Michael Bang Petersen

Aarhus University | AU · Department of Political Science

Discrimination in the evaluation of others is a key cause of social inequality around the world. However, relatively little is known about psychological interventions that can be used to prevent biased evaluations. The limited evidence that exists on these strategies is spread across many methods and populations, making it difficult to generate rel...

Reducing hostility in social media interactions is a key public concern. Most extant research emphasizes how online contextual factors breed hostility. Here, we take a different perspective and focus on the offline roots of hostility, that is, offline experiences and stable individual-level dispositions. Using a unique dataset of Danish Twitter use...

Hate is widespread online, hits everyone, and carries negative consequences. Crowd moderation—user-assisted moderation through, e. g., reporting or counter-speech—is heralded as a potential remedy. We explore this potential by linking insights on online bystander interventions to the analogy of crowd moderation as a (lost) public good. We argue tha...

This book provides a cutting-edge overview of emotion science from an evolutionary perspective. Part 1 outlines different ways of approaching the study of emotion; Part 2 covers specific emotions from an evolutionary perspective; Part 3 discusses the role of emotions in a variety of life domains; and Part 4 explores the relationship between emotion...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282308.].

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a key concern for authorities was to identify and activate the psychological states most likely to motivate the public to engage in protective behavior such as physical distancing and hygienic protection. While feelings of fear and threat were rampant during the pandemic, theories of health psychology have highlighted...

Individuals who are more motivated to avoid pathogenic infection tend to be more opposed to immigrants. Explanations for this relation emphasize lack of familiarity, with people who are more unfamiliar with ethnic outgroups being more likely to perceive them as a possible infection risk and therefore oppose immigration. Exposure to immigrants can i...

Concern about the hostility of political discussions on social media is widespread. Dominant public and scholarly narratives frequently attribute this hostility to common features of large social media platforms (such as anonymity, recommendation algorithms and echo chambers), suggesting that hostility develops as people log on to such platforms. Y...

What is the relation between morality and politics? If morality is a collection of cooperative rules, and politics is conflict over which cooperative projects to pursue, then they should be correlated. We examined the relation between moral values and political orientation in samples of participants from the USA (N = 518), Denmark (N = 552), the Ne...

During the COVID‐19 pandemic, the imposition of moralistically justified costs on unvaccinated individuals was used to incentivize vaccination uptake. Here, we ask whether such a strategy creates adverse consequences in the form of lowered trust in the pandemic response among unvaccinated individuals, which could jeopardize their compliance with th...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, public opinion regarding restrictions and lockdowns was quickly characterized by significant disagreement. In a societal crisis such as COVID-19, it is important to understand the drivers behind citizens’ attitudes and behaviors. Political disagreement related to COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns has often been inter...

Hostile interactions permeate political debates on social media, but what is driving the long-term developments in online political hostility? Prior research focuses on individual level factors such the dispositions of users or network-level factors such as echo chambers. Moving beyond these accounts, we develop and test an event-oriented explanati...

While the World was busy mitigating the disastrous health and economic effects of the novel coronavirus, a less direct, but not less concerning peril has largely remained unexplored: the COVID-19 crisis may have disrupted some of the most fundamental social and political relationships in democratic societies. We interviewed samples resembling the n...

Across diverse policy domains from climate to health policy, there is broad concern about whether popular trust in science and expertise has eroded during the past decade. This has generated discussions about the growing influence of low-trust populists whose alleged turn against science may weaken the possibility of democratic policy-making built...

We examined whether political repression deters citizens from engaging in anti-government behaviour (its intended goal) or in fact motivates it. Analyses of 101 nationally representative samples from three continents (N = 139 266) revealed a positive association between perceived levels of repression and intentions to engage in anti-government viol...

Background Implementing a lockdown for disease mitigation is a balancing act: Non-pharmaceutical interventions can reduce disease transmission significantly, but interventions also have considerable societal costs. Therefore, decision-makers need near real-time information to calibrate the level of restrictions. Methods We fielded daily surveys in...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public...

We live in a world of text. Yet the sheer magnitude of social media data, coupled with a need to measure complex psychological constructs, has made this important source of data difficult to use. Researchers often engage in costly hand coding of thousands of texts using supervised techniques or rely on unsupervised techniques where the measurement...

By conforming to ingroup norms, individuals coordinate with other group members, preserve cohesion, and avoid costs of exclusion. Previous experiments have shown that increased concerns about infectious disease increase conformity. However, coordination with other group members has multiple benefits, most of which exist independent of pathogenic in...

