Viewpoint Diversity Research Articles

United for what and for whom? An analysis of White Christian nationalism in a 2023 school board election campaign

Public school board elections have become cultural battlegrounds as groups with opposing views on education, politics, religion, and social and cultural issues vie to shape public education, their communities, and the nation. To date, little research has examined White Christian nationalism as a political force shaping these elections. This paper analyzes the November 2023 State College Area School District (SCASD) school board election in a polarized Pennsylvania town, focusing on the five “United for SCASD” candidates. Using public data (e.g., Facebook, websites, radio interviews, emails from candidates to board and administrators), the paper examines how these candidates’ rhetoric – largely drawing on Civil Rights-era minoritarian framing – mobilized key White Christian nationalist tropes such as persectuion and voicelessness. The findings explore how candidates characterized desirable versus undesirable types of unity and diversity. For instance, they advocated for focusing on students’ “common humanity” and teaching American exceptionalism as unifying strategies, argued for “parents’ rights” to opt children out of objectionable material, and asserted the need for “viewpoint diversity” on the board. However, they opposed the board’s alleged ideological uniformity and “divisive” initiatives and curricula focusing on systemic inequities, especially concerning race/racism and gender. The data show some evidence of White Christian nationalist tropes, particularly beliefs in American exceptionalism, the trope of persecution and voicelessness, the assertion of a common cultural template for US public schools, and us-them binaries, in this case, between liberal board members and their constituents versus the U4SCASD slate and more "conservative," often rural, families.

Diverse news, diverse perceptions? Investigating the effects of actor and viewpoint diversity in news content on audience perceptions and opinions

Diverse news, diverse perceptions? Investigating the effects of actor and viewpoint diversity in news content on audience perceptions and opinions

Does News Diversity Work Among Audiences? A Citizen Experiment

ABSTRACT Scholarly and policy debates alike frequently highlight the normative value of news diversity as a necessary prerequisite for journalism to optimally fulfil its watchdog function in democratic societies. Various studies have sought to conceptualise news diversity and/or to operationalise it from the vantage point of journalists and newsrooms as news content producers. However, very little remains known about how news diversity is received and perceived by audiences. In this paper, we outline an audience experiment carried out among Flemish (Belgian) adult citizens (N = 208) to examine whether enhanced viewpoint diversity in news content affects its perceived diversity and credibility. Using news content focusing on one controversial and one more politically moderate topic to assess differences in the perception of news content diversity, we find that high viewpoint diversity is observed by audiences whereas low viewpoint diversity is not. Moreover, news articles with only one viewpoint that matched their own were perceived as more credible. We conclude that researchers and policymakers can only advance the ongoing important debate on news diversity if they choose to pay more attention to how audiences (don’t) engage with it.

Can We Teach the Intuitive Dog New Tricks? Reconciling Jonathan Haidt’s Viewpoint Diversity with His Moral Psychology

In recent years, many scholars drew attention to political polarization in academia and attempted to reduce it. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, suggests that his framework of “viewpoint diversity” can reduce polarization. However, this framework contradicts his earlier work, especially the “social intuitionist model.” On the one hand, he argues that reason is not crucial to changing someone’s mind. He uses the metaphor of a dog who makes intuitive decisions and wags its tail (reason) to communicate and justify them. On the other hand, he believes that scholars can change each other’s minds on political issues through reason. This paper seeks to reveal the tension between “viewpoint diversity” and the “social intuitionist model” and to reconcile it. In order to ground these frameworks into social psychological theories, this paper examines the social intuitionist model in relation to cognitive dissonance theory and suggests modifications to Haidt’s “viewpoint diversity” based on cognitive reappraisal.

Understanding Social Media Information Sharing in Individuals with Depression: Insights from the Elaboration Likelihood Model and Schema Activation Theory.

How individuals engage with social media can significantly impact their psychological well-being. This study examines the impact of social media interactions on mental health, grounded in the frameworks of the Elaboration Likelihood Model and Schema Activation Theory. It aims to uncover behavioral differences in information sharing between the general population and individuals with depression, while also elucidating the psychological mechanisms underlying these disparities. A pre-experiment (N=30) and three experiments (Experiment 1a N=200, Experiment 1b N=180, Experiment 2 N=128) were executed online. These experiments investigated the joint effects of information quality, content valence, self-referential processing, and depression level on the intention to share information. The research design incorporated within-subject and between-subject methods, utilizing SPSS and SPSS Process to conduct independent sample t-tests, two-factor ANOVA analyses, mediation analyses, and moderated mediation analyses to test our hypotheses. Information quality and content valence significantly influence sharing intention. In scenarios involving low-quality information, individuals with depression are more inclined to share negative emotional content compared to the general population, and this tendency intensifies with the severity of depression. Moreover, self-referential processing acts as a mediator between emotional content and intention to share, yet this mediation effect weakens as the severity of depression rises. Our study highlights the importance of promoting viewpoint diversity and breaking the echo chamber effect in social media to improve the mental health of individuals with depression. To achieve this goal, tailoring emotional content on social media could be a practical starting point for practice.

