Table 3 - uploaded by James Polichak
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We advocate for an experimental approach to the study of personality and politics. In particular, we propose an "interactionist" model of political behavior in which the cognitive and behavioral effects of dispositional variables are qualified by experimentally induced contexts. Our operating assumption is that the political effects of personality...
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Context 1
... .48 for low and high authoritarians, respectively), and the expected authoritarianism × 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. 7 This contrast accounted for more than 95% of the treatment sum of squares (SS), and when the SS corresponding to this contrast was removed, the residual treatment SS (i.e., the SS associated with the two main effects and the interaction, after removal of that portion associated with the focused contrast) did not approach significance, F(2,101) = 0.19, ns. ...
Citations
... It is difficult to manipulate someone's personality, and research suggests that personality is mostly stable (Bleidorn et al. 2022). But if researchers understand the psychology that a trait is embedded within, then they can design manipulations that affect downstream political attitudes and behaviours in predictable ways (Lavine et al. 2002). Here, we connected the neuroticism facet of anxiety to a system designed to manage inclusion and exclusion. ...
Liberals experience more distress than conservatives. Why? We offer a novel explanation, the social support hypothesis. Maintaining social support and avoiding exclusion are basic human motivations, but people differ in their sensitivity to the threat of social exclusion. Among people high in the personality trait neuroticism , exclusion easily triggers feelings of vulnerability and neediness. The social support hypothesis translates this to politics. Concerned with their own vulnerability, we find that neurotic people prefer policies of care – social welfare and redistribution – but not other left-wing policies. Specifically, it is anxiety – the facet of neuroticism tapping sensitivity to social threats – that drives this link. And it is only for people experiencing exclusion that anxiety predicts support for social welfare. Our results come from two experiments and four representative surveys across two continents. They help to resolve the puzzle of liberal distress while providing a new template for research on personality and politics.
... Therefore, "high RWA, which expresses the value or motivational goal of establishing and maintaining collective or societal security, order, stability, and cohesion (as opposed to individual freedom, autonomy, and self-expression) is made chronically salient for individuals by their socialized belief that the world they live in is dangerous, threatening, and unpredictable (as opposed to safe, secure, stable, and predictable)" (ibid.). Indeed, research has shown that individuals high in RWA beliefs tend to react more strongly to social threats and be more prone to feeling the desire of controlling them (Lavine et al., 2002). More specifically, RWA behaviors tend to increase along with societal threats (Duckitt, 2001). ...
In the last decade, our knowledge of authoritarianism has completely shifted from that of a personality dimension to that of a multidimensional attitudinal structure. Current theories stipulate that individuals are motivated to maintain a sense of collective security within their social group. When a group is confronted with societal threats, such as COVID-19, individuals respond by increasing their exhibition of authoritarian practices to maintain collective security. Where a sense of control cannot be maintained, it can contribute to poor psychological outcomes such as negative future outlooks. In the present study, we collected a community sample of 948 individuals to test how authoritarianism may alleviate feelings of future anxiety. We hypothesized that perceived risk and demoralization would mediate the effects of authoritarianism on future anxiety. Our results supported that demoralization is a significant mediator, in that higher authoritarianism is associated with lower levels of demoralization that in turn is associated with lower levels of future anxiety. However, we did not support a mediating role in the perceived risk of COVID-19. Our results illuminate a potential pathway between authoritarianism and the mitigation of maladaptive psychological outcomes in the face of societal threats. Perhaps encouragingly, authoritarianism was associated with morale but did not diminish the seriousness of the perceived threat of COVID-19. We suggest that morale be a point of future investigation when aiming to understand the effects of authoritarianism on maintaining groups’ collective security.
