Random links
- Layla Saad: a curious case of false identification with black America
- "Saad has never once commented on crimes, either historic or modern, committed in the country in which she has spent almost all her adult life. Although Qatar officially outlawed slavery in 1952, there are estimated to be more enslaved people now living in the country than in almost any other worldwide and the Qatari government’s tolerance for the practice — which I have written about previously in these pages — has led the UN to threaten international sanctions. It is quite possible that Saad is not directly implicated in any of these abuses. But her silence on the subject of this ongoing form of slavery is striking, given her own commitment to the idea of collective guilt."
- Why Do Chinese Liberals Embrace American Conservatives?
- "The issue of political correctness in particular fascinates them, with many seeing in it uncomfortable echoes of their own experiences in a society where speech is severely constrained. They perceive Mr. Trump as embodying the sort of no-filter approach to free speech that they dream of, while viewing American liberalism as having strayed from its core values."
- Did people really drink bleach to prevent COVID-19? A tale of problematic respondents and a guide for measuring rare events in survey data
- "In a series of studies totaling close to 1400 respondents, we show that 80-90% of reports of household cleanser ingestion are made by problematic respondents. These respondents report impossible claims such as ‘recently having had a fatal heart attack’ and ‘eating concrete for its iron content’ at a similar rate to ingesting household cleaners. Additionally, respondents’ frequent misreading or misinterpreting the intent of questions accounted for the rest of such claims. Once inattentive, mischievous, and careless respondents are taken out of the analytic sample we find no evidence that people ingest cleansers."
- The Voluntariness of Voluntary Consent: Consent Searches and the Psychology of Compliance
- "In two preregistered laboratory studies, we approached a total of 209 ... with a highly intrusive request: to unlock their password-protected smartphones and hand them over to an experimenter to search through while they waited in another room. A separate 194 ... were ... asked whether a reasonable person would agree to the same request if hypothetically approached by the same researcher. ... Study 1 found that whereas most Forecasters believed a reasonable person would refuse the experimenter’s request, most Experiencers — 100 out of 103 people — promptly unlocked their phones and handed them over."