Danny Osborne

University of Auckland · School of Psychology

Provides an overview of Converse's (1964) foundational study on belief systems in mass publics.

Protestors recently repurposed the abortion rights’ mantra, “my body, my choice,” to oppose COVID-19 mandates. But do those who oppose public health mandates fully support the right to choose? We answer this question by using exploratory analyses to identify the unique response patterns underlying support for abortion and COVID-19 mandates in rando...

Although many Western democracies have made important strides towards egalitarianism in recent years, members of the LGB+ community continue to endure sustained animus. Yet, little empirical work has examined the ideologies that promote sexual prejudice in the 21st century. We address this oversight by positing that hostile sexism temporally preced...

Dating back to—and even before—Adorno and colleagues’ groundbreaking work on the authoritarian personality, scholars have aimed to identify individual differences underlying (in)tolerance. Here, we argue that an individual difference approach can also help inform our understanding of attitudes toward Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) goals. We...

Recent research argues that authoritarianism exists on the right and left, further positing that both manifestations share core features. We explore this possibility by conducting a latent profile analysis of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and social dominance orientation (SDO) in a nationwide random sample of...

Introduction In this longitudinal study, we examine the potential costs and benefits of humility for well-being and civic trust among immigrants in a pluralistic democracy. Methods With data from 14,864 immigrant participants from a nationwide random sample in New Zealand, we used multilevel modeling to examine the associations of general humility...

Although perceptions of wealth are shaped by people’s social environment and ideological beliefs, few studies integrate these two perspectives. We address this oversight by examining the association between participants’ actual and estimated average neighborhood household income and whether political orientation moderates this relationship. Using a...

Although living in diverse communities can affect attitudes, studies rarely—if ever—assess mediators of the relationship between macro-level diversity and individual-level intergroup attitudes. According to the Dual Process Model of Ideology and Prejudice, community-level diversity should correlate negatively with right-wing authoritarianism (RWA)...

Short-form scales are often necessary for large omnibus surveys. This study compared the reliability of 108 short-form scales and single-item indicators included in the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS) with their full-form parent counterparts. Scale psychometrics were evaluated using an omnibus dataset pooling multiple samples with a...

Despite growing concerns about declining social cohesion, no systematic analyses have assessed how societal disengagement manifests in New Zealand. The present study addresses this oversight by examining societal disengagement in a large, nationwide random sample of New Zealand adults collected in 2021/2022 (N = 34,131). Using latent profile analys...

Ethnic identity is a major area of study across many disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science. Yet, little is known about changes in ethnic identity across the adult lifespan, and whether such changes are driven by normal aging processes (aging effects), unique societal influences linked with one’s formative...

This study examines the impact of personally experiencing sexual harassment on women’s subjective well-being and perceptions of gender relations and society. We draw upon large-scale national probability panel data and utilize propensity score matching to identify (1) women who reported sexual harassment in the past year and (2) a matched control g...

Although social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) often predict similar outcomes, their respective motivations to reinforce inequality and mitigate threat are ostensibly incompatible with attempts to manage a pandemic. We test the potential countervailing associations SDO and RWA have with COVID-19 attitudes in a nat...

Pundits have speculated that the spread of conspiracies and misinformation (termed “misbeliefs”) is leading to a resurgence of right‐wing, reactionary movements. However, the current empirical picture regarding the relationship between misbeliefs and collective action is mixed. We help clarify these associations by using two waves of data collected...

Political knowledge is crucial for well-functioning democracies, with most scholars assuming that people at the political extremes are more knowledgeable than those at the center. Here, we adopt a data-driven approach to examine the relationship between political orientation and political knowledge by testing a series of polynomial curves in 45 cou...

Although the positive relationship between income and well-being is well established, the psychological mechanisms underlying this process are less understood. One underexplored explanation is that objective wealth (or lack thereof) fosters relative comparisons, which, in turn, predicts well-being. Extant work has, however, mostly focused on object...