The Quality of COVID-19 Coverage: Investigating Relevance and Viewpoint Diversity in German Mainstream and Alternative Media

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic was a major challenge for journalism. In the case of Germany, critics very early on voiced concerns over the quality of mainstream media coverage. Mainstream media were attacked for the intensity of their coverage, for reporting too much and unnecessarily frightening audiences, for not presenting a diversity of viewpoints on the pandemic and the measures taken to mitigate it, and for being one-sided and too close to the government. Against this background, this paper examines the intensity and viewpoint diversity of the coverage of 13 mainstream and two alternative media in Germany in 2020 and 2021. Based on a comprehensive manual content analysis of almost 9000 news stories, we conclude that the mainstream media did not cover the pandemic in a fundamentally exaggerated or one-sided way. However, they did not always report intensively when the pandemic was particularly severe, and they tended to warn against the pandemic rather than criticize the measures taken. In contrast, alternative media coverage tended to be more one-sided and generally biased against government measures.

A Renaissance of Civic Education and Civic Engagement in Higher Education in the Spirit of the American Founders and Constitutionalism

A growing number of states have responded to negative trends in civic knowledge, trust, and engagement by creating new institutes or schools at state universities, with the express aim of reinvigorating civic education and thoughtful, engaged citizenship. In seeking to increase civic knowledge, champion viewpoint diversity, model civil discussion of ideas, combat polarization, and embrace the civic responsibilities of higher education, these institutes can be seen as carrying forward the American founders’ vision of civic education, the moral foundations of law and constitutionalism, and the constitutional principles of free speech and federalism.

Hierarchical alignment network for domain adaptive object detection in aerial images

Domain Adaptive Object Detection (DAOD) alleviates the reliance on labeled data by transferring knowledge learned from labeled source domain to unlabeled target domain. Recent DAOD methods is modeled mainly based on ground-level images. Compared to ground-level images, aerial images suffer from scale variation and viewpoint diversity. This means that domain adaptive object detection in aerial images is a more challenging task. In this work, we address the domain shift in aerial images from two levels: 1) image-level shifts, such as weather, lighting, viewpoint, etc., 2) instance-level shifts, such as object appearance, scale, etc. Specifically, multiple domain-confusion classifiers are designed to learn image-level common knowledge of the source and target domains. Different levels of domain classifiers are further assigned adaptive weights to coordinate the transferability and discriminability of the adaptive detectors. Meanwhile, instance-level alignment is realized by forcing the intrinsic relationship between classes in both domains to be consistent. In addition, we perform instance-level alignment in different semantic-level feature layers to improve the scale awareness of the adaptation model. Extensive experimental results on VisDrone, UAVDT, DIOR and DOTA datasets demonstrate that our method achieves optimal detection performance in four domain adaption scenarios compared to other state-of-the-art methods, e.g., in Daytime → Night (VisDrone), the mAP50 is 23.5 %; in VisDrone → UAVDT, DIOR → UAVDT and DOTA → VisDrone, the AP50 of the car is 63.1 %, 46.6 % and 44.8 % respectively. Code will be available online (https://github.com/MaYou1997/HANet).

Noticed and appreciated? The role of argument diversity in enhancing news credibility and reader satisfaction

Although viewpoint diversity is a key value for audiences, journalism and media policy, not much is known about how audiences process and evaluate it. This is critical because any positive effect we might expect from a broad range of views (e.g., on opinion formation) requires that recipients recognize and appreciate it as a part of news content. The current study examines how news readers process and evaluate argument diversity as a specific aspect of viewpoint diversity. In a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subject experiment, 1363 subjects were exposed to news reports containing a diverse or homogenous set of arguments in the context of two currently debated issues (artificial intelligence and immigration). Reports were either published by a single or multiple media outlets to determine potential differences between internal and external argument diversity. We find that readers not only recognize the presence of argument diversity, but that it leads to an increase in overall news satisfaction. This increase can be attributed to a higher credibility of news reports with diverse arguments.

