Viewpoint Diversity Research Articles

God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success by Ilana M. Horowitz

Reviewed by: God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success by Ilana M. Horowitz Robert Benne God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion's Surprising Impact on Academic Success. By Ilana M. Horowitz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 240 pp. The author, Ilana Horowitz, has as interesting a history as the subject matter of her book. She was born in the Soviet Union of non-religious Jewish parents who had to hide whatever Jewish rituals they had left. After immigrating to the United States she went to non-religious Jewish schools and continued her agnosticism. She entered an elite university, Stanford, and earned a Ph.D. in sociology. It was a great surprise to her to live in a neighborhood where many Christian families were devoutly religious. She began wondering how their religious intensity affected the educational outcomes of their children. Finding little research on that subject, she plunged into extensive empirical research and produced this book. [End Page 112] Her research shows that an "upbringing of religious restraint" leads to better educational outcomes for young people. By "religious restraint" she means that such young people are taught to be disciplined, respectful of elders and teachers, and devoted "to live a life that is pleasing to God" (15–17). They have higher grades and rates of graduation than similar young people who are not seriously religious. This difference is particularly true of working- and middle-class youngsters. There is not such a large difference between religious and secular children of highly educated upper-middle and higher-class parents. While the religiously intense young tend to do better with regard to grades and graduation in the lower grades and high school, they do not aim at elite education beyond high school. They do not aspire to go to the top schools. On the surface, this seems odd, but there are interesting reasons why the religious do not aim for the highest ranked schools. First, they do not pursue elite levels because that has little to do with living a life pleasing to God. They think they can get as well prepared for their vocations in nearby schools that are not so highly ranked. Second, as elite colleges exhibit more "wokeness," the religious young—reinforced by their parents—shy away from them. The author thinks this is a shame because such students would add religious and viewpoint diversity to those elite schools (177). Another interesting finding is that "abiders"—another word she uses for the seriously religious—tend to make less money than their secular counterparts. One reason is that they want more time with their families than high octane work allows. Another is that they like to live in areas that are more religious rather than the highly secular environs of large cities where more money can be made (179). There are other goods associated with the religiously intense. "They are significantly less likely to experience emotional, cognitive, or physical despair. They feel less anxious, healthier, and more optimistic about life" (179). They are content with social order, including traditional gender norms (181). The author even suggests that the decline of religion among young people is less than fearful Christians believe (11). Perhaps most encouraging to religious adults is that these young people take their Christianity into their public, secular lives (173). [End Page 113] All and all, this book offers some hope to Christians in a world that seems to be becoming more hostile to religion, especially orthodox religion. I found it very encouraging. While the book is very comprehensive, there is one gap that I wish she would have covered. How many serious young Christians are now home-schooled or go to Christian schools? There seems to be an ever greater number taking those routes, partly because their families believe that public schools are increasingly under the sway of anti-Christian ideologies. The author seems oblivious to those developments. Nevertheless, this is a very substantial book that should bring some satisfaction to Christians who worry about the decline of Christian faith and life in the next generations. Robert Benne Institute of Lutheran Theology Brookings, South Dakota Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Viewpoint Diversity at UNC Charlotte

Abstract Introduction: A number of recent surveys have shown that college campuses are becoming intolerant of different viewpoints. Part of the mission of any college should be to create a space where different viewpoints can be debated in a healthy, intellectual way. To gauge the campus climate at their own University, the authors deployed a survey to business students asking how comfortable they were sharing and responding to different viewpoints. Methods: Business students were surveyed for their attitudes towards diverse viewpoints. The survey instrument has been used at other colleges to survey students for several years. Results: A portion of students are censoring their views on controversial topics. There is often a reluctance to present honest viewpoints in the classroom. Discussion: Faculty needs to be mindful of the classroom environment they create. Colleges should be a major place where different viewpoints are discussed and debated. Limitations: Only business students were surveyed. There may be different outcomes for students in other majors. Conclusions: These results suggest that many students are self-censoring their views in class. Faculty should be aware of this and create an environment where different viewpoints are welcome.

