Search results for "PsyArXiv|Social and Behavioral Sciences|Social and Personality Psychology|Cultural Differences"
showing 10 items of 129 documents
Socio-developmental aspects of European identity: The influence of age, gender and context
2010
In the last years, researchers have been interested in understanding factors affecting the development of European identity. To contribute new insights to the literature, this study explored how age, gender and context variables influence the process of European identification and the attitudes towards Europeans in two different Italian groups: Northern Italians and Southern Italians. Interview data were collected from 1037 children and adolescents (472 males, 565 females), aged from 6 to 16 years old and living in northern and southern regions of Italy. They were asked to answer an individual interview during school time. For the particular purposes of the study, four main measures were us…
A bioweapon or a hoax? The link between distinct conspiracy beliefs about the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak and pandemic behavior
2020
During the coronavirus disease pandemic rising in 2020, governments and nongovernmental organizations across the globe have taken great efforts to curb the infection rate by promoting or legally prescribing behavior that can reduce the spread of the virus. At the same time, this pandemic has given rise to speculations and conspiracy theories. Conspiracy worldviews have been connected to refusal to trust science, the biomedical model of disease, and legal means of political engagement in previous research. In three studies from the United States ( N = 220; N = 288) and the UK ( N = 298), we went beyond this focus on a general conspiracy worldview and tested the idea that different forms of …
Narcissism and the Strategic Pursuit of Short-Term Mating:Universal Links across 11 World Regions of the International Sexuality Description Project-2
2017
Previous studies have documented links between sub-clinical narcissism and the active pursuit of short-term mating strategies (e.g., unrestricted sociosexuality, marital infidelity, mate poaching). Nearly all of these investigations have relied solely on samples from Western cultures. In the current study, responsesfrom a cross-cultural survey of 30,470 people across 53 nations spanning 11 world regions (North America, Central/South America, Northern Europe, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Oceania, Southeast Asia, and East Asia) were used to evaluate whether narcissism (as measured by the Narcissistic Personality Inventory; NPI) was universally associat…
Resolving the Puzzle of Conspiracy Worldview and Political Activism: Belief in Secret Plots Decreases Normative but Increases Nonnormative Political …
2019
It is a hitherto open and debated question whether the belief in conspiracies increases or attenuates the willingness to engage in political action. In the present article, we tested the notion, whether (a) the relation between belief in conspiracies and general political engagement is curvilinear (inverted U-shaped) and (b) there may be opposing relations to normative versus nonnormative forms of political engagement. Two preregistered experiments ( N = 194, N = 402) support both propositions and show that the hypothetical adoption of a worldview that sees the world as governed by secret plots attenuates reported intentions to participate in normative, legal forms of political participati…
How Will We React to the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life?
2018
How will humanity react to the discovery of extraterrestrial life? Speculation on this topic abounds, but empirical research is practically non-existent. We report the results of three empirical studies assessing psychological reactions to the discovery of extraterrestrial life using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis software. We examined language use in media coverage of past discovery announcements of this nature, with a focus on extraterrestrial microbial life (Pilot Study). A large online sample (N = 501) was asked to write about their own and humanity’s reaction to a hypothetical announcement of such a discovery (Study 1), and an independent, large online sampl…
Interindividual Differences in Treatment Effects based on Structural Equation Models with Latent Variables: An EffectLiteR Tutorial
2019
The investigation of interindividual differences in the effects of a treatment is challenging, because many constructs-of-interest in psychological research such as depression or anxiety are latent variables and modeling heterogeneity in treatment effects requires interactions and potentially nonlinear relationships. In this paper, we present a tutorial of the EffectLiteR approach (Mayer, Dietzfelbinger, Rosseel, & Steyer, 2016) that allows for estimating individual treatment effects based on latent variable models. We describe step by step how to apply the approach using the EffectLiteR software package with data from the multicenter randomized controlled trial of the Social Phobia…
Evaluating the microscopic effect of brushing stone tools as a cleaning procedure
2020
Cleaning stone tool surfaces is a common procedure in lithic studies. The first step widely applied at any archeological site (and/or at field laboratories) is the gross removal of sediment from the surfaces of artifacts. Lithic surface alterations due to mechanical action applied in wet or dry cleaning regimes have never been examined at a microscopic scale. This could have important implications in traceology, as any modern surface modifications inflicted on archeological artifacts might compromise their functional interpretations. The current trend toward quantification of use-wear traces makes the testing even more important, as even slight, apparently invisible surface alterations migh…
Statistically validated networks in bipartite complex systems.
2011
Many complex systems present an intrinsic bipartite nature and are often described and modeled in terms of networks [1-5]. Examples include movies and actors [1, 2, 4], authors and scientific papers [6-9], email accounts and emails [10], plants and animals that pollinate them [11, 12]. Bipartite networks are often very heterogeneous in the number of relationships that the elements of one set establish with the elements of the other set. When one constructs a projected network with nodes from only one set, the system heterogeneity makes it very difficult to identify preferential links between the elements. Here we introduce an unsupervised method to statistically validate each link of the pr…
Subtle Increases in Interletter Spacing Facilitate the Encoding of Words during Normal Reading
2012
BackgroundSeveral recent studies have revealed that words presented with a small increase in interletter spacing are identified faster than words presented with the default interletter spacing (i.e., w a t e r faster than water). Modeling work has shown that this advantage occurs at an early encoding level. Given the implications of this finding for the ease of reading in the new digital era, here we examined whether the beneficial effect of small increases in interletter spacing can be generalized to a normal reading situation.MethodologyWe conducted an experiment in which the participant's eyes were monitored when reading sentences varying in interletter spacing: i) sentences were present…
A cultural comparison study of smartphone adoption in Uzbekistan, South Korea and Turkey
2017
Smartphone popularity is increasing due to the technological advances that mean manufacturers can make more sophisticated devices, and telecommunication companies can provide better connections. Gartner reported that 403 million smartphones were sold in the fourth quarter of 2015, a 9.7% increase over the same period in 2014. It is a common perception that users tend to utilise advanced technology to increase productivity. However, there are studies indicating quite opposite or alternatively slow rates of adoption. To avoid this, companies invest in studying consumer behaviour. The purpose of the study is to examine the effects of drivers and cultural differences on smartphone acceptance in…