Behavioral researchers are increasingly conducting their studies online, to gain access to large and diverse samples that would be difficult to get in a laboratory environment. However, there are technical access barriers to building experiments online, and web browsers can present problems for consistent timing-an important issue with reaction-time-sensitive measures. For example, to ensure accuracy and test-retest reliability in presentation and response recording, experimenters need a working knowledge of programming languages such as JavaScript. We review some of the previous and current tools for online behavioral research, as well as how well they address the issues of usability and timing. We then present the Gorilla Experiment Builder (gorilla.sc), a fully tooled experiment authoring and deployment platform, designed to resolve many timing issues and make reliable online experimentation open and accessible to a wider range of technical abilities. To demonstrate the platform's aptitude for accessible, reliable, and scalable research, we administered a task with a range of participant groups (primary school children and adults), settings (without supervision, at home, and under supervision, in both schools and public engagement events), equipment (participant's own computer, computer supplied by the researcher), and connection types (personal internet connection, mobile phone 3G/4G). We used a simplified flanker task taken from the attentional network task (Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2004). We replicated the Bconflict network^effect in all these populations, demonstrating the platform's capability to run reaction-time-sensitive experiments. Unresolved limitations of running experiments online are then discussed, along with potential solutions and some future features of the platform.
Behavioural researchers are increasingly conducting their studies online to gain access to large and diverse samples that would be difficult to get in a laboratory environment. However, there are technical access barriers to building experiments online, and web-browsers can present problems for consistent timingan important issue with reaction time-sensitive measures. For example, to ensure accuracy and test-retest reliability in presentation and response recording, experimenters need a working knowledge of programming languages such as JavaScript. We review some of the previous and current tools for online behavioural research, and how well they address the issues of usability and timing. We then present The Gorilla Experiment Builder (gorilla.sc) a fully tooled experiment authoring and deployment platform, designed to resolve many timing issues, and make reliable online experimentation open and accessible to a wider range of technical abilities. In order to demonstrate the platform's aptitude for accessible, reliable and scalable research, we administered the task with a range of participant groups (primary school children and adults), settings (without supervision, at home, and under supervision, in schools and public engagement events), equipment (own computers, computer supplied by researcher), and connection types (personal internet connection, mobile phone 3G/4G). We used a simplified flanker task, taken from the Attentional Networks Task (Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2004). We replicated the 'conflict network' effect in all these populations, demonstrating the platform's capability to run reaction timesensitive experiments. Unresolved limitations of running experiments online are then discussed, along with potential solutions, and some future features of the platform.
Behavioural researchers are increasingly conducting their studies online to gain access to large and diverse samples that would be difficult to get in a laboratory environment. However, there are technical access barriers to building experiments online, and web-browsers can present problems for consistent timing – an important issue with reaction time-sensitive measures. For example, to ensure accuracy and test-retest reliability in presentation and response recording, experimenters need a working knowledge of programming languages such as JavaScript. We review some of the previous and current tools for online behavioural research, and how well they address the issues of usability and timing. We then present The Gorilla Experiment Builder (gorilla.sc) a fully tooled experiment authoring and deployment platform, designed to resolve many timing issues, and make reliable online experimentation open and accessible to a wider range of technical abilities. In order to demonstrate the platform’s aptitude for accessible, reliable and scalable research, we administered the task with a range of participant groups (primary school children and adults), settings (without supervision, at home, and under supervision, in schools and public engagement events), equipment (own computers, computer supplied by researcher), and connection types (personal internet connection, mobile phone 3G/4G). We used a simplified flanker task, taken from the Attentional Networks Task (Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2004). We replicated the ‘conflict network’ effect in all these populations, demonstrating the platform’s capability to run reaction time-sensitive experiments. Unresolved limitations of running experiments online are then discussed, along with potential solutions, and some future features of the platform.
Human societies are structured by what we refer to as ‘institutions’, which are socially created and culturally inherited proscriptions on behaviour that define roles and set expectations about social interactions. The study of institutions in several social science fields has provided many important insights that have not been fully appreciated in the evolutionary human sciences. However, such research has often lacked a shared understanding of general processes of change that shape institutional diversity across space and time. We argue that evolutionary theory can provide a useful framework for synthesizing information from different disciplines to address issues such as how and why institutions change over time, how institutional rules co-evolve with other culturally inherited traits, and the role that ecological factors might play in shaping institutional diversity. We argue that we can gain important insights by applying cultural evolutionary thinking to the study of institutions, but that we also need to expand and adapt our approaches to better handle the ways that institutions work, and how they might change over time. In this paper, we illustrate our approach by describing macro-scale empirical comparative analyses that demonstrate how evolutionary theory can be used to generate and test hypotheses about the processes that have shaped some of the major patterns we see in institutional diversity over time and across the world today. We then go on to discuss how we might usefully develop micro-scale models of institutional change by adapting concepts from game theory and agent-based modelling. We end by considering current challenges and areas for future research, and the potential implications for other areas of study and real-world applications. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Foundations of cultural evolution’.
Previous research has sought to explain the rise of right-wing populist leaders in terms of the evolutionary framework of dominance and prestige. In this framework, dominance is defined as high social rank acquired via coercion and fear, and prestige is defined as high social rank acquired via competence and admiration. Previous studies have shown that right-wing populist leaders are rated as more dominant than nonpopulist leaders, and right-wing populist / dominant leaders are favoured in times of economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict. In this paper we explore and critique this application of dominance-prestige to politics. First, we argue that the dominance-prestige framework, originally developed to explain inter-personal relationships within small-scale societies characterised by face-to-face interaction, does not straightforwardly extend to large-scale democratic societies which have frequent anonymous interaction and complex ingroup-outgroup dynamics. Second, we show that economic uncertainty and intergroup conflict predict not only preference for dominant leaders, but also prestigious leaders. Third, we show that perceptions of leaders as dominant or prestigious are not fixed, and depend on the political ideology of the perceiver: people view leaders who share their ideology as prestigious, and who oppose their ideology as dominant, whether that ideology is liberal or conservative. Fourth, we show that political ideology is a stronger predictor than economic uncertainty of preference for Donald Trump vs Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US Presidential Election, contradicting previous findings that link Trump"s success to economic uncertainty. We conclude by suggesting that, if economic uncertainty does not directly affect preferences for right-wing populist leaders, other features of their discourse such as higher emotionality might explain their success.
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