The colonial ideologies of historical negation and symbolic exclusion (i.e., the “Dark Duo”) promote inequality between settler colonizers and Indigenous peoples by denying the contemporary relevance of past injustices and excluding Indigenous culture from the nation’s identity, respectively. Although their correlates are established, the temporal...

Although a growing literature demonstrates that social media usage fosters upward social comparisons, the potential for social media use to elicit perceptions of unjust disadvantage relative to others remains unexplored. We address this oversight by leveraging six annual waves of a nationwide random probability sample of adults (ages 18-99; N = 62,...

We investigated mean-level changes in social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) during (vs before) New Zealand's nationwide coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown at a time when New Zealand was led by a left-leaning government. The number of participants in the study ranged from (Ns = 24,065-24,653). Using prope...

Political knowledge is a valuable resource in democracies. The dominant perspective is that people at the political extremes are more knowledgeable than those at the center. We adopted a data-driven approach to examine the relationship between political orientation and political knowledge by testing a series of polynomial curves in 45 countries (N...

Despite being a core psychological construct for over 70 years, research has yet to examine how perceptions of deprivation relative to other individuals and/or groups develop across adulthood. As such, this preregistered study uses cohort-sequential latent growth modeling to examine changes in individual- and group-based relative deprivation (IRD a...

Feelings of group-based relative deprivation (GRD) motivate collective responses to defend the ingroup. As such, there may be status-based asymmetries in the associations GRD has with ideologies that perpetuate inequality—namely, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO). Study 1 examined this hypothesis using a natio...

The recent reversal of Roe v. Wade in the United States demonstrates both the precarity of reproductive rights and the need to identify the correlates of abortion support. Surprisingly, little is known about how the transition to parenthood impacts attitudes toward abortion. We address this oversight by utilising nine annual waves (2011–2019) of lo...

In an adversarial collaboration, two preregistered U.S.-based studies (total N = 6,181) tested three hypotheses regarding the relationship between political ideology and cognitive rigidity (i.e., less evidence-based belief updating): rigidity-of-the-right, symmetry, and rigidity-of-extremes. Across both studies, general conservatism and social cons...

Contact with members of one’s own group (ingroup) and other groups (outgroups) shapes individuals’ beliefs about the world, including perceptions of discrimination against one’s ingroup. Research to date indicates that, among members of disadvantaged groups, contact with an advantaged outgroup is associated with less perceived discrimination, while...

Does the day of the week an email is sent inviting existing participants to complete a follow-up questionnaire for an annual online survey impact response rate? We answer this question using a preregistered experiment conducted as part of an ongoing national probability panel study in New Zealand. Across 14 consecutive days, existing participants i...

Individuals who endorse system-justifying ideologies are less likely to uphold pro-environmental orientations. In particular, Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) have been shown to correlate negatively with environmentalism. Yet recent theorising and empirical findings suggest authoritarianism may also serve lef...

The COVID‐19 pandemic produced multiple stressors that risk relationship conflict and dissatisfaction. We extended prior studies that yielded inconsistent effects of the pandemic on relationships by using propensity score matching to (1) compare levels of relationship conflict and satisfaction during the pandemic (pandemic group; N = 7268) to simil...

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified existing inequalities by disproportionately affecting marginalized groups, which should differentially affect perceptions of, and responses to, inequality. Accordingly, the present study examines the effects of the pandemic on feelings of individual-and group-based relative deprivation (IRD and GRD, respectively)...

Over the past two decades, citizens’ political rights and civil liberties have declined globally. Psychological science can play an instrumental role in both explaining and combating the authoritarian impulses that underlie these attacks on personal autonomy. In this Review, we describe the psychological processes and situational factors that foste...

Although religious identification often correlates positively with traditional gender role attitudes and ambivalent sexism (Mikołajczak & Pietrzak, Sex Roles, 70(9–10), 387–399, 2014), other work shows it has countervailing associations with related conservative views (Lockhart et al., Religion, Brain & Behavior, 10(4), 379–392, 2020). One reason t...

