Pictures of you: God images,gun ownership,and empowerment in the United States

Objective

In the current study, we seek to shed new light on the role of religion in American gun culture by considering whether images people hold of God affect the probability of gun ownership and the experience of empowerment through guns for religious Americans (i.e., the extent to which owners derive security, identity, and status from their guns).

Methods

We analyze nationally representative data from the 2021 Baylor Religion Survey in the United States. Binary logistic and ordinary least squares regression models were used.

Results

We failed to observe any associations between God images and gun ownership. However, among gun owners (n = 430), belief in an engaged God was associated with lower levels of gun empowerment, while belief in a judgmental God was associated with higher levels.

Conclusion

God images may contribute to the experience of empowerment through guns by representing spiritual connection and intimacy or divine anger and retribution. We suggest that future research delve deeper into the intersection of God images and gun-related beliefs and behaviors.     

Sheriffs,right-wing extremism,and the limits of U.S. federalism during a crisis

Background

During the COVID-19 crisis, sheriffs across the country vocally refused to implement mask mandates.

Objectives

In this note, we argue that resistance to mask mandates emerged out of successful efforts to recruit sheriffs into right-wing extremism (RWE) and its foundations in white supremacy, nativism, and anti-government extremism.

Methods

We draw on upon historical analysis and a national survey of sheriffs

Results

We show how RWE movements recruited sheriffs and that a substantial share of sheriffs adopted RWE attitudes. We argue that this radicalization of county sheriffs primes them to resist a core component of federalism: mandates by supra governments. We identify a relationship between sheriffs. RWE attitudes and their resistance to enforcing COVID-19 mask mandates.

Conclusion

Our work demonstrates the importance of considering the implications of violent extremism in the United States, particularly as it aligns with local law enforcement.     

Is the Tea Party Libertarian,Authoritarian, or Something Else?*

Objective

Research on the Tea Party finds that both libertarian and authoritarian attitudes drive support for this movement, but political scientists lack a satisfactory explanation of this contradiction.

Methods

Factor analysis of nine attitudes from the 2012 American National Election Study is used to explore whether statism and moral traditionalism are intercorrelated on a dimension distinct from attitudes toward government; regression analysis is used to test if these distinct dimensions help to explain support for the Tea Party.

Results

Controlling for several competing explanations, the multiplicative interaction of anti‐government and morally statist ideological factors is shown to be a predictor of Tea Party support, especially among conservatives.

Conclusion

Our results suggest the Tea Party movement is in part driven by what Nietzsche called “misarchism,” an ideological mixture of moralism, statism, and libertarianism he first observed in Herbert Spencer.

     

Stay or go? Turnover in CMO,EMO and regular charter schools

Background

We examine whether working conditions in different types of charter schools lead to different levels of teacher turnover. We consider two types of teacher turnover behaviors. One is teacher migration, which refers to the transfer of teachers from one school to another. The other one is teacher attrition, which describes the phenomenon of teachers leaving the profession entirely. We distinguish among charter schools managed by for-profit education management organizations (EMOs), those managed by non-profit charter management organizations (CMOs), and regular charter schools.

How to reveal people’s preferences: Comparing time consistency and predictive power of multiple price list risk elicitation methods

The question of how to measure and classify people’s risk preferences is of substantial importance in the field of economics. Inspired by the multitude of ways used to elicit risk preferences, we conduct a holistic investigation of the most prevalent method, the multiple price list (MPL) and its derivations. In our experiment, we find that revealed preferences differ under various versions of MPLs as well as yield unstable results within a 30-minute time frame. We determine the most stable elicitation method with the highest forecast accuracy by using multiple measures of within-method consistency and by using behavior in two economically relevant games as benchmarks. A derivation of the well-known method by Holt and Laury (American Economic Review 92(5):1644–1655, 2002), where the highest payoff is varied instead of probabilities, emerges as the best MPL method in both dimensions. As we pinpoint each MPL characteristic’s effect on the revealed preference and its consistency, our results have implications for preference elicitation procedures in general.     

