Candidate name order effects in New Hampshire: Evidence from primaries and from general elections with party column ballots.

Research in a few U.S. states has shown that candidates listed first on ballots gain extra votes as a result.

The Turnout Gap in Surveys: Explanations and Solutions.

Postelection surveys regularly overestimate voter turnout by 10 points or more. This article provides the first comprehensive documentation of the turnout gap in three major ongoing surveys (the General Social Survey, Current Population Survey, and American National Election Studies), evaluates explanations for it, interprets its significance, and suggests means to continue evaluating and improving survey measurements of turnout. Accuracy was greater in face-to-face than telephone interviews, consistent with the notion that the former mode engages more respondent effort with less social desirability bias.

A Social Psychological Model of Scientific Practices: Explaining Research Practices and Outlining the Potential for Successful Reforms.

A crescendo of incidents have raised concerns about whether scientific practices in psychology may be suboptimal, sometimes leading to the publication, dissemination, and application of unreliable or misinterpreted findings. Psychology has been a leader in identifying possibly suboptimal practices and proposing reforms that might enhance the efficiency of the scientific process and the publication of robust evidence and interpretations. To help shape future efforts, this paper offers a model of the psychological and socio-structural forces and processes that may influence scientists' practices.

Moderation of classic social psychological effects by demographics in the U.S. adult population: New opportunities for theoretical advancement.

For decades, social psychologists have collected data primarily from college undergraduates and, recently, from haphazard samples of adults. Yet researchers have routinely presumed that thus observed treatment effects characterize "people" in general. Tests of seven highly cited social psychological phenomena (two involving opinion change resulting from social influence and five involving the use of heuristics in social judgments) using data collected from randomly sampled, representative groups of American adults documented generalizability of the six phenomena that have been replicated previously with undergraduate samples.

Correction: Perceptions of health risks of cigarette smoking: A new measure reveals widespread misunderstanding.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Perceptions of health risks of cigarette smoking: A new measure reveals widespread misunderstanding.

Most Americans recognize that smoking causes serious diseases, yet many Americans continue to smoke. One possible explanation for this paradox is that perhaps Americans do not accurately perceive the extent to which smoking increases the probability of adverse health outcomes. This paper examines the accuracy of Americans' perceptions of the absolute risk, attributable risk, and relative risk of lung cancer, and assesses which of these beliefs drive Americans' smoking behavior.

Attitude Strength.

Attitude strength has been the focus of a huge volume of research in psychology and related sciences for decades. The insights offered by this literature have tremendous value for understanding attitude functioning and structure and for the effective application of the attitude concept in applied settings. This is the first Annual Review of Psychology article on the topic, and it offers a review of theory and evidence regarding one of the most researched strength-related attitude features: attitude importance.

Improving ability measurement in surveys by following the principles of IRT: The Wordsum vocabulary test in the General Social Survey.

Survey researchers often administer batteries of questions to measure respondents' abilities, but these batteries are not always designed in keeping with the principles of optimal test construction. This paper illustrates one instance in which following these principles can improve a measurement tool used widely in the social and behavioral sciences: the GSS's vocabulary test called "Wordsum". This ten-item test is composed of very difficult items and very easy items, and item response theory (IRT) suggests that the omission of moderately difficult items is likely to have handicapped Wordsum's effectiveness.

Does mentioning "some people" and "other people" in a survey question increase the accuracy of adolescents' self-reports?

A great deal of developmental research has relied on self-reports solicited using the "some/other" question format ("Some students think that… but other students think that…"). This article reports tests of the assumptions underlying its use: that it conveys to adolescents that socially undesirable attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors are not uncommon and legitimizes reporting them, yielding more valid self-reports than would be obtained by "direct" questions, which do not mention what other people think or do. A meta-analysis of 11 experiments embedded in four surveys of diverse samples of adolescents did not support the assumption that the some/other form increases validity.

The validity of self-reported nicotine product use in the 2001-2008 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Background: Many researchers rely on high-quality face-to-face national surveys conducted by the federal government to estimate the prevalence of nicotine product use, but some scholars have suggested that adults' self-reports in such surveys are intentionally distorted by social desirability response bias, thus raising questions about the validity of those data.

Objectives: To assess the validity of face-to-face survey self-reports by comparing them with physiological tests.

Research Design: Respondents in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey provided self-reports of nicotine product use and gave blood samples that were analyzed for levels of serum cotinine, an indicator of nicotine exposure.

Why Do White Americans Oppose Race-Targeted Policies? Clarifying the Impact of Symbolic Racism.

Measures of symbolic racism (SR) have often been used to tap racial prejudice toward Blacks. However, given the wording of questions used for this purpose, some of the apparent effects on attitudes toward policies to help Blacks may instead be due to political conservatism, attitudes toward government, and/or attitudes toward redistributive government policies in general. Using data from national probability sample surveys and an experiment, we explored whether SR has effects even when controlling for these potential confounds and whether its effects are specific to policies involving Blacks.

Social power and attitude strength over the life course.

Past findings indicate that middle-aged adults in the United States tend to be more resistant to attitude change than younger and older adults, but little is known about why this is so. The authors propose that midlife adults' disproportionate occupation of high-power social roles (which call for resoluteness) may partly explain their heightened resistance to persuasion. Using nationally representative data sets, the article first documents that in various domains the possession of social power peaks in midlife.

The association of knowledge with concern about global warming: trusted information sources shape public thinking.

During the last decade, a great deal of news media attention has focused on informing the American public about scientific findings on global warming (GW). Has learning this sort of information led the American public to become more concerned about GW? Using data from two surveys of nationally representative samples of American adults, this article shows that the relation between self-reported knowledge and concern about GW is more complex than what previous research has suggested. Among people who trust scientists to provide reliable information about the environment and among Democrats and Independents, increased knowledge has been associated with increased concern.

Attitude importance and the accumulation of attitude-relevant knowledge in memory.

People who attach personal importance to an attitude are especially knowledgeable about the attitude object. This article tests an explanation for this relation: that importance causes the accumulation of knowledge by inspiring selective exposure to and selective elaboration of relevant information. Nine studies showed that (a) after watching televised debates between presidential candidates, viewers were better able to remember the statements made on policy issues on which they had more personally important attitudes; (b) importance motivated selective exposure and selective elaboration: Greater personal importance was associated with better memory for relevant information encountered under controlled laboratory conditions, and manipulations eliminating opportunities for selective exposure and selective elaboration eliminated the importance-memory accuracy relation; and (c) people do not use perceptions of their knowledge volume to infer how important an attitude is to them, but importance does cause knowledge accumulation.

The impact of personality on cognitive, behavioral, and affective political processes: the effects of need to evaluate.

Need to evaluate (NE) is a personality trait that reflects a person's proclivity to create and hold attitudes; people high in NE are especially likely to form attitudes toward all sorts of objects. Using data from the 1998 National Election Survey Pilot and the 2000 National Election Survey, NE was shown to predict a variety of important attitude-relevant cognitive, behavioral, and affective political processes beyond simply holding attitudes: NE predicted how many evaluative beliefs about candidates a person held, the likelihood that a person would use party identification and issue stances to determine candidate preferences, the extent to which a person engaged in political activism, the likelihood that a person voted or intended to vote, the extent to which a person used the news media for gathering information, and the intensity of emotional reactions a person felt toward political candidates. Thus, NE appears to play a powerful role in shaping important political behavior, emotion, and cognition.