Restrictions to curb the spread of COVID-19 have required widespread compliance over long periods, but citizens’ attitudes to these often change over time. Here, we examine the time course of political attitudes in New Zealand over the months before and after the announcement of the country’s first nationwide COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 using a large...

Research on area-level deprivation has yet to illuminate how the macro-level context affects individual-level measures of ideologies that justify inequality. The current study addressed this oversight by investigating the associations different forms of area-level deprivation have with system-justifying beliefs and whether these associations, in tu...

Despite the extensive literature on relative deprivation theory, few studies have examined the longitudinal effects of individual- and group-based relative deprivation (IRD and GRD, respectively) on individual- and group-based outcomes, nor has research investigated the between-person and within-person effects of these constructs. Using two random...

Although political party support and attitudes towards the political system are closely related, the temporal ordering of these associations is unclear. Indeed, prior research identifies both partisan-led change in system attitudes and system attitude-led change in party support. Using a ten-year (2010-2020) national probability sample of New Zeala...

Over the last quarter of a century, social psychological research on collective action has grown exponentially and progressed through four distinct phases. While the first phase showed that identity, efficacy, and injustice motivate the aggrieved to protest on behalf of their ingroup, the second phase acknowledged that protests could involve collab...

Although abortion and euthanasia are highly contested issues at the heart of the culture war, the moral foundations underlying ideological differences on these issues are mostly unknown. Given that much of the extant debate is framed around the sanctity of life, we argued that the moral foundation of purity/sanctity-a core moral belief that emphasi...

The devastating effects of climate change on human rights has led the United Nations to recommend a human rights-based approach to climate action. However, no research has examined the relations between support for human rights and climate change beliefs, which is critical if such a rights-based approach is to receive widespread public backing. Her...

Social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) are foundational constructs in intergroup relations, yet their development across the lifespan is poorly understood. The few studies on the topic demonstrate that age positively correlates with both SDO and RWA. However, it is unclear whether this association is due to (a) nor...

Social dominance orientation (SDO) is a widely researched construct that indexes a preference for hierarchical intergroup relations. However, it remains unclear whether this preference (a) motivates people to seek out occupations that enhance hierarchical relations between groups (i.e., occupational assortment), (b) develops as a result of working...

Is it possible to predict COVID-19 vaccination status prior to the existence and availability of COVID-19 vaccines? Here, we present a logistic model by regressing decisions to vaccinate in late 2021 on lagged sociodemographic, health, social, and political indicators from 2019 in a sample of New Zealand adults aged between 18 and 94 (Mage = 52.92,...

Although religiosity correlates positively with authoritarianism, the temporal ordering of this relationship is unclear. Because religious teachings often promote authoritarian values, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) should increase following religious conversion. Yet spiritual beliefs may also promote egalitarianism. As such, social dominance or...

Despite being a defining issue in the culture war, the political psychology of abortion attitudes remains poorly understood. We address this oversight by reviewing existing literature and integrating new analyses of several large‐scale, cross‐sectional, and longitudinal datasets to identify the demographic and ideological correlates of abortion att...

Are religious citizens more open to authoritarian governance than secular citizens within countries around the world? This chapter reviews survey evidence relevant to this question. While findings do suggest that religious commitment and belief strength are often associated with greater openness to authoritarian governance, a number of common metho...

New research emphasises the need to conceptually differentiate authoritarianism on right and left from conventional conservatism and liberalism. It is therefore argued that authoritarianism is best conceptualised as an intolerant and morally absolutist motive to coercively impose particular values, way of life, and social organisation on individual...

In this chapter, I review current research on the relationship between personality and political preferences, with an eye to its complexities and the ways in which it is conditioned on other variables – including the contextual factors mentioned at the outset. To provide context, I briefly review research on the structure of political preferences....

