
Michele RoccatoUniversity of Turin | UNITO · Dipartimento di Psicologia
Michele Roccato
PhD
About
179
Publications
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Introduction
At present my main research interests are the multilevel prediction of populist attitudes and votes and the social-psychological consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. In recent years, I have mainly studied authoritarianism, fear of crime, and the social-psychological dynamics in environmental conflicts
Additional affiliations
October 2001 - present
Publications
Publications (179)
Objective:
We aimed to predict the trend of populist orientations and votes in Italy before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Method:
Using the Consequences of COVID-19 (COCO) data set (quota sample of the Italian adult population), we conducted a 3.5-year, seven-wave longitudinal study, with one wave before the pandemic (June 2019) and six waves d...
Using a unique longitudinal database (large quota sample of the Italian adult population, n = 2,223) structured in seven waves, we analysed how trust in the police changed in the 3.5 years between June 2019 (i.e. before the outbreak of COVID-19) and October 2022 (i.e. after COVID-19). A latent growth model showed that trust in the police changed fo...
We conducted two studies to analyze the relations between dissatisfaction with experiences with the national healthcare system and trust in political (political parties and parliament), super partes (judiciary and police), and international (European Union [EU] and United Nations [UN]) institutions via the mediation of trust in the national healthc...
When the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the world, the contextual conditions in which the rise of populism took place deeply and rapidly changed. Did this mark a turning point in the trend of populism? In this chapter, we attempt to answer this question mainly based on a longitudinal research program we undertook soon after the pandemic onset (taking a...
In this study, we investigated whether Giorgia Meloni’s gender was an advantage, a disadvantage or an irrelevant factor in the 2022 Italian general election. Using datasets from two election surveys conducted with two quota samples of the adult Italian population, Ns = 1,572 (ITANES dataset) and 1,150 (COCO dataset), we predicted the vote in the el...
Objectives:
We aimed to predict the favor for a technocratic government in the context of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
Method:
We tested a multilevel mediated moderated model on the ResPOnsE COVID-19 data set (rolling cross-section design, quota sample of the Italian adult population, N = 8210, data collected from March 17 to June 16, 2021).
Results:
S...
Working with a wide quota sample of the Italian adult population, surveyed in the 5th wave of the CoCo (Consequences of COVID-19) project (N = 1,143), we developed and validated the COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy (CVH) Scale, composed of four 4-category items assessing participants’ attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine. Structural equations modelling...
The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between (a) sociodemographic variables, past non-consensual experiences and sexual consent and (b) the endorsement of rape supportive attitudes. A sample of 1042 heterosexual adults (42.4% men) was surveyed. A predictive model indicated that the most relevant predictors of rape supportive atti...
The primacy of beauty for women is frequently conveyed through language and, more particularly, through a particular class of conversational devices, compliments. Although previous research has been conducted on the impact of appearance compliments on individuals’ psychological state, research has yet to examine what happens when a compliment about...
Epidemiological data show that men and women have similar probabilities of contracting COVID-19. However, men with COVID-19 tend to have more severe outcomes than women. We performed two studies to analyze the associations between gender, adherence to traditional masculinity ideology, perceived vulnerability to COVID-19, and the adoption of protect...
In an earlier cross-sectional study, Roccato et al. (2021) showed that household crowding during the COVID-19 lockdown was positively related to support for anti-democratic political systems. However, little is known about the persistence of these effect over time. In this study, we examined its duration in a longitudinal study structured in five w...
We conducted a secondary analysis of the 2018 (ninth round) European Social Survey dataset (N = 19,512, nested in 24 countries) to analyse the association between relative deprivation and right‐wing populist voting, moderated by participants' income and their country's GDP. A multilevel moderated model showed that relative deprivation, income and G...
Using data from a survey of a quota sample of the Italian population (N = 1,504), we analysed the relation between perception of relative deprivation and populism. Perceived relative deprivation showed a positive association with populist orientation and the vote both for a right-wing populist party and for a non-positional populist party. Strength...