Comment on Pommerehne et al., “concordia discors: Or: What do economists think?”

Conclusion Why do Pommerehne and associates apparently overlook the point that both their hypothesis and data contain elements which are not compatible? Their findings in fact might be interpreted as contradictory to a human capital explanation for the behavior of their sample of economists. Kuhn (1970) would propose that mainstream economics has provided a set of assumptions to place over these findings that allows a neo-classical interpretation. However, the human capital theory does not address the contradictions in the data they gathered. As Berger and Luchman (1966, pp. 62–63) would conclude, institutionalization may take place in any area of relevant conduct to provide a corresponding canopy of legitimations, stretching over a protective cover of both cognitive and normative interpretation. Once again, the institutionalization of mainstream science has been successful in suppressing alternative assumptions that could explain the data more adequately and with greater consistency.We conclude that the paper by Pommerehne and associates contains shortcomings of theorizing and method. Likewise we conclude that a theoretical formulation which takes into account the normative and therefore the cultural factors of science will provide an explanation of the opinion and behavior of economists more in keeping with their empirical findings than one based on self-interest alone.     

Alone and adrift: The association between mass school shootings,school size,and student support

Background

School shootings have approached epidemic levels in recent years. While mental illness is undoubtedly involved in nearly all cases of mass school violence, we sought to determine how environmental context may exacerbate preexisting personal factors. The present study investigated the associations between mass school shootings, school enrollment size, student–teacher ratios, and student transitions.

The Price Effects of Family Caps on Fertility Decisions of Poor Women

ABSTRACT

Family Caps have been a popular welfare reform policy designed to discourage women on welfare from bearing additional children. It has been thought that the principal mechanism through which a Cap achieves its objective of lower birth rates is the financial pressure placed on women by the denial of cash benefits. Our study uses instrumental variables Probit modeling to directly measure the contribution that price makes to Cap impact on births. We reexamine data from the New Jersey Family Development Program (n = 8,393) experiment and find that only a very small percentage (about 2.5%) of the overall Family Cap effect reported in earlier studies can be attributed to price. Moreover, the price effect holds only for short-term Black welfare recipients. We speculate that much of the unexplained Family Cap treatment effect stems from a message of social pressure and disapproval toward welfare receipt and childbearing on welfare. We offer a possible direction for future research which would directly measure the social disapproval component.     

Public perceptions of castle doctrine and stand your ground cases

Introduction

Stand your ground (SYG) and castle doctrine (CD) laws are presently growing throughout the United States. The present study aims to better understand public perceptions of SYG and CD cases and demographic factors that influence judicial decision making.

Methods

Participants were 204 adults who were randomly assigned one of four vignettes that depicted a CD or SYG scenario and varied by defendant demographics. After reading the vignette, participants completed a questionnaire assessing whether they believed the defendant was guilty of the murder and whether the homicide was justified.

Results

Results indicated participants were more likely to assign a guilty verdict to the SYG scenario, compared to the CD scenario. Additionally, participants assigned to the SYG vignette believed the male defendant was more justified in killing the victim, compared to participants assigned the female defendant.

Conclusion

Results from this study reveal how potential jurors may harbor sex/gender bias in determining justifiable homicide in stand your ground cases.     

Who should cast the casting vote? Using sequential voting to amalgamate information

In this study, we are concerned with how agents can best amalgamate their private information about a binary state of Nature. The agents are heterogeneous in their “ability”, the quality of their private information. The agents cannot directly communicate their private information but instead can only vote between the two states (say “Innocent” or “Guilty” on a criminal jury). We first describe possible methods of sequential majority voting, and then we analyze a particular one: the first \(n-1\) jurors vote simultaneously and, in the case of a tie, the remaining juror has the casting vote. We prove that when \(n=3\) (a common situation for a tribunal of three judges), the probability of a correct verdict is maximized when the agent of median ability has the casting vote.     

