Daniel Romer
Biographic Data
| ID | 220949 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Daniel Romer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Daniel |
| FAMILY NAME | Romer |
| SIGNATURE | ROMER D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2568-0669 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 76 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1374 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Cumulative Exposure: Scholarly Responses to 50 Years of Cultivation Research
This issue features the latest Scholarly Milestones essay, “Cultivation at 50” by Michael Morgan, Richard Perloff, Andy Ruddock, and James Shanahan, a meditation on the theory’s history, evolution
Lessons learned about conspiracy mindset and belief in vaccination misinformation during the Covid pandemic of 2019 in the United States
We review research we conducted from the first through the 3rd year of the COVID pandemic that identified conspiracy mindset as an important source of vaccination resistance in the United States (US). We show that the mindset was highly related to the acceptance of misinformation about the safety and efficacy of vaccination, including the vaccines against COVID-19. We show that its effects were overcome to some extent in racial-ethnic and politic…
Tobacco, nicotine and counter-marketing promotions using Instagram’s branded content tool
Despite attempts at self-regulation, paid partnership posts promoting tobacco and nicotine products are present on Instagram, especially posts promoting venues and events that feature tobacco and nicotine use. Self-regulation of this content shows limited success, suggesting a need for federal oversight and additional counter-marketing in social media settings
Democracy amid Crises: Polarization, Pandemic, Protests, and Persuasion
Theoretical advances in research on the development of risk taking
Rethinking Cell Phone Use While Driving: Isolated Risk Behavior or a Pattern of Risk-Taking Associated with Impulsivity in Young Drivers
This study examines whether cell phone use stands apart from a general pattern of risky driving practices associated with crashes and impulsivity-related personality traits in young drivers. A retrospective online survey study recruited 384 young drivers from across the United States using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to complete a survey measuring risky driving practices (including cell phone use), history of crashes, and impulsivity-related persona…
Brazil’s Efforts to Reduce Cigarette Use Illustrate Both the Potential Successes and Challenges of This Goal
Brazil's Efforts to Reduce Cigarette Use Illustrate Both the Potential Successes and Challenges of This Goal Daniel Romer PhD Affiliation The author is with the Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.CopyRightCorrespondence should be sent to Daniel Romer, PhD, Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania, 202 S 36th St, Philadelphia PA 19104 ([email protected]). Reprints can be ordered at htt…
Conspiratorial thinking, selective exposure to conservative media, and response to Covid-19 in the US
Exploring the Role of Media Use Within an Integrated Behavioral Model (IBM) Approach to Vote Likelihood
Political interest is a key predictor of likelihood to vote. We argue that the political interest-vote intention relationship can be explained by well-established theories that predict behavior across domains (e.g., theory of reasoned action, theory of planned behavior). Relying on the integrated behavioral model, we propose a core mediation model with vote likelihood (i.e., behavioral intention) as the dependent variable. Two types of media use …
Conspiracy theories as barriers to controlling the spread of Covid-19 in the U.S
Because belief in COVID-related conspiracy theories predicts resistance to both preventive behaviors and future vaccination for the virus, it will be critical to confront both conspiracy theories and vaccination misinformation to prevent further spread of the virus in the US. Reducing those barriers will require continued messaging by public health authorities on mainstream media and in particular on politically conservative outlets that have sup…
Effects of exposure to self-harm on social media: Evidence from a two-wave panel study among young adults
Suicide is a leading cause of death among youth, and media depictions of suicidal behavior can be a contributing risk factor. Of interest, Instagram recently received more scholarly attention due to its large number of publicly available, explicit, and graphic depictions of self-harm. Importantly, researchers have hypothesized that exposure to this content could be a risk for self-harm and suicide in vulnerable audiences. We tested this hypothesi…
Investigating harmful and helpful effects of watching season 2 of 13 Reasons Why: Results of a two-wave U.S. panel survey
Parent reports of adolescents and young adults perceived to show signs of a rapid onset of gender dysphoria
PURPOSE: In on-line forums, parents have reported that their children seemed to experience a sudden or rapid onset of gender dysphoria, appearing for the first time during puberty or even after its completion. Parents describe that the onset of gender dysphoria seemed to occur in the context of belonging to a peer group where one, multiple, or even all of the friends have become gender dysphoric and transgender-identified during the same timefram…
