Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

This is a review of Collected Works of John Tate. Parts I, II, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. American Mathematical Society, Providence, Rhode Island, 2016. For several decades it has been clear to the friends and colleagues of John Tate that a “Collected Works” was merited. The award of the Abel Prize to Tate in 2010 added impetus, and finally, in Tate’s ninety-second year we have these two magnificent volumes, edited by Barry Mazur and Jean-Pierre Serre. Beyond Tate’s published articles, they include five unpublished articles and a selection of his letters, most accompanied by Tate’s comments, and a collection of photographs of Tate. For an overview of Tate’s work, the editors refer the reader to [4]. Before discussing the volumes, I describe some of Tate’s work. 1. Hecke L-series and Tate’s thesis Like many budding number theorists, Tate’s favorite theorem when young was Gauss’s law of quadratic reciprocity. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student in 1946, he was fortunate to find there the person, Emil Artin, who had discovered the most general reciprocity law, so solving Hilbert’s ninth problem. By 1920, the German school of algebraic number theorists (Hilbert, Weber, . . .) together with its brilliant student Takagi had succeeded in classifying the abelian extensions of a number field K: to each group I of ideal classes in K, there is attached an extension L of K (the class field of I); the group I determines the arithmetic of the extension L/K, and the Galois group of L/K is isomorphic to I. Artin’s contribution was to prove (in 1927) that there is a natural isomorphism from I to the Galois group of L/K. When the base field contains an appropriate root of 1, Artin’s isomorphism gives a reciprocity law, and all possible reciprocity laws arise this way. In the 1930s, Chevalley reworked abelian class field theory. In particular, he replaced “ideals” with his “idèles” which greatly clarified the relation between the local and global aspects of the theory. For his thesis, Artin suggested that Tate do the same for Hecke L-series. When Hecke proved that the abelian L-functions of number fields (generalizations of Dirichlet’s L-functions) have an analytic continuation throughout the plane with a functional equation of the expected type, he saw that his methods applied even to a new kind of L-function, now named after him. Once Tate had developed his harmonic analysis of local fields and of the idèle group, he was able prove analytic continuation and functional equations for all the relevant L-series without Hecke’s complicated theta-formulas. Received by the editors September 5, 2016. 2010 Mathematics Subject Classification. Primary 01A75, 11-06, 14-06. c ©2017 American Mathematical Society

The collected works

Conclusions and Recommendations, are particularly interesting in view of the controversies aroused by the Warnock Report. Many of the recommendations contained here are similar to Warnock's (for example, concerning the legitimacy of AID children, the need for a licensing authority to supervise the work ofAID and IVF centres, etc), but others are at odds with the corresponding Warnock recommendations. In general, the authors place higher value on the family as an institution than did the Warnock Committee and display a much livelier awareness of the possible social dangers of the new techniques. One weakness of the book is that since its authors are approaching these topics from the standpoint of social scientists, their recommendations for legislative action which surely must be based on properly ethical considerations, not merely sociological ones seem devoid of any satisfactory rational support. For example, they concede that experimentation on human embryos is an objectionable practice, since 'the material acting as the subject of the experimentation is a human being at the beginning of its individual development' (p 178); but the practical recommendation which they make concerning this practice is disappointingly feeble:

https://jme.bmj.com/content/medethics/12/3/165.full.pdf

Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy

Despite the increased use of health claims in food advertising, few studies have investigated how specific nutrition claims have differential effects depending on how they are presented. In this context, the current study tests the anchoring hypothesis. Anchoring refers to a common human tendency to evaluate information differently depending on the presence or absence of a numerical “anchor” or reference point. Two (pilot and main) experimental studies explore anchoring effects on audience response to food advertising both directly and moderated by cognitive, motivational, and message factors. The pilot study finds that food product ads employing nutrition claims with an anchor rather than without an anchor generate two results: First, participants perceive the product to have lower fat/lower calorie contents (anchoring hypothesis); second, they prefer the messages with an anchor over those without an anchor. The main study reports that when anchoring is successfully evoked, it produces favorable attitude...

Not all nutrition claims are perceived equal: anchoring effects and moderating mechanisms in food advertising.

The purpose of this study is to explicate the complexities of the mechanism through which norm messages achieve their intended goals, and to examine how the normative mechanism differs according to the collectivism orientation of two culturally distinct countries. To analyze data collected from 464 US and Korean college students, it uses the O-S-O-R approach, which represents four elements of the communication process – (pre) Orientation-Stimuli-(post) Orientation-Response. Multi-group path analysis yields three major findings. First, collectivism orientation is significantly related to injunctive norm perception (INP) only among Korean respondents. Second, descriptive norm perceptions (DNP) and INP as post-orientations lead to behavioural intention through different mechanisms. That is, INP leads to behavioural intention directly regardless of types of norm messages and country, but indirectly through issue importance only in the IN message condition among the US. participants. By contrast, DNP leads to behavioural intention only directly, except for the DN message condition among the US participants in which there is no such significant relationship. Third, the normative mechanism was more rigorous and consistent among Koreans than Americans.

