Despite the increased use of dating technology for finding and forming romantic relationships, location remains relevant for relationship formation. While current research on relationship formation attends to the ratio of marriageable men to women, marital attitudes, and gendered racial exclusion, this research does not always consider a nuanced look at how location can also constrain opportunities to make short- or long-term romantic connections. Drawing on interviews with 111 Asian, White, Black, and Latina heterosexual college-educated women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-three, I find that regardless of race/ethnicity, women observe that some places provide limited opportunities to meet men and that the mismatch between their dating norms, beliefs, and/or expectations for relationships and the location where they reside make their search more difficult. Women of color additionally note that some locations provide fewer opportunities for same-race and/or interracial dating than others. I also find that women of color are more likely to employ strategies to address their locational barriers than White women.

Therefore, I argue that not only does location continue to matter for forming romantic connections in the digital age, but that location and race also intersect to create unique locational barriers for women of color. This intersection, consequently, demonstrates that the opportunities for relationship formation remain stratified despite the rise of dating technology.

How much does politics affect relationship building? Previous experimental studies have come to vastly different conclusions – ranging from null to truly transformative effects. To explore these differences, this study replicates and extends previous research by conducting five survey experiments meant to expand our understanding of how politics does/does not shape the formation of romantic relationships. We find that people, indeed, are influenced by the politics of prospective partners; respondents evaluate those in the political out-group as being less attractive, less dateable, and less worthy of matchmaking efforts. However, these effects are modest in size – falling almost exactly in between previous study estimates. Our results shine light on a literature that has, up until this point, produced a chasm in study results – a vital task given concerns over growing levels of partisan animus in the USA and the rapidly expanding body of research on affective polarization.

In this study, we investigated a psychological mechanism underlying the corruption of government officials, based on cultural factors in China. The proposed psychological kidnapping model describes how some bribers set up relations (guanxi, 关系) with bribees to conceal the intention of bribery and gradually lead them into corruption. Through text analysis, classification, and encoding of corruption cases, we defined the term psychological kidnapping, as well as its fundamental characteristics and the corresponding interaction process model (study 1). Using qualitative analysis, we confirmed the three stages of the process of corruption (attraction and acceptance, trust and integration, and collusion or fracture). In a further step, we unveiled three characteristics of psychological kidnapping, known as concealed resource delivery, imbalanced perceptions of corruption risk and cost for government officials, and soft menace from bribers. Then we explored the essential role of renqing (人情) in study 2 as a key enabler of psychological kidnapping. We hope that this work can provide a theoretical base for the prevention of corruption in the public service sector in China.