Traditionally, one of the main focuses of political psychology has been to identify the motives, needs, and other deep psychological differences shape ideological differences between liberals and conservatives bottom-up. We review this literature and offer some critique of it. Next, we argue that rather than trying to test how deep psychological di...

This chapter examines research from political science, sociology, and psychology to understand how and why class position is associated with differences in political attitudes and choices. After reviewing influential definitions of social class, we examine research on explanations of class differences in political behaviour. These include class dif...

At its core, political psychology is an inherently multidisciplinary field that aims to integrate insights from psychology, political science, sociology, and related disciplines to explain how people shape, and are shaped by, political phenomena across international borders. To these ends, the Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology presents 41...

Many Arab countries have experienced deep social, political, and psychological struggles and transformations, yet political psychological analyses of the region remain scarce. This chapter provides a brief overview of the historical context, present, and future directions of the field. Some challenges are epistemological and theoretical, including...

This chapter explores the particular background of critical psychology and its links with political psychology. We discuss of some of the most significant features of critical perspectives in political psychology: historical awareness and critique, and the pursuit of social justice. In the remainder of the chapter, we focus specifically on the ways...

Collective narcissism is a belief in the greatness of one’s social group, accompanied by a conviction that others do not appreciate the in-group enough. In this chapter, we review empirical studies which elucidate the antecedents and consequences of collective narcissism. Collective narcissism is thought to compensate for frustrated individual need...

Pregnancy and motherhood are among the most cherished experiences of many women, but for many others are involuntary or unwanted. In either case, they are ideologically loaded and politically consequential. We review various lines of research across the social sciences documenting some of the myths surrounding pregnancy and motherhood, and some of...

Conspiracy theories (CTs) and CT belief stem from uncertain, hard to explain, crisis situations, especially when strongly held social and political identities are threatened making people feel anxious, insecure, or out of control. Connected to alarming developments in world politics, CTs are no longer manifestations of extremists and paranoids. As...

Ethnocentrism is an attitudinal construct that involves a strong sense of ethnic group self-centredness and self-importance. It is a universal phenomenon found across cultures and time periods. Although ethnocentrism can be expressed in many domains, it finds its expressions particularly significant in the political domain. This chapter provides a...

This chapter reviews the literature that seeks to identify the people who are enamoured with populism. It focuses on two related measures of support for populism at the individual level: populist attitudes and the vote for populist parties. We first detail the problems with definitions of populism and the resulting measures of populist attitudes wi...

Why have citizens become increasingly polarised? One answer is that there is increasing identification with political parties – a process known as partisanship. This chapter focuses on the role that social identity and partisanship play in contemporary politics. Partisan identities influence political preferences, such that partisans are more likel...

Rational choice theory explains and evaluates how individuals choose among alternative instruments to achieve their goals and objectives. Although much research on political decision-making highlights psychological biases that appear to interfere with rationality, the contrast between rational choice and the psychology of information processing is...

This chapter aims to synthesise recent research studying political ideology from an evolutionary perspective. We begin by outlining how evolutionary theory can be applied to human psychology. We then review recent lines of evolutionary research linking variation in political ideology to physical formidability, the behavioural immune system, threat...

The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to gove...

Research exploring public opinion dynamics in the domain of immigration has exploded in recent decades, and for obvious reasons. Policy debates in developed democracies have intensified as barriers to movement fell in Europe and the USA and as populist leaders began to capitalise on, if not stoke, public anxieties about the influx of newcomers. A c...

Rising rates of inequality undermine people’s health and well-being, as well as their civic engagement and trust in democracy. Despite the severity of these effects, little is known about the psychological processes that transmit macro levels of inequality into individual-level outcomes. We argue in the current chapter that these harmful effects em...

What is the essence of group decision-making? How does group dynamics affect policy outcomes? This chapter contributes to foreign policy analysis and national security decision-making by advancing a comparative group dynamic perspective. Specifically, we examine three models of group decision-making: Groupthink, Polythink, and Con-Div, and apply ea...

