Projects of Özge Kemahlıoğlu, Junko Kanero and Çiğdem Bağcı members of Sabancı University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) is entitled to receive support within the framework of the TUBITAK ARDEB 1001 Program - Scientific and Technological Research Project Support.
The project of Junko Kanero and Çiğdem Bağcı is entitled “Developing Attitudes towards Robots and Other Groups: Examining Human-Robot Interaction in Terms of Intergroup Contact”. This project consists of a series of experimental studies exploring how children and adults interact with and think about social robots. Using Intergroup Contact Theory (Allport, 1954; Pettigrew, 1997) as a conceptual framework, we empirically examine the psychological consequences of face-to-face contact with a robot. We aim to provide a comprehensive picture on the topic by testing a wide range of populations and measures in controlled environments.
The project of Özge Kemahlıoğlu, is entitled “How Voters Use Information When They Update Their Policy Expectations”. The literature analytically distinguishes between retrospective and prospective voting. Voters are expected to make their decision based on a review of the past performance of governments (retrospective evaluation) and a comparison of the expectations from policies of alternative governments (prospective evaluation). Recently the different steps of retrospective evaluation have been analyzed, including how the voters’ information affect their evaluations. However, not many studies have been conducted on the process of prospective evaluation.
This project aims to analyze how voters update their expectations based on available information. Information that can be used to form expectations about policies’ consequences can originate from different sources. Especially, in environments with limited media opportunities, information shared by the government can play an important role. Yet, the government would be expected to be more informed and decide strategically how it will share this information with the public. In a context of such asymmetric information not every voter will use this information and update her expectations.
According to the main hypothesis of this project, voters who are ideologically close to the government and the government will have similar interests, making the government more willing to share information accurately. Knowing this, ideologically close voters will be more inclined to think that the shared information is accurate and will update her expectation based on this information. We plan to test this hypothesis with a survey experiment.