Media Competition, Multimarket Contact, and Viewpoint Diversity

Media Competition, Multimarket Contact, and Viewpoint Diversity

Impacts of Viewpoint Diversity Law on Teaching and Learning in Florida’s State Universities

This study explores the impact of Florida House Bill 233 on teaching and learning in Florida’s State University System. This bill purports to promote intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity by permitting students to record classes and by creating a cause of action for faculty violating these principles. Faculty were invited to share qualitative feedback about the specific impacts of the two provisions. The vast majority of faculty expressed negative views of these provisions, suggesting they would inhibit intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity by deterring student participation in classes, discouraging faculty from engaging students in discussions of certain topics, and creating an atmosphere of mistrust between faculty and students. Faculty with positive views of the recording provision suggested that these provisions promote intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity by discouraging faculty from imposing their views and giving students a remedy if they feel that faculty are violating their rights.

Political Viewpoint Diversity in the News: Market and Ownership Conditions for a Pluralistic Media System

The assumption that ownership has an effect on the diversity of news is based on the forms of control that ownership allows and the market conditions in which ownership is exercised. In this study, we perform a large-scale analysis of the Swedish newspaper market, surveying 130 newspapers and parliamentary speeches over a period of six years (2014–2019), to substantiate to what extent market and for-profit ownership forms impact political viewpoint diversity. Our analysis shows that newspapers with market leadership and chain ownership offer more political viewpoint diversity than number two and single-owned papers. In contrast, the ownership forms surveyed here (private, foundation, and publicly traded ownerships) display little effect on newspapers’ internal diversity. We also find that a greater number of papers in a local market does not imply more external diversity in that market. The analysis thus offers some nuance to the notion that ownership form and market pluralism are prerequisites for viewpoint diversity, highlighting instead the importance of scale effects for pluralistic media systems.

Viewpoint diversity in public health.

Schools of public health are often situated within universities but not infrequently also function as public health advocacy organizations. Viewpoint diversity on many issues is often limited within schools of public health and does not reflect the diversity one finds in society more generally. It is argued that welcoming, and even seeking out, viewpoint diversity within public health would contribute to understanding and knowledge, to the training public health leaders and academics who can serve the whole of society, and to working together across ideological lines to better contribute to population health.

Higher education as the frontline of democracy: The case against Florida House Bill 233, the anti-shielding/intellectual viewpoint diversity/student recording legislative act

In 2021, the Florida Legislature passed House Bill 233. The bill has three provisions: 1) it mandates an “intellectual viewpoint diversity” survey that asks students, faculty, and other employees at Florida’s public colleges and universities to report on their levels of comfort to express their ideological and political opinions; 2) it forbids instructors from “shielding” students from “access to, or observation of, ideas and opinions that they may find uncomfortable, unwelcome, disagreeable, or offensive”; 3) it deputizes students as vigilantes to record instructor lectures without the instructor’s consent “as evidence in, or in preparation for, a criminal or civil proceeding.” By narrating my involvement as a plaintiff in litigation against this bill, I discuss how the protections of intellectual inquiry are being struggled over in the context of state overreach and growing authoritarianism and how this threatens the roots of democratic culture.

Developing participant intellectual humility through technology delivered instruction – A proposed model

In this paper, we propose an intervention model as a pedagogical tool to develop intellectual humility through the lens of Karl Weick's (1995) sensemaking paradigm. We discuss the digital learning program Perspectives™ as an intervention method for instructional delivery. The purpose of our proposed model is to increase participant engagement and learning in becoming tolerant to viewpoint diversity and open inquiry, the hallmark of a liberal education. The model will serve as a key step in future research underpinning the promotion of cultural diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom. Beyond the theoretical contributions, this research also provides a methodological contribution by pairing the model with the use of a technology delivered instructional tool.

