Partisan in-group bias before and after elections

Partisan attachment is a major source of group identity in democracies, accounting for a strong in-group bias when citizens make judgments on trust, cooperation, and resource sharing. Yet what factors condition behavioural expressions of partisan in-group bias are not well-understood. Here, I explore the impact of one theoretically-critical factor - election cycles - in fueling partisan-based discrimination and favouritism. Using an experiment embedded in a panel study fielded immediately before and after the 2015 Canadian federal election, I find that pre-election in-group bias levels were cut by a full third within two days of election day. The bulk of the decline is explained by a decrease in willingness to discriminate against out-partisans, while co-partisan favouritism levels remain stable. Further, in-group bias substantially decreases post-election among supporters of gaining parties and among strategic voters, while losing party supporters and sincere voters continued to express it strongly. I discuss theoretical implications on our current, static understanding of partisan-based discriminatory behaviour.     

Disaggregating the Incentives of Conflict Management: An Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to develop a formal model of the arms export process that incorporates the complementary ideas of a fuzzy decision‐making goal and a fuzzy decision‐making constraint. The model is formulated as a control problem: The decision‐making actor—in this case, a hegemonic exporter—will attempt to control the evolution of its political relationship with a prospective importer by choosing, over time, a sequence of arms transfer strategies. The exporter's strategic choices will be influenced by its fuzzy goal (a fuzzy set of political relations outcomes between the two states that the exporter seeks to maximize) and its fuzzy constraint (a fuzzy set of arms options that the exporter is constrained to choose by virtue of the preferences of the importer's neighbors). The solution to the control problem is the exporter's optimal policy sequence, and this is uncovered via the dynamic programming optimization technique. The model is illustrated by the multistage decision‐making of the U.S. for Egypt in the years 1968–1971 and 1974–1977.     

《关于正确处理人民内部矛盾的问题》一文的理论偏差及其启示

毛泽东在<关于正确处理人民内部矛盾的问题>(以下简称<正处>)文中,以历史唯物主义的态度,首次阐明了社会主义社会的基本矛盾.正确处理人民内部矛盾理论,是毛泽东结合中国国情对马克思主义矛盾论作出的独创性贡献.但是由于社会历史条件的限制,该理论存在着一定的历史局限性.结合中国的实际,深入反思这些局限性,对新的历史条件下如何正确处理人民内部矛盾,是有启示的.     

Juvenile perpetrators of race/ethnicity-based bias crimes

Most bias crime literature focuses on adults despite the fact that youth account for a large proportion of prejudice-motivated violence. The LA County Commission on Human Relations data for all bias crimes from 2002-2008 was used to examine similarities and differences between adult and youth suspects of bias-motivated crimes. Findings showed youth victims of racial bias crimes were 12 times more likely to be targeted by youth suspects and over five times more likely to commit property offenses. Public places were nearly three times more likely than resident places to be the location of the bias crime by youth suspects. Female perpetrators of racial bias crimes were two times more likely to be youths. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

How Media Exposure Relates to Laypersons’ Understanding of Psychopathy

While conceptualization of psychopathy has evolved, so too has the public's relationship with psychology changed. Concurrently, portrayal of psychopaths has made several shifts, both through nonfiction sources and in popular film and television. Psychopathic villains of the mid‐20th century have made space for a growing cast of protagonist psychopaths. This study examined whether a relationship existed between exposure to fictional psychopaths and how lay individuals conceptualize psychopathy. Specifically, this study explored conceptualization differences based on exposure to antagonist versus protagonist fictional psychopaths. Surveyed community participants supported earlier research suggesting mixed misunderstanding of psychopathy. Additionally, higher exposure to protagonist psychopaths was associated with higher endorsement of flattering distractor traits, reflecting a kind of romanticized psychopathy. These findings have legal, practical, and ethical implications, including the potential for biased jurors, confounded research about psychopathy's labeling effect, and questions about how psychologists should respond on an individual and systemic level.     