Modeling Trajectories of Sensation Seeking and Impulsivity Dimensions from Early to Late Adolescence: Universal Trends or Distinct Sub-groups
Beyond stereotypes of adolescent risk taking: Placing the adolescent brain in developmental context
Recent neuroscience models of adolescent brain development attribute the morbidity and mortality of this period to structural and functional imbalances between more fully developed limbic regions that subserve reward and emotion as opposed to those that enable cognitive control. We challenge this interpretation of adolescent development by distinguishing risk-taking that peaks during adolescence (sensation seeking and impulsive action) from risk …
Intertemporal stability of uncertainty preferences
Afterword to the Issue “Adolescents in the Digital Age: Effects on Health and Development”
The articles in this thematic issue suggest both opportunities and hazards for the health and development of adolescents in the digital age. We place these concerns in the context of improving health for young people in the US and elsewhere, and suggest that based on evidence uncovered to date, increasing digital connection may be having no less favorable than adverse effect on adolescents
The Role of Parents in Problematic Internet Use among US Adolescents
The internet has transformed the way youth communicate, learn, and network, with implications for their broader social, psychological, and physical health and well-being. With the technological capability of accessing the internet from anywhere, at any time, paired with the enormous variety of internet activities in which youth engage—from social networking to chatting to streaming videos to playing games to watching television content—instances …
Introduction to the Issue “Adolescents in the Digital Age: Effects on Health and Development”
This thematic issue brings together papers by researchers who are studying the ways that today’s adolescents interact with their peers, families, and the larger media environment in the digital age. The contributors highlight both the challenges and the opportunities that this new age presents for the healthy development of young people
Distinguishing Hypotheses From Hyperbole in Studies of Media Violence: A Comment on Markey et al. (2015)
In alleging that Bushman et al. (2013) made sensational and unsubstantiated claims, Markey et al. (2015) mistake hypotheses for hyperbole. Moreover, in their effort to show that gun violence in PG-13 movies (for ages 13 and older) is unrelated to trends in population violence, they make unjustified demands on our data, with outcomes that are unconnected to hypothesized effects. Using outcomes in line with our hypotheses, we draw the contrary conc…
Emotional reaction facilitates the brain and behavioural impact of graphic cigarette warning labels in smokers
Recognition memory and craving are, respectively, correlates of effectiveness of addiction-related public health communications and interventions, and amygdala activation facilitates the encoding of emotional memories. Thus, our results suggest that emotional reaction to graphic warning labels contributes to their public health impact and may be an integral part of the neural mechanisms underlying their effectiveness. Given the urgency of the deb…
Die Ökonomie des Konsumverzichts: Weniger kann mehr sein
Die Treppe statt den Aufzug benutzen, das Auto stehen lassen und aufs Fahrrad umsteigen: Das Verzichten auf persönliche Vorteile wird oft eingefordert, um politische Nachhaltigkeitsziele zu erreichen. Allerdings ist der selbst gewählte, freiwillige Ertragsverzicht ein schwer erklärbares Verhaltensphänomen
The Protective Effects of Parental Monitoring and Internet Restriction on Adolescents’ Risk of Online Harassment
Violence in Popular U.S. Prime Time TV Dramas and the Cultivation of Fear: A Time Series Analysis
Gerbner and Gross’s cultivation theory predicts that prolonged exposure to TV violence creates fear of crime, symptomatic of a mean world syndrome. We tested the theory’s prediction in a time series model with annual changes in violence portrayal on popular US TV shows from 1972 to 2010 as a predictor of changes in public perceptions of local crime rates and fear of crime. We found that contrary to the prediction that TV violence would affect per…
HIV-Related Stigma Among African-American Youth in the Northeast and Southeast US
A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth
This paper examines whether the Solow growth model is consistent with the international variation in the standard of living. It shows that an augmented Solow model that includes accumulation of human as well as physical capital provides an excellent description of the cross-country data. The paper also examines the implications of the Solow model for convergence in standards of living, that is, for whether poor countries tend to grow faster than …
Conspiracy theories as barriers to controlling the spread of Covid-19 in the U.S
Because belief in COVID-related conspiracy theories predicts resistance to both preventive behaviors and future vaccination for the virus, it will be critical to confront both conspiracy theories and vaccination misinformation to prevent further spread of the virus in the US. Reducing those barriers will require continued messaging by public health authorities on mainstream media and in particular on politically conservative outlets that have sup…
