Alexander Bor
Biographic Data
| ID | 1051111 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexander Bor |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexander |
| FAMILY NAME | Bor |
| SIGNATURE | BOR A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2624-9221 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 264 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Subverting democracy in the name of democracy
Attempts to subvert democracy are often justified, paradoxically, as an effort to save or improve democracy. Yet, little is known about the effectiveness of these justifications. Here, we conduct two original vignette experiments, where US American and Polish respondents are introduced to a proposal of executive aggrandizement, usurping control over election results and capturing the media, respectively. We manipulate the proposal's party and the…
Cross-cultural evidence that intergroup conflict heightens preferences for dominant leaders: A 25-country study
Across societies and across history, seemingly dominant, authoritarian leaders have emerged frequently, often rising to power based on widespread popular support. One prominent theory holds that evolved psychological mechanisms of followership regulate citizens' leadership preferences such that dominant individuals are intuitively attributed leadership qualities when followers face intergroup conflicts like war. A key hypothesis based on this the…
Increased pressure lowered trust among unvaccinated during the Covid‐19 pandemic: Effects of the announcement of reintroducing vaccination passports in Denmark
During the COVID‐19 pandemic, the imposition of moralistically justified costs on unvaccinated individuals was used to incentivize vaccination uptake. Here, we ask whether such a strategy creates adverse consequences in the form of lowered trust in the pandemic response among unvaccinated individuals, which could jeopardize their compliance with the broader set of health interventions. As our empirical case, we use a press conference held by the …
Super-Unsupervised’ Classification for Labelling Text: Online Political Hostility as an Illustration
We live in a world of text. Yet the sheer magnitude of social media data, coupled with a need to measure complex psychological constructs, has made this important source of data difficult to use. Researchers often engage in costly hand coding of thousands of texts using supervised techniques or rely on unsupervised techniques where the measurement of predefined constructs is difficult. We propose a novel approach that we call ‘super-unsupervised’…
Stability and change in the opinion–policy relationship: Evidence from minimum wage laws
Recent studies have documented large discrepancies between mass preferences and policies in U.S. states consistent with theories that highlight the oversized influence of affluent Americans on policymaking. In this note, we replicate and extend a recent such study (Simonovits, Guess, and Nagler, 2019) to assess how policy bias evolves in time. Specifically, relying on novel data and methods, we construct measures of minimum wage preferences and c…
Moralizing the Covid ‐19 Pandemic: Self‐Interest Predicts Moral Condemnation of Other's Compliance, Distancing, and Vaccination
The emergence of the novel coronavirus has put societies under tremendous pressure to instigate massive and rapid behavior change. Throughout history, an effective strategy to facilitate novel behaviors has been to morally condemn those who do not behave in an appropriate way. Accordingly, here, we investigate if complying with the advice of health authorities—for example, to physically distance or vaccinate—has emerged as a moralized issue durin…
National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic
Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during …
Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to Covid-19 pandemic using machine learning
At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social…
Candidate evaluations across the aisle: Cross‐cultural evidence that out‐partisans value candidate warmth more than in‐partisans
Partisans view their own candidates through rose‐coloured glasses and see competing candidates much more negatively. However, recent advances in political behaviour reveal that such directional motivated reasoning is not simply about love and hate, but also about more nuanced shifts in preferences. Combining two insights from the psychological sciences – coalitional reasoning and a general dislike of self‐interested leaders – we form the novel pr…
The Psychology of Online Political Hostility: A Comprehensive, Cross-National Test of the Mismatch Hypothesis
Why are online discussions about politics more hostile than offline discussions? A popular answer argues that human psychology is tailored for face-to-face interaction and people's behavior therefore changes for the worse in impersonal online discussions. We provide a theoretical formalization and empirical test of this explanation: the mismatch hypothesis. We argue that mismatches between human psychology and novel features of online environment…
Transparent communication about negative features of Covid-19 vaccines decreases acceptance but increases trust
