The hidden cost of humanization: Individuating information reduces prosocial behavior toward in-group members

This paper reports robust experimental evidence that humanization—in the form of individuating information about another’s personal preferences—leads to decreased prosocial behavior toward in-group members. Previous research shows that individuating information increases prosocial behavior toward dehumanized out-group members. Its consequences for in-group members, however, are less well understood. Using methods from social psychology and behavioral economics, four experiments show that individuating information decreases pro-social behavior toward in-group members in a variety of settings (charitable giving, altruistic punishment, and trust games). Moreover, this effect results from decreased reliance on group membership labels, and not from other potential explanations like the induction of new group identities. Understanding these effects sheds light on the motives behind intergroup conflict, which may not result from a difference in social perception (i.e., humanized in-groups and dehumanized out-groups), but rather from biases associated with group membership (i.e., in-group favoritism and out-group discrimination) that are eliminated by individuating information. Together, these results indicate that humanization carries a hidden cost for in-group members by disrupting group identities that would otherwise make them targets of altruistic actions.     

Poetic Labors and Challenging Political Science: An Epistolary Poem

ABSTRACT

The author, a political theorist, uses poetry to reflect on and spur structural change in admissions committees, hiring committees, funding decisions, curriculum development, and the institutionalized awards-making structure regarding African Politics in the American Political Science Association. This poem, delivered and performed at the American Political Science Association 2018 meeting in Boston, provides empirical and verifiable data about how scholarly awards are distributed in the discipline. The analysis of this process reflects on a long history of erasing, minimizing, and tokenizing the scholarship of African political scientists in the discipline of political science. Written as an epistolary poem, the author explains how #MeToo accounts for complex and interrelated forms of exclusion from the production of knowledge and uses the history of Black women in politics associations, writings by Patricia J. Williams, Pearl T. Robinson, Darlene Miller, and poetry by June Jordan (1936–2002) and Sweet Honey in the Rock (f. 1973).     

广州市不同户籍人口工资收入差距研究

户籍制度导致的社会不公一直是社会各界和学术界许多学科关注的问题,许多研究都指出在劳动力市场上,不同户籍人口的收入差距明显。本文尝试通过2005年广州市人口抽样调查的情况进一步说明,在市场经济比较活跃,外来人口聚集的地区,不公平的主要表现不是在工资上,而是在获得工作岗位的机会上,特别是在获得市场垄断与政府控制的行业的工作岗位上。     

出口导向经济模式的形成、问题与前景

 改革开放三十年来，出口作为经济增长的而一个重要方面，在我国经济增长过程中发挥了重要作用。本文通过运用投入产出的分析方法，利用1997、2002、2007三张投入产出表，分析随着我国对外贸易依存度的逐步提升，产业结构发生相应的变化。通过分析认为我国的出口导向型经济发展模式在资源角度与收入分配方面面临可持续发展的挑战。提出在推动结构战略性调整和转变过程中，有必要主动利用国家政策介入收入分配调整，推动企业主动采取技术创新，才能改变出口导向模式不可持续的发展路径，最终实现经济社会与环境的协调可持续发展。     

Income as a resilience factor for the impact of discrimination and institutional unfairness on minorities’ emotional well-being

This study investigated the impact of personal vs. institutional discrimination on the emotional well-being (EWB) of immigrant and ethnic minorities, and a possible protective mechanism of economic achievements that may buffer the negative effects of discrimination. Data were collected from the Israeli 2015 Social Survey. Immigrant minorities were those who came to Israel after 1980. Israeli Palestinians were regarded as an ethnic minority. The study showed that perceived unfairness and discrimination in public institutions, which were not necessarily directed towards individuals or their minority group, threatens EWB of minorities to an extent similar to that of personally experienced discrimination. Income moderated the effects of common and personal discrimination on EWB of immigrant and ethnic minorities, but not in the same way across the various groups. The study provides evidence that income may be a resilience factor, which buffers and compensates for the negative effect of discrimination on minorities’ EWB.     

从资源地缘政治角度分析中东石油安全问题

石油在当今的地位远非只是单纯的国际性的大宗商品,而是一种将经济、军事和政治利益集一身的战略商品。石油如此重要,却绝大部分来自于长期面临政治动荡、军事冲突不断的中东地区。中东石油安全问题归根到底是石油供给安全问题。虽然造成中东石油供给安全的原因很多,如恐怖袭击、反西方和激进宗教主义情绪、自然性因素等等,但从资源地缘政治学角度剖析,其根源在于各国对战略资源石油的安全考虑,以及为掌控这一资源而在中东地区实行的不同的对外政策,从而导致了对这一资源控制权的争夺。     

Consequences of economic inequality: Introduction to a special issue

As an introduction to the papers of this special issue on Consequences of Economic Inequality we first underline with a simple empirical exercise the relevance of studying the subject of consequences of economic inequality in many socially important fields. Next, we sketch the two main theoretical perspectives on the channels by which inequality exerts its effects: on the one hand, the psychosocial, which stresses the role of individual status and stratification, and, on the other hand, the neo-material, which puts the focus on resources at people's disposal. In our view the two are not mutually exclusive. Thirdly, we present each of the contributions and relate their results to these main perspectives. We find support for the view that inequality can magnify not only the differences between individuals or households in the resources at their disposal, but also the association between these resources and politics, well-being and social stratification.     

Networks and collective action

This paper proposes a new measure for a group's ability to lead society to adopt their standard of behavior, which in particular takes account of the time the group takes to convince the whole society to adopt their position. This notion of a group's power to initiate action is computed as the reciprocal of the resistance against it, which is in turn given by the expected absorption time of a related finite state partial Markov chain that captures the social dynamics. The measure is applicable and meaningful in a variety of models where interaction between agents is formalized through (weighted) binary relations. Using Percolation Theory, it is shown that the group power is monotonic as a function of groups of agents. We also explain the differences between our measure and those discussed in the literature on Graph Theory, and illustrate all these concerns by a thorough analysis of two particular cases: the Wolfe Primate Data and the 11S hijackers’ network.     

Global Norms vs. Global Actors: International Politics,Muslim Identity,and Support for Shariʿa

Many scholars argue that local cultures are an impediment to the diffusion of “global” norms. Others point out that local populations domesticate global cultural elements by integrating them into preexisting cultures, generating hybridized systems. In the current study, I argue that local cultures are not necessarily impediments to cultural change and hybridization is only one aspect of cultural domestication. Instead, I find that individuals attribute global norms to local cultural objects as a means for disassociating putatively universal norms from the powerful actors that dominate international politics. I illustrate this process using the case of support for shari?a (sometimes called Islamic law) in majority‐Muslim countries. Results of multimethod analyses show that with the exception of attitudes about gender roles and sexuality, Muslims who support implementing shari?a do not systematically object to many so‐called global norms; in fact, they may express more enthusiasm about democracy, tolerance for people of other religions, optimism about scientific advances, and concern for environmental preservation than those who oppose implementing shari?a. Likewise, many Muslims assert their full participation in global society on terms not dictated by Western actors by repackaging ostensibly universal norms as components of the unambiguously local shari?a.