Ronald Kline
Biographic Data
| ID | 764056 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ronald Kline |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ronald |
| FAMILY NAME | Kline |
| SIGNATURE | KLINE R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Stony Brook University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1874-4975 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 144 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Deservingness heuristics drive redistributive choices, but weights on recipient effort vary
Building on the deservingness heuristic—evaluating recipients based on need and effort—from evolutionary psychology, we develop a simple model of altruism conditional on deservingness to explain individuals’ redistributive preferences. We test the model’s predictions using an incentivized experiment where participants could directly transfer their earned money to a recipient with varying levels of income and effort. When recipients’ effort is cle…
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine Publication Information
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine Publication Information
Who Do You Trust? Institutions That Constrain Leaders Help People Prevent Disaster
We are vulnerable to disasters, yet citizens hesitate to spend on disaster prevention. Is this because the problem is too complex? Or are citizens concerned political elites will behave poorly? Using an experimental economic game that simulates disaster, we tested whether people can understand when an institution incentivizes elites to exaggerate the cost of disaster prevention. Citizen players could contribute money to prevent disaster. Leader p…
Is a Rational Politics of Disaster Possible? Making Useful Decisions for Others in an Experimental Disaster Game
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine Publication Information
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine Publication Information
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine Publication Information
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine Publication Information
Anticipating moral hazard undermines climate mitigation in an experimental geoengineering game
Collective Risk and Distributional Equity in Climate Change Bargaining
International climate negotiations occur against the backdrop of increasing collective risk: the likelihood of catastrophic economic loss due to climate change will continue to increase unless and until global mitigation efforts are sufficient to prevent it. We introduce a novel alternating-offers bargaining model that incorporates this characteristic feature of climate change. We test the model using an incentivized experiment. We manipulate two…
Where mitigation and migration meet
How disunity matters to the history of cybernetics in the human sciences in the United States, 1940–80
Rather than assume a unitary cybernetics, I ask how its disunity mattered to the history of the human sciences in the United States from about 1940 to 1980. I compare the work of four prominent social scientists – Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, and Talcott Parsons – who created cybernetic models in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology with the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and relate their interpretations…
Unfair Rules for Unequal Pay: Wage Discrimination and Procedural Justice
Do people judge some forms of wage discrimination to be more unfair than others? We report an experiment in an online labor market in which participants were paid based on discriminatory rules. We test hypotheses about fairness based on procedural justice, divisiveness, and affective polarization between partisans. Workers transcribed text and then learned that they earned more or less money than other workers for doing the same job. We manipulat…
Loss-Framed Arguments Can Stifle Political Activism
Research commonly finds that citizens are loss averse: they dislike losses far more than similarly sized gains. One implication is that arguments for policy change framed in terms of losses to be avoided often have a larger impact on public opinion than arguments framed in terms of gains to be enjoyed. Although several scholars have observed this pattern with respect to public opinion, we know far less about the effect of loss- and gain-framed ar…
Personality and Prosocial Behavior: A Multilevel Meta-Analysis
We investigate the effect of personality on prosocial behavior in a Bayesian multilevel meta-analysis (MLMA) of 15 published, interdisciplinary experimental studies. With data from the 15 studies constituting nearly 2500 individual observations, we find that the Big Five traits of Agreeableness and Openness are significantly and positively associated with prosocial behavior, while none of the other three traits are. These results are robust to a …
Differentiated responsibilities and prosocial behaviour in climate change mitigation
The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age
Passing It Along: Experiments on Creating the Negative Externalities of Climate Change
Climate change is a global social dilemma. Mitigating it is partly a political problem created by inequitable distributions of the benefits of carbon emissions and the costs of climate change; that is, the people who benefit the most are not the same set of people who pay the most costs. Here we use an experimental economic approach to political science to study these inequities. In two experiments, we show that people willingly create climate pr…
Passive non-participation versus strategic defection in a collective risk social dilemma
