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Growing attention has been given to the massive spike in anti-Asian hate crimes since the COVID-19 outbreak. But it is also essential to recognize that not all Asians experience the rise of anti-Asian racism to the same degree. Many individual and contextual factors may shape individuals’ subjective experience of anti-Asian racism. Underlying Asians’ differential experiences are the unequal psychological consequences they bear. This essay explores nativity, and co-ethnic concentration, as well as how they interact to affect Asians’ experience of anti-Asian racism.

While some scholars suggest that awareness of income inequality is strongest when the actual level of inequality is high, others find that individuals’ awareness of income inequality is largely unresponsive to actual inequality. In this article, we argue that individuals in different social class positions often respond to the actual levels of income inequality distinctively, and therefore a class perspective is essential in understanding how actual inequality and people’s perceptions of it are associated. Using data from the social inequality modules of the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP, 1992, 1999, and 2009) as well as the World Income Inequality Database ( https://www.wider.unu.edu/ ) and the World Inequality Database ( https://wid.world/ ), we consider how actual inequality interacts with social class to shape people’s perceptions of income inequality across 64 country-years between 1992 and 2009. We find that overall, perceptions of inequality are higher among the working class and lower among salariats. However, cross-nationally and over time, as the actual level of inequality increases, working classes become less critical toward inequality, whereas salariats become more critical. The actual level of inequality itself has no impact on people’s discontent toward it. This creates a counterbalancing effect that obscures the aggregate relationship between rising inequality and people’s perceptions of it.

Aggregate figures unequivocally depict an increase in anti-Asian sentiment in the United States and other Western countries since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there is limited understanding of the contexts under which Asians encounter discrimination. The authors examine how coethnic concentration shapes Asians’ experiences of discrimination across U.S. counties during COVID-19 and also assess whether county-level context (e.g., COVID-19 infection rates, unemployment rates) could help explain this relationship. The authors analyze the Understanding Coronavirus in America tracking survey, a nationally representative panel of American households, along with county-level contextual data. The authors find an n-shaped relationship between coethnic concentration and Asians’ perceived discrimination. This relationship is explained largely by county-level COVID-19 infection rates. Together, the context of medium Asian concentration and high COVID-19 cases created a particularly hostile environment for Asians during COVID-19.

The rise of anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a global phenomenon. This article aims to develop a transcultural communication perspective to examine the global rise in anti-Asian violence. It discusses the intersection of global and local factors underlying the rise of anti-Asian racism in Canada, namely (1) the historical and ongoing impacts of settler colonialism (2) the flaws of Canadian multiculturalism, and (3) the insider/outsider dichotomy adopted by mass media’s framing of the pandemic. By explicating these structural factors from a transcultural communication perspective, this article argues that politicized transcultural discussions on white supremacy are urgently needed for initiating constructive conversations over anti-Asian racism worldwide.

This article reviews Brenner’s most recent monograph, New Urban Spaces, in which he demonstrates his systematic and decades-long effort into developing new epistemological perspectives, conceptual proposals, and methodological strategies for urban investigation in our so-called global ‘urban age’. We use images taken in the city of Toronto to interpret and visually explain some of Brenner’s key concepts and arguments. In our critical assessment, we point out that Brenner’s abstract theorizing and overgeneralization may have provoked an ignorance of the local variations in effect globally and a failure to tease out specific testable hypotheses for urban investigation. To conclude, we introduce a newly developed scenic approach, one that extends Brenner’s view on the urban by stressing the importance of local variations and testable hypotheses.

While foreign pundits have alternatively blamed and praised the Chinese government’s handling of the COVID-19 virus, little is known about how citizens within China understand this performance. Thi...

A large literature has suggested that education leads to higher trust. In this article, I argue that how education and trust are associated at the individual level may depend on the level of risk and uncertainty of each institutional setting. Trust involves not only individuals’ risk-taking propensity and capability but also their perception of how uncertain or risky the situation they are in. I test this micro–macro interactive approach by analyzing data from the World Values Survey, the European Social Survey, and the World Bank. Results show that the education and trust association can change from positive to negative both cross-nationally and within national contexts over time in response to the social and political stability at the macro level. In stable and low-conflict societies, the association between education and trust is highly positive. However, the association becomes negative in transitional societies where social and political risks are widespread. Supporting the risk-taking and risk awareness mechanisms underpinning the interactive process, I show that education has varying impacts on risk-taking propensity and risk awareness across different institutional contexts.

