Publications in Social Sciences by NOMIS researchers

A leader I can(not) trust: understanding the path from epistemic trust to political leader choices via dogmatism

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in Politics and the Life Sciences

October 31, 2024

Details

There is growing concern about the impact of declining political trust on democracies. Psychological research has introduced the concept of epistemic (mis)trust as a stable disposition acquired through development, which may influence our sociopolitical engagement. Given trust’s prominence in current politics, we examined the relationship between epistemic trust and people’s choices of (un)trustworthy political leaders. In two representative samples in the UK and US (N = 1096), we tested whether epistemic trust predicts political leader choices through three political dimensions: dogmatism, political trust, and ideology. Although epistemic trust did not directly predict choices of political leaders, it predicted dogmatism and political ideology, which in turn predicted choices of political leaders. A network analysis revealed that epistemic trust and political dimensions only interact through their common connection with dogmatism. These findings suggest that cognitive and affective development may underlie an individual’s political ideology and associated beliefs.

Research field(s)
Political Science & Public Administration, Psychology & Cognitive Sciences

DOI
10.1017/pls.2024.11

L’Exil, toujours recommencé: Chronique de la frontière

NOMIS Researcher(s)

January 5, 2024

Details

Anthropologue et médecin, Didier Fassin est professeur au Collège de France, titulaire de la chaire Questions morales et enjeux politiques dans les sociétés contemporaines, et directeur d’études à l’EHESS. Anne-Claire Defossez est sociologue, chercheure à l’Institute for Advanced Study de Princeton.

Fuyant les violences politiques, les persécutions religieuses ou la pauvreté, des hommes, des femmes, des enfants d’Afghanistan, d’Iran, du Maghreb et d’Afrique subsaharienne, se mettent en route pour des voyages de plusieurs années au cours desquels ils affrontent les rackets des bandes armées, les brutalités des polices, les camps d’enfermement, les murs de barbelés, les rigueurs du désert, les périls de la mer. Beaucoup y perdent la vie.
Cinq années durant, été comme hiver, Didier Fassin et Anne-Claire Defossez ont mené une recherche à la frontière entre l’Italie et la France, dans les Alpes, auprès de nombre de ces exilés, pour reconstituer leur périple en l’inscrivant dans le contexte géopolitique des bouleversements du monde. Ils ont pris part aux activités menées pour leur porter assistance. Ils ont rencontré les multiples acteurs de ce territoire de migrations millénaires.
Leur enquête donne ainsi à comprendre l’expérience des exilés, l’engagement des volontaires et même le désarroi des forces de l’ordre, conscientes de la vanité de leur mission. Elle dévoile l’inefficacité d’une militarisation de la frontière qui rend plus dangereuse la traversée de la montagne et d’une politique qui nie les droits de personnes en quête de protection.

Research field(s)
Social Sciences

Displaced people’s perilous journeys: border violence as a public health issue

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in The Lancet

October 7, 2023

Details

The 21st century has seen displacement of migrants and refugees unprecedented since World War 2. As of the end of 2022, of the 108 million people who had to leave their homes because of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations, 62·5 million were internally displaced, 35·3 million were refugees, and 5·4 million were officially asylum seekers.

However, the number of people still in transit in search of protection or a better life is unknown. Whether they are Venezuelans trying to reach the USA, Senegalese trying to reach the Canary Islands, or Ethiopians trying to reach Saudi Arabia, or whether they are Guineans crossing the Sahara, Afghans crossing the Evros River, or Rohingyas crossing the Andaman Sea, the only figures that we have about these people are the conservative statistics produced by the International Organization for Migration of the number of deaths worldwide: 58 280 in 10 years.

But what about those who survived? In Europe, an indirect source is the number of asylum seekers, since most people arriving after forcible displacement apply for refugee status. In 2022, not counting Ukrainians who were granted temporary protection, there were 881 000 people seeking asylum, mostly from Syria, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and Türkiye.

This means at least an equivalent number of people travelled from their home country to their host country in the previous months or years. Yet, we know little of the journey of this approximately 1 million displaced people.

Research field(s)
Social Sciences

DOI
10.1016/S0140-6736(23)02030-5

Re-cognizing the new self: The neurocognitive plasticity of self-processing following facial transplantation

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

March 27, 2023

Details

The face is a defining feature of our individuality, crucial for our social interactions. But what happens when the face connected to the self is radically altered or replaced? We address the plasticity of self-face recognition in the context of facial transplantation. While the acquisition of a new face following facial transplantation is a medical fact, the experience of a new identity is an unexplored psychological outcome. We traced the changes in self-face recognition before and after facial transplantation to understand if and how the transplanted face gradually comes to be perceived and recognized as the recipient’s own new face. Neurobehavioral evidence documents a strong representation of the pre-injury appearance pre-operatively, while following the transplantation, the recipient incorporates the new face into his self-identity. The acquisition of this new facial identity is supported by neural activity in medial frontal regions that are considered to integrate psychological and perceptual aspects of the self. Copyright © 2023 the Author(s).