... Understanding the pandemic in this light is important because what is often seen as the key attribute of authoritarianism-obedience to authority-is more appropriately understood as a strategy through which authoritarians seek to minimize threats, maintain order, and exert control over their lives. Authoritarians perceive the world as inherently uncertain and threatening (Duckitt 1989;Feldman 2003;Lavine et al. 2002) and are thus motivated to adopt strategies (often punitive) that promote stability, security, and continuity (Duckitt and Sibley 2006;Filsinger and Freitag 2022). Authoritarians deep-seated desire to preserve the prevailing social order and oneness therefore represents the underlying motivation for behaviors commonly associated with authoritarians, such as deference to authority and aggression toward deviants and nonconformists (Feldman 2003;Feldman and Stenner 1997;Stenner 2005). ...
Government restrictions intended to mitigate the spread of COVID-19—such as “lockdowns,” mask mandates, and vaccine passports—produced intense resentment among some groups and led to resistance, defiance, and social unrest in many countries. To better understand the roots of this opposition, we examine the role of dispositional authoritarianism as a psychological motivator of participation in anti-restriction protests and support for the groups that engaged in such actions. Because obedience to authority is commonly identified as a core feature of authoritarianism, existing studies have suggested authoritarians should be more likely to endorse pandemic restrictions and oppose anti-government dissent. However, we propose the alternative hypothesis: individuals with authoritarian dispositions are more likely to oppose pandemic restrictions and more likely to express support for pandemic dissidents (e.g., anti-vax and anti-lockdown groups). Data from three surveys deployed in the United States and United Kingdom support our hypotheses, demonstrating a counterintuitive relationship between dispositional authoritarianism and opposition to public health authorities during the pandemic. We further find that dispositional authoritarianism produces an intriguing misalignment between ideology and support for pandemic restrictions among those on the left, leading liberals who score high in authoritarianism to mirror the attitudes and behaviors of their conservative counterparts.
... For example, Mirisola, Roccato, Russo, Spagna, and Vieno (2013) found that people with low RWA scores increased their RWA score after reading threatening information. Lavine, Lodge, Polichak, and Taber (2002) found that authoritarian people were more sensitive to threatening information, which implies the reverse causality. Cohrs and Asbrock (2009) found that threatening information about an outgroup increased prejudice more in persons with high RWA than in low RWA persons. ...
Individual danger and collective danger have very different effects according to the predictions of a theory called regality theory , based on evolutionary psychology. This study explores the effects of different kinds of danger on 37 different indicators of psychological and cultural responses to danger based on data from two waves of the World Values Survey, including 173,000 respondents in 79 countries.
The results show that individual danger and collective danger have very different – and often opposite – psychological and cultural effects. Collective dangers are positively correlated with many indicators related to authoritarianism, nationalism, discipline, intolerance, morality, religiosity, etc. Individual dangers have neutral or opposite correlations with many of these indicators. Infectious diseases have little or no effects on these indicators. Many previous studies that confound different kinds of danger may be misleading.
Several psychological and cultural theories are discussed in relation to these results. The observed effects of collective danger are in agreement with many of these theories while individual danger has unexpected effects. The findings are not in agreement with terror management theory and pathogen stress theory.
... Thus authoritarian behavior is activated in reaction to specific threats. Experimental evidence has shown that a perceived threat alters the cognitive strategies employed by authoritarians to extract novel political information from the environment (Lavine et al. 2002;Lavine, Lodge, and Freitas 2005). Others suggest, based on social identity, that in-group norms and out-group leaders during campaigns may play a role in preferences over preferences for personal freedom and individual autonomy ). ...
Mounting evidence shows that authoritarian orientations exert a powerful influence on public opinion attitudes and candidate support. The 2018 Brazilian elections brought to power Jair Bolsonaro, a candidate with an open disregard for democracy and democratic institutions. This study examines Brazilian voters’ differences in authoritarianism and electoral support for a right-wing authoritarian candidate. It employs the AmericasBarometer national survey data to demonstrate that authoritarianism is politically important in Brazil because of its association with attitudes toward the use of force as well as with conservative social and political attitudes. The effect of authoritarianism on the probability of voting for Bolsonaro is as large as that of other relevant political behavior variables such as ideology, negative partisanship, or religiosity, whereas nonauthoritarian voters spread their votes across other candidates. Although these other variables are also relevant to Bolsonaro’s victory, his candidacy was uniquely able to mobilize a coalition of authoritarian voters. Whether or not authoritarianism remains a salient cleavage in the electorate is considered along with the consequences of this potential divide for political competition in Brazilian politics.
