Jan-Erik Lönnqvist

• Professor at University of Helsinki

A long-standing debate in research on the political attitudes of the mass public concerns the extent to which these attitudes are ideologically constrained. Another, more recent debate, asks whether these attitudes are indicative of more general social behavior. We investigated (1) how ideologically constrained the preferences of the mass public ar...

Keskustelua toistettavuuskriisistä.

Background Insights from mental health stigma research indicate the importance of societal and political views on mental health perceptions. Most studies originate from typical Western neo-liberal settings and focus on generic mental health issues. Our research explores these associations in Hungary, an understudied post-communist context with sign...

Employing European Social Survey data (ESS Round 7) from 20 countries ( N = 20,464), we tested several pre-registered hypotheses regarding the associations between basic personal values—as conceptualized by Schwartz’ Values Theory—and vote choice in national elections. To operationalize vote choice, we relied on the Chapel Hill Experts Survey for e...

Studies advancing the hypothesis of a “gender-equality paradox” have found that societies with more gender equality demonstrate larger gender differences across a range of phenomena. In doing so, they rely on that practice of predicting an algebraic difference score—calculated from mean scores for men and women across a set of countries—with an ind...

Women and girls consistently outperform men and boys in educational outcomes. A large body of qualitative work suggests that boys’ difficulties in integrating peer acceptance with being studious may explain this gender gap. Gender differences in personality have also been suggested as an explanation. We investigated whether empirically constructed...

There is a lack of research-based knowledge of the conditions in which, in supposedly integrated settings, segregation prevails in people’s everyday lives. An important task for research in the field, therefore, is to develop methods that consider the intersection of temporal, spatial, gender, and generational factors at play in everyday racial con...

Studies advancing the hypothesis of a “gender-equality paradox” have found that societies with more gender equality demonstrate larger gender differences across a range of phenomena. In doing so, they rely on that practice of predicting an algebraic difference score—calculated from mean scores for men and women across a set of countries—with an ind...

Introduction: A recent article by Kavanagh et al. (2021) in American Political Science Review suggested that health vulnerability predicts voting patterns for the populist far-right. Aim: We sought to distinguish socioculturally conservative from antielite voting, expecting health vulnerability to predict only the former. Methods: We combined data...

We examined associations between childlessness and voting in Europe. We used cross-sectional European Social Survey data from 20 countries (n = 37,623). Our results suggest that there is a "childless vote" in Europe. Supporting our pre-registered hypothesis, childless individuals voted for parties that had visibly positioned themselves at the Green...

Background: People align their beliefs and behaviors, including those related to health, increasingly along politically ideological lines. Objective: We investigated whether individual political orientation (PO) predicts the use of conventional (CM) and complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) across Europe. Methods: We used cross-sectional sa...

Introduction I investigated the authorship gender gap in research on political psychology. Methods The material comprises 1,166 articles published in the field’s flagship journal Political Psychology between 1997 and 2021. These were rated for author gender, methodology, purpose, and topic. Results Women were underrepresented as authors (37.1% wo...

Voting advice applications (VAAs) are online tools designed to match voters with specific parties and/or candidates. Because candidate-centred electoral systems incentivize strategic positioning to maximise personal vote shares, it is unclear if the information that candidates provide in VAAs reflect their sincere ideological positions. The aim of...

Experience sampling methodology (ESM) has provided researchers with a flexible and innovative measurement tool, and the methodology has become increasingly popular in several fields of psychology. Therefore, validity studies on such measures are important. The present study investigated convergent and discriminant validity of ESM measures using pee...

Some of the most persistently recurring research questions concern sex differences. Despite much progress, limited research has thus far been undertaken to investigate whether there is one general construct of genderedness that runs through various domains of human individuality. In order to determine whether being gender typical in one way goes to...

Accessing information online is now easier than ever. However, also false information is circulated in increasing quantities. We sought to identify social psychological factors that could explain why some people are more susceptible to false information. Specifically, we investigated whether psychological predispositions (social dominance orientati...

The authoritarian personality is characterized by unquestionining obedience and respect to authority. System justification theory (SJT) argues that people are motivated to defend, bolster, and justify aspects of existing social, economic, and political systems. Commitment to the status quo is also a key characteristic of the authoritarian personali...

We investigated the associations between refugee and environmental attitudes among 36876 respondents from 20 countries included in the European Social Survey Round 8 (2016). Three preregistered hypotheses were supported: (H1) there was a positive association between these attitudes across countries (meta-analytical partial correlation = .16), (H2)...