Collective action is a pervasive aspect of political life in the 21st century. In the past 20 years, it has also been increasingly studied as a psychologically mediated and consequential form of political behaviour. Initial research focused primarily on the collective organisation of action. This was appropriate: collective action is inherently a g...

The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to gove...

Today’s information environment is drastically different from the heyday of print and broadcast, but these changes exceed the scope of researchers’ agendas. More is known now than when these technologies were in their infancy, yet efforts to understand the implications of changing communication technology for media effects have produced mixed findi...

Race and racism have long played a central role in American campaigns and elections. Racial politics have changed considerably in recent history, but out-group animus continues to play a decisive role in White political behaviour and preferences. This phenomenon is becoming even more visible due to the well-documented shift from implicit to explici...

Ideology is a central concept in political psychology. Here, we synthesise the scholarly debate's major themes. We first examine the ways in which ideology has been operationalised and discuss its prevalence (or lack thereof) in the mass public. This is followed by a discussion of the top-down and bottom-up forces that shape citizens' ideology. Top...

Many Western societies are becoming increasingly ethnically diverse. In this chapter, we focus on whether diversity at a macro level (that is, diversity of individuals’ social contexts) is beneficial or disadvantageous for intergroup relations. We therefore review research in political and social psychology on the consequences of macro-diversity fo...

Nations and individuals vary in their support for human rights. International surveys face difficult issues (e.g., acquiring comparable samples, insuring equivalent meaning of survey questions in many languages), and these surveys are limited in the range of human rights issues examined and number of countries surveyed. Internationally, support for...

The current chapter examines factors predicting engagement and disengagement with climate change. After providing a baseline overview of climate change and public opinion on the topic, we explore how psychological motives might conflict with individuals’ desire to be accurate when considering climate change information. Next, we examine how individ...

Hate speech is a form of communication that targets disadvantaged social groups in a harmful way. It can be seen as a driving force behind the successes of numerous populist politicians and extremist movements. In this chapter, we argue that studying hate speech can be crucial for a better understanding of political mobilisation, intergroup relatio...

The primary topic of our chapter is the need for possible theoretical foundations of, and empirical approaches to, a developmental science of politics. We demonstrate the utility of studying political socialisation surrounding presidential elections by describing the results of a large study of US elementary-school-age children’s views of the 2016...

While most research on party polarisation previously focused on the ideological extremity of party positions, in recent years a new form of polarisation has emerged in the American electorate. Ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and fear those from the other party. This phenomenon of animosity across the party divide is known as affective polar...

This chapter covers two key areas in which gender shapes electoral politics from the perspective of political psychology: candidate evaluation and campaign strategy. The bulk of the chapter reviews scholarship about the role of gender stereotypes in candidate evaluations. This work includes stereotypes about traits and policy positions as well as t...

Associating a social or political attitude with one’s subjective sense of moral right and wrong (i.e., imbuing the attitude with 'moral conviction') is related to a variety of positive and negative consequences. For example, holding an attitude with moral conviction predicts greater political engagement such as voting – a normatively positive outco...

What is public opinion, what factors cause it to form in particular ways, and why does it matter? In this chapter, we define public opinion as opinions on matters of public debate that have significant implications for society. Then, we provide an overview of key developments in three central topics in research on public opinion. First, we discuss...

While the field of political psychology has overwhelmingly focused on political orientation (i.e., ideological content), this chapter proposes that political extremism (i.e., ideological strength) at the left and right also matters for a range of important variables. The main argument is that feelings of distress prompt a desire for epistemic clari...

In the aftermath of collective violence, reconciliation is supposed to ensure that violent conflict does not re-erupt after official treaties have brought it to a halt. This requires attention to the psychological processes that were shaped by the group’s role as victims or perpetrators of violence, as well as to the sociopolitical context in the a...

