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Summary. A survey experiment that examines whether voters forgive corruption when they learn that politicians otherwise performed well in office. For the most part, they do not.
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Summary. Explores how liability concerns influence physicians to order tests that patients don’t need.
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Summary. An individual has a mind; a group does not. Yet humans routinely endow groups with mental states irreducible to any of their members (e.g., “scientists hope to understand every aspect of nature”). But are these mental states categorically similar to those we attribute to individuals? In two fMRI experiments, we tested this question against a set of brain regions that are consistently associated with social cognition—medial pFC, anterior temporal lobe, TPJ, and medial parietal cortex. Participants alternately answered questions about the mental states and physical attributes of individual people and groups. Regions previously associated with mentalizing about individuals were also robustly responsive to judgments of groups, suggesting that perceivers deploy the same social-cognitive processes when thinking about the mind of an individual and the “mind” of a group. However, multivariate searchlight analysis revealed that several of these regions showed distinct multivoxel patterns of response to groups and individual people, suggesting that perceivers maintain distinct representations of groups and individuals during mental state inferences. These findings suggest that perceivers mentalize about groups in a manner qualitatively similar to mentalizing about individual people, but that the brain nevertheless maintains important distinctions between the representations of such entities.
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Summary. This piece explores the similarities and differences between the ethical and regulatory issues raised by direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs and those raised by the promotion of foods for their purported health-benefits.
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Summary. The general public is skeptical of our current system of campaign finance and feels that members of Congress are corrupt. Although the scholarly literature on campaign contribution influence is mixed, there is growing consensus that Political Action Committees (PACs) and interest groups do, indeed, have a powerful influence on policymaking in Congress. In this article, the author reviews this literature and discusses how influence occurs. Findings reveal that influence is only very rarely an explicit quid pro quo exchange. Instead, it is typically an ongoing, implicit, reciprocal exchange that impacts multiple stages of the legislative process and yields contributors many dividends, such as softer regulations, lower taxes, and lucrative contracts—none of which are explicitly promised (except in rare cases of full-blown bribery), but are, nonetheless, regularly granted. The social relationships between contributors and lawmakers are central to this process, as is the ability to get legislators to sway their colleagues.