Four studies demonstrated both the power of group influence in persuasion and people's blindness to it. Even under conditions of effortful processing, attitudes toward a social policy depended almost exclusively upon the stated position of one's political party. This effect overwhelmed the impact of both the policy's objective content and participants' ideological beliefs (Studies 1-3), and it ...

FirstpubIished in Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences Vol. IX (1941), thearticle is a large-scale investigation of that "fetish "of technique, ortechnical efficiency, which, after 1941, represented for critical theory, especially for Marcuse, the key ideological replacement of the commodity fetish under modern industralized authoritarian states. With respect to Marcuse's better-known late...

The Semple antirabies vaccine was developed by David Semple in India in 1911. Semple introduced a peculiarly British approach within the Pasteurian tradition by using carbolized dead virus. This article studies this unique phase of vaccine research between 1910 and 1935 to show that in the debates and laboratory experiments around the potency and safety of vaccines, categories like "living" and...

Legislative speech records from the 101st to 108th Congresses of the US Senate are analysed to study political ideologies. A widely-used text classification algorithm – Support Vector Machines (SVM) – allows the extraction of terms that are most indicative of conservative and liberal positions in legislative speeches and the prediction of senators’ ideological positions, with a 92 per cent leve...

In argumentative political speech, the way an issue is framed may indicate the unstated assumptions of the argument and hence the ideological position of the speaker. Our goal is to use and extend our prior work on discourse parsing and the identification of argumentation schemes to identify specific instances of issue framing and, more generally, ideological positions as they are expressed in ...

Critics of Hindutva nationalism see it as either an elite conspiracy or a mass political movement with no necessary relation to the Hindu faith. I focus instead on its ideological deployment, treating it as a modern religious construction of Hinduism that legitimates capitalism—much like Christianity in the 17th and 18th century. I mobilize Slavoj Žižek, Erenesto Laclau, and Louis Althusser’s t...

This paper presents the preliminary findings of research into the disengagement from highly entitative and ideological social groups, such as one percent motorcycle clubs, military special forces and fundamental ideological groups. Using a grounded theory approach, the discourse of 25 former members identified the discrepancy between group membership and the self-concept as the core theme in th...

In the present chapter it is carried out an evaluation of the motivations which lead to the launching and the subsequent development of the Human Genome Project. In this respect, then ideological, biosanitary and economic factors are considered. Although the importance of the sanitary applications is admitted, both in then diagnostic aspect and, the long term, in the therapeutic one, it is argu...

There has been widespread support for harm reduction programs as an essential component for responding to the HIV and illicit drug use epidemics. However, despite the growing international acceptance of harm reduction, there continues to be strong opposition to this approach, with critics alleging that harm reduction programs enable drug use. Vancouver, Canada provides a compelling case study t...