Introduction:
Occupational safety and health (OSH) have a remarkable impact on the sustainability of firms and organizations. However, the sustainability perspective has often focused primarily on environmental and economic concerns, leaving key social and workplace aspects, such as OSH, underemphasized. The link between all these aspects is parti...
This article explores whether the current populist zeitgeist has changed the social representation of the political labels ‘left’ and ‘right’ in terms of their relevance, understanding and meaning. We merged two post-electoral quota samples of the Italian adult population. The first (N = 1,377) was collected in 2006 by the ITANES research group, th...
Objective
Exogenous shocks trigger rally effects, leading the public opinion toward increased trust in institutions. Rally effects have an important social function because they help society react to shocks rapidly and efficiently as a single unit and cohesively face the threat. However, little is known about the individual functions that these eff...
Using an Italian land use conflict on the building a high-speed railway (HSR) as case study, we analyzed how perceived changes in public opinion influence (a) people’s willingness to speak out, and (b) subsequently their intentions to engage in action (N = 311). Regardless of whether they were on the majority or minority side of the conflict, citiz...
The detrimental effects of sexism on women’s professional lives are well known. However, what is still under-investigated is whether women would all be affected to the same extent by exposure to sexist manifestations in the workplace, or individual variables, such as ideological standpoints, moderate women’s reactions to such events. We conducted t...
We analysed some political consequences of household crowding during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown across a wide quota sample of the Italian adult population, stratified as concerns gender, age, level of education, geographical area of residence, and size of area of residence, interviewed before (May–June 2019) and during (April 2020) the lockdown (N...
Ente di afferenza: Università di Torino (unito) Copyright c by Società editrice il Mulino, Bologna. Tutti i diritti sono riservati. Per altre informazioni si veda https://www.rivisteweb.it Licenza d'uso L'articoloè messo a disposizione dell'utente in licenza per uso esclusivamente privato e personale, senza scopo di lucro e senza fini direttamente...
Objectives
We aimed to analyze the enduring effects exerted by COVID‐19 exposure and subjective economic threats on support for anti‐democratic political systems.
Method
We performed a two‐wave longitudinal study on a quota panel of the Italian adult population (N = 1,073), surveyed first in April 2020, during the first peak of the pandemic (T1) a...
Ente di afferenza: Università di Torino (unito) Copyright c by Società editrice il Mulino, Bologna. Tutti i diritti sono riservati. Per altre informazioni si veda https://www.rivisteweb.it Licenza d'uso L'articoloè messo a disposizione dell'utente in licenza per uso esclusivamente privato e personale, senza scopo di lucro e senza fini direttamente...
In two experimental vignette studies, we examined the relationship between exposure to a sexist message and women’s writing skills in the context of a simulated job selection interview. In Study 1, under experimental conditions, 85 Italian women (Mage = 26.99, SD = 10.62) were exposed to a benevolent sexist message, a hostile sexist message, or a n...
Objectives. The urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic has led governments to impose restrictions
on individual freedom and required citizens to comply with these restrictions. In addition, lock-
downs related to COVID-19 have led to a significant economic crisis. We aimed to study how the
pandemic and related economic threats have impacted support for an...
Objectives
We predicted populist orientation and vote for two populist parties, the Five Star Movement (FSM) and the League, in the 2019 European election by focusing on perceived economic threat, perceived cultural threat, dissatisfaction with representative democracy, and on first‐order interactions.
Method
We surveyed a quota sample of the Ital...
Archival, correlational, and experimental studies converge showing strong links between societal threat and authoritarianism. However, inconsistent with the social cognitive studies showing that our perception of the reality is systematically biased, the literature on the threat-authoritarianism relations has largely ignored the connection between...
Smart Farming Technologies (SFTs) can improve production output while minimising costs and preserving resources; however, they are scarcely adopted by farmers. In the present study, the factors affecting farmers' intentions to adopt two types of SFTs (Type 1: drones, sensors for data acquisition and automatic download, and agricultural apps; Type 2...
We performed a multilevel, multinational analysis of the 2014 European Social Survey dataset (N = 33,597, nested in 19 countries) to study how individual conservative values and cultural embeddedness moderate the link between contact with immigrants and the attitudes toward them. A combination of frequency and positivity of contact with immigrants...