Social influences on the sexual behavior of youth at risk for HIV exposure
OBJECTIVES. Adolescents are increasingly at risk for infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and other sexually transmitted diseases, especially in poor urban minority communities. To aid the design of interventions in these communities, this study investigated the role of knowledge, attitudes, perceived parental monitoring, and peer behavior in the onset and progression of sexual behavior in children at risk for exposure to HIV. METHOD…
Realizing the Social Internet? Online Social Networking Meets Offline Civic Engagement
Does Internet use have the potential to build social capital? Emerging evidence suggests that politically knowledgeable, interpersonally trusting, and civically engaged individuals share particular patterns of Internet use. In previous national survey studies, Internet use has been divided into a handful of excessively broad categories, and researchers have been unable to address newer, category-spanning Internet uses as well as the potential imp…
Using Drama to Persuade
Television ads can be classified as either arguments or dramas or hybrids of these forms. We claim that form dimension influences how ads are processed. An argument backs its claims with appeals to objectivity and is processed evaluatively. A drama appeals more to subjective criteria and is processed empathically. A study is reported in which 40 television commercials were classified on a dramatization scale. They were shown to 1,215 people, and …
Teachers as Builders of Respectful School Climates: Implications for Adolescent Drug Use Norms and Depressive Symptoms in High School
Identifying Best Practices in Civic Education: Lessons from the Student Voices Program
School‐based civic education is increasingly recognized as an effective means for increasing political awareness and participation in American youth. This study examines the Student Voices curriculum, implemented in 22 Philadelphia high schools, to assess program activities that mediate gains in outcomes linked to future political participation (following of politics, political knowledge, and political efficacy). The results indicate that class d…
Conspiratorial thinking, selective exposure to conservative media, and response to Covid-19 in the US
Building Social Capital in Young People: The Role of Mass Media and Life Outlook
In this study we evaluate different models of media use to determine whether television and other popular media facilitate or hinder the development of social capital in young people. We surveyed a nationally representative sample of 14- to 22-year olds (N = 1,800) to assess the media–social capital relationship controlling for pessimistic life outlook. Consistent with CitationBeck's (1967) theory of depression, we hypothesized that young people …
Talking” computers: A reliable and private method to conduct interviews on sensitive topics with children
To obtain valid results, interviews on sex‐related topics not only require confidentiality but also privacy. However, the typical solutions to this problem, self‐administered questionnaires or telephone interviews, may not be appropriate for pre‐ and early adolescents who may require face‐to‐face (FTF) interviews. In this research, we tested the hypothesis that interviews delivered by talking computers would elicit more reports of sexual experien…
Investigating harmful and helpful effects of watching season 2 of 13 Reasons Why: Results of a two-wave U.S. panel survey
The Protective Effects of Parental Monitoring and Internet Restriction on Adolescents’ Risk of Online Harassment
Early adolescent sexual debut: The mediating role of working memory ability, sensation seeking, and impulsivity
Although deficits in working memory ability have been implicated in suboptimal decision making and risk taking among adolescents, its influence on early sexual initiation has so far not been examined. Analyzing 2 waves of panel data from a community sample of adolescents (N = 347; Mean age[baseline] = 13.4 years), assessed 1 year apart, the present study tested the hypothesis that weak working memory ability predicts early sexual initiation and e…
Media Contagion and Suicide Among the Young
Research continues to demonstrate that vulnerable youth are susceptible to the influence of reports and portrayals of suicide in the mass media. The evidence is stronger for the influence of reports in the news media than in fictional formats. However, several studies have found dramatic effects of televised portrayals that have led to increased rates of suicide and suicide attempts using the same methods displayed in the shows. Recent content an…
Effects of exposure to self-harm on social media: Evidence from a two-wave panel study among young adults
Suicide is a leading cause of death among youth, and media depictions of suicidal behavior can be a contributing risk factor. Of interest, Instagram recently received more scholarly attention due to its large number of publicly available, explicit, and graphic depictions of self-harm. Importantly, researchers have hypothesized that exposure to this content could be a risk for self-harm and suicide in vulnerable audiences. We tested this hypothesi…