The Complexity of Hate Crime and Bias Activity: Variation across Contexts and Types of Bias

Are racially-motivated hate crimes, non-criminal bias incidents, and general forms of crime associated with the same structural factors? If so, then social disorganization, a powerful structural correlate of general crime, should predict rates of hate incidents. However, tests of social disorganization’s effects on racially-motivated hate crime yield inconsistent results. This study uses data from the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission (PHRC) to explore such inconsistencies. Specifically, we assess the effects of social disorganization across contexts and types of bias motivation using bias incidents over 12 years. The results suggest that (a) social disorganization, particularly residential instability, is robustly correlated with rates of both hate crime and other prejudicial conduct, and that (b) the interactive effects of social disorganization help explain variations in incident rates by motivation type. Specifically, anti-black incidents are most frequent in unstable, homogeneous (i.e. white) and advantaged communities, while anti-white incidents are most frequent in unstable, disadvantaged communities.     

Examining Interobserver Reliability of Metric and Morphoscopic Characteristics of the Mandible

Mandibular metric and morphological characteristics have long been used for sex and ancestry estimation. Currently, there are no large‐scale studies examining interobserver agreement, particularly examining the role of observer experience. This study examines the interobserver agreement of six morphoscopic and eleven metric mandibular variables. Four observers with varied levels of experience scored 183 mandibles from the William M. Bass Donated Skeletal Collection. Absolute agreement and consistency were evaluated with the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC). Additionally, technical error of measurement (TEM) and relative TEM (%TEM) were calculated for each metric variable. All analyses were conducted twice—once with all observers and again with only experienced observers. Results show mean morphoscopic agreement of 0.543 among all observers and 0.615 for experienced observers, and mean metric agreement of 0.886 among all observers and 0.911 for experienced observers. Further, no TEM exceeded 2 mm. All results were significant (p < 0.001).     

Forgetting to make votes count: The role of previous democratic experience

This paper argues that wasted votes in founding elections decrease when countries have a previous democratic experience before the current democratic period. This historical-institutionalist argument is tested with national election results in 22 founding elections in third-wave European, Asian, Latin American and African democracies. The results demonstrate that having a democratic past clearly increases coordination and then reduces the percentage of wasted votes in the founding election, controlling for the electoral system.     

Forensic Gait Analysis and Recognition: Standards of Evidence Admissibility

Gait is one biological characteristic which has attracted strong research interest due to its potential use in human identification. Although almost two decades have passed since a forensic gait expert has testified to the identity of a perpetrator in court, the methods remain insufficiently robust, considering the recent paradigm shift witnessed in the forensic science community regarding quality of evidence. In contrast, technological advancements have taken the lead, and research into automated gait recognition has greatly surpassed forensic gait analysis in terms of the size of acquired datasets and demographic variability of participants, tested variables, and statistical evaluation of results. Despite these advantages, gait recognition presents with different problems which are yet to be resolved. Therefore, courts should treat gait evidence with caution, as they should any other form of evidence originating from disciplines without fully established codes of practice, error rates, and demonstrable applications in forensic scenarios.     

Technology-Mediated Exposure to Police–Citizen Encounters: A Quasi-Experimental Assessment of Consequences for Citizen Perceptions

Anecdotal evidence suggests that recent video-recorded police–citizen encounters have undermined police legitimacy and fueled civil unrest across the United States. Drawing from the process-based model of policing, social cognitive theory, and past research on media effects, we assess the influence of viewing cell phone videos of police–citizen encounters on perceptions of law enforcement. Using quasi-experimental methods and video footage of an actual police–citizen encounter captured on cell phones, the effects of viewing these videos are assessed using a series of repeated measure ANOVAs. Results indicate that viewing cell phone videos of police–citizen encounters significantly impacts perceptions of law enforcement, though little evidence of differing effects based on point-of-view, number of video exposures, or ordering of video exposures was found. The process-based model of policing should consider further incorporating the contributions of technology to provide a more holistic account of the factors influencing perceptions of police.