Why are some people motivated to circulate hostile political information? While prior studies have focused on partisan motivations, we demonstrate that some individuals circulate hostile rumors because they wish to unleash chaos to “burn down” the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process. To understand this psychology, we...

Et afgørende fokus under covid-19-pandemien har været på at motivere omfattende adfærdsændringer i befolkningen. I denne artikel undersøger vi, hvilke psykologiske faktorer der var mest afgørende for danskernes adfærd under anden bølge af pandemien. Baseret på en spørgeskemaundersøgelse, der er repræsentativ for den voksne danske befolkning, viser...

A fundamental aim during the COVID-19 pandemic has been to motivate comprehensive behavioral change in the population in order to protect them against infection with the corona virus. Here, we study how psychological factors relate to such behavior change during the second wave of the pandemic. Using survey data representative of the adult Danish p...

Health authorities have highlighted “pandemic fatigue” as a psychological consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic and warned that “fatigue” could demotivate compliance with health-related policies and mandates. Yet, fatigue from following the policies of authorities may have consequences far beyond the health domain. Theories from the social sciences...

Individuals who are more motivated to avoid pathogenic infection tend to be more opposed to immigrants. Explanations for this relation emphasize that lack of familiarity plays a key role, with people who are more unfamiliar with ethnic outgroups and their customs being more prone to perceive them as a possible infection risk and therefore oppose im...

Implementing a lockdown for disease mitigation is a balancing act: Non-pharmaceutical interventions can reduce disease transmission significantly, but interventions also have considerable societal costs. Therefore, decision-makers need near real-time information to calibrate the level of restrictions. We fielded daily surveys in Denmark during the...

Differences in attitudes on social issues such as abortion, immigration and sex are hugely divisive, and understanding their origins is among the most important tasks facing human behavioural sciences. Despite the clear psychological importance of parenthood and the motivation to provide care for children, researchers have only recently begun inves...

Differences in attitudes on social issues such as abortion, immigration, and sex are hugely divisive, and understanding their origins is among the most important tasks facing human behavioural sciences. Despite the clear psychological importance of parenthood and the motivation to provide care for children, researchers have only recently begun inve...

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied ma...

Political hostility and ideological polarization permeate political debates on social media, but what is driving long-term developments in ideological polarization and political hostility? Prominent theories of social media argue that social media networks are best conceptualized as echo chambers, i.e., systems insulated from external input. Contra...

What is the relationship between morality and politics? If morality is a collection of cooperative rules, and politics is conflict over which cooperative projects to pursue, then we should expect the two to be related. People who expect to benefit from a particular type of cooperation will be likely to endorse the corresponding moral values and pol...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behavior change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public h...

Hadefuld adfærd på de sociale medier i forbindelse med eksempelvis politiske diskussioner anses for et stigende samfundsproblem. I denne artikel spørger vi: Hvem er udøverne af det politiske had på internettet – og hvem er ofrene? Og er udøverne af og ofrene for had anderledes på internettet end udenfor internettet? Analyserne viser, at de personer...

Hostile behavior on social media in connection with, for example, political discussions, is considered a growing societal problem. In this article, we ask: Who are the perpetrators of political hostility on the Internet – and who are the victims? And are the perpetrators and victims of hostility on the Internet different from the victims outside th...

The emergence of the novel coronavirus has put societies under tremendous pressure to instigate massive and rapid behavior change. Throughout history, an effective strategy to facilitate novel behaviors has been to morally condemn those who do not behave in an appropriate way. Accordingly, here, we investigate if complying with the advice of health...

Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals ( N = 11,200) from 31 countries show...

Theoretical work in evolutionary psychology have proposed that conspiracy theories may serve a coalitional function. Specifically, fringe and offensive statements such as conspiracy theories are expected to send a highly credible signal of coalition membership by clearly distinguishing the speaker’s group from other groups. A key implication of thi...

We estimate the willingness to take the booster dose in a representative sample of Danes. We estimate an overall willingness in the adult Danish population of about 87 percent and a willingness of about 95.5 percent among primary vaccine takers. Moreover, we show that these percentages are significantly lower among younger populations, as well as a...

Despite early hope that vaccines may end the COVID-19 pandemic, large unvaccinated minorities persist even in countries with high vaccine access. Consequently, public debates and protests have been intensifying over the issue of vaccination. Here, we ask whether people's status as either vaccinated or unvaccinated has come to reflect a socio-politi...

How should health authorities communicate to motivate the public to comply with health advice during a prolonged health crisis such as a pandemic? During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, for example, people have had to comply with successive restrictions as the world faced multiple races between controlling new waves of the virus and the development and im...