Significance During a pandemic, governments face incentives to not disclose negative information about vaccines to not jeopardize public vaccine acceptance. Against these incentives, the current study provides an experimental, cross-national demonstration of the importance of transparency in communication about a vaccine against COVID-19. While disclosing negative information may increase hesitancy, transparency sustains trust in health authoriti…
Compliance without fear: Individual‐level protective behaviour during the first wave of the Covid‐19 pandemic
OBJECTIVES: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic required rapid public compliance with advice from health authorities. Here, we ask who was most likely to do so during the first wave of the pandemic. DESIGN: Quota-sampled cross-sectional and panel data from eight Western democracies (Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States). METHODS: We fielded online public opinion surveys to 26,508 citizens b…
Public acceptance of Covid-19 vaccines: Cross-national evidence on levels and individual-level predictors using observational data
OBJECTIVES: The management of the COVID-19 pandemic hinges on the approval of safe and effective vaccines but, equally importantly, on high vaccine acceptance among people. To facilitate vaccine acceptance via effective health communication, it is key to understand levels of vaccine scepticism and the demographic, psychological and political predictors. To this end, we examine the levels and predictors of acceptance of an approved COVID-19 vaccin…
Public support for government responses against Covid-19: Assessing levels and predictors in eight Western democracies during 2020
In order to halt the spread of COVID-19 governments have engaged in policies that are both economically costly and involve infringements of individual rights. In democratic countries, these policy responses have elicited significant debate but little is known about the extent to which the responses are supported or opposed by the broader public. This article investigates how citizens across eight Western democracies evaluate the specific policies…
Empathy, Deservingness, and Preferences for Welfare Assistance: A Large-Scale Online Perspective-Taking Experiment
Partisan Polarization Is the Primary Psychological Motivation behind Political Fake News Sharing on Twitter
The rise of "fake news" is a major concern in contemporary Western democracies. Yet, research on the psychological motivations behind the spread of political fake news on social media is surprisingly limited. Are citizens who share fake newsignorantand lazy? Are they fueled by sinister motives, seeking todisruptthe social status quo? Or do they seek to attack partisan opponents in an increasinglypolarizedpolitical environment? This article is the…
Evolutionary leadership theory and economic voting: Warmth and competence impressions mediate the effect of economic perceptions on vote
Dominant Jerks: People infer dominance from the utterance of challenging and offensive statements
Why do people utter offensive or challenging statements? One reason might be displaying one’s dominance: if no one calls out the speaker of a challenging statement, it might because the audience is afraid to challenge the speaker. In two experiments (N = 635), participants read vignettes in which a speaker uttered either a statement about a mundane topic, or an offensive statement. The statement was either challenging (it clashed with the audienc…
When Should the Majority Rule? Experimental Evidence for Madisonian Judgments in Five Cultures
In democracies, majority-rule voting is an esteemed rule for collective decisions, but its hazards have recently become apparent after a series of controversial referendums and ascendant populist leaders. Here, we investigate people’s judgments about when voting is appropriate for collective decisions across five countries with diverse cultures and political institutions (Denmark, Hungary, India, Russia, and USA). Participants read scenarios in w…
Correcting for base rates in multidimensional “Who said what?” experiments
The “Who said what?” protocol is a popular experimental paradigm and has been used for 40 years to study spontaneous mental categorization. This paper offers a crucial methodological improvement to calculate unbiased estimates in multidimensional “Who said what?” studies. Previous studies predominantly corrected for base rates by first correcting the base rates and consequently aggregating errors for the two dimensions separately. The paper demon…
Spontaneous categorization along competence in partner and leader evaluations
Successful cooperation requires a partner both willing and capable of contributing to a joint endeavour. Accordingly, partner choice psychology should include mechanisms to distinguish between people with good and bad intentions, and between people who are competent and incompetent. While it is well established that intentions influence partner choice, the literature offers mixed evidence concerning people's ability to gauge competence in social …
The relative weight of character traits in political candidate evaluations: Warmth is more important than competence, leadership and integrity
Citizens in the Making in Post-Soviet States
Olena Nikolayenko BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies., Abingdon: Routledge, 2011, xvii+155pp, £85.00 h/b THIS BOOK PROVIDES UNIQUE INSIGHTS INTO THE POLITICAL VIEWS and at