On the intensity of downside risk aversion

The degree of downside risk aversion (or equivalently prudence) is so far usually measured by . We propose here another measure, , which has specific and interesting local and global properties. Some of these properties are to a wide extent similar to those of the classical measure of absolute risk aversion, which is not always the case for . It also appears that the two measures are not mutually exclusive. Instead, they seem to be rather complementary as shown through an economic application dealing with a simple general equilibrium model of savings.

Psychological Bases of an Individual Approach to the Young Adolescent

Communication I. Need for Self-Assertion: Chief Factor in the Behavior of Young Adolescents (Submitted by A. R. Luriia, Full Member, Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, RSFSR)

When pupils enter the period of early adolescence, considerable changes in their behavior occur, Harsh in their judgments and often selfwilled in their actions, young adolescents cannot at all be compared to fourth-graders [c. 11 years old - Ed.], who are industrious and obedient to their teachers. In the fifth grade we can find manifestations of anarchism, the phenomenon of the "meaning barrier," a critical attitude, a tendency to defy shortcomings, obstinacy in its persistent form, and other negative phenomena, which are encountered so rarely in younger schoolchildren as normally not to be taken into account.     

Who is early voting? An individual level examination

Objective. Early voting has been suggested as one method of increasing voter turnout. Allowing voters to cast their ballots during a longer time period may ameliorate some barriers to participation that exist. However, the question of whether early voting mobilizes previous nonvoting registrants or simply makes voting easier for those who would have participated anyway remains largely unanswered. Methods. We test these questions through the use of an individual level survey of voters in one Tennessee county. Using logistic regression, we consider the impact of demographic and attitudinal factors on the propensity to vote on election day or to use early voting. Results. We find marked differences between nonvoters and voters of either type, but we find few significant differences between early voters and traditional voters. We find little support for a mobilization effect and some evidence suggests that early voting merely conveniences those who would have voted anyway.     

Sensing the skin: acne sufferers and the dermatologization of life

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore what we call the “dermatologization of life” and how it regulates the ways in which acne sufferers relate to their skin. We refer to these ways of relating to the skin as “skin sensing”. Through an analysis of the online narratives found on the website acne.org, we demonstrate how the skin sensing bound up with dermatologization both converges with and diverges from biomedical understandings of acne in three key contexts: the hormonal, the alimentary and the nocturnal. In doing so, we show that skin sensing involves a complex combination of pleasure and pain, excitement and exhaustion, and work and play. Ultimately, we suggest that the ways in which acne sufferers sense their skin open up a set of possibilities that not only disable but also enable them as they embark on the often all-consuming quest for a clear complexion.     

PRM inference using Jaffray &; Faÿ’s Local Conditioning

Probabilistic Relational Models (PRMs) are a framework for compactly representing uncertainties (actually probabilities). They result from the combination of Bayesian Networks (BNs), Object-Oriented languages, and relational models. They are specifically designed for their efficient construction, maintenance and exploitation for very large scale problems, where BNs are known to perform poorly. Actually, in large-scale problems, it is often the case that BNs result from the combination of patterns (small BN fragments) repeated many times. PRMs exploit this feature by defining these patterns only once (the so-called PRM’s classes) and using them through multiple instances, as prescribed by the Object-Oriented paradigm. This design induces low construction and maintenance costs. In addition, by exploiting the classes’ structures, PRM’s state-of-the-art inference algorithm “Structured Variable Elimination” (SVE) significantly outperforms BN’s classical inference algorithms (e.g., Variable Elimination, VE; Local Conditioning, LC). SVE is actually an extension of VE that simply exploits classes to avoid redundant computations. In this article, we show that SVE can be enhanced using LC. Although LC is often thought as being outperformed by VE-like algorithms in BNs, we do think that it should play an important role for PRMs because its features are very well suited for best exploiting PRM classes. In this article, relying on Faÿ and Jaffray’s works, we show how LC can be used in conjunction with VE and deduce an extension of SVE that outperforms it for large-scale problems. Numerical experiments highlight the practical efficiency of our algorithm.     

