Lene Aarøe

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Aarhus University

Recent research highlights the significant potential of ChatGPT for text annotation in social science research. However, ChatGPT is a closed-source product, which has major drawbacks with regards to transparency, reproducibility, cost, and data protection. Recent advances in open-source (OS) large language models (LLMs) offer an alternative without...

Identifying cues to contagious disease is critical for effectively tracking and defending against interpersonal infection threats. People hold lay beliefs about the types of sensory information most relevant for identifying whether others are sick with transmissible illnesses. Are these beliefs universal, or do they vary along cultural and ecologic...

Individuals who are more motivated to avoid pathogenic infection tend to be more opposed to immigrants. Explanations for this relation emphasize lack of familiarity, with people who are more unfamiliar with ethnic outgroups being more likely to perceive them as a possible infection risk and therefore oppose immigration. Exposure to immigrants can i...

Exemplars are central in news reporting. However, extreme negative exemplars can bias citizens’ factual perceptions and attributions of political responsibility. Nonetheless, our knowledge of the factors shaping journalistic preferences for including exemplars in news stories is limited. We investigate the extent to which educational socialization,...

Individuals can experience a lack of economic resources compared to others, which we refer to as subjective experiences of economic scarcity. While such experiences have been shown to shift cognitive focus, attention, and decision-making, their association with human morality remains debated. We conduct a comprehensive investigation of the relation...

People vary both in their embrace of their society’s traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents...

Individuals who are more motivated to avoid pathogenic infection tend to be more opposed to immigrants. Explanations for this relation emphasize that lack of familiarity plays a key role, with people who are more unfamiliar with ethnic outgroups and their customs being more prone to perceive them as a possible infection risk and therefore oppose im...

People vary in the extent to which they embrace their society’s traditions, impacting a range of social and political phenomena. People also vary in the degree to which they perceive disparate dangers as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions likely regularly offered direct and indirect avenues for addressing hazar...

Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals ( N = 11,200) from 31 countries show...

Acute hunger leads to self-protective behaviour, where people keep resources to themselves. However, little is known about whether acute hunger influences individuals' inclination to engage in unethical behaviour for direct monetary gains. Past research in moral psychology has found that people are less likely to cheat for monetary than non-monetar...

An increasing number of experts agree that nuclear power should be part of the solution to fight climate change as it emits little greenhouse gases, has had no negative health consequences during normal operation, and even limited consequences after accidents. However, in many countries the population is much more ambivalent about nuclear power, an...

A fundamental characteristic of modern societies is economic inequality, where deprived individuals experience chronic economic scarcity. While such experiences have been shown to produce detrimental outcomes in regards to human judgment and decision-making, the consequences of such scarcity for our morality remain debated. We conduct one of the mo...

Individuals around the globe experience different forms of material resource scarcity in terms of aspects such as hunger, thirst, or financial strains. As experiences of material scarcity have been found to make individuals more risk-taking, impulsive, and focused on regaining resources in the short-term, a growing body of research has investigated...

Individuals around the globe experience different forms of material resource scarcity in terms of aspects such as hunger, thirst, or financial strains. As experiences of material scarcity have been found to make individuals more risk-taking, impulsive, and focused on regaining resources in the short-term, a growing body of research has investigated...

While related fields have turned to personality to understand human behavior, we know relatively little about its role in and impact in public administration. We review how personality has been studied in public administration and offer an empirical test of how it relates to policymaker attitudes about administrative arrangements. Using the “Big Fi...

Although the genetic influence on voter turnout is substantial (typically 40–50%), the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Across the social sciences, research suggests that ‘resources for politics’ (as indexed notably by educational attainment and intelligence test performance) constitute a central cluster of factors that predict electoral parti...

An increasing number of experts agree that nuclear power should be part of the solution to fight climate change as it emits little greenhouse gases, has had no negative health consequences during normal operation, and even limited consequences after accidents. However, in many countries the population is much more ambivalent about nuclear power, an...

Widespread distrust in politicians is often attributed to the way elites portray politics to citizens: the media, competing candidates, and foreign governments are largely considered responsible for portraying politicians as self-interested actors pursuing personal electoral and economic interests. This article turns to the mass level and considers...

While there is growing interest in the relationship between pathogen‐avoidance motivations and partisanship, the extant findings remain contradictory and suffer from a number of methodological limitations related to measurement and internal and external validity. We address these limitations and marshal the most complete test to date of the relatio...

One means by which the state reinforces inequality is by imposing administrative burdens that loom larger for citizens with lower levels of human capital. Integrating insights from various disciplines, this article focuses on one aspect of human capital: cognitive resources. The authors outline a model that explains how burdens and cognitive resour...

Media stories often reach citizens via a two-step process, transmitted to them indirectly via their social networks. Why are some media stories strongly transmitted and impact opinions powerfully in this two-step flow while others quickly perish? Integrating classical research on the two-step flow of political communication and novel theories from...

