Christian partisans in the United States demonstrate high levels of affective polarization and anti-democratic attitudes, but how to depolarize this group remains poorly understood. Social identity theory suggests that spiritually framed depolarization appeals from a religious messenger may be more effective than secular appeals. We test this claim in a pre-registered survey experiment, where American Christian partisans (N=3,066) were randomly assigned to watch one of three videos highlighting common ground with outparty individuals. The control was a civic appeal, where the speaker identified as American and urged participants to reflect on shared American values. In the “spiritual unity” appeal, the speaker identified as a Christian pastor and urged participants to follow the example of Jesus in bridging political division. In the “spiritual opponent” appeal, the pastor further highlighted how individuals, regardless of political party, are on the same side against spiritual forces seeking to sow division. Neither spiritual appeal outperformed the civic appeal on reducing affective polarization, and both spiritual appeals modestly increased outparty dehumanization. The spiritual opponent appeal also increased support for anti-democratic attitudes and Christian Nationalism. We do not find heterogeneous effects for participants identifying as White, Evangelical, or Republican. These findings suggest that spiritual appeals may not be more effective than secular ones at depolarizing Christians.

Organizations can motivate and coordinate work by socializing members to internalize organizational values. Existing theories posit that organizations achieve normative control through encapsulation, wherein peers and managers are primary sources of members' socialization. Drawing on ethnographic data from a not-for-profit school, I show how an external actor-beneficiaries-can become a source of normative control. I develop a multistage process that explains how teachers were socialized by parents, specifically by hearing these parent beneficiaries narrate their needs; engaging in collective storytelling about beneficiaries; experiencing episodic shaming centered on how teachers' daily performance met (or did not meet) beneficiaries' needs; and receiving validation from beneficiaries. Because these sequential stages establish beneficiaries as sources of control through social interactions set in specific times and places, and establish shared emotional states among organizational members, I theorize that these stages compose a ritual of integration. Although teachers initially arrived at the school with heterogeneous values, this ritual led many of them to internalize the organizational value of self-sacrifice. Teachers who were unmoved by parents' stories or came to see parents as exploitative did not internalize this value, and they tended to exit the organization. This study reveals how normative control can arise not only through socialization from in-group members but also from ritual interactions with and about beneficiaries.

Despite research on differences in moral logics across demographic categories, the overall community structure in how Americans share standards of judgment, and hence a fundamental basis for categorical inequalities, remains unclear. To identify communities of shared moral logics, we inductively code judgments in interview transcripts from a probability sample of Americans. We then identify clusters in a network induced by similarities in how Americans judge. We find that competence and prosociality emerge as primary logics by which Americans judge others positively. Gender is the strongest predictor for which moral logics Americans deploy in daily life. Finally, different communities emerge in judgments of institutions, or in negative judgments, suggesting that Americans deploy various moral logics depending on context, which suggests possibilities for bridging categorical divides.

Scholars warn that partisan divisions in the mass public threaten the health of American democracy. We conducted a megastudy ( n = 32,059 participants) testing 25 treatments designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes. We find that many treatments reduced partisan animosity, most strongly by highlighting relatable sympathetic individuals with different political beliefs or by emphasizing common identities shared by rival partisans. We also identify several treatments that reduced support for undemocratic practices—most strongly by correcting misperceptions of rival partisans’ views or highlighting the threat of democratic collapse—which shows that antidemocratic attitudes are not intractable. Taken together, the study’s findings identify promising general strategies for reducing partisan division and improving democratic attitudes, shedding theoretical light on challenges facing American democracy.

To maximize productivity, manufacturers must organize and equip their workforces to efficiently handle variable workloads. Their success depends on their ability to assign experienced and skilled workers to specialized tasks and coordinate work on production lines. Worker turnover may disrupt such efforts. We use staffing, productivity, and pay data from within a major consumer electronics manufacturer’s supply chain to study how firms should manage worker turnover and its effects using production decisions, wages, and inventory. We find that worker turnover impedes coordination between assembly line coworkers by weakening knowledge sharing and relationships. Publicly available unit-cost estimates imply that worker turnover accounts for $206–274 million in added direct expenses alone from defectively assembled units failing the firm’s stringent quality control. To evaluate managerial alternatives, we structurally estimate a dynamic equilibrium model (an Experience-Based Equilibrium) encompassing (1) workers’ endogenous turnover decisions and (2) the firm’s weekly planning of its production scheduling and staffing in response. In counterfactual analyses, a less turnover-prone, hence more productive, workforce significantly benefits the firm, reducing its variable production costs by 4.5%, or an estimated $928 million for the studied product. Such benefits justify paying higher efficiency wages even to less skilled workforces; furthermore, interestingly, rational inventory management policies incentivize self-interested firms to reduce rather than tolerate turnover. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management. Funding: The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the data sponsor, and K. Moon gratefully acknowledges support from the Wharton Dean’s Research Fund and the Claude Marion Endowed Faculty Scholar Award of the Wharton School. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4476 .