Growing evidence suggests that outbreaks such as the COVID-19 pandemic are better handled in places where social capital is high. Less clear, however, are the channels through which social capital ...

More trust in unfamiliar others often indicates higher quality of life for individuals and societies. Current litertaure has thus far provided two distintive theories to explain why some people are more trusting than others. A culture theory views trust as a persistent human trait that people learned from socialization early in life. An experiential theory suggests that people constantly update their trust according to changing life experiences in different contexts. To test how stable trust can be, in this article I consider whether the experience of growing up in a low trust place and then migrating to a high trust place would change migrants’ trust and vice versa. In Canada, trust is lower in Quebec. My analyses of data from Statistics Canada’s General Social Surveys show that Quebecers who emigrated to live in other regions of the country continue to show a lower level of trust, and that English Canadians who migrated to live in Quebec remain more trusting than local natives. This is especially true among migrants who migrated as an adult. My additional analysis also shows that Quebec migrants residing in the Atlantic region, closer to Quebec, seem to have more trust than Quebecers residing in the Prairie regions and British Columbia that are overwhelmingly English-speaking and far away from Quebec geographically, which yields some support for the experiential theory of trust. Nonetheless, the overall pattern lends stronger support for the cultural theory that an individual’ trust in others is stabilized early in life.

This survey study of US adults examines the association of stress experienced as a result of inflation with sociodemographic characteristics such as sex, race and ethnicity, education, and income levels.

Objective: Early prostate cancer micrometastatic foci undergo a mesenchymal to epithelial reverting transition, not only aiding seeding and colonization, but also rendering the tumor cells generally chemoresistant. We previously found that upregulated E-cadherin in the epithelial micrometastases activated canonical survival pathways, including PI3K-Akt, that protected the tumor cells from death; however, the extent of protection from blocking the pathway in its entirety was modest, because different isoforms may have alternately affected cell functioning. Here, we characterized Akt isoform expressions in primary and metastatic prostate cancers, as well as their individual contributions to chemoresistance. Methods: Akt isoforms and E-cadherin were manipulated with drugs, knocked down, and over expressed. Tumor cell killing was determined in vitro and in vivo. Overall survival was calculated from patient records and specimens. Results: Pan-Akt inhibition sensitized tumor cells to chemotherapy, and specific blockade of Akt1 or/and Akt2 caused cells to be more chemoresponsive. Overexpression of Akt3 induced apoptosis. A low dose of Akt1 or Akt2 inhibitor enabled standard chemotherapies to significantly eradicate metastatic prostate tumors in a mouse model, acting as chemosensitizers. In human specimens, we found Akt1 and Akt2 positively correlated, whereas Akt3 inversely correlated, with the overall survival of prostate cancer patients. Akt1high/Akt2high/Akt3low tumors had the worst outcomes. Conclusions: E-cadherin-induced activation of Akt1/2 isoforms was the essential mechanism of chemoresistance, whereas Akt3 made cells more fragile. These findings emphasized the need to target Akt1/2, rather than pan-Akt, as a rational therapeutic approach.

This article examines how the experience of moving from a high to a low-trust place might affect people’ trust and vice versa. Given that the American South has lower trust than other regions of th...

It is commonly held that education generates higher trust in others. In this article we consider how education might affect trust in transitional China where sociopolitical risks are widespread. We...

