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Tug-of-War Model of attitude associations: How do you model the way people positively or negatively think of social groups (e.g., based on race)? We conceptualize group-valence relationships as angles between cognitive axes representing groups and valence. If the angle is acute (less then 90 degrees), the social group and the give valence category (positive/negative) correspond. For example, if someone has anti-old bias, the angle between the "negative" portion of the valence scale and the "old" portion of the age scale would be narrow. We fit the model to IAT data but more generalized versions of the model can be extended to other research paradigms too.
Polarization and Extremism: People end up with polarized and extreme pieces of information when choosing between options (for e.g., in elections) -- even when the underlying information doesn't support any particular option. This happens because while moderate information is busy canceling out, it's only extreme pieces of information that help decisively support one option over another. We show polarization and extremism can be reigned in with a task switch: comparing the relative preferability of two options (instead of choosing one) redirects people to minimize the variance in the information they have. We prove this mathematically (in the supplement), show it in simulations, and demonstrate it with empirical data.
Polarization and Extremism with Qualitative Information: Extending previous work, we show that even information that is qualitative (i.e., expressed in words, not numbers) and multidimensional (i.e., assessing several criteria instead of just one) gets polarized due to the task structure. We propose a new way to measure polarization (using the Bimodality Coefficient) introduce a new intervention that reduces polarization and extremism -- the independent rating task.
Nostalgia correlates with and causes preference for harmful norms from the past. Across multiple in-person and online samples, we show that nostalgic feelings are positively related to supporting relaxing smoking and car safety regulations, as well as supporting and enjoying more offensive humor.
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