Conrad BaldnerSapienza University of Rome | la sapienza · Department of Developmental and Social Psychology
Conrad Baldner
Doctor of Philosophy
About
40
Publications
21,086
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396
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
Conrad Baldner currently works at the Department of Developmental and Social Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome. Conrad does research in Personality Psychology and Social Psychology. His most recent publication is 'Need for Closure, Torture, and Punishment Motivations: The Mediating Role of Moral Foundations.'
Additional affiliations
June 2019 - present
April 2018 - June 2019
August 2012 - October 2014
Education
October 2014 - December 2017
August 2008 - July 2012
Field of study
- Developmental and Biological Psychology
January 2005 - May 2008
Publications
Publications (40)
Can poor financial decisions be traced back to individual differences, and will individuals risk their own resources in the same manner as others’ resources? To help answer these questions, we assessed the relationship between other-focused financial risk, self-focused financial risk, and individual difference variables. 952 participants at a large...
Empathy is a concept whose history has been marred by conceptual inconsistencies. Dispositional measures of empathy have varied in constituent subscales and have been suggested to conflate with other related constructs. The current investigation consists of correlational and exploratory factor analyses with self-report empathy measures to assess th...
The issue of attitude-behavior relations is revisited in light of recent work on motivation and the psychology of goals. It is suggested that for object-attitudes to drive a specific behavior, a chain of contingencies must be realized: Liking must be transmuted into wanting, wanting must evolve into a goal, the goal must be momentarily dominant, an...
As the first field study of perceived behavioral control (PBC) to assess alcohol consumption with a physiological measure (i.e., blood alcohol content; BAC), the research examined the impact of intoxication on alcohol-specific PBC (APBC). In total, 665 passersby were recruited into the study at several late-night drinking locations near a large uni...
This research examined the relationship between individual differences in the tendency towards locomotion (i.e., the aspect of self-regulation concerned with movement from state to state), job search behaviors, and positive employment outcomes (i.e., number of interviews, number of job offers, employment status). Data from two studies with unemploy...
In line with the seminal ideas on the
“
prejudice-prone personality
” provided by Allport (1954) in the book The Nature of Prejudice, various studies have highlighted the association between individuals’ high need for cognitive closure
(NCC) and prejudice towards various outgroups. Nonetheless, evidence on the invariance of individuals’ prejudice t...
This study aimed to investigate how some specific cultural and personal factors can influence people’s life satisfaction. By embracing an interactionist perspective, we hypothesized that perceiving one’s social environment as culturally tight (greater strength of social norms) can “match” with regulatory prevention focus (focus on safety following...
The link between threat and anti-immigrant prejudice is well-established. Relatedly, recent research has also shown that situational threats (such as concern with COVID-19 threat) increase anti-immigrant prejudice through the mediating role of desire for cultural tightness. This study aims to further our understanding of the psychological processes...
In recent decades, a new line of research has found associations between specific individual differences with prejudice against female leaders. In three studies collected in Italy with heterogeneous samples (Total N = 391), we investigated the relationship between self-reported need for cognitive closure (NCC) and attitudes towards women as manager...
This research investigated the relationship between individual preference for the need for cognitive closure (NCC) and attitudes towards women as managers and the moderating role of direct or imagined contact with women leaders. In two studies (total N = 369) collected in different countries and with different methods (Study 1: Italy, correlational...
This research investigated the motivational underpinnings of attitudes toward weapon ownership. We propose that people who have a strong need for closure (NFC) would be more likely to approve of weapon ownership, but that this relationship would be serially mediated by the endorsement of binding moral foundations and fear of immigrants. Specificall...
People vary on their desire for strict norms, and the moral underpinnings of these differences have yet to be explored. The current research examined whether and how moral beliefs held by individuals would affect the extent to which they want their country to be tight (i.e., having strict social norms) or loose (i.e., having more permissive social...
The COVID-19 pandemic is a health crisis that requires individuals to comply with many health-protective behaviors. Following the previous literature, cultural tightness has been found to be a key mechanism to increase coordination in order to mitigate collective threats (e.g., COVID-19). In this study, we test a moderated mediation model to examin...