The moral economy of diversity: How the epistemic value of diversity transforms late modern knowledge cultures

We may well be witnessing a decisive event in the history of knowledge as diversity is becoming one of the premier values of late modern societies. We seek to preserve and foster biodiversity, neurodiversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity, gender diversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, and perspectival diversity. Perspectival diversity has become the passage point through which other forms of diversity must pass to become epistemically consequential. This article examines how two of its varieties, viewpoint diversity and educational diversity, have come to transform the moral economy of science. Both aim at multiplying perspectives on a given subject, but their political subtexts differ markedly. The valorization of educational diversity followed a US Supreme Court decision in 1978 that enabled universities to advance social justice, if they justified race-conscious admissions in terms of the pedagogic benefits of a more diverse student body for all. By contrast, the proponents of viewpoint diversity aim at the reform of scientific knowledge production and distribution rather than the reallocation of status and power among different social groups. We examine the political epistemology of viewpoint diversity by analyzing a controversy between social psychologists who, amid the American culture wars of the 2010s, debated how to rein in their political biases in a scientific field supposedly lacking political diversity. Out of this scientific controversy grew Heterodox Academy, an activist organization promoting viewpoint diversity in higher education. By relating and comparing viewpoint and educational diversity, we clarify what is at stake epistemically in the US-centric moral economy of diversity.

Strengthen Academic Pharmacy by Protecting Self-Expression

Pharmacy, including academic pharmacy, is affected by several important issues. Additionally, we deal with these issues in a society that is increasingly polarized in beliefs and siloed in interactions. Within this important juncture, pharmacy faculty may be prone to employ restrictions on freedom of expression, particularly around viewpoints they do not endorse. This tendency will likely have unintended effects and inhibit the ability of the profession to find solutions to its current challenges. We implore the Academy to actively work to increase viewpoint diversity, open inquiry, and academic freedom.

The case for robust academic research on corporate governance

Corporate Governance: An International ReviewVolume 31, Issue 3 p. 400-404 EDITORIAL The case for robust academic research on corporate governance Konstantinos Stathopoulos, Corresponding Author Konstantinos Stathopoulos [email protected] The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Correspondence Konstantinos Stathopoulos, The University of Manchester, Booth Street West, Manchester M15 6PB, UK. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorTill Talaulicar, Till Talaulicar University of Erfurt, Erfurt, GermanySearch for more papers by this author Konstantinos Stathopoulos, Corresponding Author Konstantinos Stathopoulos [email protected] The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK Correspondence Konstantinos Stathopoulos, The University of Manchester, Booth Street West, Manchester M15 6PB, UK. Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorTill Talaulicar, Till Talaulicar University of Erfurt, Erfurt, GermanySearch for more papers by this author First published: 07 May 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12531Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL REFERENCES Bhagat, S., & Hubbard, G. (2022). Rule of law and purpose of the corporation. Corporate Governance: An International Review, 30(1), 10– 26. https://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12374 Castañer, X., Goranova, M., Hermes, N., Kavadis, N., & Zattoni, A. (2022). Ownership and corporate governance across institutional contexts. Corporate Governance: An International Review, 30(6), 638– 655. https://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12491 Chen, V. Z., Hobdari, B., Kellermanns, F., & Sluhan, A. (2022). For love or money? Family versus financial blockholders in international acquisitions. Corporate Governance: An International Review, 30(2), 140– 160. https://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12392 Chen, X., Torsin, W., & Tsang, A. (2022). International differences in the CEO gender pay gap. Corporate Governance: An International Review, 30(5), 516– 541. https://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12421 Hudson, K., & Morgan, R. (2022). Ideological homophily in board composition and interlock networks: Do liberal directors inhibit viewpoint diversity? Corporate Governance: An International Review, 30(3), 272– 289. https://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12406 Ponomareva, Y., Federo, R., Aguilera, R., & Collin, S.-O. (2022). The cost of conformity to good governance: Board design and compensation. Corporate Governance: An International Review, 30(4), 399– 420. https://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12408 Volume31, Issue3May 2023Pages 400-404 ReferencesRelatedInformation

Perceived impacts of a viewpoint diversity law in Florida’s State Universities

ABSTRACT Intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity are hotly debated topics in academia, marked by an increase in legislation focusing on intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity within academic settings. This study explores the impact of Florida House Bill 233 on public universities, including academics’ morale. House Bill 233 purports to support intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity through four components: prohibiting shielding of students, staff, and academics from certain speech; requiring an annual assessment on intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity; creating a cause of action for certain video- or audio-recordings; and revising provisions related to protected expressive activity, university student governments, and codes of conduct. This study sampled 187 academics from four state universities. Findings indicate that while academics support intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity conceptually, most academics suggested the bill has negative impacts on intellectual freedom and viewpoint diversity and faculty morale. Implications for future research and policy development are discussed.

The Integration of Psychology & Christianity: A Domain-Based Approach

The Integration of Psychology & Christianity: A Domain-Based Approach