We investigated the attitudes of the 11410 candidates in the Finnish 2017 municipal elections who had responded to a Voting Advice Application. Women candidates were, both in terms of economic and social attitudes, more progressive than men. Building on the gender diagnosticity approach, we used responses to the attitude items to construct a dimens...

We investigated the associations between refugee and environmental attitudes among 36876 respondents from 20 countries included in the European Social Survey Round 8 (2016). Three preregistered hypotheses were supported: (H1) there was a positive association between these attitudes across countries (meta-analytical partial correlation = .16), (H2)...

We investigated determinants of liking at zero-acquaintance, focusing on individual differences in perceivers’ reactions to appearance cues. Perceivers (N = 385) viewed portrait photographs of Targets (N = 146). Perceiver’s Agreeableness and Extraversion were uniquely associated with liking targets. Targets who expressed positive emotions, looked r...

Yksilön asenteet eivät ole satunnaiset. Sen sijaan ihmiset omaksuvat tiettyjä asennekokonaisuuksia – poliittisia ideologioita, joita eri sosiaaliset ryhmät ylläpitävät. Esimerkiksi maahanmuuton kannatus tai vastustus tuo useimmiten mukanaan tukun muita asenteita sosiaali-, talous- ja turvallisuuspolitiikasta. Tavanomainen muuttujakeskeinen lähestym...

Some of the most persistently recurring research questions in the fields of personality and social psychology concern sex differences. Although much progress has been made, no research has addressed the basic question of whether there is one general construct of genderedness that runs through various life domains, or whether genderedness is specifi...

We investigated political polarization among the 28284 candidates in the Finnish municipal election who ran for municipal council in 2012, 2017, or both, and had responded to a Voting Advice Application. Our results revealed political polarization in terms of both conversion (longitudinal analysis, n = 6643) and recruitment (cross-sectional compari...

Sociometric status, the regard that other group members confer to an individual, is one of the most ubiquitous and behaviourally relevant attributes assigned to the person by the social environment. Despite this, its contribution to personality development has received little attention. The present three‐wave longitudinal study, spanning the age ra...

Sociometric status, the regard that other group members confer to an individual, is one of the most ubiquitous and behaviorally relevant attributes assigned to the person by the social environment. Despite this, its contribution to personality development has received little attention. The present three-wave longitudinal study, spanning the age ran...

We investigated political polarization among the 28284 candidates in the Finnish municipal election who ran for municipal council in 2012, 2017, or both, and had responded to a Voting Advice Application. Our results revealed political polarization in terms of both conversion (longitudinal analysis, n = 6643) and recruitment (cross-sectional compari...

We investigated the relation between economic and social attitudes and the psychological underpinnings of these attitudes in candidates (N = 9515) in the Finnish 2017 municipal elections. In this politically elite sample, right-wing economic attitudes and social conservatism were positively correlated (r = 0.41), and this correlation was predominan...

In a monetarily incentivized Dictator Game, we expected Dictators’ empathy toward the Recipients to cause more pro-social allocations. Empathy was experimentally induced via a commonly used perspective taking task. Dictators (N = 474) were instructed to split an endowment of 10€ between themselves and an unknown Recipient. They could split the mone...

The populist, anti‐immigration‐oriented Finns Party was considered the winner of the Finnish 2015 parliamentary elections. In a representative sample of young adults (N = 606), a longitudinal pre‐ post‐election design revealed that attitudes towards immigration became more favourable among those disappointed by the outcome and those who did not vot...

Spousal similarity and its consequences are widely studied, but methodologically challenging topics. We employed Response Surface Analysis to examine similarity along political attitudes, personal values, and personality traits. Opposite-sex couples (624 individuals) expecting a child were recruited. Spouses were highly similar regarding their poli...

Spousal similarity and its consequences are widely studied, but methodologically challenging topics. We employed Response Surface Analysis to examine similarity along political attitudes, personal values, and personality traits. Opposite-sex couples (624 individuals) expecting a child were recruited. Spouses were highly similar regarding their poli...

Friends tend to be similar on many characteristics, including personality traits. Yet, a real-world similarity-attraction effect based on actual personality traits is not supported by current research. One reason for this apparent contradiction could be that dark personality traits have been absent from this literature. In a sample (. N=. 181) of m...

Offline social capital in the form of interpersonal networks is known to be associated with subjective well-being (SWB). In two studies run in the US (N = 153) and Germany (N = 187), we initially investigated whether the size of an individual's Facebook social network was associated with SWB and perceived social support. Objectively measured Facebo...

Focusing on similarity of personal values and of personality traits, we investigated who is friends with whom in Facebook friendships. A Facebook application administered questionnaires and retrieved data on whom in our sample of 3348 participants were friends. On average, participants had 8.7 friends within our sample. People similar to each other...