Empirical evidence suggests that non-participation underlies a variety of social dilemmas. In collective risk social dilemmas (CRSD), non-participation is viewed as strategic defection—a selfish behavior that increases individual utility at the cost of the group. We conducted a hybrid laboratory-then-online experiment to examine if non-participation in a CRSD may be fundamentally different from the act of strategic defection. We confirmed that no…
Racial Salience, Viability, and the Wilder Effect: Evaluating Polling Accuracy for Black Candidates
This study assesses whether polling discrepancies for black candidates can be explained by an interaction of racial salience in an election and the candidate's electoral strength. We hypothesize that voters will have few nonracial justifications for their lack of support for a black candidate when race is a salient issue and the candidate is electorally viable. As a result, polls will experience more problems with socially desirable response bias…
Staff Listing
Staff Listing
Staff Listing
Supermajority voting, social indifference and status quo constraints
We develop several results related to equilibrium in sophisticated voting under an amendment agenda procedure and supermajoritarian voting rules. Contrary to the simple majority case, we demonstrate that attainable equilibria are a function of the location of the status quo ex ante as well as the tie-breaking rule in place. Most importantly, we demonstrate that the Banks set (the set of sophisticated voting outcomes) does not reduce to the core u…
Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States
L'automobile a certes transforme la societe rurale aux Etats-Unis, mais l'A. demontre egalement que les fermiers ont participe a la construction de l'automobile en soumettant des idees de modifications technologiques destinees a faciliter l'utilisation de l'automobile en milieu rural
The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age
Where are the Cyborgs in Cybernetics
Cyborgs — cybernetic organisms, hybrids of humans and machines — have pervaded everyday life, the military, popular culture, and the academic world since the advent of cyborg studies in the mid 1980s. They have been a recurrent theme in STS in recent decades, but there are surprisingly few cyborgs referred to in the early history of cybernetics in the USA and Britain. In this paper, I analyze the work of the early cyberneticians who researched an…
Passing It Along: Experiments on Creating the Negative Externalities of Climate Change
Climate change is a global social dilemma. Mitigating it is partly a political problem created by inequitable distributions of the benefits of carbon emissions and the costs of climate change; that is, the people who benefit the most are not the same set of people who pay the most costs. Here we use an experimental economic approach to political science to study these inequities. In two experiments, we show that people willingly create climate pr…
Personality and Prosocial Behavior: A Multilevel Meta-Analysis
We investigate the effect of personality on prosocial behavior in a Bayesian multilevel meta-analysis (MLMA) of 15 published, interdisciplinary experimental studies. With data from the 15 studies constituting nearly 2500 individual observations, we find that the Big Five traits of Agreeableness and Openness are significantly and positively associated with prosocial behavior, while none of the other three traits are. These results are robust to a …
Evaluating the Impact of Vice Presidential Selection on Voter Choice
We update and extend work by Wattenberg and Grofman (1993) and Wattenberg (1995) on the consequences of vice presidential selection for voter choice in U.S. presidential elections by offering a simple quantitative model that allows us to measure both potential and actual effects of differences between vice presidential and presidential preferences. We model the impact of vice presidential selection as a weighted average of the differences in voti…
Engineering Practice and Engineering Ethics
Diane Vaughan's analysis of the causes of the Challenger accident suggests ways to apply science and technology studies to the teaching of engineering ethics. By sensitizing future engineers to the ongoing construction of risk during mundane engineering practice, we can better prepare them to address issues of public health, safety, and welfare before they require heroic intervention. Understanding the importance of precedents, incremental change…
How many political parties are there, really? A new measure of the ideologically cognizable number of parties/party groupings
We offer a new measure of the ideologically cognizable number of political parties/party groupings that is intended to be complementary to the standard approach to counting the effective number of political parties – the Laakso–Taagepera index (1979). This approach allows the possibility of precise measurement of concepts such as polarized pluralism or fragmented bipolarism and is applicable to both unidimensional and multidimensional representat…
I’m Not Voting for Her: Polling Discrepancies and Female Candidates
Although there is a large literature on the predictive accuracy of pre-election polls, there is virtually no systematic research examining the role that a candidate's gender plays in polling accuracy. This is a surprising omission given the precipitous growth of female candidates in recent years. Looking at Senate and Gubernatorial candidates from 1989 to 2008 (more than 200 elections in over 40 states), we analyze the accuracy of pre-election po…
Who Do You Trust? Institutions That Constrain Leaders Help People Prevent Disaster
