Response Decoupling and Partisans' Evaluations of Politicians' Transgressions.

There is growing interest in the study of expressive responding in public opinion surveys, with scholars seeking to determine whether partisan differences in response to survey items attest to genuine differences in perceptions or to insincere responses meant to signal in-party approval or out-party disapproval. This study focuses on partisan gaps in evaluations of the inappropriateness of politicians' transgressions and tests the effectiveness of a technique designed to reduce expressive responding. This "response decoupling" technique gives respondents the opportunity to separate their evaluations of a politician's performance from their evaluations of a transgression committed by the politician, thereby allowing partisans to both disapprove of the transgression and signal support for the politician. The technique was experimentally tested in a study in Israel (N = 906) and in two pre-registered studies in the US (total N = 3,172), as these studies presented respondents with a real-life transgression of an actual politician. Overall, the technique had a weak effect, as only in the Israeli study was the effect statistically significant. On the whole, these results suggest that while partisan gaps in evaluations of politicians' transgressions may reflect genuine perceptual differences, it may also be the case that allowing respondents to decouple their responses is not a sufficiently powerful method to reduce expressive responding. The paper concludes by discussing the implications and limitations of these findings. Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-022-09796-0.

When do we care about political neutrality? The hypocritical nature of reaction to political bias.

Claims and accusations of political bias are common in many countries. The essence of such claims is a denunciation of alleged violations of political neutrality in the context of media coverage, legal and bureaucratic decisions, academic teaching etc. Yet the acts and messages that give rise to such claims are also embedded within a context of intergroup competition. Thus, in evaluating the seriousness of, and the need for taking a corrective action in reaction to a purported politically biased act people may consider both the alleged normative violation and the political implications of the act/message for the evaluator's ingroup. The question thus arises whether partisans react similarly to ingroup-aiding and ingroup-harming actions or messages which they perceive as politically biased. In three separate studies, conducted in two countries, we show that political considerations strongly affect partisans' reactions to actions and messages that they perceive as politically biased. Namely, ingroup-harming biased messages/acts are considered more serious and are more likely to warrant corrective action in comparison to ingroup-aiding biased messages/acts. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for the implementations of measures intended for correcting and preventing biases, and for the nature of conflict and competition between rival political groups.

Bayesian Time-of-Flight for Realtime Shape, Illumination and Albedo.

We propose a computational model for shape, illumination and albedo inference in a pulsed time-of-flight (TOF) camera. In contrast to TOF cameras based on phase modulation, our camera enables general exposure profiles. This results in added flexibility and requires novel computational approaches. To address this challenge we propose a generative probabilistic model that accurately relates latent imaging conditions to observed camera responses. While principled, realtime inference in the model turns out to be infeasible, and we propose to employ efficient non-parametric regression trees to approximate the model outputs. As a result we are able to provide, for each pixel, at video frame rate, estimates and uncertainty for depth, effective albedo, and ambient light intensity . These results we present are state-of-the-art in depth imaging. The flexibility of our approach allows us to easily enrich our generative model. We demonstrate this by extending the original single-path model to a two-path model, capable of describing some multipath effects. The new model is seamlessly integrated in the system at no additional computational cost. Our work also addresses the important question of optimal exposure design in pulsed TOF systems. Finally, for benchmark purposes and to obtain realistic empirical priors of multipath and insights into this phenomena, we propose a physically accurate simulation of multipath phenomena.