AFFILIATE RESEARCH
Measuring Enlarged Mentality: Development and Validation of the Enlarged Mentality Scale

By Myojumg Chung | July 2024
Hannah Arendt’s concept of enlarged mentality (also referred to as representative thinking) has received much attention from theorists and philosophers, but it has not been a central concept in the empirical political communication literature. This article explicates the concept of enlarged mentality and argues for its relevance to political communication theory and research. Specifically, we developed and validated a 10-item survey instrument to measure orientation towards enlarged thinking among individuals. The Enlarged Mentality Scale was validated in two national samples (Singapore, United Kingdom) and was found to show predictive validity toward deliberative and political engagement variables. We offer suggestions on how the measure of enlarged mentality could be useful for different areas of political communication research. Learn More >>
Other Affiliate Research

A Case Study in an A.I.-Assisted Content Audit
This paper presents an experimental case study utilizing machine learning and generative AI to audit content diversity in a hyper- local news outlet, The Scope, based at a university and focused on underrepresented communities in Boston. Through computational text analysis, including entity extraction, topic labeling, and quote extraction and attribution, we evaluate the extent to which The Scope’s coverage aligns with its mission to amplify diverse voices.

AI Regulation: Competition, Arbitrage & Regulatory Capture
The commercial launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 and the fast development of Large Language Models catapulted the regulation of Artificial Intelligence to the forefront of policy debates One overlooked area is the political economy of these regulatory initiatives–or how countries and companies can behave strategically and use different regulatory levers to protect their interests in the international competition on how to regulate AI.
This Article helps fill this gap by shedding light on the tradeoffs involved in the design of AI regulatory regimes in a world where: (i) governments compete with other governments to use AI regulation, privacy, and intellectual property regimes to promote their national interests; and (ii) companies behave strategically in this competition, sometimes trying to capture the regulatory framework.

Multimodal Drivers of Attention Interruption to Baby Product Video Ads
Ad designers often use sequences of shots in video ads, where frames are similar within a shot but vary across shots. These visual variations, along with changes in auditory and narrative cues, can interrupt viewers’ attention. In this paper, we address the underexplored task of applying multimodal feature extraction techniques to marketing problems.
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