We agree with Bara and Joffe that there is a need for improvement of reporting quality in animal research (AR) [1]. Presenting details on both methods used and potential cofounders during AR is not only important to reproduce results, and to ensure animal welfare (AW) and public support, it is a duty when animals are compromised, stressed or sacrificed to understand diseases or to identify trea...

In a typical brainstorming method, criticism must be withheld for creative ideation. We envisage a web-based system that is designed to avoid possible negative influences of, and make good use of, critical thinking to generate creative ideas. To investigate its plausibility, we developed a system in which people participate collectively in a sequence of processes including generating, criticizi...

A metapragmatic expression denotes an event of speaking. An embedded metapragmatic construction embeds one metapragmatic expression within another, as in "Bush said Clinton lied." This article reports that embedded metapragmatic constructions, when used in television news coverage of U.S. political campaigns, most often predicate on the topic of lying. Simple metapragmatic constructions in this...

Scholars universally acknowledge government corruption to be widespread in Africa, yet there is no such agreement on whether office-holding tends to corrupt politicians or corrupt politicians tend to obtain office. Building on the corruption and behavioral economics literatures, we identify behavioral choices that we argue are linked to corruption. We conduct controlled experiments with over 14...

In practice, the most relevant question for direct democracy is not whether it could advantageously replace representative democracy, but whether it can be combined with it to improve political outcomes. We find that, by reallocating some political power to the population, direct democracy significantly affects the incentives, selection, and reelection prospects of politicians. When citizens ca...

This paper extends the political agency approach to an environment in which voting may be divided between informed and instrumental, informed and ‘expressive’ and uninformed due to ‘rational irrationality’. It constructs a model where politicians may be good, bad or populist. Initially the existence of only good and populist politicians is assumed and the incentives for good politicians to pool...

Prior research found that people's assessments of relative competence predicted the outcome of Senate and Congressional races. We hypothesized that snap judgments of "facial competence" would provide useful forecasts of the popular vote in presidential primaries before the candidates become well known to the voters. We obtained facial competence ratings of 11 potential candidates for the Democr...

This paper studies how a politician’s preferences and abilities to influence public and private sector productivity affect her choices over economic policies. Extremism between policies of leftand right-wing incumbents increases with ability, because voters are more willing to re-elect competent politicians. Positive correlations between certain ability dimensions and preferences amplify politi...