Missing the Party: Political Categorization and Reasoning in the Absence of Party Label Cues.

This research addressed theoretical approaches in political science arguing that the American electorate is either poorly informed or dependent on party label cues, by assessing performance on political judgment tasks when party label information is missing. The research materials were created from the results of a national opinion survey held during a national election. The experiments themselves were run on nationally representative samples of adults, identified from another national electoral survey. Participants saw profiles of simulated individuals, including information about demographics and issue positions, but omitting party labels. In Experiment 1, participants successfully judged the likelihood of party membership based on the profiles. In Experiment 2, participants successfully voted based on their party interests. The results were mediated by participants' political knowledge. Conclusions are drawn with respect to theories from political science and issues in cognitive science regarding categorization and reasoning.

Early infant diagnosis of HIV infection in Zambia through mobile phone texting of blood test results.

OBJECTIVE: To see if, in the diagnosis of infant infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Zambia, turnaround times could be reduced by using an automated notification system based on mobile phone texting. METHODS: In Zambia's Southern province, dried samples of blood from infants are sent to regional laboratories to be tested for HIV with polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Turnaround times for the postal notification of the results of such tests to 10 health facilities over 19 months were evaluated by retrospective data collection. These baseline data were used to determine how turnaround times were affected by customized software built to deliver the test results automatically and directly from the processing laboratory to the health facility of sample origin via short message service (SMS) texts. SMS system data were collected over a 7.5-month period for all infant dried blood samples used for HIV testing in the 10 study facilities. FINDINGS: Mean turnaround time for result notification to a health facility fell from 44.2 days pre-implementation to 26.7 days post-implementation. The reduction in turnaround time was statistically significant in nine (90%) facilities. The mean time to notification of a caregiver also fell significantly, from 66.8 days pre-implementation to 35.0 days post-implementation. Only 0.5% of the texted reports investigated differed from the corresponding paper reports. CONCLUSION: The texting of the results of infant HIV tests significantly shortened the times between sample collection and results notification to the relevant health facilities and caregivers.

Polarizing cues.

People categorize themselves and others, creating ingroup and outgroup distinctions. In American politics, parties constitute the in- and outgroups, and party leaders hold sway in articulating party positions. A party leader's endorsement of a policy can be persuasive, inducing co-partisans to take the same position. In contrast, a party leader's endorsement may polarize opinion, inducing out-party identifiers to take a contrary position. Using survey experiments from the 2008 presidential election, I examine whether in- and out-party candidate cues­John McCain and Barack Obama­affected partisan opinion. The results indicate that in-party leader cues do not persuade but that out-party leader cues polarize. This finding holds in an experiment featuring President Bush in which his endorsement did not persuade Republicans but it polarized Democrats. Lastly, I compare the effect of party leader cues to party label cues. The results suggest that politicians, not parties, function as polarizing cues.

The opposite of republican: polarization and political categorization.

Two experiments examined the typicality structure of contrasting political categories. In Experiment 1, two separate groups of participants rated the typicality of 15 individuals, including political figures and media personalities, with respect to the categories Democrat or Republican. The relation between the two sets of ratings was negative, linear, and extremely strong, r = -.9957. Essentially, one category was treated as a mirror image of the other. Experiment 2 replicated this result, showing some boundary conditions, and extending the result to liberal and conservative categories. The same method was applied to two other pairs of contrasting categories, healthy and junk foods, and male and female jobs. For those categories, the relation between contrasting pairs was weaker and there was less of a direct trade-off between typicality in one category versus typicality in its opposite. The results are discussed in terms of implications for political decision making and reasoning, and conceptual representation.