We present a simple model of populism as the rejection of “disloyal” leaders. We show that adding the assumption that people are worse off when they experience low income as a result of leader betrayal (than when it is the result of bad luck) to a simple voter choice model yields a preference for incompetent leaders. These deliver worse material outcomes in general, but they reduce the feelings...

Abstract: How are people unconsciously influenced by the rise of Donald Trump? We test the theory that Trump’s rise has irrationally changed the behavior of one group of people: elite bridge players, whom we assume are otherwise completely typical. We examine the hands played in one of the premier North American bridge events, the Vanderbilt Knockout Tournament, in 1999 and 2015. We find that p...

This study investigated the cognitive processing of true and false political information. Specifically, it examined the impact of source credibility on the assessment of veracity when information comes from a polarizing source (Experiment 1), and effectiveness of explanations when they come from one's own political party or an opposition party (Experiment 2). These experiments were conducted pr...

D oes security trump reliability, or vice versa? In 2013, the Seventh International Conference on Software Security and Reliability (SERE) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, hosted a panel discussion with representation from industry, academia, and government to answer this question. Neither the panelists nor anyone in the audience took a firm stance. Rather, the discussion meandered from the original ...

Mere weeks before the US presidential election a petition, #DiagnoseTrump, is calling for more information about the Republican candidate’s health because he “appears to exhibit all the symptoms of the mental disorder narcissistic personality disorder.” It goes on, “Mental health professionals need to come forward and urge the Republican Party to insist that their nominee has an evaluation to d...

As illustrated by the story of Amanda Knox and many others wrongfully convicted, false confessions often trump factual innocence. Focusing on consequences, recent research suggests that confessions are powerfully persuasive as a matter of logic and common sense; that many false confessions contain richly detailed narratives and accurate crime facts that appear to betray guilty knowledge; and th...

President-elect Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to repeal Obamacare. We review what effect the incoming administration may have on U.S. health care policy.

In this paper, we propose a framework to infer the topic preferences of Donald Trump’s followers on Twitter. We first use latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to derive the weighted mixture of topics for each Trump tweet. Then we use negative binomial regression to model the “likes,” with the weights of each topic serving as explanatory variables. Our study shows that attacking Democrats such as P...

Introduction. This paper compares public access to information about two controversial coastal developments in North-east Scotland: the construction of a gas terminal by the British Gas Council and Total in the 1970s, and the current development of 'the world's greatest golf course' by the tycoon Donald Trump. Method. Data has been collected from a range of sources, including: the records of lo...