Toxicity and hostility permeate political debates on social media, but who is responsible? Canonical theories of political engagement equate political resources with being a “model democratic citizen.” In contrast, we develop the theoretical argument that in the current polarized political climate, those same resources come to motivate hostile enga...

In American politics, the truth is rapidly losing relevance. The public square is teeming with misinformation, conspiracy theories, cynicism and hubris. Why has this happened? What does it mean? What can we do about it? In this volume, leading scholars offer multiple perspectives on these questions, and others, to provide the first comprehensive em...

In American politics, the truth is rapidly losing relevance. The public square is teeming with misinformation, conspiracy theories, cynicism and hubris. Why has this happened? What does it mean? What can we do about it? In this volume, leading scholars offer multiple perspectives on these questions, and others, to provide the first comprehensive em...

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and str...

Why do people disseminate fake news online? We investigate this question by focusing on the effect of perceived conflict on the endorsement of fake news in the context of a regional conflict between Russia and the West as experienced by Ukrainian citizens. In our survey experiment, a sample of Ukrainians (N= 1,615) was randomly assigned to read neg...

Background While effective vaccines against the SARS-COV-2 virus have been developed and countries around the world have invested heavily to secure vaccine rollout, a fundamental challenge remains. How do policy-makers around the world ensure high vaccine uptake? What is lacking is a comprehensive assessment that captures a total spectrum of featur...

We estimate the willingness to taking the booster dose in a representative sample of Danes. We estimate an overall willingness in the adult Danish population of 85.5 percent and a willingness of 94.7 percent among primary vaccine takers. We, moreover, show that these percentages will be significantly lower among younger populations as well as among...

While the World has been busy mitigating the disastrous health and economic effects of the novel coronavirus, a less direct, but not less concerning peril has largely remained unexplored: the COVID-19 crisis may disrupt some of the most fundamental social and political relationships in democratic societies. We interviewed samples resembling the nat...

Background: Since the initial phases of vaccination campaigns, health authorities across the world have recommended vaccination of children between 15 and 18; and since the summer of 2021, vaccinations of children between 12 and 15 have been recommended. Recently, American and European Health Authorities have approved the use of a vaccine against C...

On March 11, 2021, the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID-19 was suspended in three Nordic countries and, on subsequent days, in other European countries. Using data on vaccine acceptance in eight Western countries obtained on a daily basis, we show that these decisions - and associated news - decreased public vaccine acceptance in several countries...

On November 8 2021, a press conference was held by the Danish government to re-introduce covid passports as a way of containing increasing COVID-19 infections and make life as an unvaccinated “more burdensome”. While new vaccinations increased in the weeks following the press conference, we show that this increased pressure also decreased trust amo...

The political discontent triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic – including public protesting and the airing of anti-elite sentiments – is reminiscent of discontent often associated with populism. Research on populism has highlighted a sense of vulnerability and loss of control as drives of populism. Similarly, health authorities and researchers have h...

Objective: An effective vaccine against COVID-19 is a desired solution to curb the spread of the disease. However, vaccine hesitancy might hinder high uptake rates and thus undermine efforts to eliminate COVID-19 once an effective vaccine became available. The present contribution addresses this issue by examining two ways of increasing the intenti...

Why are online discussions about politics more hostile than offline discussions? A popular answer argues that human psychology is tailored for face-to-face interaction and people’s behavior therefore changes for the worse in impersonal online discussions. We provide a theoretical formalization and empirical test of this explanation: the mismatch hy...

Background: Public use of face masks has been widely adopted to halter the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but a key concern has been whether the effectiveness of face mask use is limited due to the elicitation of false feelings of security that decrease the observance of other protective behaviors, the so-called risk-compensation. Methods: We exploit quas...

What are the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for people’s political attitudes and behavior? We tested, specifically, whether the psychological burden of the COVID-19 pandemic relates to antisystemic attitudes (dissatisfaction with the fundamental social and political order), peaceful political activism, and political violence. Nationally repr...

The fields of political psychology and election studies often live separate lives. One reason has been the difficulty of including long psychological question batteries in the high-quality, representative samples that are the hallmark of election studies. In this study, we examine a novel one-item measure of psychological differences in sensitivity...

Significance During a pandemic, governments face incentives to not disclose negative information about vaccines to not jeopardize public vaccine acceptance. Against these incentives, the current study provides an experimental, cross-national demonstration of the importance of transparency in communication about a vaccine against COVID-19. While dis...