We analyzed the relations between exposure to news describing a natural disaster and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) with 241 Italian adults, surveyed twice, before and after a severe earthquake. Our results were compatible with the idea that the exposure to earthquake news led to an increase in RWA among people who had low, but not among who had...
Sustainability is defined as meeting the human needs of current as well as future generations. This anthropocentric perspective leads to joint objectives between sustainability and ergonomics. In the present study, we adopted a systems ergonomic approach and, based on the Theory of Planned Behavior, we analyzed the paths by which the information en...
We addressed the interactive effects of authoritarianism and social threat in explaining the preference for antidemocratic political systems. Using a quasi-experimental design (N = 171), we manipulated exposure to social threat and tested its effect in combination with authoritarianism, operationalized as a three-dimension construct composed of aut...
A growing body of research documents the adverse effects of sexualized appearance on people’s attitudes toward women victims of blatant forms of gender violence. However, the impact of sexualization of women victims of subtle forms of gender violence and the moderating role of people’s conservativism on victim blaming remain under-investigated. In...
Objectives
We developed and validated the POPulist ORientation (POPOR) Scale (composed of six five‐category items), operationalizing populist orientation as a unidimensional construct composed of six facets: (1) anti‐economic, financial, and intellectual establishment attitude; (2) anti‐political establishment; (3) conception of the people as a hom...
With the aim of understanding the relationship between the presence of immigrants and prejudice toward them, we tested two competing predictions drawn from the outgroup threat theory and the contact hypothesis. We also tested whether such relationship differed depending on individual political ideology. The results of a multilevel analysis conducte...
Individuals and communities all over the world are experiencing rapid societal changes due to economic, social, cultural, and political cross-national interconnections. Social scientists agree on the importance of understanding the psychological, social, and cultural implications of this globalization process (Diaz & Zirkel, 2012; Scholte, 2005). T...
We explore the motivations behind the electoral success of the Lega and the Five-star Movement at the 2018 Italian general election. In most of the literature on populism, the success of the new European populist parties is interpreted as stemming from the process of globalisation, which has produced the so-called ‘modernisation losers’: ‘cultural...
In an experimental vignette study performed with 92 Portuguese women, we analyzed the relations between exposure to hostile sexism (HS) and benevolent sexism (BS) in a workplace context, system justification (SJ), and anxiety, measured after participants were exposed to an HS, a BS, or a neutral communication about the context of the industry they...
Measuring individuals' level of food neophobia, i.e., the reluctance to eat novel food, is a critical task since it negatively affects diet variety and quality. Using structural equations models, the revised Food Neophobia Scale (FNS-R) was validated with a sample of 711 Italian adults. After deleting 4 items characterized by both low face validity...
In the present study, we conceptualized housing-related subjective well-being (HRSWB) as a three-dimensional construct, defined by positive and negative emotions related to housing and housing satisfaction. Moreover, we predicted the construct via a mediated model, with the objective characteristics of the household as exogenous variables and its s...
Agriculture is among the most hazardous productive sectors, and farm machinery is a major source of injury. In the present study, a mediated model was used to test the role played by workers' characteristics, work environment factors, and near misses in predicting agricultural machinery-related accidents in a sample of Italian users (n = 290). Hour...
Objectives: We aimed at testing a model of the direct and indirect effects of being a part-time farmer on the probability of being involved in an agricultural machinery-related accident, considering the role played by unsafe beliefs and the frequency of use of machinery.
Methods: Two-hundred and fifty-two Italian men, regular users of agricultural...
Objective
We investigated the risk factors for falls when egressing from agricultural tractors, analyzing the role played by worked hours, work experience, operators’ behavior, and near misses.
Background
Many accidents occur within the agricultural sector each year. Among them, falls while dismounting the tractor represent a major source of injur...
In this study, we investigated the effects of experimentally manipulated criminal and economic threats on psychological reactions to crime. In addition, we examined if these effects were moderated by participants' personal values. Two moderated regressions performed on the data from a quasi-experimental vignette study (N = 96) showed that criminal...