The psychological underpinnings of labor market discrimination were investigated by having participants from Israel, the West Bank and Germany (N = 205) act as employers in a stylized employment task in which they ranked, set wages, and imposed a minimum effort level on applicants. State self-esteem was measured before and after the employment task...

We investigated the psychological adaptation of Ingrian–Finnish migrants from Russia to Finland between 2008 and 2013. Pre-migration data (N = 225) were collected at the Finnish language courses that were part of the immigration training program. The three post-migration follow-ups were conducted half a year (N = 155), and 2 (N = 133) and 3 years (...

In four bargaining games with an option to punish, participants could avoid punishment by shifting the blame for an unfair offer on a random coin flip. Punishments were not affected by whether the results of the coin flip could be verified, nor by beliefs about whether a coin had actually been flipped (Studies 1–3). Our results suggest that the rat...

In a sample of 7- to 8-year-old children (N = 760), we examined the associations between personality traits, oral fluency and sociometric popularity. Extending upon research conducted with older populations, we found parent ratings of extraversion at age 7 to predict popularity one year later. More importantly, we expected and found teacher-rated o...

Social relationships are assumed to be among the most important sources of well-being. However, previous studies showing that objectively measured social network size contributes to well-being have not included personality traits. We investigated, in a sample of Facebook users (N = 4701), whether the effects of Extraversion on well-being are mediat...

In three studies (S1–S3; N = 256) we investigated whether moral hypocrisy (MH) is motivated by conscious impression management concerns or whether it is self-deceptive. In a dictator game, MH occurred both within participants (saying one thing, doing another; S1) and between participants (doing one thing when it is inconsequential, doing another th...

The present study examined the associations of the Five-Factor Model personality dimensions with Degree (number of friends) and Transitivity (the likelihood that two of a person’s friends are friends with each other) of a person’s network on the social networking site Facebook. A Facebook application administered a personality questionnaire and obj...

The present study examined the relations between personal values, value congruence, interpersonal relationships and subjective well-being in psychology/education and business students from Argentina (N = 275), Bulgaria (N = 182) and Finland (N = 148). Regression analyses showed, first, that there were no direct relations between higher order value...

The present study examined the relations of personal values to life satisfaction across 25 European nations. Multilevel statistics with country-level Human Development Index (HDI) as a contextual moderator tested its effect on the individual-level relations between personal values and life satisfaction (LS). HDI moderated the relations between LS a...

We examined Finns' and bilingual Swedish-Finns' stereotypes regarding personality differences between Finns and Swedish-Finns and compared them with their respective self-ratings. Stereotype ratings by both groups converged on depicting Swedish-Finns as having a more desirable personality. In-group bias also influenced stereotypes. Contrary to pred...

Returning to a sample of Ingrian Finnish migrants (N = 136) in which postmigration change in personal values has previously been documented, we investigated the permanency of such value change. Personal values, measured within the framework provided by Schwartz’s (1992) values theory, were previously measured prior to migration and 1 year after mig...

Do the political values of the general public form a coherent system? What might be the source of coherence? We view political values as expressions, in the political domain, of more basic personal values. Basic personal values (e.g., security, achievement, benevolence, hedonism) are organized on a circular continuum that reflects their conflicting...

Relying on the framework provided by Schwartz's theory of personal values, we investigated whether values can help explain prosocial behaviour. We first distinguished value‐expressive behaviours from value‐ambivalent behaviours. The former are compatible with primarily one value or with congruent values, the latter with mutually conflicting values....

In a 4-year longitudinal study, we investigated stereotype change in the context of increased intergroup contact. Specifically, using one pre- and two postmigration measurement points, we followed some 200 Ingrian Finns and their families migrating from Russia to Finland. Stereotypes of a typical Finn were conceptualized within the framework provid...

How do people trade off efficiency against equality concerns? To study this question, we conducted a modified mini ultimatum game (N=120) in which proposers were asked to choose between offering 8:2 and y:y, y∈{5, 4.5, 4,.., 0.5}; all offers in Euro. According to the data, 58 of 60 proposers have a unique switching point towards the unequal split a...

The present study examined how Big Five personality ratings of the same target individuals differ as a function of the power relation between the target and the judge. Our targets were 37 employees with leadership duties from two large organizations. The targets' subordinates (N = 352), peers (N = 186), and superiors (N = 62) constituted our groups...

Person perception research has focused on the accuracy of observers receiving truthful target information; however, in real life people may often wish to manage the impression that they convey. We investigated whether people can “pose personality” in photographs. Sixty target participants posed each in 10 photographs in which they sought to express...

