Using data from Clifford and Jerit’s (2018), this week I explore their findings about the effects of disgust and anxiety on political learning. Through a series of experiments manipulating information about a disease, they find that people who were disgusted were less likely to seek out more information. I show this effect from their data and then discuss real world implications of this finding. Read More...
Using data from Wang et al. (2021) as a baseline, this week I explore how the effect of intergroup contact varies among different societies with data from our political psychology class. The results show that the treatment affect responses in our Harvard class have minimal differences towards Republicans compared with the control responses. This contracts the findings from Wang et al. (2021) as they found that there was a statistically significant increase in treatment affect responses towards Japanese people compared with the control responses. Read More...
Using data from Reny and Newman’s (2021), I explore opinions towards the police and about the level of discrimination faced by Black Americans during the protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. The topic of exploration this week is symbolic politics and the question we are trying to answer is: Are attitudes towards police symbolic? Finally I will explore several models evaluating the effects of party and the protests on police favorability. Read More...
This week I'll be exploring the role that gender and other variables have on which types of countries are more likely to initiate conflicts with other countries. The data is modified from Barnhart et al. (2020) which found evidence that women's suffrage plays an important role in democratic peace. Read More...
This week I'll be exploring how personality affects political ideology based off the research of Carney et al. (2009). Using methods from Rammstedt and John (2007) and Gosling et al. (2003), we surveyed students' personalities in our class using BFI-10, a short version of the Big Five Inventory, and TIPI, the Ten-Item Personality Inventory. Using these measures of personality that focus on the following traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness, I connect them to the findings in Carney et al. (2009) to explore the survey methods tying personalities to political ideology. Read More...
This week I will explore hierarchies using the Social Dominance Theory from Sidanius and Pratto (1999). Using this theory and evaluating data showing the distribution of Social Dominance Orientation of certain demographics, I will evaluate how Social Dominance Theory impacts political behavior. At the end, I will also evaluate some institutions that are hierarchy enhancing and hierarchy attenuating and the role that institutions of higher education play in the social hierarchy. Read More...
Would Harvard students in our class support in-party and out-party marriage? In this blog, I evaluate responses to a replication of the survey conducted in Klar et al. (2018) to evaluate affective polarization. Read More...
In this blog post, I will be exploring different types of strategies for cooperation from Axelrod (2006) with simulations of the Prisoner's dilemma game. Read More...
For the first blog, I'll be exploring how System 1 and System 2 thinking affect how voters perceive candidates. More specifically, I'll be exploring competence from faces from Todorov, et al. (2005). Read More...
The fall semester is wrapping up and this will be my final blog post for Gov 1347. After 10 blogs, I can't help but stop and appreciate just how much I've learned in the past three months and all the fun I had writing these. So, even though this chapter is coming to an end, I'm excited to see what my next blog post might entail. For this final Gov 1347 post, I will be evaluating and testing the post-election narrative that COVID-19 was the main cause of Trump's loss to Biden. I'll start with a comparison of the 2020 and 2016 election results. Then, I'll pull in county-level data and evaluate connections between the 2020 election and covid. Read More...