In two quasi-experimental vignette studies, we have analyzed how societal threat to safety moderates the relation between right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and psychological distress. In Study 1 (Italian community sample, N = 343), we focused on depressive symptoms (measured with the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale and the General...
Based on the application of a social psychology intergroup perspective to the analysis of people–place relationships, we conducted an experimental study in the context of a land use conflict revolving around the construction of a bridge over the Messina Channel (Italy). We aimed to analyze the relations between the salience of the identification wi...
We tested the hypothesis that parental support for autonomy moderates the effects of societal threat to safety on the development of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). In a quasi-experimental study performed on 241 Italian university students, societal threat to safety fostered RWA only among participants who reported low levels of parental support...
The main aim of this study was to investigate the relations between basic personal values, drawn on Schwartz’s value theory, and the expression of the individual fear of crime by analysing the moderating role of contextual cues (i.e., crime rates). We performed a multinational, multilevel study using the 2008 European Social Survey dataset (N = 53,...
Building on a social psychological perspective that is centered on intergroup relations, the chapter focuses on analyzing Locally Unwanted Land Use (LULU) conflicts, i.e., conflicts that oppose the siting process of facilities, such as nuclear stations, incinerators, transport infrastructures, or facilities for stigmatized groups. It is argued that...
Exposure to societal threat can elicit an increase in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). In this study, using a quasi-experimental vignette design (Italian community sample, N = 86), we tested the moderating role of self-concept clarity (SCC). A moderated regression showed that manipulated societal threat to safety fostered RWA only among low SCC s...
Hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine the relationships between social capital (at the individual, the neighborhood, and the regional levels) and adolescents' fear of crime, while controlling for the main individual (sociodemographics, television viewing, and bullying victimization), neighborhood (neighborhood size and aggregated victimi...
In this study, we aimed to develop and validate the Perception of Housing Quality Scale (PHQS), a multi-item, multi-factorial measure of perceived housing quality focused on peoples homes as the unit of analysis and based on individuals perceptions of how much the physical aspects of their home environments fulfill their daily needs. The instrument...
We performed a multilevel, multinational analysis using the 2012 European Social Survey dataset
(N=41 080, nested in 20 countries) to study how living in a non-communist versus in a post-communist country moderates
the link between individual conservative values (drawn on Schwartz’s theory of basic human values) and political
orientation (assessed...
The psychosocial literature on envy has been reviewed. After discussing its bases, we have discussed the differences between «benign» and «malign» envy, and among them and a number of other feelings, mainly jealousy and Schadenfreude (i.e., the malign joy for another's failure). After differentiating between dispositional and episodic envy, we have...
The literature shows that exposure to societal threat stemming from criminality can elicit an increase in
right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) via the mediation of the loss of perceived control. In this study, we
investigated whether the perception of meaning can act as a buffering factor for such process, performing
an experiment with 316 Italian uni...
In this paper, we analyzed the relationships among political identity, the perception of moral distance between the political ingroup and the political outgroup, and outgroup animalistic dehumanization. One correlational and one experimental study revealed a positive correlation of ingroup identification (Study 1, N = 99) and salience of ingroup me...
In a community sample from the Susa valley (N = 57, 32 men, mean age = 40.54, SD = 15.72) we have studied the relations among ingroup over-exclusion, threat to group value, and tendency to participate in demonstrations in favour of participants' opinion towards the siting of a high speed train (T AV) in the valley. A hierarchic moderation showed in...
In this study, we aimed to develop two short, balanced, unidimensional and invariant across genders parallel forms of the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale. With a sample composed of 839 participants (F = 58.2%, mean age = 26.50 years, SD = 9.35) we have validated two scales, each one composed of 10 items. After correcting for the distortion...
Using the Linguistic Category Model as framework, in two studies we analysed the relations between the level of abstractness of the descriptions of rapists, the nationality of the rapists, and participants’ fear of crime. In Study 1 we preliminarily analysed how Italian newspapers describe the perpetrators of rapes as a function of their nationalit...