The role of collectivism orientation in differential normative mechanisms: A cross-national study of anti-smoking public service announcement effectiveness

Guided by the influence of presumed influence model, this study focuses on the direct and mediating roles of adolescent perceived media influence on peers--i.e., perceptions about how much peers are influenced by antismoking messages--in predicting adolescent smoking attitudes and behavior. Analysis of two-wave panel data indicates that adolescents' perceived media influence on peers at Time 2 directly influenced their smoking attitudes and behavior at Time 2 and appeared to serve as a causal bridge for the variable at Time 1. The exposure to antismoking campaigns seems to achieve the desired outcome indirectly through perceived media influence on peers. ********** For decades, antismoking efforts at both state and national levels have produced numerous media campaigns that target adolescents. Evidence suggests that campaigns such as the American Legacy Foundation's "truth" have contributed to a reduction in the adolescent smoking rate (Farrelly et al. 2005). That rate, however, remains relatively high at around 20%. According to the Healthy People 2010 initiative of the US Department of Health and Human Services, the federal government's goal was to have reduced it to 16% by the year 2010. Although such an ambitious goal has not been achieved, health campaigners and intervention researchers continue to investigate several strategies to make it more attainable. In the process, they have increasingly emphasized the importance of understanding the mechanisms through which antismoking campaigns work (e.g., Baranowski, Anderson, and Carmack 1998; Clayton, Scutchfield, and Wyatt 2000; MacKinnon et al. 2001). To advance this understanding, we focus on peer perceptions that mediate adolescents' self-reported exposure to antismoking messages and their smoking attitudes and behavior. When individuals form impressions of other people and behave according to their subjective social perceptions, they often do not rely on their own actual, direct observations and experiences of others. Instead, they use information that is simply "available" (Ross and Fletcher 1985). Adolescents are known to be particularly susceptible to peer perceptions because they are highly concerned about the impressions they make on others (Rosenberg 1986). In fact, studies on adolescent behavior have found that perceptions often determine peer influence more than peer behavior itself does (Bauman and Fisher 1986). This study concentrates on the mediation that results from peer perceptions. To do so, it uses the influence of presumed influence (IPI) model, which incorporates the perceptions of others in the context of media influence. The IPI model's core postulate is that "people perceive some influence of a communication on others (presumed influence) and, as a result, change their own attitudes or behaviors (influence of presumed influence)" (Gunther and Storey 2003, p. 199). This study builds on that model to examine the roles of perceived media influence on peers. Specifically, it explores how adolescent perceptions of peer responses to antismoking media messages mediate their self-reported exposure to antismoking messages and their attitudes and behaviors. Past studies have tested and confirmed the IPI model in contexts such as maternal health care delivery (Gunther and Story 2003), adolescent smoking (Gunther et al. 2006; Paek and Gunther 2007) and adolescent sexual behavior (Chia 2006). But those studies all relied on cross-sectional data and therefore could not provide sufficiently convincing causal claims. In contrast, through analyzing two-wave panel survey data, the current study develops a causal model that more rigorously incorporates peer perception, or the role of perceived media influence on peers. It raises two research questions. First, to what extent does peer perception mediate between self-reported exposure to antismoking messages and smoking attitudes and behavior? Second, how robust are the direct and mediating roles of peer perceptions over time? …

How Adolescents' Perceived Media Influence on Peers Affects Smoking Decisions

This study has two aims: to identify effective strategies for managing false rumors about risks and to investigate the roles that basic and situational trust in government play in that process. Online experiment data were collected nationwide from 915 adults in South Korea. They were exposed to a false rumor about radiation-contaminated seafood and were randomly assigned to one of three rumor response conditions (refutation, denial, attack the attacker). One-way ANOVA indicated that the refutation response yielded the highest level of situational trust in government response (TGR). Results of moderated mediation models using the PROCESS Macro indicated the following. (1) The refutation response had a positive effect on TGR, and the attack response had a negative effect. (2) There were significant interaction effects between the attack response and preexisting basic trust in government (BTG) in that the attack response had a negative effect on TGR only when BTG was low. (3) TGR significantly mediated the relationship between each of the three rumor responses and two dependent variables (intentions for rumor dissemination and for unwarranted actions), but in dramatically different ways across the responses. This study provides evidence for the superior effectiveness of the refutation rumor response and identifies specific roles of trust in government in the risk rumor management process.

https://www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/risa.13377

Mediating and Moderating Roles of Trust in Government in Effective Risk Rumor Management: A Test Case of Radiation‐Contaminated Seafood in South Korea

Perceived effectiveness (PE) has been studied as an important antecedent of persuasion. But judgments of PE may vary its persuasive impact depending on whom people think about as message referents. This study explores PE judgment for both self and different others as well as their independent roles in the persuasion process. Theoretical rationales are drawn from the third-person effect and its contingent concepts regarding perceived media effects. A study was conducted among 355 participants who evaluated two child abuse prevention public service announcements (PSAs). They estimated that the average American parent judged the PSAs more favorably than their close peer or themselves. Structural equation models indicate that self's and close-peer's PE judgment led to persuasion for one PSA (“Wonders”), while the target's PE judgment affected persuasion for another PSA (“Awareness”). These results suggest a potential moderating role of message characteristics in self–other PE judgments and their consequences.

Thomas Hove

Papers

Not all nutrition claims are perceived equal: anchoring effects and moderating mechanisms in food advertising.

The role of collectivism orientation in differential normative mechanisms: A cross-national study of anti-smoking public service announcement effectiveness

How Adolescents' Perceived Media Influence on Peers Affects Smoking Decisions

Mediating and Moderating Roles of Trust in Government in Effective Risk Rumor Management: A Test Case of Radiation‐Contaminated Seafood in South Korea

When Distant Others Matter More: Perceived Effectiveness for Self and Other in the Child Abuse PSA Context