Extant theory suggests that crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic may change people's trust in others. A crisis-to-solidarity model suggests that people become more trusting, while a crisis-to-negative experience theory suggests that people lose trust, and a stability perspective predicts that social trust will largely remain unchanged. We argue that, when a crisis occurs, trust is likely to fall into distinct trajectories of change that will conform to these different perspectives, and placement into contrasting trajectories of change will be predicated on socioeconomic position. To test our argument, we use data from multiple waves of Canadian national surveys conducted from September 2019 to February 2021 and examine how two major forms of social trust-generalized trust and neighborhood trust-changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. A longitudinal latent class analysis (LLCA) shows increasing, decreasing, and stable trajectories of trust, which conform to each of the proposed patterns. We further show that individuals' baseline socioeconomic position is a strong indicator of the placement in these trajectories. Both forms of trust increased among individuals with higher socioeconomic positions while decreased among individuals with lower socioeconomic positions. This research contributes to the literature on the social context of trust by reconciling contrasting views of the consequences of crises for trust, and also in showing that the segmentation of changes in trust are proscribed by structures of social stratification.

In this article, we provide a cultural explanation of a long-standing trust puzzle in Canada-Quebecers trust much less than their fellow Canadians. Specifically, we develop a novel approach to empirically assess the historical influence of the Catholic Church, using the Quiet Revolution (a period of abrupt modernization in Quebec) as a natural experiment. We find that older cohorts socialized prior to the Quiet Revolution are significantly less trusting-a distinctive trend that is most pronounced among Catholics. Conversely, in the rest of Canada older cohorts are more trusting, following the trend commonly found in other countries. Furthermore, measures of both religious beliefs and modernization account for a large part of the birth cohort trust gap in Quebec. The findings suggest that low trust in Quebec is rooted in the province's Catholic cultural heritage, but that the legacy of the Quiet Revolution is gradually changing the trust culture.Dans cet article, nous proposons une explication culturelle d'un casse-tête de longue date au Canada - les Québécois ont un niveau de confiance sociale plus bas que leurs concitoyens Canadiens. Plus précisément, nous développons une nouvelle approche pour évaluer empiriquement l'influence historique de l'Église catholique, en utilisant la Révolution tranquille (une période de modernisation abrupte au Québec) comme expérience naturelle. Nous constatons que les cohortes plus âgées et socialisées avant la Révolution tranquille font nettement moins confiance - une tendance distincte qui est plus prononcée chez les catholiques. Le contraire est constaté dans le reste du Canada : les cohortes plus âgées font davantage confiance, ce qui suit la tendance communément observée dans d'autres pays. De plus, les mesures des croyances religieuses et de la modernisation expliquent une grande partie de l'écart de confiance sociale entre les cohortes de naissance au Québec. Les résultats suggèrent que le faible niveau de confiance au Québec est enraciné dans l'héritage culturel catholique de la province, mais que le legs de la Révolution tranquille modifie progressivement la culture de confiance.

This paper reports findings from a crowdsourced replication. Eighty-five independent teams attempted a computational replication of results reported in an original study of policy preferences and immigration by fitting the same statistical models to the same data. The replication involved an experimental condition. Random assignment put participating teams into either the transparent group that received the original study and code, or the opaque group receiving only a methods section, rough results description and no code. The transparent group mostly verified the numerical results of the original study with the same sign and p-value threshold (95.7%), while the opaque group had less success (89.3%). Exact numerical reproductions to the second decimal place were far less common (76.9% and 48.1%), and the number of teams who verified at least 95% of all effects in all models they ran was 79.5% and 65.2% respectively. Therefore, the reliability we quantify depends on how reliability is defined, but most definitions suggest it would take a minimum of three independent replications to achieve reliability. Qualitative investigation of the teams’ workflows reveals many causes of error including mistakes and procedural variations. Although minor error across researchers is not surprising, we show this occurs where it is least expected in the case of computational reproduction. Even when we curate the results to boost ecological validity, the error remains large enough to undermine reliability between researchers to some extent. The presence of inter-researcher variability may explain some of the current “reliability crisis” in the social sciences because it may be undetected in all forms of research involving data analysis. The obvious implication of our study is more transparency. Broader implications are that researcher variability adds an additional meta-source of error that may not derive from conscious measurement or modeling decisions, and that replications cannot alone resolve this type of uncertainty.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to widespread mental health issues. In this article, we consider how, due to a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes across the country, Asians might face a disproportionate mental health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analyzing data from the University of Southern California’s Center for Economic and Social Research Understanding Coronavirus in America survey, we report several major findings. First, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Asians (Asian Americans in particular) have experienced higher levels of mental disorders than whites. Second, Asian Americans and Asian immigrants are about twice as likely as whites to report having encountered instances of COVID-19-related acute discrimination. Third, experiences of COVID-19-associated discrimination have led to increased mental disorders for all Americans. Finally, COVID-19-related acute discrimination partially explains the disproportionate mental health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Asians. In conclusion, we highlight the importance of tackling hate, violence, and discrimination so as to address the disproportionate mental health impatcs of COVID-19 on minority populations.

