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In a preregistered large-sample controlled experiment, I randomly assigned participants to receive information about the endorsement of Joe Biden by the scientific journal Nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. The endorsement message caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters. This distrust lowered the demand for COVID-related information provided by Nature, as evidenced by substantially reduced requests for Nature articles on vaccine efficacy when offered. The endorsement also reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general. The estimated effects on Biden supporters’ trust in Nature and scientists were positive, small and mostly statistically insignificant. I found little evidence that the endorsement changed views about Biden and Trump.

These results suggest that political endorsement by scientific journals can undermine and polarize public confidence in the endorsing journals and the scientific community.

... scientists don’t have any special expertise on questions of values and policy. “Sticking to the science” keeps scientists speaking on issues precisely where they ought to be trusted by the public.

(CNN)One week ago, Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp crushed former Sen. David Perdue by 52(!) points in a high-profile primary fight.

On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump, who endorsed Perdue, suggested that something was fishy about that race.

So, because Trump's record of endorsements in 2022 is generally strong, the fact that he endorsed a bunch of candidates in Georgia who lost must mean that there were shenanigans happening.

Why would consumers look even somewhat favorably upon virtual influencers that make comments about real products?

. Virtual and human social-media influencers can be equally effective for certain types of posts, the research suggests.

The thinking is that virtual influencers can be fun and entertaining and make a brand seem innovative and tech savvy,

The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Tuesday, February 8, 2011Tuesday, February 8, 2011 Go Follow the Atlantic » Politics Presented by When Ronald Reagan Endorsed Ron Paul Joshua Green Epitaph for the DLC Marc Ambinder A Hard Time Raising Concerns About Egypt Chris Good Business Presented by Could a Hybrid Mortgage System Work? Daniel Indiviglio Fighting Bias in Academia Megan McArdle The Tech Revolution For Seniors Derek Thompson Culture Presented By 'Tiger Mother' Creates a New World Order James Fallows Justin Bieber: Daydream Believer James Parker <!-- /li

these questions tend to overlook the way IQ tests are designed. As a neuropsychologist who has administered hundreds of these measures, I can tell you that their structures reflect a deeply embedded bias toward intelligence as a function of reading skills

Trump would be not be in consideration for our endorsement if one of the Republicans with a modicum of qualification, dignity and serious purpose — think John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio — were still in contention

Instead, Clinton’s California appearances have been limited to rallies, photo opportunities, perfunctory interviews and fundraisers, fundraisers and more fundraisers. Her double-cross on the debate pledge only feeds into the perception (established through the years) of the Clintons’ sense of entitlement, and their presumption that they can set their own rules

Sanders has had a profound impact on the debate, moved Clinton to the left, and, admirably, he has inspired young people to engage in politics. The 74-year-old senator has tapped the legitimate anxieties of generations who see the promise of opportunity that has defined this nation slipping away.

Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.

In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”

titled “Tightness-Looseness Across the 50 United States,” the study calculated a catalog of measures for each state, including the incidence of natural disasters, disease prevalence, residents’ levels of openness and conscientiousness, drug and alcohol use, homelessness and incarceration rates.

what does it say when a completely generic endorsement of free speech and open debate is in and of itself immediately diagnosed as anti-progressive, as anti-left?

There is literally no specific instance discussed in that open letter, no real-world incident about which there might be specific and tangible controversy. So how can someone object to an endorsement of free speech and open debate without being opposed to those things in and of themselves? You can’t.

people are objecting to it because social justice politics are plainly opposed to free speech.

there seems to be a growing gulf between U.S Republicans and science. Indeed, by some polls only 6 percent of scientists are Republican, and in the recent U.S. Presidential election, 68 science Nobel Prize winners endorsed the Democratic nominee Barack Obama over the Republican candidate Mitt Romney.

What are the reasons for this apparent tilt?

he backs up his statement by suggesting a precedent: the social sciences, he feels, have already received this treatment at the hands of conservatives in government by making pointed fingers at their funding.

The artist who deploys irony tests the sophistication of his audience and divides it into two parts, those in the know and those who live in a fool’s paradise. Irony creates a privileged vantage point from which you can frame and stand aloof from a world you are too savvy to take at face value. Irony is the essence of the critical attitude, of the observer’s cool gaze; every reviewer who is not just a bourgeois cheerleader (and no reviewer will admit to being that) is an ironist.

“Les Misérables” defeats irony by not allowing the distance it requires. If you’re looking right down the throats of the characters, there is no space between them and you; their perspective is your perspective; their emotions are your emotions; you can’t frame what you are literally inside of.

Endless high passion and basic human emotions indulged in without respite are what “Les Misérables” offers in its refusal to afford the distance that enables irony.

occasionally lured by the promises of effortless slimming

Dr.-Oz-endorsed Garcinia Cambogia pills are languishing in his kitchen cupboard - because they don’t seem to work. Bruni applauds the recent interest in fighting&nbsp;aggressively marketed junk-that-makes-us-fat, and wants to remind us that we should also pay attention to aggressively marketed pills

most of the supplements marketed as fat burners have little or no science to support their claims

His comments come as the pope, who earned a master's degree in chemistry before turning to the priesthood, becomes increasingly vocal about climate change. Pope Francis is preparing a groundbreaking encyclical to be released in the coming weeks that's expected to make the case that taking action to fight climate change is a moral and religious imperative.

