Research on democratic backsliding increasingly views mass polarization as a mechanism that facilitates democratic erosion. This study examines trajectories of ideological polarization in Poland between 1997 and 2023, a period encompassing democratic backsliding whose onset is typically dated to 2015. Using repeated issue-based questions from the Polish National Election Study (POLNES), we distinguish three aspects of polarization: radicalization of individuals’ positions on single issues, issue alignment (system-level correlation of issue positions across different domains), and issue partisanship (the extent to which issue positions are explained by party preferences). We find no evidence of increased single-issue radicalization over the studied period. By contrast, both issue alignment and issue partisanship increased, particularly on socio-cultural issues, with little change on economic issues. These trends are not linear: they emerge around the 2011 election and persist thereafter. This pattern is consistent with theories that view changes in mass polarization as facilitating conditions for democratic backsliding. Additionally, our findings highlight the heterogeneous nature of polarization and show that focusing
on single issues or unidimensional ideological scales can obscure important changes in the structure of mass belief systems.
The link between economic inequality and individual well-being has been gaining increasing research attention. This study examines this relationship using data from 71 countries with diverse national incomes, addressing three key research gaps: (1) incorporating measures of both perceived and objective economic inequality, (2) extending analysis to multiple components of well-being beyond happiness, including meaning in life, harmony, and spirituality, and (3) assessing levels of both current and ideal well-being. Findings reveal that perceived economic inequality predicts personal well-being more strongly than objective inequality. In addition, perceived inequality is associated with a wider gap between current and ideal levels of happiness, meaning, harmony, and spirituality, although national income moderates the effects of meaning, harmony, and spirituality. We discuss the implications of these results, highlighting the need for more culturally sensitive studies on perceived economic inequality and well-being.
This data paper presents a dataset, of 12,361 observations compiled from the Happiness Meanders project, which explores cultural variations in individual and family well-being, ideal and actual happiness, emotional experiences and expressions, and cultural models of selfhood across 48 countries. Participants were recruited through academic networks. Data were collected using standardised scales, including the Satisfaction with Life Scale, the Interdependent Happiness Scale, the Cultural Models of Selfhood Scale, and the Emotional Experience and Expression inspired by Affect Valuation Index. The dataset underwent thorough technical validation, including checks for variable consistency, handling missing data, and identifying potential response biases. A filter for data quality was applied, with potentially unreliable data flagged for exclusion. This dataset offers a valuable resource for examining cultural influences on emotional dynamics (frequence of experience and expression), individual and family oriented evaluations of happiness, ideal and actual evaluation of happiness, cultural models of selfhood, and can support further research in cross-cultural psychology and related social sciences.
Large online marketplaces increasingly rely on multi-stage ranking pipelines where a learned relevance model is complemented by business-aware constraints such as contractual pacing, exposure caps and commercial alignment objectives. This paper develops a second-stage, contract-aware re-ranking layer for real-estate recommendation that explicitly balances user–item relevance with plan fulfillment, lead value and operational guardrails. The proposed multi-objective re-ranker (PMOR) combines a calibrated base relevance score with multiplicative business adjustments and subtractive penalties for approaching contractual caps and for within-slate similarity. The method supports heterogeneous settlement models, including pay-per-action and fixed-fee contracts, via contract-specific weights. Because the scoring function is deterministic and structured, it admits exact component-wise contribution analysis and counterfactual ablations without relying on surrogate explainability methods. Offline evaluation on production logs from an anonymized marketplace covers 4219 recommendation requests and 184,147 candidate items, joined with daily business snapshots using an as-of strategy to prevent look-ahead bias. Under a profit proxy based on effective lead value, position discounting and billability, PMOR achieves an indexed expected-revenue proxy of 487.4 (baseline = 100), corresponding to a lift of 387.4% over a model-only baseline and 48.4% over a legacy production re-ranker (LPR). The gain is primarily associated with improved billable exposure, increasing the share of billable positions in TOP-3 to 78.22% compared with 37.85% for LPR. We discuss parameter sensitivity, operational considerations and limitations of offline proxy objectives for deployment.
Cognitive aging is characterized by a deterioration of episodic memory functions. Since episodic memory requires retrieval of context, it has been proposed that older adults suffer from a specific deficit in terms of remembering context associated with to-be-remembered information. At the same time, however, it has been argued that providing context information at the time of retrieval can ameliorate age-related memory deficits. These positions can be reconciled if older adults show a deficit in encoding specific, not meaningful (i.e., not related) item-context associations but demonstrate a preserved ability to encode meaningful item-context associations and retrieve them when both items and contexts are provided as cues. In three experiments, we demonstrate such a pattern of deficits and preserved functions by asking younger and older adults to encode pairs of words embedded in contexts, then varying whether these contexts are reinstated when the same pairs of words are restudied. We then examine how this manipulation affects – via spontaneous retrieval of item-context associations – metacognitive monitoring of the effectiveness of restudy in the form of judgments of learning (JOLs). Experiment 1, using semantically unrelated contexts, showed the context reinstatement effect in JOLs only for younger adults. Experiments 2 and 3, promoting encoding of context for older adults by using semantically related contexts, showed effects of context reinstatement for older and younger adults. Together, these results show that older adults sometimes fail to encode specific contextual associations, but if they do encode them, they experience no deficit in spontaneous retrieval of these associations.
Pozostałe osiągnięcia naukoweArtykuły (zamknięty dostęp)Journal article