The US has experienced a substantial decline in social trust in recent decades. Surprisingly few studies analyze whether individual-level explanations can account for this decrease. We use three-wave panel data from the General Social Survey (2006–2014) to study the effects of four possible individual-level sources of changes in social trust: job loss, social ties, income, and confidence in political institutions. Findings from fixed-effects linear regression models suggest that all but social ties matter. We then use 1973–2018 GSS data to predict trust based on observed values for unemployment, confidence in institutions, and satisfaction with income, versus an alternative counterfactual scenario in which the values of those three predictors are held constant at their mean levels in the early 1970s. Predicted values from these two scenarios differ substantially, suggesting that decreasing confidence in institutions and increasing unemployment scarring may explain about half of the observed decline in US social trust.

Subtle gender dynamics in the publishing process involving collaboration, peer-review, readership, citation, and media coverage disadvantage women in academia. In this study we consider whether commenting on published work is also gendered. Using all the comments published over a 16-year period in PNAS (N = 869) and Science (N = 481), we find that there is a gender gap in the authorship of comment letters: women are less likely than men to comment on published academic research. This disparity is greater than gender differences in the publication of research articles. There is also a gendered pattern in commenting: women comment writers are relatively less likely to engage with men’s research. If left unaddressed, these patterns in academic commenting could impede scholarly exchange between men and women and further marginalize women within the scientific community.

Cities, all over the world, have become more diverse than ever. This poses great challenges to urban studies and theorising. In this article, we review current debates in urban theory through Howitt’s (1998) three-facet conceptualisation of geographical scale and find that urban theorists have high levels of disagreement on the areal (scale as size), the hierarchical (scale as level) as well as the dialectical (scale as relation) aspects of the city. We show that, if urban theorists are to find a common approach to the city, we should contemplate: 1) what cities to study; 2) from which geographical level(s); and 3) how the city relates to other entities. We illustrate how the theory of urban scenes could potentially be used to address these debates in urban theory.

How can declining political trust in Western democracies be explained, especially, when it remains stable and high in authoritarian societies? Underlying this question is a debate about whether political trust represents a diffuse orientation toward the political system as a whole or a specific assessment of incumbent performance. This article argues that the solution requires a move away from existing approaches that focus on question content and instead thinking about the pattern of responses. While previous work assumes that individuals display both specific and diffuse trust, we argue that the individual patterning of responses indicates either diffuse or specific trust but not both. We develop a response pattern model and use it to identify three types of individuals – critical trusters (specific trust), compliants (diffuse trust), and cynics (diffuse distrust). Tests of the model with the World Values Survey (WVS) and the US General Social Survey (GSS) show that democracies have a higher proportion of critical trusters than other systems of government and that the proportion of critical trusters has increased over time in the United States. The response pattern model directly connects cross-national and longitudinal empirical evidence to theory about the relationship between democracy and different types of trust.

China has recently become one of the world’s largest shale gas producers. However, little is known about how shale gas development and fracking affect local communities in China nor how local commu...

Although there has been a longstanding curiosity about the socio-political consequences of China’s remarkable urban–rural divide, we have yet to understand the divide’s possible influence on mental health. Using data from the 2016 wave of the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS), we find that depressive symptoms of both rural–urban migrants and rural residents are significantly higher than those of urban residents. Consistent with the fundamental-causes-of-disease and stress-exposure perspectives, results from zero-inflated negative binomial regression suggest that such differences in depressive symptoms can be attributed to socioeconomic status and proximate stressors such as unemployment, living alone, and the unaffordability of medical services. In particular, the rural–urban difference in depressive symptoms is explained away by educational attainment. A further investigation using spline Poisson regression suggests that the protective effects of the period of middle school, which vary substantially across demographic groups, are especially relevant to the rural–urban disparity in depression. We argue that hukou is a fundamental cause of disease in China and mental health is an important yet understudied area where China’s salient urban–rural inequality strikes.