Implications of Eurocentrism for Social Work Education: Trivialization vis-à-vis Skin Color

The significance of skin color among people of color and its relative absence in social work literature is arguably attributed to Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism defines human reality via Eurocentric norms, ideas, values and perspectives. Evidence of Eurocentrism in social work is contained in its literature priorities, skin color litigation, brown racism and skin bleaching. Demonstration of the aforementioned social pathologies involving skin color pertaining to people of color is a critical, existential phenomenon. If social work is to remain viable and be sustained in the future, it must conform to the dictates of changes in the population. That will require a commensurate adjustment and a willingness of its intelligentsia to accommodate skin color and other alternative views relative to education and practice.     

Stability of risk preference measures: results from a field experiment on French farmers

We compare two different elicitation methods for measuring risk attitudes on a sample of French farmers. We consider the lottery tasks initially proposed by Holt and Laury (Econ Rev 92:1644?C1655, 2002) and by Eckel and Grossman (Evol Hum Behav 23:281?C295, 2002; J Econ Behav Org 68:1?C7, 2008). The main empirical result from this within-subject study is that risk preference measures are affected by the type of mechanism used. We first show that this risk preference instability can be related to non-expected utility preferences of farmers. Using a risk-taking psychometric questionnaire, we then demonstrate that risk preferences of farmers are context-dependent. This may be another explanation of the observed risk preference instability.     

A tractable method to measure utility and loss aversion under prospect theory

This paper provides an efficient method to measure utility under prospect theory. Our method minimizes both the number of elicitations required to measure utility and the cognitive burden for subjects, being based on the elicitation of certainty equivalents for two-outcome prospects. We applied our method in an experiment and were able to replicate the main findings on prospect theory, suggesting that our method measures what it is intended to. Our data confirmed empirically that risk seeking and concave utility can coincide under prospect theory. Utility did not depend on the probability used in the elicitation, which offers support for the validity of prospect theory.

Experimental evidence on valuation with multiple priors

Popular models for decision making under ambiguity assume that people use not one but multiple priors. This paper is a first attempt to experimentally elicit the min and the max of multiple priors directly. In an ambiguous scenario we measure a participant’s single prior, her min and max of multiple priors, and the valuation of an ambiguous asset with the same underlying states as the ambiguous scenario. We use the min and the max of multiple priors to directly test two popular multiple priors models: the maxmin model and the α maxmin model. We find more support for the α maxmin model: although people put about twice the weight on the minimum of multiple priors, they also consider the maximum. Furthermore, we indirectly elicit confidence weights over the whole set of multiple priors and test two additional models: variational preferences and the smooth model of ambiguity. Two particular versions of the variational preferences model explain less than the α maxmin but more than the maxmin model. Overall, the smooth model of ambiguity performs best among all models tested.     

Phenotypic Bias and Ethnic Identity in Filipino Americans*

Objective. Links between phenotypes (skin tone, physical features) and a range of outcomes (income, physical health, psychological distress) were examined. Ethnic identity was examined as a protective moderator of phenotypic bias. Method. Data were from a community sample of 2,092 Filipino adults in San Francisco and Honolulu. Results. After controlling for age, nativity, marital status, and education, darker skin was associated with lower income and lower physical health for females and males. For females, more ethnic features were associated with lower income. For males, darker skin was related to lower psychological distress. One interaction was found such that females with more ethnic features exhibited lower distress; however, ethnic identity moderated distress levels of those with less ethnic features. Conclusions. Phenotypic bias appears prevalent in Filipino Americans though specific effects vary by gender and skin color versus physical features. Discussion centers on the social importance of appearance and potential strengths gained from ethnic identification.