Research field(s)
Economic & Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Education

DOI
10.1073/pnas.2211966120

Beyond playing 20 questions with nature: Integrative experiment design in the social and behavioral sciences

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences

December 21, 2022

Details

The dominant paradigm of experiments in the social and behavioral sciences views an experiment as a test of a theory, where the theory is assumed to generalize beyond the experiment’s specific conditions. According to this view, which Alan Newell once characterized as “playing twenty questions with nature,” theory is advanced one experiment at a time, and the integration of disparate findings is assumed to happen via the scientific publishing process. In this article, we argue that the process of integration is at best inefficient, and at worst it does not, in fact, occur. We further show that the challenge of integration cannot be adequately addressed by recently proposed reforms that focus on the reliability and replicability of individual findings, nor simply by conducting more or larger experiments. Rather, the problem arises from the imprecise nature of social and behavioral theories and, consequently, a lack of commensurability across experiments conducted under different conditions. Therefore, researchers must fundamentally rethink how they design experiments and how the experiments relate to theory. We specifically describe an alternative framework, integrative experiment design, which intrinsically promotes commensurability and continuous integration of knowledge. In this paradigm, researchers explicitly map the design space of possible experiments associated with a given research question, embracing many potentially relevant theories rather than focusing on just one. Researchers then iteratively generate theories and test them with experiments explicitly sampled from the design space, allowing results to be integrated across experiments. Given recent methodological and technological developments, we conclude that this approach is feasible and would generate more-reliable, more-cumulative empirical and theoretical knowledge than the current paradigm – and with far greater efficiency.

Research field(s)
Experimental Psychology, Social Sciences

DOI
10.1017/S0140525X22002874

Crisis as experience and politics

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in Global Discourse

September 1, 2022

Details

In the tradition of Koselleck, crisis has often been approached as an idea or as a narrative, but less research has been conducted on how people produce, respond to, and live through crises. Most of the articles of the present issue explore this perspective, with its dual dimension of experience and politics. In line with it, the present article proposes an analysis of the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic through the questions of the rupture in time, the state of exception and the uncovering of inequalities.

Research field(s)
Economic & Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Political Science & Public Administration

DOI
10.1332/204378921X16354481297194

Facing the pandemic with trust in science

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

December 1, 2021

Details

How essential is trust in science to prevent the spread of COVID-19? People who trust in science are reportedly more likely to comply with official guidelines, implying that higher levels of adherence could be achieved by improving trust in science. However, analysis of a global dataset (n = 4341) suggests otherwise. Trust in science had a small, indirect effect on adherence to the rules. Nonetheless, it predicted people’s approval of prevention measures such as social distancing, and bridged political ideology and approval of the measures (conservatives trusted science less and in turn approved of the measures less). These effects were stronger in the USA than in other countries. Even though any increase in trust in science is unlikely to yield strong behavioural changes, given its relationships with both ideology and individuals’ attitudes to the measures, trust in science may be leveraged to yield longer-term sustainable social benefits.

Research field(s)
Economic & Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Education

DOI
10.1057/s41599-021-00982-9

When the lens is too wide: The political consequences of the visual dehumanization of refugees

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

December 1, 2021

Details

Photojournalistic images shape our understanding of sociopolitical events. How humans are depicted in images may have far-reaching consequences for our attitudes towards them. Social psychology has shown how the visualization of an ‘identifiable victim effect’ can elicit empathic responses. However, images of identifiable victims in the media are the exception rather than the norm. In the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, the majority of images in Western media depicted refugees as large unidentifiable groups. While the effects of the visual depiction of single individuals are well-known, the ways in which the visual framing of large groups operates, and its social and political consequences, remain unknown. We here focus on the visual depiction of refugees to understand how exposure to the dominant visual framing used in the media, depicting them in large groups of faceless individuals, affects their dehumanization and sets off political consequences. To that end we brought together insights from social psychology, social sciences and the humanities to test a range of hypotheses using methods from social and political psychology in 10 studies with the participation of 3951 European citizens. Seeing images of large groups resulted in greater implicit dehumanization compared with images depicting refugees in small groups. Images of large groups are also explicitly rated as more dehumanizing, and when coupled with meta-data such as newspaper headlines, images continue to play a significant and independent role on how (de)humanizing we perceive such news coverage to be. Moreover, after viewing images of large groups, participants showed increased preference for more dominant and less trustworthy-looking political leaders and supported fewer pro-refugee policies and more anti-refugee policies. In terms of a mechanistic understanding of these effects, the extent to which participants felt pity for refugees depicted in large groups as opposed to small groups mediated the effect of visual framing on the choice of a more authoritarian-looking leader. What we see in the media and how it is shown not only has consequences for the ways in which we relate to other human beings and our behaviour towards them but, ultimately, for the functioning of our political systems.

