Recent research contends that the behavioral immune system, operating largely outside conscious awareness, motivates individuals to exhibit higher levels of prejudice toward unfamiliar out-groups. This research finds that individual variance in disgust sensitivity correlates with support for political policies that facilitate the avoidance of out-groups. We were interested in developing less intrusive indicators of disgust sensitivity via olfactory measures (i.e., ratings of disgusting odors) and behavioral measures (e.g., willingness to touch disgusting objects) and studying the association between measures of disgust sensitivity and in-group bias among children and adults. We submitted a registered report to conduct this research and received an in-principle acceptance. Unfortunately, unforeseen events impaired our data collection, leaving us with a limited sample (nchildren = 32, nadults = 29) and reducing our ability to draw reliable conclusions from our results. In this essay, we describe our motivation and plan of research, the events that made completing the research impossible, and our preliminary results. In doing so, we hope to offer support for studying the effects of the behavioral immune system, even in ways that we did not originally plan. We conclude with a reflection on the value of registered reports for advancing science.

Research finds that the perception that immigrants are culturally and economically threatening is associated with negative attitudes toward immigration. In a largely separate body of work, psychophysiological predispositions toward threat sensitivity are connected to a range of political attitudes, including immigration. This article draws together these two literatures, using a lab experiment to explore psychophysiological threat sensitivity and immigration attitudes in the United States. Respondents with higher threat sensitivity, as measured by skin conductance responses to threatening images, tend to be less supportive of immigration. This finding builds on our understanding of the sources of anti-immigrant attitudes.

This study tests two sets of competing hypotheses about the relationship between trait reactivity to positive and negative stimuli (i.e., motivational reactivity), moral stances on social principles (i.e., social morality), and political ideology. The classic view contends that a specific political ideology or social morality results from a specific motivational reactivity pattern, whereas the dynamic coordination account suggests that trait motivational reactivity modulates an individual’s political ideology and social morality as a result of the majority political beliefs in their immediate social context. A survey using subjects recruited from a liberal-leaning social context was conducted to test these hypotheses. Results support the dynamic coordination account. Reactivity to negativity (indexed by defensive system activation scores) is associated with the adoption of the dominant social morality and political ideology. Reactivity to positivity (indexed by appetitive system activation scores) is associated with the adoption of nondominant social moral and political stances.

A greater frequency of left-handedness among males than females has been observed in general populations. Past studies have explained this difference with reference to males’ greater susceptibility to adverse birth events, while more recent studies have identified other contributing factors. On January 16, 2020, U.S. senators signed an oath to act impartially during the president’s impeachment trial. This televised event allowed direct comparison of the proportion of right-handedness and left-handedness in a professionally accomplished sample of males and females. As expected, no sex difference in the proportion of left-handed senators was found, although the small sample size offered low statistical power. Replicating this finding with a larger sample would support the view that left-handedness among select groups of males is linked to genetic factors.

The U.S. public’s trust in scientists reached a new high in 2019 despite the collision of science and politics witnessed by the country. This study examines the cross-decade shift in public trust in scientists by analyzing General Social Survey data (1978–2018) using interpretable machine learning algorithms. The results suggest a polarization of public trust as political ideology made an increasingly important contribution to predicting trust over time. Compared with previous decades, many conservatives started to lose trust in scientists completely between 2008 and 2018. Although the marginal importance of political ideology in contributing to trust was greater than that of party identification, it was secondary to that of education and race in 2018. We discuss the practical implications and lessons learned from using machine learning algorithms to examine public opinion trends.

Pre-registration has become an increasingly popular proposal to address concerns regarding questionable research practices. Yet preregistration does not necessarily solve these problems. It also causes additional problems, including raising costs for more junior and less resourced scholars. In addition, pre-registration restricts creativity and diminishes the broader scientific enterprise. In this way, pre-registration neither solves the problems it is intended to address, nor does it come without costs. Pre-registration is neither necessary nor sufficient for producing novel or ethical work. In short, pre-registration represents a form of virtue signaling that is more performative than actual.