Effectively addressing public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic requires persuading the mass public to change their behavior in significant ways. Many efforts to encourage behavior change-such as public service announcements, social media posts, and billboards-involve short, persuasive appeals, yet the effectiveness of these messages is unclear. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, we tested whether short messages could increase intentions to comply with public health guidelines. To identify promising messages, we conducted two pretests (n = 1,596) in which participants rated the persuasiveness of 56 unique messages: 31 based on the persuasion and social influence literatures and 25 drawn from a pool of crowdsourced messages generated by online respondents. The four top-rated messages emphasized: (1) civic responsibility to reciprocate the sacrifices of health care workers, (2) caring for the elderly and vulnerable, (3) a specific, sympathetic victim, and (4) limited health care system capacity. We then conducted three well-powered, pre-registered experiments (total n = 3,719) testing whether these four top-rated messages, and a standard public health message based on language from the CDC, increased intentions to comply with public health guidelines, such as masking in public spaces. In Study 1, we found the four messages and the standard public health message significantly outperformed a null control. In Studies 2 and 3, we compared the effects of persuasive messages to the standard public health message, finding that none consistently out-performed the standard message. This is in line with other research showing minimal persuasive effects of short messages after the very early stages of the pandemic. Across our studies, we found that (1) short messages can increase intentions to comply with public health guidelines, but (2) short messages featuring persuasive techniques from the social science literature did not substantially outperform standard public health messages.

There is substantial concern about democratic backsliding in the United States. Evidence includes notably high levels of animosity toward out-partisans and support for undemocratic practices (SUP) among the general public. Much less is known, however, about the views of elected officials-even though they influence democratic outcomes more directly. In a survey experiment conducted with state legislators (N = 534), we show that these officials exhibit less animosity toward the other party, less SUP, and less support for partisan violence (SPV) than the general pub-lic. However, legislators vastly overestimate the levels of animosity, SUP, and SPV among voters from the other party (though not among voters from their own party). Further, those legislators randomly assigned to receive accurate information about the views of voters from the other party reported significantly lower SUP and marginally significantly lower partisan animosity toward the other party. This suggests that leg-islators' democratic attitudes are causally linked to their perceptions of other-party voters' democratic attitudes. Our findings highlight the importance of ensuring that office holders have access to reliable information about voters from both parties.

Status hierarchies are fundamental forms of social order that structure peer interactions like intragroup aggression. The reciprocal relationship, however, remains unclear. Does intragroup aggression strengthen, or weaken, status hierarchies? Under what conditions? To answer these questions, I analyze an original dataset containing victimization and directed friendship networks of 8,229 adolescents across 256 classes and three semesters. Measuring the strength of status hierarchies by how likely friendship nominations are characterized by hierarchical triads, I show that peer aggression weakens status hierarchies, and temporal sequences indicate the results are unlikely to be explained by reverse causality. I theorize that clear status hierarchies emerge through coordinated reallocations of esteem, and peer aggression engenders hierarchy primarily by giving onlookers shared opportunities to coordinate. Peer aggression, however, is frequently ambiguous, and onlookers arrive at inconsistent interpretations, fragmenting how they assign esteem and reducing the clarity of status distinctions. Additional analyses confirm that whether peer aggression strengthens or weakens status hierarchies depends on the consistent perceptions of onlookers. Taken together, this research demonstrates the significance of third-party onlookers and their ability to consistently interpret interactions, while offering new explanations for when peer aggression is self-limiting or persistent.