The Representation of Public Opinion in Routine U.S. Network News

ABSTRACT Against a backdrop of increasing opinion polarization and distrust in mainstream news media, we investigate when and how U.S. evening newscasts represent citizen opinions. This paper focuses on the different public opinion displays presented in the news and the viewpoints they portray. Using a content analysis of 1,577 items from CBS, ABC, and NBC evening news, we find that public opinion is represented relatively more often in foreign and political news. Broad inferences to public opinion are most common in news coverage, followed by protests and vox pops. Lastly, we find that public opinion representation does not present notable viewpoint diversity.

The role of affective and cognitive attitude extremity in perceived viewpoint diversity exposure

The current study examines the role of affective and cognitive attitude extremity on perceived exposure to diverse political viewpoints and investigates the possibility of a “primacy of affect.” Based on a multi-level analysis of panel survey data, we show that people with extreme attitudes toward immigrants experience less viewpoint diversity and that this tendency is especially pronounced for affective attitude extremity. However, even those holding extreme attitudes do not find themselves in issue-specific echo chambers, that is, they still encounter relatively diverse sets of viewpoints.

Figleaves Right and Left: A Case-Study of Viewpoint Diversity Applied to the Philosophy of Language

This paper investigates a linguistic device that was only recently proposed, the figleaf, whose function is to prevent a bigoted statement from being interpreted as bigoted. Previous research on figleaves focused on examples of speech by conservative politicians, commentators, and their supporters. My main contributions here are coverage of figleaves across a wider range of the political spectrum and an enhanced taxonomy of figleaves, which can sharpen our theoretical understanding of the psychological and social mechanisms that facilitate bigoted speech. In light of important recent developments in the social and psychological sciences, this paper also illustrates some benefits of incorporating viewpoint diversity into philosophical research on controversial social and political topics.

Google News and Machine Gatekeepers: Algorithmic Personalisation and News Diversity in Online News Search

Through a mixed methods research design, we address normative aspects of news recommendation engines by examining whether search personalisation and news diversity are evident on Google News in the UK. First, in a quasi-experimental design, we asked a diverse set of participants (N = 78) to search Google News using four search terms and report the first five articles recommended for each term. We found little evidence of news personalisation, which challenges the claim that news search algorithms contribute to weakened viewpoint diversity. We also found a high degree of homogeneity in news search results, with legacy media brands dominating. Second, we conducted a manual content analysis of the articles recommended by Google News for our search terms (N = 192), focusing on favourability towards each term. We found that while there was little relationship between the favourability slant of the articles and political leanings of participants, there were two exceptions: self-identified right-wing participants were more likely to see unfavourable stories about 1) immigration, and 2) a left-wing politician. This reopens the question of news search engines’ contributions to polarisation and viewpoint diversity for certain news consumers.

The importance of viewpoint diversity among scientific team members. Comment on Clark et al.

The importance of viewpoint diversity among scientific team members. Comment on Clark et al.

Cross-Part Learning for Fine-Grained Image Classification.

Recent techniques have achieved remarkable improvements depended on mining subtle yet distinctive features for fine-grained visual classification (FGVC). While prior works directly combine discriminative features extracted from different parts, we argue that the potential interactions between different parts and their abilities to category predictions should be taken into consideration, which enables significant parts to contribute more to the decision of the sub-category. To this end, we present a Cross-Part Convolutional Neural Network (CP-CNN) in a weakly supervised manner to explore cross-learning among multi-regional features. Specifically, the context transformer is implemented to encourage joint feature learning across different parts under the guidance of a navigator. The part with the highest confidence is regarded as a navigator to deliver distinguishing characteristics to the others with lower confidence while the complementary information is retained. To locate discriminative but subtle parts precisely, a part proposal generator (PPG) is designed with the feature enhancement blocks, through which complex scale variations caused by the viewpoint diversity can be effectively alleviated. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

LASOR: Learning Accurate 3D Human Pose and Shape via Synthetic Occlusion-Aware Data and Neural Mesh Rendering.

