Even as the pandemic wanes in public interest, understanding vaccine hesitancy remains critically important. This study examined how attitudes towards science mediate the relationship between COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and prominent psychosocial predictors: political ideology, religiosity, reactance proneness, dogmatism, perceived ostracism, and precarity. We analyzed the structure of people’s attitudes towards science, revealing four factors: belief that science is objective, belief that science and technology are beneficial, trust in science in general, and trust in medical science. With these as mediators in a saturated path analysis, low trust in medical science and lacking belief that science is objective fully mediated the relationships between nearly all predictors and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy. Political conservativism’s negative association with vaccine hesitancy was partially mediated by the same two factors. Trust in science in general was not a significant mediator once all four facets were included in the model. These findings are discussed with a focus on their implications for understanding attitudes towards science and their complex role in COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy.

In today's economic and social conditions where uncertainty is high, the legal and social dimensions of employment policies have gained importance, and it has become even more important to examine the relationship between job security and job performance for employees and organizations. Organizations need high-performing employees to achieve their goals and gain competitive advantage in their industries. Organizational commitment, defined as the employee's sense of belonging to the organization, and the motivation that pushes the individual to act in line with a goal, have psychological effects on the relationship between job security and job performance. The data collected from 582 people working in the banking sectors of Northern Cyprus, the psychological effects of organizational commitment and motivation in the relationship between perceived job security and job performance, are analysed and their positive contributions are observed. The job security provided has a positive effect on organizational outputs.

INTRODUCTION: Despite legal efforts to reduce societal barriers, people with disabilities still face anti-disability bias, stereotyping, and stigma. According to the social movement hypothesis, people’s participation in and identification with activist movements may reduce bias towards social outgroups. Alternatively, people’s intergroup attitudes and bias may influence their participation in activist activities. METHODS: This study used structural equation modeling to investigate whether reduced bias towards people with disabilities is associated with critical activism and/or personal, familial, or work experience with disability. Undergraduates (N = 497) completed an online survey including measures of anti-disability bias, critical activist orientation, experience with disability, and demographic characteristics. RESULTS: The relation between having a critical activist orientation and lower anti-disability bias was bidirectional, suggesting reciprocal influences between individual-level attitudes and participation in social movements. Aligning with intergroup contact theory, personal and familial experience with disability correlated with reduced anti-disability bias, and familial and work experience with having a critical activist orientation. Male gender correlated with increased anti-disability bias, and male gender, White race, and higher social class with lower endorsements of a critical activist orientation. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that disability experience and social status influence critical activist identity, which predicts lower bias.

This article describes the mental health outcomes of participants in the HudsonUP pilot, a five-year basic income initiative for low to mid-income residents of Hudson, NY. The study employs a mixed-methods approach, including both quantitative surveys and qualitative phenomenological interviews, to better understand participants’ experiences two years into the pilot. Through the lens of the psychological theory of scarcity, findings indicate that the HudsonUP program has improved the overall mental well-being of the participants by reducing the stress and anxiety associated with financial insecurity and helping them to meet their basic needs, pursue further education, and career opportunities. Despite the challenges of the ongoing pandemic and inflation, participants expressed gratitude for the “undercurrent of stability” provided by the program.

In the study of sentencing disparities, class related hypotheses have received considerably less attention than explanations based on offenders’ ethnicity. This is unfortunate since the two mechanisms are likely interrelated, at the very least as a result of their overlap in the population, with ethnic minorities being generally more deprived than the White majority. In this registered report we propose exploring the mediating and moderating effects between offenders’ area deprivation and their ethnic background using a novel administrative dataset capturing all offences processed through the England and Wales Crown Court. Specifically, we seek to test two key hypotheses: i) the reported ethnic disparities in sentencing are mediated and explained away by area deprivation; and ii) ethnic disparities are moderated by area deprivation, with ethnic disparities being narrower in the more deprived areas. Results from this empirical analysis will shed new light on the underlying causes of sentencing disparities, but crucially - if deprivation is shown to play a major role in the generation of ethnic disparities - they will also help inform the adequate policy responses to redress this problem.