Table 3 - uploaded by James Polichak
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Context 1
... .48 for low and high authoritarians, respectively), and the expected authoritarianism x threat interaction, F(1,101) = 3.18, p<.05. As can be seen in Table 3, selective exposure scores were heightened by the joint presence of authoritarianism and threat. A contrast comparing selective exposure scores in the high authoritarianism/high threat condition with the average scores in the three remaining conditions (+3, -1, -1, -1) was significant, F(1,101) = 7.97, p<.01. ...
Context 2
... Table 3 here In addition to manipulating threat, we also experimentally varied whether respondents chose and then actually read an article about capital punishment before or after the assessment of the extremity and ambivalence of their attitudes. When extremity and ambivalence are measured prior to information exposure, the relationship between attitude structure and the propensity to seek out attitude-consistent information can be ascertained. ...
Citations
... With the prevalence of partisan media, scholars are interested in examining the effectiveness of partisan media in shaping the society's opinions about public issues. For example, research has showed a tendency of selective exposure and group polarization (Bennett & Iyengar, 2008;Jamieson & Cappella, 2008;Lavine, Lodge, Polichak, & Taber, 2002;Rickert, 1998). Zuckerman and Chaiken's (1998) information processing model suggested that people's judgement formation is not only dependent on the relevant news content, but may also involve the media source that offers the coverage. ...
This research used a 2 × 2 pretest-posttest experimental design to measure China’s image after participants’ exposure to news stimuli on a partisan news website. Two manipulated factors were media congruency (congruent or incongruent) and news coverage (positive or negative). No effect of news coverage was detected, but congruent media led to significantly higher scores in country beliefs than incongruent media. In addition, a significant boomerang effect was found between news coverage and media congruency: the same positive coverage, when embedded in the congruent partisan media, resulted in the biggest enhancement of country beliefs and desired interaction, but led to the largest setback for these two dimensions when embedded in the incongruent partisan media. The findings suggest that when processing news about China, partisans are partially motivated by directional goals in the cognitive and conative components of China’s country image, but stick to accuracy goals in the affective dimension.
... For example, Stenner (2005) showed that authoritarian persons are activated to manifest authoritarian attitudes and behaviors in times of threat. Similarly, other research reveals that authoritarianism and threat interact in producing undesirable outcomes, such as prejudice (e.g., Feldman, 2003), biased information seeking (e.g., Lavine, Lodge, Polichak, & Taber, 2002), support for restrictions of civil liberties (e.g., Cohrs, Kielmann, Maes, & Moschner, 2005;Kossowska, Trejtowicz, de Lemus, Bukowski, Van Hiel, & Goodwin, 2011), and political intolerance (e.g., preferring order over freedom of speech, . Overall, there is ample consensus on the paramount importance of an interactionist approach to the study of authoritarianism (Lavine et al., 2002). ...
... Similarly, other research reveals that authoritarianism and threat interact in producing undesirable outcomes, such as prejudice (e.g., Feldman, 2003), biased information seeking (e.g., Lavine, Lodge, Polichak, & Taber, 2002), support for restrictions of civil liberties (e.g., Cohrs, Kielmann, Maes, & Moschner, 2005;Kossowska, Trejtowicz, de Lemus, Bukowski, Van Hiel, & Goodwin, 2011), and political intolerance (e.g., preferring order over freedom of speech, . Overall, there is ample consensus on the paramount importance of an interactionist approach to the study of authoritarianism (Lavine et al., 2002). ...
... Moreover, we found that the conventionalism dimension of the ACT model had a negative association with the dependent variable in condition of societal threat. Overall, the idea that the expression of individual difference variables depends on the characteristics of the situation dates back to the 1930s (e.g., Lewin, 1936) and periodically re-emerges across the years (e.g., Lavine et al., 2002;Mondak, Hibbing, Canache, Seligson, & Anderson, 2010). Originally, the literature on the psychological origins of antidemocracy had a genuinely interactionist outlook. ...
We addressed the interactive effects of authoritarianism and social threat in explaining the preference for antidemocratic political systems. Using a quasi-experimental design (N = 171), we manipulated exposure to social threat and tested its effect in combination with authoritarianism, operationalized as a three-dimension construct composed of authoritarianism, conservatism, and traditionalism. We found that social threat and authoritarianism lead people to endorse antidemocratic political systems. The same was true for conservatism, but only in condition of societal threat, while traditionalism was not associated with the dependent variable, either directly or in interaction with societal threat. The findings highlight the benefits of the distinction between subdimensions of authoritarianism, as well as the importance of individual-context interactions in explaining socially relevant outcomes such as support for democracy.