Partisan Polarization Is the Primary Psychological Motivation behind Political Fake News Sharing on Twitter
The rise of "fake news" is a major concern in contemporary Western democracies. Yet, research on the psychological motivations behind the spread of political fake news on social media is surprisingly limited. Are citizens who share fake newsignorantand lazy? Are they fueled by sinister motives, seeking todisruptthe social status quo? Or do they seek to attack partisan opponents in an increasinglypolarizedpolitical environment? This article is the…
The relative weight of character traits in political candidate evaluations: Warmth is more important than competence, leadership and integrity
Public support for government responses against Covid-19: Assessing levels and predictors in eight Western democracies during 2020
In order to halt the spread of COVID-19 governments have engaged in policies that are both economically costly and involve infringements of individual rights. In democratic countries, these policy responses have elicited significant debate but little is known about the extent to which the responses are supported or opposed by the broader public. This article investigates how citizens across eight Western democracies evaluate the specific policies…
The Psychology of Online Political Hostility: A Comprehensive, Cross-National Test of the Mismatch Hypothesis
Why are online discussions about politics more hostile than offline discussions? A popular answer argues that human psychology is tailored for face-to-face interaction and people's behavior therefore changes for the worse in impersonal online discussions. We provide a theoretical formalization and empirical test of this explanation: the mismatch hypothesis. We argue that mismatches between human psychology and novel features of online environment…
Moralizing the Covid ‐19 Pandemic: Self‐Interest Predicts Moral Condemnation of Other's Compliance, Distancing, and Vaccination
The emergence of the novel coronavirus has put societies under tremendous pressure to instigate massive and rapid behavior change. Throughout history, an effective strategy to facilitate novel behaviors has been to morally condemn those who do not behave in an appropriate way. Accordingly, here, we investigate if complying with the advice of health authorities—for example, to physically distance or vaccinate—has emerged as a moralized issue durin…
Empathy, Deservingness, and Preferences for Welfare Assistance: A Large-Scale Online Perspective-Taking Experiment
Candidate evaluations across the aisle: Cross‐cultural evidence that out‐partisans value candidate warmth more than in‐partisans
Partisans view their own candidates through rose‐coloured glasses and see competing candidates much more negatively. However, recent advances in political behaviour reveal that such directional motivated reasoning is not simply about love and hate, but also about more nuanced shifts in preferences. Combining two insights from the psychological sciences – coalitional reasoning and a general dislike of self‐interested leaders – we form the novel pr…
When Should the Majority Rule? Experimental Evidence for Madisonian Judgments in Five Cultures
In democracies, majority-rule voting is an esteemed rule for collective decisions, but its hazards have recently become apparent after a series of controversial referendums and ascendant populist leaders. Here, we investigate people’s judgments about when voting is appropriate for collective decisions across five countries with diverse cultures and political institutions (Denmark, Hungary, India, Russia, and USA). Participants read scenarios in w…
Increased pressure lowered trust among unvaccinated during the Covid‐19 pandemic: Effects of the announcement of reintroducing vaccination passports in Denmark
During the COVID‐19 pandemic, the imposition of moralistically justified costs on unvaccinated individuals was used to incentivize vaccination uptake. Here, we ask whether such a strategy creates adverse consequences in the form of lowered trust in the pandemic response among unvaccinated individuals, which could jeopardize their compliance with the broader set of health interventions. As our empirical case, we use a press conference held by the …
Cross-cultural evidence that intergroup conflict heightens preferences for dominant leaders: A 25-country study
Across societies and across history, seemingly dominant, authoritarian leaders have emerged frequently, often rising to power based on widespread popular support. One prominent theory holds that evolved psychological mechanisms of followership regulate citizens' leadership preferences such that dominant individuals are intuitively attributed leadership qualities when followers face intergroup conflicts like war. A key hypothesis based on this the…
Super-Unsupervised’ Classification for Labelling Text: Online Political Hostility as an Illustration
We live in a world of text. Yet the sheer magnitude of social media data, coupled with a need to measure complex psychological constructs, has made this important source of data difficult to use. Researchers often engage in costly hand coding of thousands of texts using supervised techniques or rely on unsupervised techniques where the measurement of predefined constructs is difficult. We propose a novel approach that we call ‘super-unsupervised’…