Research has documented labor conflict within foreign-owned, and especially Chinese-owned, manufac-turing firms in sub-Saharan economies. Yet, systematic comparisons of foreign versus domestic firms are rare, and it remains unclear whether labor conflict is a phenomenon that affects emerging industries or is specific to foreign firms. Drawing on a large firm survey in Ethiopia, we show that foreign firms hire sim-ilarly educated and experienced workers. They also offer comparable salaries, benefits, and hours than domestic firms, after controlling for firm size and age. Nevertheless, they experience more complaints, strikes, and protests, with Chinese-owned firms reporting particularly high rates of labor conflict. To scru-tinize these findings, we conduct case studies of labor management in six domestic and eight foreign -owned firms around Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. We observe antagonistic labor relations in five foreign -owned firms, four of which are Chinese-owned. In these firms, managers perceive employees as using labor laws to take advantage of them, whereas employees see labor laws as a basis for harmonious labor relations. In the remaining firms, managers frame their firm policies as consistent with employee percep-tions of labor laws. We conjecture that the visibility of formal labor institutions leads employees to inter-pret disagreements as intentional disrespect, rather than ignorance. Our findings suggest that misaligned perceptions about the role of local labor institutions may be an important driver of conflict in foreign -owned firms. (c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

There is widespread concern that rising affective polarization—particularly dislike for outpartisans—exacerbates Americans’ anti-democratic attitudes. Accordingly, scholars and practitioners alike have invested great effort in developing depolarization interventions that reduce affective polarization. Critically, however, it remains unclear whether these interventions reduce anti-democratic attitudes, or only change sentiments towards outpartisans. Here we address this question with experimental tests (total n = 8,385) of three previously established depolarization interventions: correcting misperceptions of outpartisans, priming inter-partisan friendships and observing warm cross-partisan interactions between political leaders. While these depolarization interventions reliably reduced affective polarization, we do not find compelling evidence that these interventions reduced support for undemocratic candidates, support for partisan violence or prioritizing partisan ends over democratic means. Thus, future efforts to strengthen pro-democratic attitudes may do better if they target these outcomes directly. More broadly, these findings call into question the previously assumed causal effect of affective polarization on anti-democratic attitudes.

Vaccine hesitancy is a critical barrier to widespread vaccination uptake and containment of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the United States, vaccines have become politically polarized, with high rates of vaccine hesitancy observed among Republicans. In contrast to prior research focusing on partisan gaps, we investigate vaccination attitudes and uptake among a group overlooked in prior research: those who are eligible to vote but did not register in the presidential elections. Drawing on nationally representative and longitudinal survey data from April 2020 to October 2021, we show that this group – whom we call “political outsiders” – represents about 16% of the U.S. population. They had the lowest vaccination rate (47%) by 2021 October, significantly lower than Republican (65%), Independent (76%), and Democratic voters (88%). Further, we find that political outsiders are less likely to trust physicians compared to other partisan groups. Because the sources they trust differ from partisans, existing public health messaging may be less likely to reach them successfully. Finally, we find that political outsiders experience more socio-economic hardships and are less integrated into society. Hence, our results underscore the importance of targeted efforts to reach this highly vulnerable population.

Overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic requires motivating the vast majority of Americans to get vaccinated. However, vaccination rates have become politically polarized, and a substantial proportion of Republicans have remained vaccine hesitant for months. Here, we explore how endorsements by party elites affect Republicans’ COVID-19 vaccination intentions and attitudes. In a preregistered survey experiment (n = 1,480), we varied whether self-identified Republicans saw endorsements of the vaccine from prominent Republicans (including video of a speech by former President Donald Trump), from the Democratic Party (including video of a speech by President Joseph Biden), or a neutral control condition including no endorsements. Unvaccinated Republicans who were exposed to the Republican elite endorsement reported 7.0% higher vaccination intentions than those who viewed the Democratic elite endorsement and 5.7% higher than those in the neutral control condition. These effects were statistically mediated by participants’ reports of how much they thought Republican politicians would want them to get vaccinated. We also found evidence of backlash effects against Democratic elites: Republicans who viewed the Democratic elite endorsement reported they would be significantly less likely to encourage others to vaccinate and had more negative attitudes toward the vaccine, compared with those who viewed the Republican elite endorsement or the neutral control. These results demonstrate the relative advantage of cues from Republican elites—and the risks of messaging from Democrats currently in power—for promoting vaccination among the largest vaccine-hesitant subgroup in the United States.

The expansion of ranking systems has increased public access to information about organizations, but there is burgeoning concern that rankings reduce the accessibility of goods and services for individuals from lower socioeconomic status backgrounds. The evidence and underlying theory for this claim, however, remain unclear. This article develops two possibilities: (1) positional advantage, where rankings increase demand for better-ranked organizations and crowd out disadvantaged individuals; and (2) algorithmic trade-offs, where rankings lead organizations to optimize on criteria that are in tension with serving individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds. Scope conditions for these theories are established, and key predictions are tested with administrative data matched with U.S. News & World Report college rankings between 1997 and 2015. This research clarifies how the consequences of ranking systems spill over from organizations to broader social inequalities and demonstrates when and how rankings contribute to structural barriers to upward mobility.