... While it focuses on framing, another way that psychologists have found to activate latent dispositions is with primes. These are unobtrusive or subliminal cues given to survey respondents, which make a given situation more salient and activate cognitive associations among those whose personality or dispositions are susceptible to that specific cue (Lavine, Lodge, Polichak, & Taber, 2002). Keeping the authoritarianism example, for instance, if individuals who have a higher latent authoritarian disposition are primed with threat cues, that affects the kind of media they prefer to consume (Lavine, Lodge, & Freitas, 2005). ...
Representation failures are one of the main reasons for the emergence of populism in contemporary politics. Mainstream parties’ convergence towards the centre left parts of the electorate to feel underrepresented. Populists are successful when they engage apathetic voters. In this sense, populism is suggested to be a potential corrective to democracy as long as it engages dissatisfied and disenfranchised citizens, helping close the representation gap. We test this proposition in three experiments with samples from two different countries, to test whether the activation of populist attitudes has impacts on normatively positive and negative political participation. The experimental manipulations show that triggering populism neither makes individuals more likely to participate nor to donate to a political campaign. We also find that activation of populist attitudes makes people more likely to accept political apathy and justify not-voting. Our findings contribute to the ‘threat or corrective democracy’ debate, which suggests populism’s involvement in more political participation. Ultimately, and unfortunately, it does not seem like populism is an effective answer to ever falling levels of political participation or representational gaps in Western democracies.
... Adorno et al. (1950) originated work on authoritarianism in response to the rise of fascism. Research on authoritarianism has provided insight into individual level prejudice and out-group hostility (Altemeyer 1998), reactions to threat (Feldman and Stenner 1997;Lavine et al. 2002), responses to persuasive messages ( Lavine et al. 1999), presidential vote choice (Weber, Federico, and Feldman 2017), and political polarization (Hetherington and Weiler 2009;Luttig 2017). ...
This article investigates the gender gap in gun control attitudes, in which women are more likely to support gun control than men. Women are less likely than men to own a gun and to see owning guns as a means of self-protection. Using the 2012 American National Election Study Data, this article tests authoritarianism, which includes the desire for security and a disposition toward higher levels of perceived threat, as an explanation for the gap. The results indicate that authoritarian women are more likely than authoritarian men to support gun control. In fact, authoritarianism appears to have the opposite effect on men and women’s gun control attitudes. Authoritarianism is associated with higher levels of support for gun control among women and lower levels of support among men.
... Studies suggest that more conservative individuals respond more to threatening and negative stimuli than do more liberal individuals. Lavine, Lodge, Polichak and Taber (2002) found students higher on right-wing authoritarianism recognised and responded more quickly to threat-related words than to neutral words. Vigil (2010) found American undergraduates identifying as Republicans were more likely to identify blurred faces as angry, fearful or disgusted (threat-related expressions) rather than joyful, sad or surprised. ...
Two studies were conducted in order to investigate the relationships among conservatism, anxiety and sensitivity to threat in Turkish samples. Previous research, predominantly conducted in the U.S., has shown that conservatism is related to fear of threat (especially fear of death), as well as avoidance of threatening and emotional stimuli and experiences. Our first study investigated the relationship between anxiety and conservatism with self-report measures. The results suggested that all the dimensions of Turkey-specific conservatism we tested – commitment to tradition, outgroup antipathy, antihedonism, authoritarianism, and religious sensitivity – were related to trait anxiety, confirming that there is a general, fairly context-independent association between conservatism and sensitivity to potential threats and dangers. In order to eliminate the potential shortcoming of using self-report measures, our second study investigated the relationship between conservatism and sensitivity to threat by employing a behavioural measure to assess the latter, namely the dot probe task, a widely employed measure of attentional bias to threat. Results suggested that more conservative participants showed more sensitivity to threat stimuli than did less conservative participants. Surprisingly however, more conservative participants showed attentional avoidance of threat, i.e. their attention was biased away from threat stimuli rather than towards threat stimuli. The findings are discussed within the context of the literature on ‘vigilance-avoidance’ in anxiety, and in relation to the contribution towards the growing literature on conservatism, emotion, and social psychophysiology.
In this study, we investigated the effects of experimentally manipulated criminal and economic threats on psychological reactions to crime. In addition, we examined if these effects were moderated by participants' personal values. Two moderated regressions performed on the data from a quasi-experimental vignette study (N = 96) showed that criminal and economic threats influenced fear of crime and crime risk perception. These effects were significant only (for economic threat) or were stronger (for criminal threat) among people high in conservatism.