Tightening social norms is thought to be adaptive for dealing with collective threat yet it may have negative consequences for increasing prejudice. The present research investigated the role of desire for cultural tightness, triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, in increasing negative attitudes towards immigrants. We used participant-level data from...
Previous research on the need for cognitive closure (NFC), or the desire for epistemic certainty, has consistently found that it is associated with negative attitudes toward immigrants, among other outgroups, potentially because they represent agents of change and/or due to a general preference for perceived stability and certainty associated with...
Ambidextrous learning plays an essential role for organizations striving to learn how to survive and compete. However, extant studies provide few ambidextrous learning strategies for construction engineering project partnerships. According to absorptive capacity theory, we argue that ambidextrous learning can be achieved by formal control (behavior...
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has caused a global health crisis. Consequently, many countries have adopted restrictive measures that caused a substantial change in society. Within this framework, it is reasonable to suppose that a sentiment of societal discontent, defined as generalized concern about the precarious state of socie...
Researchers have spent the past five decades asking why women leaders face disproportionally more disapproval than their men colleagues. We extend recent research by investigating the need for cognitive closure (NCC), or the desire for stable and certain knowledge, to help answer this question. Consistent with Role Congruity Theory, we propose that...
Women are harmed by stereotypes about their fit for positions of authority and changing these stereotypes is not a simple task. As stereotypes have strong epistemic properties, individuals with a high need for cognitive closure (NCC; i.e., the desire for epistemic certainty) can be more likely to accept these stereotypes and, consequently, to prefe...
The investigation explores the representations of Italian populism and immigration on social media. Although social media are the preferred vehicle of populist communication, their role has only begun to be studied in recent years. We are part of this new attention by focusing on both communication and its impact on followers of two populist leader...
Positivity (i.e., the individual tendency to positively approach life experiences) has proven to be an effective construct applied in positive psychology. However, individuals’ self-regulation may have contrasting effects on positivity. We specifically examined whether positivity could be partially explained through two aspects of motivation concer...
Individuals who have a strong locomotion orientation tend to be future-oriented and motivated to move from the present state toward a future state, making swift and steady progress toward their goals. The current study has assessed the conceptual possibility that such motivation leads locomotors to experience greater hopeful thinking, an active cog...
Empathy is a construct with a long history of definitional variability, which is reflected in the variety of scales designed to measure it. A recent investigation involved a series of analyses to explore constructs assessed in the self-report of empathy and to illuminate the inconsistency in measurement across multiple scales. The current investiga...
Why do some people help others in need, and some do not? One potential answer is sympathy, which reflects an other-focused desire to help others in need. Consequentially, we posit that sympathy toward a specific target joined with the attainability of successful helping forms a helping goal. In three experiments we found that helping behavior was h...
Although sympathy is a powerful other‐focused motivation, not all individuals will experience sympathy when it is appropriate. Immigrants, as a disadvantaged out‐group, are especially in need of sympathy and, given the tensions of the immigration debate, are at‐risk for low sympathy. Indeed, past research has found that sympathy is less likely to b...
In Study 1 (N = 164), we found that dispositional need for closure was indirectly and negatively associated with collective action intentions in favor of immigrants, sequentially mediated first through binding moral foundations and then political conservatism. In Study 2 (N = 180), we found that dispositional need for closure was indirectly and neg...
Why are people (de)motivated to mobilize in favor of immigrants? Addressing this question, we investigated the role of individuals' epistemic motivation (i.e., need for closure) in influencing the process of becoming motivated to participate in collective action in favor of immigrants in Italy. Specifically, the mediational role of binding moral fo...
Women leaders in the workforce are adversely affected by two sets of stereotypes: women are warm and communal but leaders are assertive and competent. This mismatch of stereotypes can lead to negative attitudes toward women leaders, however, not all individuals will be equally sensitive to these stereotypes. Men and women characterized by a need fo...
Why do people have anti-immigrant attitudes? We proposed that individuals’ need for cognitive closure—an epistemic motivation associated with an aversion to change in established environments—is predictive of a dislike of immigrants through increased binding to powerful groups. In four studies, collected in both Italy (Study 1) and the United State...