Research field(s)
Economic & Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Education

DOI
10.1057/s41599-021-00786-x

Using random assignment to measure court accessibility for low-income divorce seekers

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

April 6, 2021

Details

We conducted a field experiment in which 311 low-income individuals seeking a divorce were randomly assigned to receive access to a pro bono lawyer (versus minimal help) to assist with filing for divorce. Examining court records, we found that assignment to an attorney made a large difference in whether participants filed for and obtained a divorce. Three years after randomization, 46% of the treated group had terminated their marriages in the proper legal venue, compared to 9% of the control group. Among “compliers”- participants who obtained representation only if assigned to receive it-those with lawyers were far more likely to file for and obtain a divorce than those not assigned lawyers. Because divorce implicates fundamental constitutional interests and can be effectuated only by resort to the courts, the US Constitution requires that dissolution of marriage be made achievable regardless of ability to pay. Yet, we observed few low-income individuals who were able to initiate divorce suits on their own. Through interviews and archival research, we identified barriers that low-income litigants faced in navigating the divorce system, including mandatory wait times, limited hours at important facilities, and burdensome paperwork sometimes requiring access to photocopiers and typewriters. This study therefore documents a salient instance in which a civil legal process was inaccessible to those without lawyers, even though their legal issues were straightforward, involving few if any matters for courts to adjudicate.

Research field(s)
Economic & Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Law

DOI
10.1073/pnas.2009086118

Out of our skull, in our skin: the Microbiota-Gut-Brain axis and the Extended Cognition Thesis

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in Biology and Philosophy

April 1, 2021

Details

According to a shared functionalist view in philosophy of mind, a cognitive system, and cognitive function thereof, is based on the components of the organism it is realized by which, indeed, play a causal role in regulating our cognitive processes. This led philosophers to suggest also that, thus, cognition could be seen as an extended process, whose vehicle can extend not only outside the brain but also beyond bodily boundaries, on different kinds of devices. This is what we call the ‘Externally Extended Cognition Thesis.’ This notion has generated a lively debate. Here, we offer a novel notion of extended cognition, according to which cognition can be seen as being realized (and expanded) outside the brain, but still inside the body. This is what we call the ‘Internally Extended Cognition Thesis’. Not only our thesis but also our approach while defending it is innovative. The argument we offer is supported by recent empirical findings in the life sciences and biomedicine, which suggest that the gut microbiota’s activity has a functional role in regulating our cognitive processes and behaviors. In doing so, we embrace the holobiont-perspective, according to which it is possible to claim that what we call biological individuals are not autonomous entities with clear boundaries, but should rather be seen as networks of multiple interactions among species. Thus, by analyzing different sets of evidence in light of the holobiont-perspective, we argue that the gut microbiota could be seen as a component of our organism. On the basis of the philosophical interpretation of this evidence, however, we also suggest that there are no impediments standing the way of considering the gut microbiota also as a functional extension of our cognitive system. If so, this amounts to extending cognition out of ‘our skull’, though still confining it within ‘our body’: to ‘our gut’. This is an instance of the ‘Internally Extended Cognition Thesis,’ whose benefits for an original (biologically informed) theory of extended cognition are discussed.

Research field(s)
Economic & Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Science Studies

DOI
10.1007/s10539-021-09790-6

Hazardous confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic: The fate of migrants detained yet nondeportable

NOMIS Researcher(s)

Published in Journal of Human Rights

October 19, 2020

Details

As the French government decided on a lockdown of the population to prevent the spread of COVID-19, it soon appeared that, in an apparent paradox, two forcibly confined categories were particularly at risk: prisoners and detainees. Confronted with multiple mobilizations from civil society, authorities reacted in two distinct ways, significantly reducing the demographic of correctional facilities to allow for protective measures, but refusing to temporarily close detention centers, despite their insalubrious conditions and the impossibility of organizing deportations. These differential policies reveal an implicit moral hierarchy, in which undocumented migrants occupy the lower segment of the social scale, as well as a politics of indifference, which inculcates in them the illegitimacy of their presence and the unworthiness of their lives. Rebellions, self-harm, and hunger strikes are attempts to denounce and resist this intolerable situation.

Research field(s)
Economic & Social Sciences, Social Sciences, International Relations

DOI
10.1080/14754835.2020.1822155

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