We present, test, and extend a theoretical framework that connects disgust, a powerful basic human emotion, to political attitudes through psychological mechanisms designed to protect humans from disease. These mechanisms work outside of conscious awareness, and in modern environments, they can motivate individuals to avoid intergroup contact by op...

Studies of framing effects are a fundamental part of media effects research. A framing effect occurs when a media frame affects audience members' understanding of or opinion about an issue. The literature suggests three psychological processes—accessibility change, belief importance change, and belief content change—that can mediate framing effects...

[This corrects the article on p. 1038 in vol. 7, PMID: 27516744.].

People who are more avoidant of pathogens are more politically conservative, as are nations with greater parasite stress. In the current research, we test two prominent hypotheses that have been proposed as explanations for these relationships. The first, which is an intragroup account, holds that these relationships between pathogens and politics...

Throughout human evolutionary history, cooperative contact with others has been fundamental for human survival. At the same time, social contact has been a source of threats. In this article, we focus on one particular viable threat, communicable disease, and investigate how motivations to avoid pathogens influence people's propensity to interact a...

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurring within groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either est...

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurringwithin groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either esta...

Social trust forms the fundamental basis for social interaction within societies. Understanding the cognitive architecture of trust and the roots of individual differences in trust is of key importance. We predicted that one of the factors calibrating individual levels of trust is the intrauterine flow of nutrients from mother to child as indexed b...

Political behavior is behavior aimed at regulating access to resources: Who is recognized to get what, when, and how? Evidence across a number of disciplines shows that humans over evolutionary history have evolved sophisticated abilities to engage in political behavior through status seeking and coalition formation in order to attract resources to...

Party identification is central to the study of American political behavior yet there remains disagreement over whether it is largely instrumental or expressive in nature. We draw on social identity theory to develop the expressive model and conduct four studies to compare it to an instrumental explanation of campaign involvement. We find strong su...

The eld of political psychology is steadily growing. But how do researchers most fruitfully contribute to the increasing stock of knowledge about the psychological underpinnings of political behavior? In this article, we outline the scienti c ideals of political psychology and we point to the most recent key theoretical and methodical innovations i...

A robust finding in the welfare state literature is that public support for the welfare state differs widely across countries. Yet recent research on the psychology of welfare support suggests that people everywhere form welfare opinions using psychological predispositions designed to regulate interpersonal help giving using cues regarding recipien...

We apply error management theory to the analysis of individual differences in the negativity bias and political ideology. Using principles from evolutionary psychology, we propose a coherent theoretical framework for understanding (1) why individuals differ in their political ideology and (2) the conditions under which these individual differences...

The question of the ability of citizens to respond to elite communication in a manner consistent with their own deeper values is fundamental in the literature on public opinion. Prior research shows that citizens are more likely to follow frames emphasizing values matching their own deeper values. Yet research has also identified a number of cases...

Social-welfare policies are a modern instantiation of a phenomenon that has pervaded human evolutionary history: resource sharing. Ancestrally, food was a key shared resource in situations of temporary hunger. If evolved human psychology continues to shape how individuals think about current, evolutionarily novel conditions, this invites the predic...

How do modern individuals form a sense of the vast societies in which they live? Social cognition has evolved to make sense of small, intimate social groups, but in complex mass societies, comparable vivid social cues are scarcer. Extant research on political attitudes and behavior has emphasized media and interpersonal networks as key sources of c...

As evidenced by research in evolutionary psychology, humans have evolved sophisticated psychological mechanisms tailored to solve enduring adaptive problems of social life. Many of these social problems are political in nature and relate to the distribution of costs and benefits within and between groups. In that sense, evolutionary psychology sugg...

The question of the role of Islam in the public space has become a new pivotal point in political disputes about civil liberties in Western Europe. This debate challenges the scholarly literature on tolerance by highlighting that our understanding of the situational factors shaping tolerance judgments remains limited. This study therefore investiga...

Do politically irrelevant events influence important policy opinions? Previous research on social welfare attitudes has emphasized the role of political factors such as economic self-interest and ideology. Here, we demonstrate that attitudes to social welfare are also influenced by short-term fluctuations in hunger. Using theories in evolutionary p...

An impressive body of research shows that the framing of an issue affects citizens' attitudes, but also that some frames are more influential than others. Yet, we have surprisingly limited knowledge of the factors that affect the strength of a frame, that is, the frame's capacity to influence citizens' opinions. Therefore, this study investigates t...

While much research has investigated the persuasive effects of partisan cues on citizens' evaluations of political messages, our knowledge regarding failed persuasion is limited. It remains particularly unclear whether failed elite attempts at persuasion simply leave citizens' attitudes unchanged or whether such attempts at persuading one segment o...

Abstract will be provided by author.