Mass Media as an HIV-Prevention Strategy: Using Culturally Sensitive Messages to Reduce HIV-Associated Sexual Behavior of At-Risk African American Youth
The evidence base and theoretical frameworks for mass media HIV-prevention campaigns in the United States are not well-developed. We describe an intervention approach using culturally sensitive mass media messages to enhance protective beliefs and behavior of African American adolescents at risk for HIV. This approach exploits the potential that mass media messages have, not only to reach a large segment of the adolescent population and thereby s…
A person–situation approach to altruistic behavior
As originally proposed by Ribal (1963), the strengths of two interpersonal motives, nurturance and succorance, define four ideal types of orientation toward giving and receiving help. Altruistic and receptive-giving people are nurturant toward others, but receptive givers also want others to be succ
Distraction, counterarguing and the internalization of attitude change
The hypothesis that distraction during a persuasive communication enhances the resulting attitude change by disrupting counterarguing was critically examined. Although previous research using Brock's postcommunication counterarguing index has shown that distraction inhibits counterarguing, the relationship was re‐evaluated in the present experiments with a more direct measure of counterarguing. In these experiments, the direct measure of countera…
Modeling Trajectories of Sensation Seeking and Impulsivity Dimensions from Early to Late Adolescence: Universal Trends or Distinct Sub-groups
The Responsible Reporting of Suicide in Print Journalism
Prominently placed press reports of suicide have the ability to produce imitation among vulnerable individuals. This led to the release of consensus recommendations supporting the responsible news reporting of suicide in August 2001. This article summarizes research supporting the recommendations and indicates ways that reporters can cover suicide without encouraging imitation. Content analysis of the New York Times for 1990, 1995, and 1999 indic…
Dependency and fault as determinants of helping
Student Drug Testing in the Context of Positive and Negative School Climates: Results from a National Survey
Drug Trafficking and Drug Use among Urban African American Early Adolescents
The relation between drug trafficking (selling and delivering) and drug use among young adolescents has remained poorly characterized to date. In the current study, the associations between drug trafficking, cigarettes and/or alcohol use, and illicit drug use have been explored in three different areas—self-reported behaviors, personal feelings, and perception of friends' involvement—based on a sample of 455 African American youths 9 through 15 y…
Blame Discourse versus Realistic Conflict as Explanations of Ethnic Tension in Urban Neighborhoods
Urban neighborhoods are major sites of ethnic tension in the United States. One explanation (realistic conflict) attributes this tension to competing interests among ethnic groups that create neighborhood social problems, while another (blame discourse) attributes it to discursive practices that transform otherwise negotiable differences into ethnic conflict. Analysis of interviews with 517 residents of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (ages 16- 65 yea…
Personality traits: Fact or fiction? A critique of the Shweder and D'Andrade systematic distortion hypothesis
According to Shweder and D'Andrade (1979, 1980), covariation in memory-based ratings of people's behavior is determined more by semantic relations between behavior categories than by actual co-occurrence. They claim therefore that the existence of personality traits is largely a fiction supported by our conceptions rather than by reality. Contrary to this hypothesis, we argue that semantics are logically implicated in both the observation and rec…
Dependency and fault as determinants of helping
Affiliation and Attraction in Field Settings
Internalization versus identification in the laboratory: A causal analysis of attitude change
Two possible mediators of attitude change, internalization and identification, were investigated in a laboratory setting. Internalization was assumed to underlie change when respondents are attracted to others who hold the same opinion and can argue in favor of their attitude position; identification was assumed to mediate change when respondents are attracted to similar others but cannot necessarily support their position. A causal analysis base…
Distraction, counterarguing and the internalization of attitude change
The hypothesis that distraction during a persuasive communication enhances the resulting attitude change by disrupting counterarguing was critically examined. Although previous research using Brock's postcommunication counterarguing index has shown that distraction inhibits counterarguing, the relationship was re‐evaluated in the present experiments with a more direct measure of counterarguing. In these experiments, the direct measure of countera…
A person-situation causal analysis of self-reports of attitudes
Group cohesiveness, social norms, and bystander intervention.