... Previous research has found political views to be just one manifestation of a cognitive and affective make-up and to have a robust correlation with threat perception [74]. It is thus not surprising that aligning with a particular political ideology may make disgust-related concepts in long-term memory more or less accessible (see [75] for converging findings with threat-related concepts). Thus, our results suggest a difference between fluctuating states (i.e., the participant's emotional response to a particular set of headlines) and stable traits (i.e., aligning with more conservative or more liberal ideology) in affecting the ease of accessing disgusting and negative words. ...
Disgust is an aversive reaction protecting an organism from disease. People differ in how prone they are to experiencing it, and this fluctuates depending on how safe the environment is. Previous research has shown that the recognition and processing of disgusting words depends not on the word’s disgust per se but rather on individual sensitivity to disgust. However, the influence of dynamically changing disgust on language comprehension has not yet been researched. In a series of studies, we investigated whether the media’s portrayal of COVID-19 will affect subsequent language processing via changes in disgust. The participants were exposed to news headlines either depicting COVID-19 as a threat or downplaying it, and then rated single words for disgust and valence (Experiment 1; N = 83) or made a lexical decision (Experiment 2; N = 86). The headline type affected only word ratings and not lexical decisions, but political ideology and disgust proneness affected both. More liberal participants assigned higher disgust ratings after the headlines discounted the threat of COVID-19, whereas more conservative participants did so after the headlines emphasized it. We explain the results through the politicization and polarization of the pandemic. Further, political ideology was more predictive of reaction times in Experiment 2 than disgust proneness. High conservatism correlated with longer reaction times for disgusting and negative words, and the opposite was true for low conservatism. The results suggest that disgust proneness and political ideology dynamically interact with perceived environmental safety and have a measurable effect on language processing. Importantly, they also suggest that the media’s stance on the pandemic and the political framing of the issue may affect the public response by increasing or decreasing our disgust.
... Our first three behavioural measures of negativity bias attempt conceptual replications of previous research using smaller and less representative samples. First, we measure the cognitive accessibility of threatening concepts (for example, disease and murder) using a lexical decision task in which respondents attempt to recognize positive, negative and neutral words as quickly as possible 27 . Second, we measure attentional biases to threatening images using a flanker task in which respondents attempt to categorize target images (for example, a seal pup and a gun) as positive or negative in the presence of positive or negative distractor images 28 . ...
... Final analytical sample sizes for each regression model vary on the basis of data availability across respondents and are provided in the Supplementary Results. No statistical methods were used to predetermine sample sizes but our sample sizes are similar to, or larger than, those reported in previous publications addressing similar questions using behavioural or physiological measures of negativity bias 17,[26][27][28]63 . ...
... Measure 1: cognitive accessibility of threatening concepts. We adapt previous work on authoritarianism and use a lexical decision task (LDT) to measure negativity bias 27 . In an LDT, respondents are exposed to a series of trials. ...
Research suggests that right-wing ideology is associated with negativity bias: a tendency to pay more attention and give more weight to negative versus positive stimuli. This work typically relies on either self-reported traits related to negativity bias in large, often-representative, samples or physiological and behavioural indicators of negativity bias in small convenience samples. We extend this literature and examine the relationship of negativity bias to political ideology using five distinct behavioural measures of negativity bias in four national samples of US residents with a total analytical sample size of about 4,000 respondents. We also examine the association of these behavioural measures to four of the most common self-report measures of personality in the literature on ideology. Across a wide range of tests, we find no consistent evidence for a relationship of negativity bias to either ideology or self-reported personality.
... Authoritarians are especially sensitive to threat (Lavine et al., 2002;Stevens & Vaughan-Williams, 2014) and therefore more likely to perceive the world as threatening (Duckitt, 2001(Duckitt, , 2013. Studies show that authoritarian attitudes are associated with greater perceived threat from outgroups (Dhont & Van Hiel, 2011) and viewing the world as a dangerous place (Duckitt & Fisher, 2003). ...