National identity represents one of the most central and defining group identities in the modern world with important implications in everyday life. In the current chapter, we review the extant literature from political psychology on nationhood by considering two key dimensions of national identity: (a) identification and attachment; and (b) its co...

This chapter discusses some of the relevant findings in the study of genetics and politics, with an examination of how these forces interact and intersect. Particular attention is given to the importance of assortative mating in determining political ideology, a topic that has been typically neglected by political science. Full incorporation of evo...

The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to gove...

Research on persuasion and social influence suggests that crafting effective persuasive and influential appeals is not only feasible but can be done fairly reliably with appropriate guidance from the relevant theories. With the advent of large-scale experiments conducted in field settings, key propositions about persuasion and social influence can...

This chapter surveys recent research about the effects of discrete emotions in politics and international relations. We first examine the appraisal theory of emotions in psychology and discuss its categorisation of contacting, distancing, attack, and rejection emotions. Next, we review Affective Intelligence Theory (AIT) and its impact on the study...

Which psychological orientations form the cultural foundations of political regimes? To answer this question, I demonstrate as a point of departure that (1) the countries’ membership in culture zones explains some 70% of the global variation in autocracy-vs-democracy and (2) that this culture-bound variation has remained astoundingly constant over...

The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to gove...

As in other areas of behavioural science, research in political psychology has focused on citizens of Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic ('WEIRD') countries. In this chapter, we review recent studies of political psychology conducted in the Global South (e.g., Latin America, Africa, Middle East, and Asian/Pacific regions). Popu...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic claimed millions of lives and caused unprecedented disruptions. Despite these negative impacts, there is optimism the pandemic may shift public opinion on other global crises by fostering a sense of collective efficacy. Using propensity score matching to compare New Zealanders assessed before (n =12,304) and after (n =...

This chapter presents detailed analysis of descriptive statistics from the 182,399 unique respondents who engaged with the Vote Compass engagement tool during the 2020 election campaign. In doing so, it provides a better understanding of what issues the New Zealand public were concerned about and what they wanted a government to do about them. It a...

This chapter presents detailed analysis of descriptive statistics from the 182,399 unique respondents who engaged with the Vote Compass engagement tool during the 2020 election campaign. In doing so, it outlines how well Labour, National, New Zealand First, the Greens, ACT and the Māori Party’s policy positions aligned with the views of their own s...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused millions of deaths and unprecedented disruptions on societies. Negative impacts are coupled with optimism the pandemic may shift public opinion on other cross-national crises. Comparing matched samples of New Zealanders assessed before and after nationwide lockdowns in 2020 (Ns = 15,815), we show the pandemic enhanced p...

Research over the last three decades reveals that Openness to Experience—a personality trait that captures interest in novelty, creativity, unconventionalism, and open-mindedness—correlates negatively with political conservatism. Here, we summarise this vast literature by meta-analysing 232 unique samples (N = 575,691) that examine the relationship...

Although system-justifying beliefs often mitigate perceptions of discrimination, status-based asymmetries in the ideological motivators of perceived discrimination are unknown. Because the content and societal implications of discrimination claims are status-dependant, social dominance orientation (SDO) should motivate perceptions of (reverse) disc...

Concerns over potential negative effects of excessive meat consumption on both the environment and personal health, coupled with long-standing debates over animal rights, have motivated research on the prevalence and predictors of plant-based versus meat-based diets. Yet few studies have examined longitudinal trends in dietary behaviours using larg...

We examine political attitude change using data from a large national probability sample collected over the months leading up to, and following, the 2019 March 15 terror attacks against a Muslim minority community in Christchurch, New Zealand. Satisfaction with the government declined in the months prior to the attack, rose sharply immediately foll...

Although epistemic needs motivate the endorsement of system-justifying beliefs, few studies have investigated moderators of this association. Here, we argue that because being the target of discrimination should undermine one’s sense of control, the association between epistemic needs and system-justifying beliefs should be stronger for disadvantag...