Fen Edebiyat Fakültesi / Faculty of Letters and Science
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/11727/1396
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Item An Abstract Mind is a Principled One: Abstract Mindset Increases Consistency in Responses to Political Attitude Scales(2018) Alper, Sinan; 0000-0002-9051-0690; ABG-6854-2020Past literature suggested that not everyone is politically sophisticated. In the current research, it is proposed that an experimental manipulation of abstract mindset would decrease variation in responses to political attitude scales and render individuals more internally consistent in their political attitudes. Three hypotheses are proposed: (1) Abstract mindset would lower within-subject standard deviations (SDs) and increase Cronbach's alphas in responses to political attitude scales; (2) decrease in SDs could not be attributed to a response bias; and (3) abstract mindset would lower SDs even after controlling for differences in mean scores on those scales. In seven experiments, five different paradigms were used to manipulate abstractness and four different political scales were used as dependent measures on samples from two distinct cultures (US and Turkey). Analyses of individual studies and an aggregate analysis of combined data supported all hypotheses and showed that abstract mindset decreases SDs and increases Cronbach's alpha scores in self-reported political attitudes. Results suggest that abstract mindset enhances apparent political sophistication by highlighting core political beliefs behind different attitudinal statements. Implications for construal level theory and political sophistication research are discussed.Item The evil eye effect: vertical pupils are perceived as more threatening(2019) Alper, Sinan; Us, Elif Oyku; Tasman, Dicle Rojda; 0000-0002-6671-2129; 30486750; AAJ-6747-2020Popular culture has many examples of evil characters having vertically pupilled eyes. Humans have a long evolutionary history of rivalry with snakes and their visual systems were evolved to rapidly detect snakes and snake-related cues. Considering such evolutionary background, we hypothesised that humans would perceive vertical pupils, which are characteristics of ambush predators including some of the snakes, as threatening. In seven studies (aggregate N = 1458) conducted on samples from American and Turkish samples, we found that vertical pupils are perceived as more threatening on both explicit (Study 1) and implicit level (Studies 2-7) and they are associated with physical, rather than social, threat (Study 4). Findings provided partial support regarding our hypothesis about the relevance of snake detection processes: Snake phobia, and not spider phobia, was found to be related to perceiving vertical pupils as threatening (Study 5), however an experimental manipulation of saliency of snakes rendered no significant effect (Study 6) and a comparison of fears of snakes, alligators, and cats did not support our prediction (Study 7). We discuss the potential implications and limitations of these novel findings.Item Do changes in threat salience predict the moral content of sermons? The case of Friday Khutbas in Turkey(2019) Alper, Sinan; Bayrak, Fatih; Us, Elif Oyku; Yilmaz, Onurcan; 0000-0002-6671-2129; 0000-0001-6350-6234; AAJ-6747-2020We analyzed the content of "Friday Khutbas" delivered in Turkish mosques between January 2001 and December 2018 to test the prediction of moral foundations theory (MFT) literature that threat salience would lead to an increased endorsement of binding moral foundations. As societal-level indicators of threat, we examined (a) historical data on the proportion of terrorism-related news published in a Turkish newspaper, (b) the geopolitical risk score of Turkey as measured by Geopolitical Risk Index, and (c) Google Trends data on the search frequency of words "terror", "terrorism", or "terrorist". To measure the endorsement of moral foundations, we built a Turkish Moral Foundations Dictionary and counted the relative frequency of morality-related words in the khutbas delivered in Istanbul, Turkey. Time series analyses showed that risk salience in a certain month was positively related to endorsement of the loyalty/betrayal foundation in that month's Friday Khutbas. There were mixed results for the other moral foundations.Item Control Deprivation Decreases, Not Increases, Belief in a Controlling God for People with Independent Self-Construal(2019) Alper, Sinan; Sumer, Nebi; 0000-0002-7460-4515; AAA-7817-2020Compensatory Control Model suggests that, when deprived of personal control, people compensate this lack by bolstering their belief in a controlling God. However, this is not the only way of reacting to control deprivation as past literature also depicted that people sometimes become motivated to restore their personal control. We argued that people with highly independent self-construal would not be comfortable with enhancing external control in the absence of a personal one. We conducted an online experiment (N = 246) and the results indicated that control deprivation actually decreased, not increased, belief in a controlling God for people with independent self-construal. Such finding suggested that not everyone compensates for the lack of personal control by enhancing external control. Implications of the findings and potential limitations were discussed.