While effective vaccines against the SARS-COV-2 virus have been developed and countries around the world have invested heavily to secure vaccine rollout, a fundamental challenge remains. How do policy-makers around the world ensure high vaccine uptake? What is lacking is a comprehensive assessment that captures a total spectrum of features related...

We live in a world of text but the sheer magnitude of social media data coupled with a need to measure complex psychological constructs have made this important source of data difficult to use for many social scientists. Either researchers engage in costly hand-coding of thousands of texts using supervised techniques or in unsupervised techniques w...

In order to halt the spread of COVID-19 governments have engaged in policies that are both economically costly and involve infringements of individual rights. In democratic countries, these policy responses have elicited significant debate but little is known about the extent to which the responses are supported or opposed by the broader public. Th...

Political collective action requires assembling and motivating supporters. Many theories view emotions as functional tools for managing relationships, including within groups. We study what leads citizens to use the emotions anger and gratitude as social pressure. Specifically, we test what determines the use of these emotions to prevent potential...

Objectives The management of the COVID-19 pandemic hinges on the approval of safe and effective vaccines but, equally importantly, on high vaccine acceptance among people. To facilitate vaccine acceptance via effective health communication, it is key to understand levels of vaccine scepticism and the demographic, psychological and political predict...

One of the unprecedented measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic was to close borders across the world. In Europe, the closing of national borders was perceived as particularly controversial because of the emphasis on the free movement of labor and citizens across borders within the European Union. Here, we...

The rise of “fake news” is a major concern in contemporary Western democracies. Yet, research on the psychological motivations behind the spread of political fake news on social media is surprisingly limited. Are citizens who share fake news ignorant and lazy? Are they fueled by sinister motives, seeking to disrupt the social status quo? Or do they...

This article presents a large-scale, empirical evaluation of the psychophysiological correlates of political ideology and, in particular, the claim that conservatives react with higher levels of electrodermal activity to threatening stimuli than liberals. We (1) conduct two large replications of this claim, using locally representative samples of D...

By conforming to ingroup norms, individuals coordinate with other group members, preserve cohesion, and avoid costs of exclusion. Experimental studies have reported that increased concerns about infectious disease increases conformity. However, coordination with other group members has myriad benefits, most of which exist independent of pathogenic...

Objectives: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic required rapid public compliance with advice from health authorities. Here, we ask who was most likely to do so during the first wave of the pandemic. Design: Quota-sampled cross-sectional and panel data from eight Western democracies (Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the United...

The decision to temporarily suspend the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID-19 raised debate about the suspension's potential effects on the levels of acceptance of the overall vaccination program against COVID-19. Here, we trace the impact of first the Danish decision and subsequent national decisions on general COVID-19 vaccine acceptance by compar...

People form political attitudes to serve psychological needs. Recent research shows that some individuals have a strong desire to incite chaos when they perceive themselves to be marginalized by society. These individuals tend to see chaos as a way to invert the power structure and gain social status in the process. Analysing data drawn from large-...

The world is facing a race between controlling new and more infectious variants of coronavirus and implementing vaccinations: How can health authorities and governments most effectively communicate the need to engage more strongly in protective behavior to avoid a collapse of the healthcare system until vaccination programs are effective? In the fi...

Although the genetic influence on voter turnout is substantial (typically 40–50%), the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Across the social sciences, research suggests that ‘resources for politics’ (as indexed notably by educational attainment and intelligence test performance) constitute a central cluster of factors that predict electoral parti...

What are the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on people's political attitudes and behavior? This article examined, specifically, whether the psychological burden of the COVID-19 pandemic drives anti-systemic attitudes and engagement in peaceful and violent political activism. We collected nationally representative two-wave panel data in the Un...

Objective: An effective vaccine against COVID-19 is a desired solution to curb the spread of the disease. However, vaccine hesitancy might hinder high uptake rates and thus undermine efforts to eliminate COVID-19 once an effective vaccine became available. The present contribution addresses this issue by examining two ways of increasing the intenti...

Physical distancing is a crucial aspect of most countries’ strategies to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. However, keeping distance to others in public requires significant changes in conduct and behavior relative to ordinary circumstances. Throughout history, an effective strategy to make people engage in such behavioral change has been to morally co...

Health authorities emphasize the importance of "radical transparency" in communicating about future COVID-19 vaccines to counter conspiracy-based skepticism. While this resonates with research that highlights uncertainty as a major psychological predictor of conspiracy-related beliefs, no systematic evidence exists regarding the effectiveness of tr...