[gov3009-l] Baum on "Political Scandal, Gender, and Tabloid News"

Hello, We are happy to announce that we will have Matthew Baum of the Harvard Kennedy School at the Applied Statistics workshop this Wednesday, February 3rd at 12 noon. The title of the talk is "Political Scandal, Gender, and Tabloid News: An Experimental Examination of the Evolutionary Origins of Consumer Preferences for Scandalous News." Matt has passed along the following abstract for the talk. Abstract: Building on recent work in evolutionary psychology, we predict substantial gender- and self-image-related differences in demand for scandalous political news. We argue that individuals’ relative attractiveness can alter their motivation to seek information about potential sexual competitors and mates, even when those figures are “virtual”—appearing in mass media. We test our hypotheses using national survey data, as well as experiments on student and nationally-representative population samples. We find strong correlations between respondents’ self-image and their likelihood of seeking and distributing positive or negative information about “virtual” competitors and mates. The Applied Statistics workshop meets in room K354 of CGIS Knafel (1737 Cambridge St) at 12 noon on Wednesdays. A light lunch will be provided. We hope you can make it. Cheers, matt. ~~~~~~~~~~~ Matthew Blackwell PhD Candidate Institute for Quantitative Social Science Department of Government Harvard University email: mblackwell(a)iq.harvard.edu url: http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~blackwel/