Santorum has a history of rejecting established science. He denies that climate change is man-made and has dismissed global warming as a "hoax" despite the fact that 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that "climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities," according to NASA.

“The church has gotten it wrong a few times on science, and I think that we probably are better off leaving science to the scientists and focusing on what we're really good at, which is theology and morality,” Santorum said. "When we get involved with political and controversial scientific theories, I think the church is not as forceful and credible."

The C.I.A., the F.B.I. and the White House may all agree that Russia was behind the hacking that interfered with the election. But that was of no import to the website Breitbart News, which dismissed reports on the intelligence assessment as “left-wing fake news.”

Rush Limbaugh has diagnosed a more fundamental problem. “The fake news is the everyday news” in the mainstream media, he said on his radio show recently. “They just make it up.”

As reporters were walking out of a Trump rally this month in Orlando, Fla., a man heckled them with shouts of “Fake news!”

The vast majority of philosophy departments in the United States offer courses only on philosophy derived from Europe and the English-speaking world. For example, of the 118 doctoral programs in philosophy in the United States and Canada, only 10 percent have a specialist in Chinese philosophy as part of their regular faculty. Most philosophy departments also offer no courses on Africana, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, Native American or other non-European traditions. Indeed, of the top 50 philosophy doctoral programs in the English-speaking world, only 15 percent have any regular faculty members who teach any non-Western philosophy.

Given the importance of non-European traditions in both the history of world philosophy and in the contemporary world, and given the increasing numbers of students in our colleges and universities from non-European backgrounds, this is astonishing. No other humanities discipline demonstrates this systematic neglect of most of the civilizations in its domain. The present situation is hard to justify morally, politically, epistemically or as good educational and research training practice.

While a few philosophy departments have made their curriculums more diverse, and while the American Philosophical Association has slowly broadened the representation of the world’s philosophical traditions on its programs, progress has been minimal.

What did satisfy Haidt’s natural thirst for understanding human beings was social psychology.

Haidt initially found moral psychology “really dull.” He described it to me as “really missing the heart of the matter and too cerebral.” This changed in his second year after he took a course from the anthropologist Allen Fiske and got interested in moral emotions.

“The Emotional Dog and its Rational Trail,” which he describes as “the most important article I’ve ever written.”

I already knew that many college-aged students don’t believe in moral facts.

the overwhelming majority of college freshman in their classrooms view moral claims as mere opinions that are not true or are true only relative to a culture.

where is the view coming from?

How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”

concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”

“they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”

Most urgent questions of public policy turn on empirical imponderables, and so policymakers fall back on ideological predispositions or muddle through. Is there a better way?

The gold standard for empirical research is the randomized field trial (RFT).

The RFT works better than most other types of empirical investigation. Most of us use anecdotes or common sense empiricism to make inferences about the future, but psychological biases interfere with the reliability of these methods

In the end, Mitt Romney didn’t lose the Michigan primary, and he didn’t lose his near-lock on the Republican nomination. Rick Santorum isn’t going away, but a solid victory in Michigan and an easy win in Arizona leaves the Romney campaign’s basic math more or less intact. If their candidate can keep winning contests in the West and Northeast and holding serve across the Midwest, Romney’s rivals won’t be able to stop him from grinding out a victory.

Thanks to his own smooth evasiveness and the blunders of his rivals, meanwhile, he had managed to sidestep the obvious resemblances between his Massachusetts health care bill and the White House’s Affordable Care Act. And by selling himself as a turnaround artist rather than an ideologue, a champion of the middle class rather than a defender of his fellow 1 percenters, he seemed well-positioned to campaign on competence, experience and sound economic stewardship in the general election.

From the very first debates onward, Romney has spent the primary campaign walking a fine line — trying to assuage widespread right-wing doubts about his ideological reliability, while crafting a persona and a policy portfolio that will appeal to moderates as well as conservatives come November.

In acknowledging the problem, politicians must endorse a solution, but the only major policy solutions to climate change — taxing or regulating the oil, gas and coal industries — are anathema to the base of the Republican Party. Thus, many Republicans, especially in Florida, appear to be dealing with the issue by keeping silent.

on this, Republicans are dead set against taking action on climate change on the national level. If you have political aspirations, this is not something you should talk about if you want to win a Republican primary.”

“Sea level rise is our reality in Miami Beach,” said the city’s mayor, Philip Levine. “We are past the point of debating the existence of climate change and are now focusing on adapting to current and future threats.” In the face of encroaching saltwater and sunny-day flooding like that on Alton Road, Mr. Levine has supported a $400 million spending project to make the city’s drainage system more resilient in the face of rising tides.

For some Louisiana public school students, their science textbook is the Bible, and in biology class they read the Book of Genesis to learn the “creation point of view.”

In another email exchange with Rowland, a parent had complained that a different teacher, Cindy Tolliver, actually taught that evolution was a “fact.” This parent complained that Tolliver was “pushing her twisted religious beliefs onto the class.” Principal Rowland responded, “I can assure you this will not happen again.” Advertisement

permits science teachers to use supplemental materials to “critique” evolution, opening a backdoor that these teachers are using, as intended, to teach creationism.&nbsp;Such lessons are allowed under this Louisiana law, but they are illegal under federal law