2","pages":"289-297"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"9118818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}