Citizens in the Making in Post-Soviet States
Olena Nikolayenko BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies., Abingdon: Routledge, 2011, xvii+155pp, £85.00 h/b THIS BOOK PROVIDES UNIQUE INSIGHTS INTO THE POLITICAL VIEWS and at
Spontaneous categorization along competence in partner and leader evaluations
Successful cooperation requires a partner both willing and capable of contributing to a joint endeavour. Accordingly, partner choice psychology should include mechanisms to distinguish between people with good and bad intentions, and between people who are competent and incompetent. While it is well established that intentions influence partner choice, the literature offers mixed evidence concerning people's ability to gauge competence in social …
The relative weight of character traits in political candidate evaluations: Warmth is more important than competence, leadership and integrity
Correcting for base rates in multidimensional “Who said what?” experiments
The “Who said what?” protocol is a popular experimental paradigm and has been used for 40 years to study spontaneous mental categorization. This paper offers a crucial methodological improvement to calculate unbiased estimates in multidimensional “Who said what?” studies. Previous studies predominantly corrected for base rates by first correcting the base rates and consequently aggregating errors for the two dimensions separately. The paper demon…
Evolutionary leadership theory and economic voting: Warmth and competence impressions mediate the effect of economic perceptions on vote
Dominant Jerks: People infer dominance from the utterance of challenging and offensive statements
Why do people utter offensive or challenging statements? One reason might be displaying one’s dominance: if no one calls out the speaker of a challenging statement, it might because the audience is afraid to challenge the speaker. In two experiments (N = 635), participants read vignettes in which a speaker uttered either a statement about a mundane topic, or an offensive statement. The statement was either challenging (it clashed with the audienc…
When Should the Majority Rule? Experimental Evidence for Madisonian Judgments in Five Cultures
In democracies, majority-rule voting is an esteemed rule for collective decisions, but its hazards have recently become apparent after a series of controversial referendums and ascendant populist leaders. Here, we investigate people’s judgments about when voting is appropriate for collective decisions across five countries with diverse cultures and political institutions (Denmark, Hungary, India, Russia, and USA). Participants read scenarios in w…
Transparent communication about negative features of Covid-19 vaccines decreases acceptance but increases trust
Significance During a pandemic, governments face incentives to not disclose negative information about vaccines to not jeopardize public vaccine acceptance. Against these incentives, the current study provides an experimental, cross-national demonstration of the importance of transparency in communication about a vaccine against COVID-19. While disclosing negative information may increase hesitancy, transparency sustains trust in health authoriti…
Compliance without fear: Individual‐level protective behaviour during the first wave of the Covid‐19 pandemic
OBJECTIVES: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic required rapid public compliance with advice from health authorities. Here, we ask who was most likely to do so during the first wave of the pandemic. DESIGN: Quota-sampled cross-sectional and panel data from eight Western democracies (Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States). METHODS: We fielded online public opinion surveys to 26,508 citizens b…
Public acceptance of Covid-19 vaccines: Cross-national evidence on levels and individual-level predictors using observational data
OBJECTIVES: The management of the COVID-19 pandemic hinges on the approval of safe and effective vaccines but, equally importantly, on high vaccine acceptance among people. To facilitate vaccine acceptance via effective health communication, it is key to understand levels of vaccine scepticism and the demographic, psychological and political predictors. To this end, we examine the levels and predictors of acceptance of an approved COVID-19 vaccin…
Public support for government responses against Covid-19: Assessing levels and predictors in eight Western democracies during 2020
In order to halt the spread of COVID-19 governments have engaged in policies that are both economically costly and involve infringements of individual rights. In democratic countries, these policy responses have elicited significant debate but little is known about the extent to which the responses are supported or opposed by the broader public. This article investigates how citizens across eight Western democracies evaluate the specific policies…
Empathy, Deservingness, and Preferences for Welfare Assistance: A Large-Scale Online Perspective-Taking Experiment
Partisan Polarization Is the Primary Psychological Motivation behind Political Fake News Sharing on Twitter