We are vulnerable to disasters, yet citizens hesitate to spend on disaster prevention. Is this because the problem is too complex? Or are citizens concerned political elites will behave poorly? Using an experimental economic game that simulates disaster, we tested whether people can understand when an institution incentivizes elites to exaggerate the cost of disaster prevention. Citizen players could contribute money to prevent disaster. Leader p…
How we count counts: The empirical effects of using coalitional potential to measure the effective number of parties
Is a Rational Politics of Disaster Possible? Making Useful Decisions for Others in an Experimental Disaster Game
Differentiated responsibilities and prosocial behaviour in climate change mitigation
Unfair Rules for Unequal Pay: Wage Discrimination and Procedural Justice
Do people judge some forms of wage discrimination to be more unfair than others? We report an experiment in an online labor market in which participants were paid based on discriminatory rules. We test hypotheses about fairness based on procedural justice, divisiveness, and affective polarization between partisans. Workers transcribed text and then learned that they earned more or less money than other workers for doing the same job. We manipulat…
Loss-Framed Arguments Can Stifle Political Activism
Research commonly finds that citizens are loss averse: they dislike losses far more than similarly sized gains. One implication is that arguments for policy change framed in terms of losses to be avoided often have a larger impact on public opinion than arguments framed in terms of gains to be enjoyed. Although several scholars have observed this pattern with respect to public opinion, we know far less about the effect of loss- and gain-framed ar…
Passive non-participation versus strategic defection in a collective risk social dilemma
Empirical evidence suggests that non-participation underlies a variety of social dilemmas. In collective risk social dilemmas (CRSD), non-participation is viewed as strategic defection—a selfish behavior that increases individual utility at the cost of the group. We conducted a hybrid laboratory-then-online experiment to examine if non-participation in a CRSD may be fundamentally different from the act of strategic defection. We confirmed that no…
Racial Salience, Viability, and the Wilder Effect: Evaluating Polling Accuracy for Black Candidates
This study assesses whether polling discrepancies for black candidates can be explained by an interaction of racial salience in an election and the candidate's electoral strength. We hypothesize that voters will have few nonracial justifications for their lack of support for a black candidate when race is a salient issue and the candidate is electorally viable. As a result, polls will experience more problems with socially desirable response bias…
Science and Engineering Theory in the Invention and Development of the Induction Motor, 1880-1900
In 1918, Michael Pupin, professor of electromechanics at Columbia University, criticized leading electrical engineers for departing from Maxwell in their theories of the induction motor. Pupin declared that the attempts of ordinary mortals to do better than Maxwell did must be discouraged. Let us follow Maxwell as long as we can, then when someone is born who is more profound than Maxwell, we will bow to him.' Pupin directed his sarcasm at engine…
Collective Risk and Distributional Equity in Climate Change Bargaining
International climate negotiations occur against the backdrop of increasing collective risk: the likelihood of catastrophic economic loss due to climate change will continue to increase unless and until global mitigation efforts are sufficient to prevent it. We introduce a novel alternating-offers bargaining model that incorporates this characteristic feature of climate change. We test the model using an incentivized experiment. We manipulate two…
How disunity matters to the history of cybernetics in the human sciences in the United States, 1940–80
Rather than assume a unitary cybernetics, I ask how its disunity mattered to the history of the human sciences in the United States from about 1940 to 1980. I compare the work of four prominent social scientists – Herbert Simon, George Miller, Karl Deutsch, and Talcott Parsons – who created cybernetic models in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology with the work of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and relate their interpretations…
Electricity and Socialism: The Career of Charles P. Steinmetz
Science and Engineering Theory in the Invention and Development of the Induction Motor, 1880-1900
In 1918, Michael Pupin, professor of electromechanics at Columbia University, criticized leading electrical engineers for departing from Maxwell in their theories of the induction motor. Pupin declared that the attempts of ordinary mortals to do better than Maxwell did must be discouraged. Let us follow Maxwell as long as we can, then when someone is born who is more profound than Maxwell, we will bow to him.' Pupin directed his sarcasm at engine…
The History of Television, 1880 to 1941 . Albert Abramson
Thomas A. Edison Papers: A Selective Microfilm Edition. Part I: 1850-1878
Journal Article Thomas A. Edison Papers: A Selective Microfilm Edition. Part I: 1850–1878. 28 reels with printed guide. 35 mm microfilm. $2,135. (Bethesda, Md.: University Publications of America, 1985.) Part II: 1879–1886. 69 reels with printed guide. 35 mm microfilm. $5,265. (Bethesda, Md.: University Publications of America, 1987.) Get access Ronald Kline Ronald Kline Cornell University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic…
Power and the Land
Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of Technology in America . Howard P. Segal
Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963. Katherine Jellison