Previous research suggests that the larger a group of bystanders is, the less likely any one bystander is to offer a victim help in an emergency. Nearly all of this research has been conducted with unacquainted bystanders, and thus, an im-portant group characteristic, cohesiveness, may have been held at a low level. Study 1 found support for the hypothesis that group size inhibits helping in low-cohesive groups but facilitates helping in high-coh…
Effects of own attitude on polarization of judgment
Personality traits: Fact or fiction? A critique of the Shweder and D'Andrade systematic distortion hypothesis
According to Shweder and D'Andrade (1979, 1980), covariation in memory-based ratings of people's behavior is determined more by semantic relations between behavior categories than by actual co-occurrence. They claim therefore that the existence of personality traits is largely a fiction supported by our conceptions rather than by reality. Contrary to this hypothesis, we argue that semantics are logically implicated in both the observation and rec…
A person-situation approach to altruistic behavior
A person–situation approach to altruistic behavior
As originally proposed by Ribal (1963), the strengths of two interpersonal motives, nurturance and succorance, define four ideal types of orientation toward giving and receiving help. Altruistic and receptive-giving people are nurturant toward others, but receptive givers also want others to be succ
Using Drama to Persuade
Television ads can be classified as either arguments or dramas or hybrids of these forms. We claim that form dimension influences how ads are processed. An argument backs its claims with appeals to objectivity and is processed evaluatively. A drama appeals more to subjective criteria and is processed empathically. A study is reported in which 40 television commercials were classified on a dramatization scale. They were shown to 1,215 people, and …
HIV education for youth: The importance of social consensus in behaviour change
Most theories of health education focus on change in the knowledge, beliefs, and skills of individuals as causes of behaviour change. We argue that this neglects the important contribution of the social environment in supporting healthier behaviour, and we describe a model of social consensus that allows alternative routes for educational influence at both individual and social levels. This model assumes that basic knowledge and skills for avoidi…
A Contribution to the Empirics of Economic Growth
This paper examines whether the Solow growth model is consistent with the international variation in the standard of living. It shows that an augmented Solow model that includes accumulation of human as well as physical capital provides an excellent description of the cross-country data. The paper also examines the implications of the Solow model for convergence in standards of living, that is, for whether poor countries tend to grow faster than …
Openness and Inflation: Theory and Evidence
Because unanticipated monetary expansion leads to real exchange rate depreciation, and because the harms of real depreciation are greater in more open economies, the benefits of unanticipated expansion are decreasing in the degree of openness. Models in which the absence of precommitment in monetary policy leads to excessive inflation therefore predict lower average inflation in more open economies. This paper tests this prediction using cross-co…
Drug Trafficking and Drug Use among Urban African American Early Adolescents
The relation between drug trafficking (selling and delivering) and drug use among young adolescents has remained poorly characterized to date. In the current study, the associations between drug trafficking, cigarettes and/or alcohol use, and illicit drug use have been explored in three different areas—self-reported behaviors, personal feelings, and perception of friends' involvement—based on a sample of 455 African American youths 9 through 15 y…
Social influences on the sexual behavior of youth at risk for HIV exposure
OBJECTIVES. Adolescents are increasingly at risk for infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and other sexually transmitted diseases, especially in poor urban minority communities. To aid the design of interventions in these communities, this study investigated the role of knowledge, attitudes, perceived parental monitoring, and peer behavior in the onset and progression of sexual behavior in children at risk for exposure to HIV. METHOD…
Talking” computers: A reliable and private method to conduct interviews on sensitive topics with children