Understanding how persons, situations, and behaviors contribute to behavioral consistency is a central goal for the science of behavior. The present study focused on dyadic social situations that were created by professional actors who enacted 4 social roles derived from interpersonal theory: dominant, submissive, agreeable, and quarrelsome. A tota...

We linked seven-year-old children's personality (n = 406), as rated by both teachers and parents, to a wide array of cognitive ability measures. Besides (i) providing descriptive data on the associations between childhood personality and cognitive ability, we (ii) investigated the benefits of having multiple informants provide personality ratings a...

How do people perceive a social dilemma such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma if the problem is framed focusing entirely on monetary incentives – as commonly done in laboratory experiments? Focusing on the involved conflict between strategic and moral incentives, we designed a two-stage experiment to analyse both the subjects’ judgement (Part 1) and their...

The authors examined the proposal that personality disorder categories may denote particular detrimental combinations of personality dimensions. A multiround economic exchange game (ten round trust game), conducted with university students pre-selected on basis of their personalities (N = 164), provided a framework within which to investigate inabi...

This study examined the role of value patterns of potential migrants from Russia to Finland (N = 229) in predicting expectations of post-migration socio-cultural adaptation. Furthermore, the fit between migrants' personal values and the values they expect to encounter in the new home country (i.e. perceived value congruence) was hypothesized to pre...

National Finns (N=286), as well as potential, Ingrian Finnish (N=229) and Russian (N=78) migrants from Russia to Finland rated their own personal values and the values of a typical Finn and Russian. Virtually all participants in our migrant samples, although still living in Russia, had been in frequent contact with Finns and Finland, suggesting tha...

A new approach to the construction of short questionnaires is introduced: ‘comprehensive single items’ (CSI) are developed with the intention to match expert descriptions of a construct as closely as possible. Based on this idea, a 60-item questionnaire, the ‘Short Five’ (S5) is constructed for measuring 30 facets of the Five-Factor Model. Studies...

We propose a refined theory of basic individual values intended to provide greater heuristic and explanatory power than the original theory of 10 values (Schwartz, 1992). The refined theory more accurately expresses the central assumption of the original theory that research has largely ignored: Values form a circular motivational continuum. The th...

We investigated the process of value change in a migration context. Specifically, in a longitudinal panel design with around 19 months between measurement points, 145 Ingrian–Finnish migrants from Russia to Finland completed the same measures of personal values both before and after migration. As expected, the importance of both Universalism and Se...

Agreement between multiple informants on child personality has received limited attention. Focusing on factor structure, gender differences and the influence of socially desirable responding (SDR), we compared parent and teacher Big Five personality ratings of around 600 7-year olds. Although parent ratings were more desirable than teacher ratings,...

We report on two studies in which we measured army cadets' tendencies to engage in two types of self-enhancement: communal self-enhancement (a moralistic bias in self-presentation) and agentic self-enhancement (an egotistic bias in self-presentation). These self-presentation styles were then related to their selection and performance as military le...

We examined the interactive effects of personal values and situational power on proposer and responder behavior in an ultimatum bargaining game. The current literature suggests that situational power could moderate the influence of personal values on behavior. For proposers (N = 107), high scores on the Self-Transcendence vs. Self-Enhancement value...

Previous studies have demonstrated that university students hold several paranormal beliefs and that paranormal beliefs can be best explained with core knowledge confusions. The aim of this study was to explore to what extent university students confuse the core ontological attributes of lifeless material objects (e.g. a house, a stone), living org...

The authors investigated how the presence or absence of monetary incentives in a prisoner’s dilemma game may influence research outcomes. Specifically, the predictive power of the Big Five personality traits on decisions in an incentivized (N = 60) or hypothetical (N = 60) prisoner’s dilemma game was investigated. Participants were less generous in...

This paper compares two prominent empirical measures of individual risk attitudes - the Holt and Laury (2002) lottery-choice task and the multi-item questionnaire advocated by Dohmen, Falk, Huffman, Schupp, Sunde and Wagner (forthcoming) - with respect to (a) their correlation with actual risk-taking behaviour in the lab - here the amount sent in a...

This study reports results from the first International Body Project (IBP-I), which surveyed 7,434 individuals in 10 major world regions about body weight ideals and body dissatisfaction. Participants completed the female Contour Drawing Figure Rating Scale (CDFRS) and self-reported their exposure to Western and local media. Results indicated there...