A key challenge in the task of human pose and shape estimation is occlusion, including self-occlusions, object-human occlusions, and inter-person occlusions. The lack of diverse and accurate pose and shape training data becomes a major bottleneck, especially for scenes with occlusions in the wild. In this paper, we focus on the estimation of human pose and shape in the case of inter-person occlusions, while also handling object-human occlusions and self-occlusion. We propose a novel framework that synthesizes occlusion-aware silhouette and 2D keypoints data and directly regress to the SMPL pose and shape parameters. A neural 3D mesh renderer is exploited to enable silhouette supervision on the fly, which contributes to great improvements in shape estimation. In addition, keypoints-and-silhouette-driven training data in panoramic viewpoints are synthesized to compensate for the lack of viewpoint diversity in any existing dataset. Experimental results show that we are among the state-of-the-art on the 3DPW and 3DPW-Crowd datasets in terms of pose estimation accuracy. The proposed method evidently outperforms Mesh Transformer, 3DCrowdNet and ROMP in terms of shape estimation. Top performance is also achieved on SSP-3D in terms of shape prediction accuracy. Demo and code will be available at https://igame-lab.github.io/LASOR/.

Does Diversity Hiring Decrease Ideological Diversity?

Christopher C. Hull asks if diversity-driven hiring is the cause of declining viewpoint diversity in higher education.

Ideological homophily in board composition and interlock networks: Do liberal directors inhibit viewpoint diversity?

AbstractResearch issueA consistent feature of social networks is homophily: the tendency for people to interact with similar others. Psychological and sociological research suggests that homophily is most pronounced along ideological lines, with conflicting evidence as to whether this tendency is higher among individuals who hold liberal or conservative beliefs. Based on this literature, we conduct the first study of ideological homophily in two key organizational networks: the intrafirm connections among directors on the board and the interfirm connections created by board interlocks.Research insightsIn a panel of 408 U.S. firms between 2000 and 2020, we find that liberalism increases homophily both within and between boards. Furthermore, we find that homophily has decreased over time but that this has been driven by conservative boards while the effect of liberalism has strengthened in recent years. These findings provide the first evidence for an ideological component in the composition of intra‐ and interorganizational networks.Academic implicationsMost research on director selection and interlock formation has focused on situational or demographic antecedents. Our findings contribute to the development of a broader theoretical framework that accounts for individual dispositional factors in these processes.Practitioner implicationsOur findings bring attention to the issue of ideological homogeneity in firms. Given the growth of homophilic tendencies among liberal directors in recent years, we suggest that it may be increasingly important for directors to become aware, and mitigate the effects, of their ideological biases in order to maintain cognitive diversity in information networks and decision making.

Impacts of Cross-Ownership Between Newspapers and Television on Viewpoint Diversity: Testing One-Owner-One-Voice Thesis

ABSTRACT The growing phenomenon of media cross-ownership and its impact on news content is receiving international attention. This study tests one-owner-one-voice thesis, which posits that a single owner represents a single voice regardless of how many media outlets the owner operates, in the context of South Korea. To do this, the current study analyzed 18,037 TV news reports and 1893 newspaper articles about the 2012 and 2017 presidential campaigns of South Korea published by three cross-owned newspaper and television clusters. The results reveal that each cross-owned newspaper and television station showed a very similar slant in covering the presidential candidates and political ideology. The findings offer strong evidence that one-owner-one-voice holds up in South Korea and suggest that it is fallacious to assume that cross-ownership ensures viewpoint diversity.

On the Varieties of Diversity: Ideological Variations in Attitudes Toward, and Understandings of Diversity.

