Projects in Progress
Rose-colored glasses: The impacts of prior attitudes and performance information on people’s evaluation of “color-blind” university admissions policies (Dongfang Gaozhao and Daniel L. Fay). [ Abstract ]
Performance information is a useful means to inform individuals’ evaluations of public policies and organizational performance. However, recent research suggests that people view performance information through a racialized lens and allow their preexisting attitudes to influence their interpretation. These attitudes may further interact with the myth of “fake news,” providing an excuse for people to reject certain information that is incompatible with their beliefs. In a context of affirmative action ban in colleges, this article uses an experiment to investigate how people may evaluate the policy and the performance of organizations implementing it. In addition, the article examines whether people may dismiss performance information as “fake news” because it does not conform to their established beliefs. The results show that in contemporary policy discourse, many narratives can be cut off at the knees and dismissed with a simple battle cry of “fake news.”
The others will help: Citizen coproduction and bystander apathy (Dongfang Gaozhao, Heewon Lee, and Frances S. Berry). [ Abstract ]
Both citizens and public organizations can benefit from coproduction. From the citizens’ perspective, their participation in coproduction may result in an efficient, effective, and equitable governance and produce individual and collective benefits for themselves. On the other hand, participating in coproduction has its psychological costs, such as social desirability and administrative burden. The calculus of coproduction allows researchers to understand citizens’ motivation of coproduction and answer why people coproduce sometimes but not at other times. This study follows this logic and investigates the bystander effect on individuals’ willingness to coproduce.