The Papers of Thomas A. Edison. Volume 3: Menlo Park: The Early Years, April 1876-December 1877 . Thomas A. Edison , Robert A. Rosenberg , Paul B. Israel , Keith A. Nier , Martha J. King
Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States
L'automobile a certes transforme la societe rurale aux Etats-Unis, mais l'A. demontre egalement que les fermiers ont participe a la construction de l'automobile en soumettant des idees de modifications technologiques destinees a faciliter l'utilisation de l'automobile en milieu rural
The Creation of Scientific Effects: Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves by Jed Z. Buchwald
TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 971 and clean electric light made it possible to reduce the marked differ ences between a daytime world and a nighttime world, where light and darkness set boundaries for the things people could do. Electric light, arc light, was used in Sweden from 1876, and elec tricity became an important element in the modernization of the nation around the turn of the century. With the help of trademarks and advertisemen…
The Creation of Scientific Effects: Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves
Engineering Ethics: Balancing Cost, Schedule, and Risk--Lessons Learned from the Space Shuttle . Rosa Lynn B. Pinkus, Larry J. Shuman , Norman P. Hummon , Harvey Wolfe The Challenger Launch Decision: …
Engineering Practice and Engineering Ethics
Diane Vaughan's analysis of the causes of the Challenger accident suggests ways to apply science and technology studies to the teaching of engineering ethics. By sensitizing future engineers to the ongoing construction of risk during mundane engineering practice, we can better prepare them to address issues of public health, safety, and welfare before they require heroic intervention. Understanding the importance of precedents, incremental change…
The Papers of Thomas A. Edison: The Wizard of Menlo Park, 1878 . Thomas A. Edison , Paul B. Israel , Keith A. Nier , Louis Carlat
Power Loss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Electric Utility Industry . Richard F. Hirsh
Consumers in the Country: Technology and Social Change in Rural America (Revisiting Rural America)
"Consumers in the Country Ronald Kline, avoiding the trap of technological determinism, explores the changing relationships among the Country Life professionals, government agencies, sales people, and others who promoted these technologies and the farm families who largely succeeded in adapting the technologies to rural culture."--BOOK JACKET
Resisting Consumer Technology in Rural America: The Telephone and Electrification
Responses
Where are the Cyborgs in Cybernetics
Cyborgs — cybernetic organisms, hybrids of humans and machines — have pervaded everyday life, the military, popular culture, and the academic world since the advent of cyborg studies in the mid 1980s. They have been a recurrent theme in STS in recent decades, but there are surprisingly few cyborgs referred to in the early history of cybernetics in the USA and Britain. In this paper, I analyze the work of the early cyberneticians who researched an…
How we count counts: The empirical effects of using coalitional potential to measure the effective number of parties
Engineering Case Studies: Bridging Micro and Macro Ethics
The literature leaves little doubt that case studies were central to the new discipline of engineering ethics when it was established in the 1970s. Early conferences and sourcebooks focused on hypothetical scenarios, and many of the cases from that decade came to comprise a litany of disasters in engineering ethics. These cases include the DC10 crashes in Paris and Chicago, the Ford Pinto gas-tank fires, and the nuclear accident at Three Mile Isl…
Evaluating the Impact of Vice Presidential Selection on Voter Choice
We update and extend work by Wattenberg and Grofman (1993) and Wattenberg (1995) on the consequences of vice presidential selection for voter choice in U.S. presidential elections by offering a simple quantitative model that allows us to measure both potential and actual effects of differences between vice presidential and presidential preferences. We model the impact of vice presidential selection as a weighted average of the differences in voti…
I’m Not Voting for Her: Polling Discrepancies and Female Candidates
Although there is a large literature on the predictive accuracy of pre-election polls, there is virtually no systematic research examining the role that a candidate's gender plays in polling accuracy. This is a surprising omission given the precipitous growth of female candidates in recent years. Looking at Senate and Gubernatorial candidates from 1989 to 2008 (more than 200 elections in over 40 states), we analyze the accuracy of pre-election po…
How many political parties are there, really? A new measure of the ideologically cognizable number of parties/party groupings
We offer a new measure of the ideologically cognizable number of political parties/party groupings that is intended to be complementary to the standard approach to counting the effective number of political parties – the Laakso–Taagepera index (1979). This approach allows the possibility of precise measurement of concepts such as polarized pluralism or fragmented bipolarism and is applicable to both unidimensional and multidimensional representat…
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Political science (27 works) · Computer Science (24 works) · Engineering (19 works) · Economics (17 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Business (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (13 works) · Philosophy (12 works) · Psychology (12 works)