Research on international student’s post migration plans treats migration as a binary stay-return category and focuses on push-pull factors as the cause of this migration. In this paper we expand the definition of migration and consider the role of life experiences and aspirations, particularly the concept of home. We ask, what are the different conceptualizations of home and how are these tied to differential migratory plans? We analyze data from 232 interviews with international students from more than 50 countries who attended a flagship public university in Canada from 2006–2013.We find that students have four ways of thinking about home: as host, as ancestral, as cosmopolitan, and as nebulous. These understandings of home correspond to particular post-migration plans. While students who view home as a host plan to stay, and those who view home as ancestral plan to return, those with cosmopolitan and nebulous conceptions of home have more open migration plans.

Since the COVID-19 outbreak started in China, Chinese and Chinese looking East Asian Canadians have experienced more racist attacks, violence, and discrimination. In this article, we consider whether East Asian Canadians face a disproportionate mental health impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and, if so, whether the increased levels of discrimination explain this differential impact. Analyzing data from a nationally representative survey we conducted in March and April, 2020, we indeed find that higher incidences of acute discrimination encountered by East Asian Canadians during the COVID-19 pandemic explain their higher levels of mental health symptoms as compared to white Canadians. We call for a need to include mental health interventions and support designed specifically to address the needs of the East Asian Canadians in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why have the effects of COVID-19 been so unevenly geographically distributed in the United States? This paper investigates the role of social capital as a mediating factor for the spread of the virus. On one hand, higher social capital could imply greater in-person interaction and risk of contagion. On the other hand, because social capital is associated with greater trust and relationships within a community, it could endow individuals with a greater concern for others, thereby leading to more hygienic practices and social distancing. Using data for over 2,700 US counties, we investigate how social capital explains the level and growth rate of infections. We find that moving a county from the 25th to the 75th percentile of the distribution of social capital would lead to a 18% and 5.7% decline in the cumulative number of infections and deaths, as well as suggestive evidence of a lower spread of the virus. Our results are robust to many demographic characteristics, controls, and alternative measures of social capital. Finally, we discuss the channels through which social capital makes communities better able to respond to outbreaks.

This article examines how Americans' actual experience of gun victimization affects their trust in others and how this further connects to the widely-discussed association between gun crime and trust at the place level. Analyzing data from the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS), I find that, regardless when it occurred in life, Americans who were victimized by guns trust much less in others than those who had no such experience. In terms of the size of the effect, repeated gun victimization has the strongest effect, followed by adulthood victimization, and then childhood victimization. I also find that individuals who later achieve higher socioeconomic status are better able to recover from the psychological effect of childhood gun victimization, lending support for the experiential theory of trust that people can update their trust according to changing experiences later in life. Finally, combing the GSS data with data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I also show that higher percentages of nonfatal and fatal gun violence victims lead to lower levels of trust both across and within the U.S. census divisions over time. Findings of this study demonstrate that America's gun violence affects not only just those killed, injured, or present during gunfire, but it can also sabotage the social and psychological well-being of all Americans.

Is political trust in China anomalous? In most countries there are systematic differences in the level of trust in national and local government that take one of three patterns. In some countries, individuals trust the national government more than local government (hierarchical trust); in others individuals trust local government more than national government; while in some countries individuals trust both levels of government equally. Of 11 Asian societies, the only country where hierarchical trust predominates is China. Elsewhere the norm is to put more trust in local levels of government. While previous studies have described the pattern of trust in China, no study has considered relative trust as an outcome or comparatively. Taking advantage of the 2006 and 2010 Asian Barometer Survey data we consider whether the hierarchical trust pattern in China is the result of political control, culture, and/or performance. We find that political control explains the hierarchical trust pattern in China.