... Rather than showing consistency and resistance to change over the lifetime, as would be expected of a personality trait, recent scholarship shows that the expression of authoritarian attitudes varies in response to situational factors (Duckitt, 2013;Lavine et al., 2002). Consequently, commentators have argued that widely-used measures of authoritarianism like Altemeyer's (1996) Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale capture attitudes and beliefs rather than personality, and are better characterised as measures of ideology (Duckitt, 2001;Feldman, 2003). ...
The threat of COVID‐19 has triggered nationalism, prejudice and support for anti‐democratic political systems around the world. Authoritarianism—an individual's orientation toward social conformity and individual autonomy—shapes interpretations of and responses to threat. We drew on theories of authoritarianism and threat to propose that authoritarians and libertarians will interpret the threat of COVID‐19 in distinct ways. An online survey of 368 Scottish nationals was administered via the Prolific platform. Original measures of realistic and symbolic threat from COVID‐19 were included, along with an established measure of the authoritarian predisposition. Linear regression analyses showed that COVID‐19 was perceived primarily as a realistic threat to physical and material well‐being; however, authoritarians were more likely than others to interpret the novel coronavirus as a symbolic threat to their prevailing values. Our findings contribute to understanding the psychology of pandemic‐era attitudes and behaviours and provide insight into possible political consequences of the coronavirus threat. The results also demonstrate how considering authoritarians' subjective construal of threats can resolve questions in the authoritarianism and threat literature and advance theory.
... Not everyone forms the same opinions even when in the same circumstances. Individuals have their own values, political affiliations, identities and so on, all of which can affect how people respond to the political context (Lavine et al., 2002). Thus, we do not expect our framing design to affect all people in the same way. ...
With votes at 16 implemented for local and devolved assembly elections in Scotland and Wales, the debate on the issue continues amongst politicians in England and Northern Ireland. Testing arguments that are often made in that debate, we analyse two survey experiments and show that framing on extending rights prompts higher support, whilst framing on policy change depresses support. These effects hold when priming on consistency of legal ages and are particularly strong amongst the very right-wing. A majority of the public remains opposed to votes at 16, but our results indicate the malleability of public opinion on the issue.
... Although interesting, our results are focused exclusively on the effect that contextual characteristics exerted on women's psychological well-being. However, consistent with Lewin's (1936) classic idea that social psychological events usually depend on the interaction between the state of the person and the state of the environment where they live, some social psychologists showed experimentally that stable individual variables lead people to respond differently when they are exposed to the same environmental stimuli (e.g., Lavine et al. 2002;Mondak et al. 2010). In this line, we reasoned that it could have been interesting to extend Study 1′s approach by integrating participants' levels of sexism in the predictive model. ...
The detrimental effects of sexism on women’s professional lives are well known. However, what is still under-investigated is whether women would all be affected to the same extent by exposure to sexist manifestations in the workplace, or individual variables, such as ideological standpoints, moderate women’s reactions to such events. We conducted two experimental vignette studies aimed to analyze the relations between sexism and women’s psychological distress. In Study 1, performed with 179 Italian adult women (Mage = 24.17, SD = 9.45), exposure to a hostile sexist message and to a benevolent sexist message fostered participants’ anxiety and depression. The effects of hostile sexist message were significantly stronger than the effects of benevolent sexist message. In Study 2, performed with 514 Italian adult women (Mage = 24.80, SD = 7.30), we confirmed the links above. Moreover, we showed that the individual level of sexism (that had negative associations with the dependent variables) partially buffered them: The effects on anxiety and depression of exposure to a hostile sexist message were stronger among participants with low versus individual levels of hostile sexism. Analogously, the effects of exposure to a benevolent sexist message were stronger among participants with low versus individual levels of benevolent sexism. Strengths, limitations, and possible developments of this research are discussed.