The rise of "fake news" is a major concern in contemporary Western democracies. Yet, research on the psychological motivations behind the spread of political fake news on social media is surprisingly limited. Are citizens who share fake newsignorantand lazy? Are they fueled by sinister motives, seeking todisruptthe social status quo? Or do they seek to attack partisan opponents in an increasinglypolarizedpolitical environment? This article is the…
National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic
Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during …
Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to Covid-19 pandemic using machine learning
At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social…
Candidate evaluations across the aisle: Cross‐cultural evidence that out‐partisans value candidate warmth more than in‐partisans
Partisans view their own candidates through rose‐coloured glasses and see competing candidates much more negatively. However, recent advances in political behaviour reveal that such directional motivated reasoning is not simply about love and hate, but also about more nuanced shifts in preferences. Combining two insights from the psychological sciences – coalitional reasoning and a general dislike of self‐interested leaders – we form the novel pr…
The Psychology of Online Political Hostility: A Comprehensive, Cross-National Test of the Mismatch Hypothesis
Why are online discussions about politics more hostile than offline discussions? A popular answer argues that human psychology is tailored for face-to-face interaction and people's behavior therefore changes for the worse in impersonal online discussions. We provide a theoretical formalization and empirical test of this explanation: the mismatch hypothesis. We argue that mismatches between human psychology and novel features of online environment…
Stability and change in the opinion–policy relationship: Evidence from minimum wage laws
Recent studies have documented large discrepancies between mass preferences and policies in U.S. states consistent with theories that highlight the oversized influence of affluent Americans on policymaking. In this note, we replicate and extend a recent such study (Simonovits, Guess, and Nagler, 2019) to assess how policy bias evolves in time. Specifically, relying on novel data and methods, we construct measures of minimum wage preferences and c…
Moralizing the Covid ‐19 Pandemic: Self‐Interest Predicts Moral Condemnation of Other's Compliance, Distancing, and Vaccination
The emergence of the novel coronavirus has put societies under tremendous pressure to instigate massive and rapid behavior change. Throughout history, an effective strategy to facilitate novel behaviors has been to morally condemn those who do not behave in an appropriate way. Accordingly, here, we investigate if complying with the advice of health authorities—for example, to physically distance or vaccinate—has emerged as a moralized issue durin…
Increased pressure lowered trust among unvaccinated during the Covid‐19 pandemic: Effects of the announcement of reintroducing vaccination passports in Denmark
During the COVID‐19 pandemic, the imposition of moralistically justified costs on unvaccinated individuals was used to incentivize vaccination uptake. Here, we ask whether such a strategy creates adverse consequences in the form of lowered trust in the pandemic response among unvaccinated individuals, which could jeopardize their compliance with the broader set of health interventions. As our empirical case, we use a press conference held by the …
Super-Unsupervised’ Classification for Labelling Text: Online Political Hostility as an Illustration
We live in a world of text. Yet the sheer magnitude of social media data, coupled with a need to measure complex psychological constructs, has made this important source of data difficult to use. Researchers often engage in costly hand coding of thousands of texts using supervised techniques or rely on unsupervised techniques where the measurement of predefined constructs is difficult. We propose a novel approach that we call ‘super-unsupervised’…
Cross-cultural evidence that intergroup conflict heightens preferences for dominant leaders: A 25-country study
Across societies and across history, seemingly dominant, authoritarian leaders have emerged frequently, often rising to power based on widespread popular support. One prominent theory holds that evolved psychological mechanisms of followership regulate citizens' leadership preferences such that dominant individuals are intuitively attributed leadership qualities when followers face intergroup conflicts like war. A key hypothesis based on this the…
Subverting democracy in the name of democracy
Attempts to subvert democracy are often justified, paradoxically, as an effort to save or improve democracy. Yet, little is known about the effectiveness of these justifications. Here, we conduct two original vignette experiments, where US American and Polish respondents are introduced to a proposal of executive aggrandizement, usurping control over election results and capturing the media, respectively. We manipulate the proposal's party and the…
Psychology (18 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Political science (11 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (8 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Medicine (7 works) · Pandemic (7 works) · 2019-20 coronavirus outbreak (6 works)