The present study utilizes European Social Survey (ESS) data to introduce European norms and equations for computation of the Self-Transcendence—Self-Enhancement and Conservation—Openness to Change value dimensions, as measured with the 21-item Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ). Our analysis of ESS round 1 and 2 data suggest that the two-dimensio...

The authors assessed whether neuroticism in emerging adulthood predicts mental disorders and self-esteem in early adulthood after controlling for possible confounding variables. A sample of 69 male military conscripts was initially assessed at age 20 and again as civilians at age 35. The initial assessment included a psychiatric interview, objectiv...

Cognitive ability has been shown to moderate the relations between emotional stability and self-reports of well being. The present study examined whether this interaction effect generalizes to non-self-report measures of well being. Male conscripts (N = 152) completed an emotional stability scale and a cognitive ability test. Several indicators of...

Altogether, 1448 individuals from six neighbouring countries of Russia in the Baltic Sea region (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Belarus) described a ‘typical’ member of their own nation and a ‘typical’ Russian, as well as rated their own personality, using the National Character Survey (NCS). Results suggest that national character...

The present study explored the premorbid personality traits Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Disinhibition in individuals later diagnosed with psychotic disorders. Results on personality questionnaires and intellectual performance tests were obtained for 213,443 apparently healthy male subjects (mean age: 20.1 years) conscripted into the Finnish Defe...

The present studies sought connections between two highly influential, but separate motivational systems: the regulatory foci and personal values. Study 1 (N = 173) showed that promotion focus was positively associated with Achievement and negatively with Tradition values, whereas prevention focus was positively associated with Conformity and Secur...

Three studies predicted and found that the individual's conformism values are one determinant of whether behaviour is guided by other personal values or by social norms. In Study 1 (N=50), pro-gay law reform participants were told they were either in a minority or a majority in terms of their attitude towards the law reform. Only participants who w...

Self-enhancement and its implications for psychological adjustment were studied in a replication and extension of a study by Kwan et al. (200426. Kwan , V. S. Y. , John , O. P. , Kenny , D. A. , Bond , M. H. , & Robins , R. W. ( 2004 ). Reconceptualizing individual differences in self-enhancement bias: An interpersonal approach . Psychological Revi...

The relations of value priorities (the Schwartz Value Survey) to guilt, shame (Tangney’s Test of Self-Conscious Affect) and empathy (Davis’ Interpersonal Reactivity Index) were examined in two samples, one of 15–19-year-old secondary school students (N=207), and the other of military conscripts (N=503). As hypothesized, guilt-proneness was, in both...

A sample of male military conscripts in the Finnish Defence Forces (N = 74) completed the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire [Cattell, R. B., Eber, H., & Tatsuoka, M. (1970). Handbook for the sixteen personality factor questionnaire. Champaign, Illinois: Institute for Personality and Ability Testing, Inc.] at age 20 and again as civilians at...

We evaluated Big Five personality factor differences between research volunteers and nonvolunteers. In the first study, 158 military officers were asked to participate in a mail survey. The personality scores of the officers were available from an archival data set. In our second study, adult siblings from large families were invited to participate...

This research was designed to investigate Paulhus' communion management (CM) and self-deceptive enhancement (SDE), socially desirable responding (SDR) scales as measures of general SDR, communal bias and agentic bias. The CM and SDE scales, as well as the Schwartz values survey (SVS), were administered to four samples drawn from different cultures...

The purpose of the present study was to connect personal values to self-esteem in 14 samples (N = 3612) of pre-professionals, high school students, and adults, from Finland, Russia, Switzerland, Italy, and Estonia. Self-enhancement values (power, achievement) and openness to change values (self-direction, stimulation) were positively, and self-tran...

The purpose of the present series of studies was to evaluate whether Paulhus's (1991) Self-Deceptive Enhancement (SDE) and Communion Management (CM) socially desirable responding (SDR) scales should be interpreted as response set measures, response style measures, or measures of substantive individual differences in personality. In Study 1 (N=57) a...

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the moderating effect of Conformism values on the relations between other values and behavior. The authors expected people low, but not high, in Conformism to behave in a manner that is consistent with their personal values related to self-transcendence versus self-enhancement. In Study 1 (N = 199),...

Some 200 military cadets rated themselves and other members of their platoons on a variety of variables, including the quality of their leadership behaviors. They also completed standardized personality questionnaires measuring the positive and negative aspects of narcissism. Strong predictions were found for variables related to the two sides of t...

The four studies presented in this dissertation were designed to examine the influence of socially desirable responding (SDR) on personality research outcomes. The assessment of personality relies heavily on the use of self-report questionnaires. Their validity could be threatened by people being dishonest in their self-descriptions and ascribing m...