Spring 2024 Colloquia
Monday, April 1, 2024
Indifference to Injustice: How Cigarette Makers use Motions in Limine to Control History in Court
ABSTRACT: Each week, a powerful and little-known aspect of civil procedure enables cigarette makers to bar and redact key words, phrases, evidence, and history in court. This rhetorical capture reframes the world's deadliest consumer technology in ways that make it difficult for people harmed by cigarettes to obtain compensation.
Daniel Akselrad, Department of Communication at Stanford University
Risk Communication in Real Time: Characterizing individuals’ engagements with climate risk communication during the 2021 Texas winter storm
ABSTRACT: As climate change threatens the well-being of billions of people worldwide, risk communication can support individuals in taking protective behaviors. Using the 2021 Texas winter storm as a case study, we characterize the amounts, app sources, and messages of climate risk communication.
Michelle Ng, Department of Communication at Stanford University
Monday, April 15, 2024
Big Bad Bags of Bias
ABSTRACT: This talk reviews research on old and new biases. I briefly review the long list of old biases uncovered by social and cognitive psychologists, and then how this once dominant “reign of error” perspective was ultimately proved overwrought. I then present a “Goodness of Judgement Index” and show how it can extract information about unbiased responding from studies reporting only data on bias. I then turn to “new” biases – mostly those involved in some aspect of social justice. Two case studies show a pattern similar to old biases. First, I review the saga of Moss-Racusin et al, who published a very famous, massively cited single study titled “Science faculty’s subtle gender biases favor male students.” A few years later, Williams & Ceci published five studies with almost 7x the total N in the same journal titled “National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women in STEM tenure track.” This article has been cited at about 1/10th the rate of the Moss-Racusin article. I then summarized the results when my lab conducted an adversarial collaboration and registered report attempting to replicate the Moss-Racusin results; and, instead, found small biases favoring women. I end by reviewing 1. research finding little or no biases against women in studies of workplace discrimination and peer review; and 2. “the discrimination paradox” – the seemingly conflicting results of high-quality studies seeming to provide evidence of both substantial and minimal racial discrimination. We resolve the paradox by showing that the findings are compatible. I end by briefly considering whether and when small biases can be larger than they might seem.
Lee Jussim, Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University
Monday, May 6, 2024
Deceptive Online Networks on Facebook and Instagram in the 2020 Election
ABSTRACT: Deceptive online networks are coordinated efforts that use identity deception to pursue strategic political or financial goals. Motivated by an interest in understanding how deceptive influence campaigns affect democracy, this paper investigates the characteristics, reach, and impact of nearly 50 deceptive online networks that reached Facebook and Instagram users living in the U.S. between June 26, 2020 and February 15, 2021.
Ruth Appel, Department of Communication at Stanford University
Smartphone Use and Mental Health: Evidence from the Stanford Human Screenome Project
ABSTRACT: Public and policy concern about the effects of smartphone use on mental health has outpaced the ability of behavioral research to confirm and describe smartphone effects. The Human Screenome Project is using data about smartphone use and mental health captured over an entire year to create person-specific models of smartphone and mental health associations that preserve idiosyncrasy and may be useful for precision individualized interventions.
Byron Reeves, Professor of Communication at Stanford University
Monday, May 13, 2024
A Meta-Analytic Assessment of the Effects of Emotions on Political Information Search and Decision-Making
ABSTRACT: With increasing interest in the role of emotions in politics across the discipline, we review theoretical and methodological approaches utilized by political psychologists. Although theorists have been highlighting the role of emotions in politics for thousands of years, modern political psychologists primarily employ Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen's (2000) affective intelligence theory to grapple with the consequences of emotions for political attitudes and behavior. We present results from a formal meta-analytic assessment exploring the strength of the empirical evidence for the relationship between emotions and political information search and decision strategies. Overall, we find weak but statistically reliable evidence linking anger, anxiety, and enthusiasm to information search when search is self-reported, but when information search is objectively measured, we find no link between it and anxiety or enthusiasm. Surprisingly, we also find little reliable evidence linking emotions to differential reliance on heuristics or more evidence-based criteria in voter decision-making.
Amy Funck, Department of Political Science at Rutgers University