Three studies explore the possibility that attitudes toward "diversity" are multidimensional rather than unidimensional and that ideological differences in diversity attitudes vary as a function of diversity subtype. Study 1 (n = 1,001) revealed that the factor structure of attitudes toward 23 diverse community features was bidimensional. Factors involving demographic and viewpoint diversity emerged. Conservatives reported more positive attitudes toward viewpoint diversity, and liberals more positive attitudes toward demographic diversity. Study 2 (n = 1,012) replicated Study 1 findings, and extended Study 1 results by showing attitudes toward the general concept of diversity predicted attitudes toward demographic diversity but not viewpoint diversity. In Study 3, 386 participants rated how relevant a set of features was to their prototypical understanding of diversity. A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) revealed people discriminate between viewpoint, demographic, and consumer diversity. Conservatives perceived viewpoint features as more relevant to "diversity," whereas liberals perceived demographic features as more relevant.

Political Journalism and Democracy: How Journalists Reflect Political Viewpoint Diversity in Their Reporting

ABSTRACT Journalists express support for providing a diversity of viewpoints in their reporting, but how is this reflected in their content? This study compared survey results of U.S. political journalists’ statements with a content analysis of their reporting. There was limited support for journalists reflecting a diversity of viewpoints in their reporting, but only for those who support civic or direct models of democracy. Most journalists, however, relied heavily on elite sources. Those journalists who reported in surveys that they preferred independent sources, however, did include a greater diversity of viewpoints in their reporting. Results related to journalist trust in institutions are also discussed.

Assessing Viewpoint Diversity in Search Results Using Ranking Fairness Metrics

The way pages are ranked in search results influences whether the users of search engines are exposed to more homogeneous, or rather to more diverse viewpoints. However, this viewpoint diversity is not trivial to assess. In this paper, we use existing and novel ranking fairness metrics to evaluate viewpoint diversity in search result rankings. We conduct a controlled simulation study that shows how ranking fairness metrics can be used for viewpoint diversity, how their outcome should be interpreted, and which metric is most suitable depending on the situation. This paper lays out important groundwork for future research to measure and assess viewpoint diversity in real search result rankings.

Change of perspectives (News Performance)

Field of application/theoretical foundation: Analyses of change of perspectives are theoretically linked to the news performance and democratic function of the media (McQuail, 1992). This construct is related to viewpoint diversity and the normative expectation that different views should be presented in news coverage (Napoli & Gillis, 2008). In addition, more recent analysis focus on different perspective articulated in user comments, often linked to theories of deliberation (Baden & Springer, 2015). References/combination with other methods of data collection: Perspective change in news coverage is measured i) directly (e.g., by asking whether change of perspective is presented in an article) or i) indirectly by coding different perspective (e.g. statements including different viewpoints). Indirect measures can also be used in automated approaches (Möller et al., 2018). Example studies: Baden & Springer (2014); Humprecht (2016) Table 1. Study summaries Author(s) Sample Unit of Analysis Values Reliability Baden & Springer (2014) Content type: Online news coverage on selected key events and user comments Outlet/country: 5 German newspapers (Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Welt, TZ, Die Zeit, Spiegel) Sampling period: Feb– July 2012 Sample size: 42 news articles, 384 user comments News article: max. 2 main interpretative frames (the text’s ‘central organizing idea’) User comments: main frame Object of problem definition Logic of evaluation: inspired (Good is what is true, divine & amazing) popular (Good is what the people want) moral (Good is what is social, fair, & moral) civic (Good is what is accepted & conventional) economic (Good is what is profitable & creates value) functional (good is what works) ecological (good is what is sustainable & natural) Logic of (inter)action: believing (interactions between the mind & the world) desire (interaction btw the mind & objects) ought (interaction btw the mind & people) negotiation (interaction btw people & the social world) exchange (interactions btw people & objects) technology (interactions btw objects & the world) life (interactions btw people & the natural world) Authors coded coverage consensually User comments: M(Holsti) = 0.78 Problem definition’s object: Holsti=0.60 Logic of Action: Holsti = 0.56 Evaluation logic: Holsti=1 Humprecht (2016) Content type: Political routine-period news Outlet/ country: 48 online news outlets from six countries (CH, DE, FR, IT, UK, US) Sampling period: June – July 2012 Sample size: N= 1660 Unit of analysis: Political news items (make reference to a political actor, e.g. politician, party, institution in headline, sub?headline, in first paragraph or in an accompanying visual) News items are all journalistic articles mentioned on the front page (‘first layer’ of the website) that are linked to the actual story (on second layer of website) Only one perspective (because underlying topic is uncontroversial) One perspective (of a debated/controversial issue, no opposition voice) Different perspectives mentioned (different sides, voices, camps, perspectives mentioned but not elaborated) Co-presence of speakers with opposing views (expressed in separate utterances) in the same article. Story shows clear attempt at giving a balanced, fair account of debated/controversial issue by including diverse viewpoints and statements) Cohen’s kappa: M = 0.64

Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus? Some Preliminary Evidence from a\xa0Most Likely Case

Although universities play a key role in questions of free speech and political viewpoint diversity, they are often associated with the opposite of a free exchange of ideas: a proliferation of restrictive campus speech codes, violent protests against controversial speakers and even the firing of inconvenient professors. For some observers these trends on university campuses are a clear indicator of the dire future for freedom of speech. Others view these incidents as scandalized singular events and regard campus intolerance as a mere myth. We take an empirical look at some of the claims in the debate and present original survey evidence from a most likely case: the leftist social science studentship at Goethe University Frankfurt. Our results show that taking offense is a common experience and that a sizable number of students are in favor of restricting speech on campus. We also find evidence for conformity pressures on campus and that both the desire to restrict speech and the reluctance to speak openly differ significantly across political ideology. Left-leaning students are less likely to tolerate controversial viewpoints and right-leaning students are more likely to self-censor on politically sensitive issues such as gender, immigration, or sexual and ethnic minorities. Although preliminary, these findings may have implications for the social sciences and academia more broadly.

Need for viewpoint diversity in clinical psychology.

Need for viewpoint diversity in clinical psychology.

Rotation-based spatial–temporal feature learning from skeleton sequences for action recognition

Recently, skeleton-based action recognition approaches achieve great improvement by providing various features from skeleton sequences as the inputs of deep neural networks for classification. Compared with other works which directly utilize the locations of joints as the representation of each action for recognition, our paper describes the relative relations embedded in skeletons to alleviate the impact of viewpoint diversity. Specifically, we propose a novel feature descriptor based on the rotation relations in skeletons to represent a certain action. Geometric algebra (GA) is introduced to calculate and derive the rotation relations according to the particular operator, namely the rotor in GA. In order to exploit the spatial and temporal characteristics in one skeleton sequence, we design two different rotor-based feature descriptors, respectively, from one frame of skeleton and two skeletons of consecutive frames. Then an efficient feature encoding strategy is proposed to transform each kind of feature descriptor into a RGB image. Afterward, we propose a two-stream convolutional neural network(CNN) based framework to learn the RGB images generated by each skeleton sequence and then fuse the scores of two networks to provide final recognition accuracy. Extensive experimental results on NTU RGB+D, Northwestern-UCLA, Gaming 3D, SYSU and UTD-MHAD datasets have demonstrated the superiority of our method.

The arrest of sociology

A new book from Colin Campbell, the distinguished British sociologist, asks a disquieting question: Has sociology progressed? Campbell concludes that our discipline has made little progress in the past half-century. This essay describes what Campbell means by progress, and the factors that, on his account, impede it. The discussion focuses on one such obstacle: the politicization of the university. The older current of ideological advocacy, that Campbell highlights, is today bolstered by a newer development: ideological policing. This is a posture that attacks free expression and viewpoint diversity. The fate of sociology hinges on colleagues grasping the dangers of such policing and finding ways to check it. Remedial measures are suggested.