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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Who Can Deviate From The Party Line? Political Ideology Moderates Evaluation Of Incongruent Policy Positions In Insula And Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Ingrid J. Haas, Melissa N. Baker, Frank J. Gonzalez Oct 2017

Who Can Deviate From The Party Line? Political Ideology Moderates Evaluation Of Incongruent Policy Positions In Insula And Anterior Cingulate Cortex, Ingrid J. Haas, Melissa N. Baker, Frank J. Gonzalez

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Political polarization at the elite level is a major concern in many contemporary democracies, which is argued to alienate large swaths of the electorate and prevent meaningful social change from occurring, yet little is known about how individuals respond to political candidates who deviate from the party line and express policy positions incongruent with their party affiliations. This experiment examines the neural underpinnings of such evaluations using functional MRI (fMRI). During fMRI, participants completed an experimental task where they evaluated policy positions attributed to hypothetical political candidates. Each block of trials focused on one candidate (Democrat or Republican), but all …


Women, Rights And Power: Review Of Alice Kang, Bargaining For Women’S Lives: Activism In An Aspiring Muslim Democracy., Jill Vickers Jan 2017

Women, Rights And Power: Review Of Alice Kang, Bargaining For Women’S Lives: Activism In An Aspiring Muslim Democracy., Jill Vickers

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Alice Kang’s Bargaining for Women’s Lives is an impressive study of the competition between women activists and religious conservatives in Muslim-majority, francophone Niger. In this emerging democracy, Kang focuses on debates about women’s rights at the time when freedom of speech and assembly were being established. She explores how Niger handles women’s issues: who puts them on the national agenda, how they get framed and who decides. In a chapter discussing (unsuccessful) efforts to reform family law, Kang identifies the inability of colonial and post-colonial rulers to create central state structures as the problem since it left traditional Muslim authorities …


The Making Of A Hero: Cultivating Empathy, Altruism, And Heroic Imagination, Ari Kohen, Matt Langdon, Brian R. Riches Jan 2017

The Making Of A Hero: Cultivating Empathy, Altruism, And Heroic Imagination, Ari Kohen, Matt Langdon, Brian R. Riches

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Heroes are not born; they’re made. This article examines the commonalities in the backgrounds of people who take heroic action on behalf of others to theorize the ways in which our society can encourage citizens to prepare themselves to act heroically. In looking closely at a variety of people who have acted heroically, in a single moment or over time, we argue they have at least four crucial commonalities: They imagined situations where help was needed and considered how they would act; they had an expansive sense of empathy, not simply with those who might be considered “like them” but …


Mass Political Behavior, Ingrid J. Haas, Stephen P. Schneider Jan 2017

Mass Political Behavior, Ingrid J. Haas, Stephen P. Schneider

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Mass political behavior is the study of how average citizens form and express opinions about politics and decide how to engage with the political system through voting or other forms of political participation. Political scientists interested in mass political behavior have drawn on a variety of disciplinary approaches to understand the topic, including history, economics, sociology, and more recently, psychology, biology, and neuroscience. Political psychologists interested in understanding mass political behavior have applied social psychological theories of attitudes, emotion, social cognition, and social identity to help improve our understanding of political behavior. This entry provides a brief overview of how …