Politics and the Life Sciences最新文献

Existing theories struggle when political engagement is an end in itself. To explain intrinsically motivated engagement in politics, this study synthesizes psychological theories to deduce a need-based theory of political motivation. It posits that intrinsic political motivation has roots in seemingly apolitical processes of need satisfaction that are universal and deeply ingrained in the human psyche. However, in a high-powered survey experiment, 14 of 15 preregistered analytical tests did not yield the expected evidence for the basic tenet that previous need-related experiences with politics affect the quality and quantity of future activities in the political domain. Showcasing a stepwise approach to engage with null results in hypothesis-driven research, post hoc analyses solidify the null findings, which call into question the validity of the presented theory and the previous evidence on which it was built. This study thus enhances our understanding of what does and does not underlie intrinsic motivation for political engagement.

Social scientists have begun to uncover links between sleep and political attitudes and behaviors. This registered report considers how diurnal morning-night associations relate to political ideology using data from the Attitudes, Identities, and Individual Differences Study, a large-scale online data collection effort. Measures encompass perceived cultural attitudes and social pressures regarding diurnal preferences and explicit and implicit measures of both morning-night attitudes and morning-night self-concepts. Together, the analyses demonstrate a relationship between morning orientation and conservatism for explicit morning-night self-concepts and, to a lesser extent, explicit morning-night attitudes. This relationship is not present for implicit associations, and associations with perceived cultural attitudes and social pressure are also largely absent. This study reinforces the notion that morningness and eveningness as explicit identities are associated with political ideology.

This study analyzes the relationship between state-level variables and Twitter discourse on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Using geographically identified tweets related to GMOs, we examined how the sentiments expressed about GMOs related to education levels, news coverage, proportion of rural and urban counties, state-level political ideology, amount of GMO-related legislation introduced, and agricultural dependence of each U.S. state. State-level characteristics predominantly did not predict the sentiment of the discourse. Instead, the topics of tweets predicted the majority of variance in tweet sentiment at the state level. The topics that tweets within a state focused on were related to state-level characteristics in some cases.

Many U.S. states have proposed policies that restrict bathroom access to an individual's birth sex. These policies have had widespread effects on safety for transgender and gender-nonconforming people, as well as on state economies. In this registered report, we assessed the role of disgust in support for policies that restrict transgender bathroom access. We found that sensitivity to pathogen disgust was positively associated with support for bathroom restrictions; sexual and injury disgust were unrelated. We also examined the role of disgust-driven moral concerns, known as purity concerns, as well as harm-related moral concerns in support for bathroom restrictions. While concerns about harm to cisgender and transgender people predicted support for bathroom restrictions, purity was a much stronger predictor. Also, purity partially mediated the link between pathogen disgust and support for bathroom restrictions, even after accounting for harm concerns. Findings and implications are discussed.

We introduce the Politics and the Life Sciences Special Issue on Disgust and Political Attitudes discussing the importance of understanding state and trait disgust, the innovative and transparent process by which registered reports and preregistered studies were chosen and funded, and the manuscripts that make up this special issue. This essay concludes by discussing future research directions in disgust and political attitudes, as well as the benefits of a transparent review process that avoids the "file drawer problem" of unpublished null findings.

In the political domain, disgust is primarily portrayed as an emotion that explains individual differences in pathogen avoidance. We hypothesized that political rhetoric accusing opponents of moral transgressions also elicits disgust responses. In this registered report, we present the results from a laboratory experiment. We find that participants self-report higher disgust and have stronger physiological (Levator labii) responses to pictures of out-party leaders compared with in-party leaders. Participants also report higher disgust in response to moral violations of in-party leaders. There is more suggestive evidence that in-party leaders evoke more labii activity when they commit moral violations than when out-party leaders do. The impact of individual differences in moral disgust and partisanship strength is very limited to absent. Intriguingly, on average, the physiological and self-reported disgust responses to the treatment are similar, but individuals differ in whether their response is physiological or cognitive. This motivates further theorizing regarding the concordance of emotional responses.