Containing the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States requires mobilizing a large majority of the mass public to vaccinate, but many Americans are hesitant or opposed to vaccination. A significant predictor of vaccine attitudes in the United States is religiosity, with more-religious individuals expressing more distrust in science and being less likely to get vaccinated. Here, we test whether explicit cues of common religious identity can help medical experts build trust and increase vaccination intentions. In a preregistered survey experiment conducted with a sample of unvaccinated American Christians (n = 1,765), we presented participants with a vaccine endorsement from a prominent medical expert (NIH Director Francis Collins) and a short essay about doctors' and scientists' endorsement of the vaccines. In the common religious identity condition, these materials also highlighted the religious identity of Collins and many medical experts. Unvaccinated Christians in the common identity condition expressed higher trust in medical experts, greater intentions to vaccinate, and greater intentions to promote vaccination to friends and family than those who did not see the common identity cue. These effects were moderated by religiosity, with the strongest effects observed among the most religious participants, and statistically mediated by heightened perceptions of shared values with the medical expert endorsing the vaccine. These findings demonstrate the efficacy of common identity cues for promoting vaccination in a vaccine-hesitant subpopulation. More generally, the results illustrate how trust in science can be built through the invocation of common group identities, even identities often assumed to be in tension with science.

Abstract Background: Idiopathic hypercalciuria (IHC) is associated with reduced bone mineral density (BMD) and increased risk of osteoporotic fractures. It is not known if thyroid disease impacts the degree of urine and bone mineral abnormalities in patients with IHC and osteoporosis (OPO). Methods: Retrospective chart review from a private endocrinology clinic identified 62 consecutive patients with OPO (fragility fracture and/or t-score ≤-2.5 on bone density scan) and concomitant diagnosis of IHC (urine calcium > 4.0 mg/kg weight/d when intaking low-moderate calcium amounts). Patients were classified into two groups: those with thyroid disease (Thy+, if presence of autoimmune thyroid disease [AITD] with high antibody titers and/or long-term thyroid medication use) and those without (Thy-). Comparisons were made between the two groups for severity of renal disease (urine calcium) and bone disease (number of fragility fractures, and BMD response to therapy). Results: Of 55 women and 7 men identified with both OPO and IHC, 30 were Thy+ (4 with Graves’, 11 with confirmed Hashimoto’s, 13 taking levothyroxine for presumed Hashimoto’s and 2 with thyroid cancer), and 32 were Thy- (including 2 with type 1 DM, 1 with vitiligo, and 6 with non-toxic nodular goiters requiring biopsies). Thy+ were compared to Thy- with respect to: mean age (70.7 ± 7.3 vs. 70.8 ± 9.3 y), sex (97% vs. 81% women), 24-hr urine calcium at diagnosis (317 ± 75 vs. 311 ± 68 mg), presence of fragility fracture (50% vs. 59%), use of thiazide (83% vs. 78%), and use of anti-fracture pharmacotherapy (73% vs. 84%). 50 patients had adequate comparative longitudinal BMD data. A (+) BMD response was based on consistent increases in BMD and/or t-scores across all spine and hip sites, and a (-) BMD response was classified by decreased BMD and/or t-scores across all sites. For Thy+ vs. Thy- patients, there were 25% vs. 69% (+) BMD response, 38% vs. 12% (-) BMD response, 21% vs. 4% with no significant BMD response, and 17% vs. 15% with mixed BMD responses. Conclusions: In this group at high risk for future fragility fractures, much lower rates of BMD preservation was seen in the Thy+ as compared to the Thy- patients. Overall, AITD and medical thyroid disease was very common (48%) in this cohort of patients with IHC and OP. However, this high rate may be confounded by the selective nature of the specialty clinic population. Further research needs to delineate the impact of AITD and thyroid medication use on the progression and treatment of patients with IHC and OPO.

Overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic requires motivating the vast majority of Americans to get vaccinated. However, vaccination rates have become politically polarized, and a substantial proportion of Republicans have remained vaccine-hesitant for months. Here, we explore how endorsements by party elites affect Republicans’ COVID-19 vaccine intentions and attitudes. In a pre-registered survey experiment (N = 1,480), we varied whether self-identified Republicans saw endorsements of the vaccine from prominent Republicans (including video of a speech by former President Donald Trump), from the Democratic party (including video of a speech by President Joseph Biden), or a neutral control condition including no endorsements. Unvaccinated Republicans who were exposed to the Republican elite endorsement reported 7.0% higher vaccination intentions than those who viewed the Democratic elite endorsement and 5.7% higher than those in the neutral control condition. These effects were statistically mediated by participants’ reports of how much they thought Republican politicians would want them to get vaccinated. We also found evidence of backlash effects against Democratic elites: Republicans who viewed the Democratic elite endorsement reported they would be significantly less likely to encourage others to vaccinate and had more negative attitudes towards the vaccine, compared with those who viewed the Republican elite endorsement or the neutral control. These results demonstrate the relative advantage of cues from Republican elites - and the risks of messaging from Democrats currently in power - for promoting vaccination among the largest vaccine-hesitant subgroup in the U.S.

The origins of the armed warfare between rebel alliances that spread across China in the late 1960s have long been obscure. This historical puzzle poses two distinct but interrelated questions: first, how and why did rebel factions form, and second, why did armed warfare follow? The authors develop a theory of political orientations as a product of contingent interactions among rebel groups and military units after the collapse of local governments and derive testable implications for the emergence of factional conflict across regions and over time. The authors then extend the theory to link levels of violence to the duration of time that conflicts remained unresolved in localities under military control, implying that violence intensified over time as the anticipated costs of defeat escalated. Both implications are tested with a national data set of 17,319 political events extracted from 2,246 city and county annals.

Policymakers in developing countries have prioritized the mass expansion of vocational education and training (VET). This study examines whether the quality of VET in developing countries increases by investing greater resources per student. To achieve this goal, we examine the impacts of attending model schools (which have far more resources per student) on a range of student cognitive, non‐cognitive, and behavioral outcomes. Using representative data from a survey of approximately 12,000 VET students from China, multivariate regression and propensity score matching analyses show that attending model vocational high schools do not benefit student outcomes, despite their substantially greater resources.

Abstract Background: Idiopathic hypercalciuria (IHC) is associated with reduced bone mineral density (BMD) and higher risk of osteoporotic fractures. Denosumab is a RANK-ligand inhibitor that prevents osteoporosis-related fractures. No previous published studies have specifically evaluated denosumab treatment of osteoporosis patients with IHC. Methods: Retrospective chart review from a private endocrinology clinic identified 31 consecutive patients with osteoporosis (prior fragility fracture and/or t-score ≤-2.5 on bone density scan) with concomitant diagnosis of IHC (defined as urine calcium > 4.0 mg/kg weight/d when intaking low-moderate calcium amounts), who had received at least 3 denosumab injections. Comparisons were made for BMD measurements determined by dual-energy x-ray absorptiometry done before denosumab initiation, and after the latest dose. Results: There were 28 women and 3 men, with average age of 71.9 ± 8.9 years. 20 subjects had prior total of 31 fragility fractures. Baseline 24-hr urine calcium was 331 ±65 mg/day. Average exposure to denosumab therapy was 9.0 ± 4.8 doses. 27 of these patients received concomitant thiazide diuretics during the course of their denosumab therapy. Baseline t-scores were -2.4 ± 0.8 at lumbar spine, -1.5 ± 0.7 at total hip and -1.8 ± 0.5 at femoral neck. After denosumab therapy, the t-scores were respectively -1.9 ± 0.9, -1.3 ± 0.8 and -1.6 ± 0.7. Mean increases in BMD were seen at the lumbar spine of 6.2 ± 8.4%, at the total hip of 3.2 ± 6.0%, and at the femoral neck of 2.5 ± 8.0% 19 patients were considered to have (+) BMD responses, based on consistent increases in BMD and/or t-scores across all spine and hip sites. 4 patients had (-) BMD responses, based on decreased BMD and/or t-scores across all sites. 6 patients had mixed responses and 2 did not have comparative BMD data. Baseline urine calcium did not seem to correlate with clinical responses. Those patients with longer duration of thiazide and/or denosumab use had higher likelihood of (+) BMD responses. However, during the course of follow-up, 4 subjects suffered 7 fragility fractures while treated with denosumab: 3 with (+) and 1 with (-) BMD responses. Conclusion: Denosumab can effectively increase BMD in a cohort of osteoporosis patients with IHC, the majority of whom also received thiazide. However, increased BMD response did not necessarily predict lower risks of fragility fractures. Further research needs to evaluate the role of denosumab therapy in such high-risk patients.