Publications by authors named "Stephen Nicholson"

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.

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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.

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Polarizing cues.

Am J Pol Sci

October 2012

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.

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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 = -.

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