How might a liberal democratic community best regulate human genetic engineering? Relevant debates widely deploy the usually undefined term “human dignity.” Its indeterminacy in meaning and use renders it useless as a guiding principle. In this article, I reject the human genome as somehow invested with a moral status, a position I call “genetic essentialism.” I explain why a critique of genetic essentialism is not a strawman and argue against defining human rights in terms of genetic essentialism. As an alternative, I propose dignity as the decisional autonomy of future persons, held in trust by the current generation. I show why a future person could be expected to have an interest in decisional autonomy and how popular deliberation, combined with expert medical and bioethical opinion, could generate principled agreement on how the decisional autonomy of future persons might be configured at the point of genetic engineering.

Morality can be adaptive or maladaptive. From this fact come polarizing disputes on the meta-ethical status of moral adaptation. The realist tracking account of morality claims that it is possible to track objective moral truths and that these truths correspond to moral rules that are adaptive. In contrast, evolutionary anti-realism rejects the existence of moral objectivity and thus asserts that adaptive moral rules cannot represent objective moral truths, since those truths do not exist. This article develops a novel evolutionary view of natural law to defend the realist tracking account. It argues that we can identify objective moral truths through cultural group selection and that adaptive moral rules are likely to reflect such truths.

In Descent of Man, Charles Darwin noted the impact of political institutions on natural selection. He thought that institutions such as asylums or hospitals may deter natural selection; however, he did not reach a decisive answer. Questions remain as to whether the selective impacts of political institutions, which in Darwin’s terms may be referred to as “artificial selection,” are compatible with natural selection, and if so, to what extent. This essay argues that currently there appears to be an essential mismatch between nature and political institutions. Unfitted institutions put exogenous and disproportionate pressures on living beings. This creates consequences for what is postulated as the condition of basic equivalence, which allows species and individuals to enjoy similar chances of survival under natural circumstances. Thus, contrary to Darwin’s expectations, it is sustained that assumed natural selection is not discouraged but becomes exacerbated by political institutions. In such conditions, selection becomes primarily artificial and perhaps mainly political, with consequences for species’ evolutionary future.

This research note addresses a gap in the public administration literature by arguing that a political Darwinism was present in the intellectual origins of American administrative theory. By examining the arguments of Woodrow Wilson, this article demonstrates that Darwinism complemented the German political thought that contributed to the establishment of America’s administrative state. The application of Darwinian evolutionary biology to politics was a vital element of Wilson’s reconceptualization of the state as a living organism. Darwinism was a key rhetorical tool employed by Wilson in his argument against the Constitution’s separation of powers. This note finds that Darwinism was present in the early stages of public administration theory in Wilson’s argumentation and persists today in the public administration literature. It concludes by sketching out an agenda for further research on Darwinism’s influence on public administration.

Scholars increasingly use Twitter data to study the life sciences and politics. However, Twitter data collection tools often pose challenges for scholars who are unfamiliar with their operation. Equally important, although many tools indicate that they offer representative samples of the full Twitter archive, little is known about whether the samples are indeed representative of the targeted population of tweets. This article evaluates such tools in terms of costs, training, and data quality as a means to introduce Twitter data as a research tool. Further, using an analysis of COVID-19 and moral foundations theory as an example, we compared the distributions of moral discussions from two commonly used tools for accessing Twitter data (Twitter’s standard APIs and third-party access) to the ground truth, the Twitter full archive. Our results highlight the importance of assessing the comparability of data sources to improve confidence in findings based on Twitter data. We also review the major new features of Twitter’s API version 2.

We introduce cognitive-affective maps (CAMs) as a novel tool to assess individual experiences and belief systems. CAMs were first presented by the cognitive scientist and philosopher Paul Thagard as a graphical representation of a mental network, visualizing attitudes, thoughts, and affective connotations toward the topic of interest. While CAMs were originally used primarily to visualize existing data, the recent release of the new software tool Valence has facilitated the applicability of CAMs for empirical data collection. In this article, we explain the concept and the theoretical background of CAMs. We exemplify how CAMs can be applied in research practice, including different options for analysis. We propose CAMs as a user-friendly and versatile methodological bridge between qualitative and quantitative research approaches and encourage incorporating the method into studies to access and visualize human attitudes and experience.

Tasks driven by artificial intelligence (AI), such as evaluating video job interviews, rely on facial recognition systems for decision-making. Therefore, it is extremely important that the science behind this technology is continually advancing. If not, visual stereotypes, such as those associated with facial age and gender, will lead to dangerous misapplications of AI.