Year: 2023
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Urban Heat Inequality: Empowering Vulnerable Households in Combating Heat Exposure in their Environments
Elevated summertime temperatures disproportionately affect marginalized communities, particularly in urban regions. Generally, urban areas are warmer than rural surroundings, and vulnerable populations tend to reside in densely populated areas with significant heat buildup. Frequent heat exposure, limited resources, and inadequate heat-coping behaviors among at-risk residents result in adverse effects. This disrupts their sleep, hampers concentration,…
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Probing the causal pathways between police procedural justice and perceptions of police legitimacy using experimental vignettes
To what extent can a single interaction with the police shape how people feel about the police? How do we know for sure it’s about how police treat people, and not something else about the situation? And why might respectful treatment motivate people to comply? Previous research has focused primarily on the impact of extreme…
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Measuring Uncertainty Perception in the Health Domain
When people perceive more uncertainty about the risks they face, they may, somewhat counterintuitively, do less in terms of prevention effort. For instance, being unsure about the health risks they face, they may fail to adopt healthy behavior. In this project, we measure people’s uncertainty perception about their health care expenditures and test how personalized…
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Cognitive strengths and deficits in adverse conditions: A balanced view
The dominant view in the social sciences is that, on average, exposure to adversity impairs cognitive abilities, such as planning, goal-directed behavior, and self-control. This view, however, is incomplete: people might also develop intact, or even enhanced, abilities for solving challenges in adverse conditions. Understanding these abilities is critical to close achievement gaps in education…
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Does incongruence between civil servants’ and citizens’ socioeconomic status negatively affect how citizens relate to civil servants and local governments? A vignette survey experiment
Inspired by the literature on ‘diploma democracies’, indicating that the overrepresentation of higher socioeconomic status (SES) politicians reduces lower SES citizens’ political trust and voter turn-out, we want to study the effect of civil servants’ SES background on how citizens relate to both civil servants and local governments. Given that today’s bureaucratic organisations are dominated…
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Gender and Ethnic Differences in Self-presentation Strategies: A Vignette Survey Experiment in Human vs. Automated Recruitment
Despite the growth of artificial intelligence (AI) in hiring, limited evidence exists on whether job candidates from different backgrounds self-present differently, and how they would adapt their self-presentation strategies to algorithmic hiring tools. While algorithmic systems hold promises to tackle persistent hiring inequality and discrimination, people’s self-confidence and perception of discrimination may shape their self-presentation…
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Social class: an exploitation-based class scheme
With this project we aim to enrich and innovate research in social stratification by collecting fine-grained data to operationalize an exploitation-based class scheme, currently underused in the social sciences. Current understanding of social inequality is based on indicators such as income and education, used as proxies for a person’s social position and experiences. We argue…
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Typifying rule-followers and rule-breakers: the effect of greed on rule-compliance
For societies to adequately respond to pressing challenges like climate change, citizens need to follow behavioral rules, even when it involves personal sacrifices like reducing your carbon footprint. Rule violations are widespread, illustrating the need for a deeper understanding of when and why people follow rules. This project will examine the role of greed, the…