Damian J Ruck

Biographic Data

ID920707
NAMEDamian J Ruck
GIVEN NAMESDamian J
FAMILY NAMERuck
SIGNATURERUCK D J
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Tennessee at Knoxville
ORCID0000-0001-8678-8852
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS9
TOTAL CITATIONS7
AUTHOR COUNT9
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2019
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2023
H-INDEX2

  • Generational effects of culture and digital media in former Soviet Republics

    Open AccessBenjamin D Horne, Natalie M Rice et al.ARTICLEHumanities and Social Sciences…2023

    In public opinion, social and digital media provide means for influence as well as sorting according to pre-existing values. Here we consider types of media usage versus opinion using new polling results in the former Soviet republics (FSRs) of Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia. Over 1000 individuals in each country were asked about a news event (the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol) and about the long-term future of their country. We find that yea…

  • Monitoring event-driven dynamics on Twitter: A case study in Belarus

    Open AccessNatalie M Rice, Benjamin D Horne et al.ARTICLESN Social Sciences2022

    Analysts of social media differ in their emphasis on the effects of message content versus social network structure. The balance of these factors may change substantially across time. When a major event occurs, initial independent reactions may give way to more social diffusion of interpretations of the event among different communities, including those committed to disinformation. Here, we explore these dynamics through a case study analysis of …

  • Cultural values predict national Covid-19 death rates

    Open AccessDamian J Ruck, Joshua Borycz et al.ARTICLESN Social Sciences2021

    National responses to a pandemic require populations to comply through personal behaviors that occur in a cultural context. Here we show that aggregated cultural values of nations, derived from World Values Survey data, have been at least as important as top-down government actions in predicting the impact of COVID-19. At the population level, the cultural factor of cosmopolitanism, together with obesity, predict higher numbers of deaths in the f…

  • Early warning of vulnerable counties in a pandemic using socio-economic variables

    Open AccessDamian J Ruck, R A Bentley et al.ARTICLEEconomics & Human Biology2021

    In the U.S. in early 2020, heterogenous and incomplete county-scale data on COVID-19 hindered effective interventions in the pandemic. While numbers of deaths can be used to estimate actual number of infections after a time lag, counties with low death counts early on have considerable uncertainty about true numbers of cases in the future. Here we show that supplementing county-scale mortality statistics with socioeconomic data helps estimate tru…

  • Neutral models are a tool, not a syndrome

    Open AccessR A Bentley, Simon Carrignon et al.ARTICLENature Human Behaviour2021Cited by: 2References: 12

  • Women-Centered Rituals and Levels of Domestic Violence: A Cross-Cultural Examination of Ritual as a Signaling and Solidarity-Building Strategy

    Kate Stockly, Stephanie N Arel et al.ARTICLEJournal for the Study of Religion…2020References: 14

    Prior research indicates that ritual can be a source of social solidarity by signaling trustworthiness and group commitment. A separate line of research expects domestic violence against women to be more common in societies with post-marital residence at the husband’s birthplace (i.e. patrilocality). Thus, we hypothesized that when wives are able to construct strong bonds with the female members of their communities through solidarity-building ri…

  • U.S. obesity as delayed effect of excess sugar

    Open AccessR A Bentley, Damian J Ruck et al.ARTICLEEconomics & Human Biology2019

    In the last century, U.S. diets were transformed, including the addition of sugars to industrially-processed foods. While excess sugar has often been implicated in the dramatic increase in U.S. adult obesity over the past 30 years, an unexplained question is why the increase in obesity took place many years after the increases in U.S. sugar consumption. To address this, here we explain adult obesity increase as the cumulative effect of increased …

  • Internet Research Agency Twitter activity predicted 2016 U.S. election polls

    Open AccessDamian J Ruck, Natalie M Rice et al.ARTICLEFirst Monday2019

    In 2016, the Internet Research Agency (IRA) deployed thousands of Twitter bots that released hundreds of thousands of English language tweets. It has been hypothesized this affected public opinion during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Here we test that hypothesis using vector autoregression (VAR) comparing time series of election opinion polling during 2016 versus numbers of re-tweets or ‘likes’ of IRA tweets. We find that changes in opinio…

  • The cultural foundations of modern democracies

    Open AccessDamian J Ruck, Luke J Matthews et al.ARTICLENature Human Behaviour2019Cited by: 5References: 34