To obtain valid results, interviews on sex‐related topics not only require confidentiality but also privacy. However, the typical solutions to this problem, self‐administered questionnaires or telephone interviews, may not be appropriate for pre‐ and early adolescents who may require face‐to‐face (FTF) interviews. In this research, we tested the hypothesis that interviews delivered by talking computers would elicit more reports of sexual experien…
Blame Discourse versus Realistic Conflict as Explanations of Ethnic Tension in Urban Neighborhoods
Urban neighborhoods are major sites of ethnic tension in the United States. One explanation (realistic conflict) attributes this tension to competing interests among ethnic groups that create neighborhood social problems, while another (blame discourse) attributes it to discursive practices that transform otherwise negotiable differences into ethnic conflict. Analysis of interviews with 517 residents of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (ages 16- 65 yea…
The Treatment of Persons of Color in Local Television News: Ethnic Blame Discourse or Realistic Group Conflict?
Blaming outgroups for social problems is a common discursive practice. However, it is not clear whether this discourse represents ethnocentric bias or realistic group conflict. To compare these explanations, the authors studied 14 weeks of local television news on three stations in Philadelphia. The authors found that persons of color were heavily presented in stories about crime, and within those stories were more likely to be presented as perpe…
Early Sexual Initiation: The Role of Peer Norms
OBJECTIVE: To elucidate which components of peer norms influence the process of sexual initiation for young adolescents. Design. Prospective cohort study. Setting. Fourteen elementary and middle schools in an urban public school district. Participants. The 1389 sixth-grade students who completed the questionnaire at the beginning (time 1) and at the end (time 2) of the school year comprise the study sample. Mean age at time 1 was 11.7 years. RESU…
Reducing Adolescent Risk: Toward an Integrated Approach
Television News and the Cultivation of Fear of Crime
Why has the public persisted in believing that violent crime is a widespread national problem in the U.S. despite declining trends in crime and the fact that crime is concentrated in urban locations? Cultivation theory suggests that widespread fear of crime is fueled in part by heavy exposure to violent dramatic programming on prime-time television. Here we explore a related hypothesis: that fear of crime is in part a by-product of exposure to cr…
Media Contagion and Suicide Among the Young
Research continues to demonstrate that vulnerable youth are susceptible to the influence of reports and portrayals of suicide in the mass media. The evidence is stronger for the influence of reports in the news media than in fictional formats. However, several studies have found dramatic effects of televised portrayals that have led to increased rates of suicide and suicide attempts using the same methods displayed in the shows. Recent content an…
The Responsible Reporting of Suicide in Print Journalism
Prominently placed press reports of suicide have the ability to produce imitation among vulnerable individuals. This led to the release of consensus recommendations supporting the responsible news reporting of suicide in August 2001. This article summarizes research supporting the recommendations and indicates ways that reporters can cover suicide without encouraging imitation. Content analysis of the New York Times for 1990, 1995, and 1999 indic…
America's Youth and Community Engagement: How Use of Mass Media Is Related to Civic Activity and Political Awareness in 14- to 22-Year-Olds
This research examines the role of the mass media in young people's disengagement from politics. In a nationally representative telephone survey ( N = 1,501), young people (ages 14 to 22) reported their habits for 12 different uses of mass media as well as awareness of current national politics and time spent in civic activities. Following Putnam's hypothesis about the beneficial effects of civic ties on political involvement, the authors predict…
Psychology (64 works) · Social Psychology (44 works) · Medicine (35 works) · Social Psychology (25 works) · Political science (24 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Developmental psychology (19 works) · Environmental health (16 works) · Adolescent Sexual and Reproductive Health (14 works) · Clinical Psychology (14 works)