Research on moral foundations theory has found that liberals typically favor the individualizing foundations (i.e., concern for the individual) but typically oppose the binding foundations (i.e., concern for the group). We propose that need for cognitive closure (NFC) can explain when liberals will favor the binding foundations. In two studies, we...
Previous research has shown a positive association between optimism and perceived social support. In this research the authors sought to uncover conditions and mechanisms that could influence this relationship; the authors were specifically interested in how these issues affect peer support in university-age women, for whom it is particularly impor...
Past research has shown that hopelessness drastically reduces the quality of life. It follows that it could be particularly useful to improve our knowledge of the potential correlates of feelings of hopelessness. We propose a negative association between locomotion mode, or the self‐regulation dimension concerned with movement from current state to...
We present the principal findings of a research program, developed across the previous eight years, focused on politics and gender issues in Italy. The theoretical perspective is that of social representations (SRs) that disputes the transparency of language, affirming its capacity to mask power and ideological relations. We assume that gender is n...
In theory, knowing an individual’s attitude about a topic should allow us to predict his or her behavior. However, in a classic study, Wicker (1969) came to the surprising conclusion that attitudes and behaviors are only weakly related. We present a new theoretical perspective that describes the conditions necessary for an attitude to be translated...
When considering how criminals should be punished, most individuals prefer retributive (i.e., punishment compensating for the harm caused by the perpetrator) over utilitarian justice (i.e., punishment with the intent to deter future crime). However, past research has found that individuals with a high (vs. low) need for cognitive closure (NCC) are...
Prior research on time issues has demonstrated that the value of time is subjective and shows that different evaluations of time (as a valuable or as an undefined resource) correspond to different attitudes, behaviors, and emotions. Based on recent research on the relationship between time and motion, the present research aimed to investigate the r...
Greek citiziens were recently asked by Prime Minister Tsipras to approve/reject the restrictions proposed by the EU in response to the national financial crisis; Tsipras himself publically favored a “No” vote. The social identity theory describes leadership as a process where followers who identify with the leader are likely to agree and comply wit...
The experience of oncoming motherhood is a time of major transition associated with elevated levels of anxiety, depressivive symptoms, and fear of giving birth. How these states are regulated during pregnancy has received little attention. Suppression, an emotion regulation strategy associated with rumination, depressive symptoms, and negative well...
The concept of empathy is infamous for the definitional disagreement that plagues it. Although originally proposed as a primarily affective process, over time empathy definitions have varied in subsuming cognitive processes, behavioral components, and other-focused intentions. Many attempts have been made to discover, or argue, what is empathy, but...
Questions
Questions (3)
I recently came across an article where a 1-factor model with three indicators was tested with EFA and CFA. The indicators were themselves summary scores, and each consisted of many items.
To be clear, these were not second-order models--the three summary scores loaded onto to the latent factor, as if they were observed indicators, and not latent constructs themselves. The items that made up the summary scores were not included in the model.
I have not seen a model like this before. My initial reaction was that this was not appropriate, since the point of factor analysis is to account for the variation amongst *observed* measures.
Was my initial reaction correct? Or is using factor analysis in this way appropriate?
I recently ran a 2-factor CFA model that had poor fit according to CFI (.60), but adequate fit according to RMSEA (.055).
Everything that I've come across in my research has suggested that this is a symptom of low correlations among indicators and/or low quality data. This seems correct, based on an inspection of my data. However, my question is: why would low CFI be associated with low correlations among indicators? If anyone could point me to a source that explains the math behind this, it would be very much appreciated.
I recently came across a paper where the authors attempted to explain the relationships between 12 items (items on a questionnaire). They tested three models:
Model A, in which all 12 items loaded on the same factor, had poor fit.
Model B, in which 12 items loaded on 3 factors (4 per each), had adequate fit.
Model C, in which the 3 first-order factors from Model B loaded on 1 second-order factor (this represented the sole latent factor from Model A), had adequate fit.
In a later paper, these authors these 12 items to represent both three individual sub scales (from Model B), as well as a "composite" factor computed by taking the average of the three sub scales.
My specific question is whether using the composite score is justified; my hunch is that using the 12 items in a composite is functionally equivalent to the poorly-fitting Model A.
Any help--or direction towards a paper or chapter that covered this topic--is appreciated.