In the present study, we analyzed the measurement properties of the general version of the System Justification Scale in Italy using the Partial Credit Model with a sample of 544 youths (182 males, Mage = 17.47, SD = 1.59). The scale was unidimensional and showed acceptable measurement properties. However, its format should be reduced from seven to...
We analysed differences in conservative values between firstborn and secondborn siblings, in the context of Sulloway’s (1996) idea that firstborns favour the status quo more than secondborns do. Using multilevel analysis to predict siblings’ conservatism, we tested two hypotheses from Sulloway’s theory: (a) firstborns are more conservative than are...
We performed a multilevel, multinational test of Stenner's model on authoritarianism using the 2008 European Values Survey dataset (N = 55 199, nested in 38 nations). We focussed on the effects exerted on four authoritarian manifestations (racial intolerance, political intolerance, negative attitudes towards immigrants, and moral intolerance) by th...
In a sample of 95 U.S. undergraduates (49.5% women, Mage = 20.99 years, SD = 3.48), we analyzed
the effects of symbolic threat on right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). We used data from an experimental
study in which negative political attacks on one’s own favorite candidate were considered as symbolic
threats. A hierarchic moderated regression showed...
In a sample of 677 adolescents, extracted from 39 classes in 15 different high schools in Trento, Italy, a multilevel analysis was performed to analyze the relations between adolescents’ conservative values, their perceptions of the conservative values their mothers would like to transmit to them (i.e., maternal socialization values) and the conser...
Using the 2006 Eurobarometer data (representative sample of the European population, N = 16 306, 27 countries), we performed a multilevel analysis aimed at predicting fear of crime. A significant proportion of the variation in fear of crime was at country level. Of the individual predictors included, being a woman, being poorly educated, being unem...
Using a multilevel, longitudinal model, we tested the mugging thesis, which states that ‘a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged’, in a national sample of Italians (N = 457, nested in 54 counties) surveyed four times between October 2002 and January 2007. We predicted participants' increase in conservatism as a function of the cross‐level i...
We analyzed directly and indirectly the relationships between societal threat to safety, perceived control, and the
increase in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) in two studies. In Study 1 (national sample of the Italian
population, N = 1,169), we performed a longitudinal analysis structured into three waves (January 2003,
September 2004, and Janua...
In a sample composed of 427 Italian undergraduates we analyzed the relations between adult attachment style on the one hand and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) on the other hand, through the mediation of life experiences. A structural equations model with latent variables showed that the avoidant and the amb...
We analyzed the correspondence between implicit and explicit attitudes of health care practitioners working with drug addicts as a function of years of professional experience, and its relation with important organizational outcomes. Consistent with the hypothesis that implicit–explicit attitude inconsistency is unpleasant and people struggle to re...
In questa rassegna abbiamo discusso la letteratura psicosociale sulle relazioni fra geni e conserva-torismo. Dopo avere illustrato il modello ACE, che costituisce il principale approccio teorico-metodologico su cui si basa la maggioranza degli studi sul tema, e le principali variabili dipendenti rilevate nelle indagini, abbiamo presentato alcuni st...
In a national sample of the Italian population, surveyed four times between October 2002 and January 2007 (N = 2,008), we performed a multilevel longitudinal study aimed at predicting the increase in crime risk perception as a function of three families of independent variables, respectively lying at the within individual level (direct victimizatio...
We conducted a longitudinal study with a sample of Italians living in Piemonte, a North-Western Italian region (N = 799, 55.2% men, mean age = 53.57, SD = 15.90), aimed at analyzing the effects exerted by criminal victimization on participants' voting preferences, assessed in terms of voting intention, between January 2005 (T1) and January 2006 (T2...
Uses of the term NIMBY (‘not in my back yard’) were analysed in the three main Italian newspapers between 1992 and 2008. In the first study, a content analysis of 231 articles containing the term NIMBY showed two main views of the issues raised: one, aligned with the conventional view, according to which protesters are mainly driven by parochialism...
In a representative sample of the Italian population (N=2,002), surveyed in January 2008, we studied the direct and interactive effects exerted on fear of crime by direct and indirect victimization, on the one hand, and perceived level of disorder of participants' community, on the other hand. Indirect victimization fostered fear of crime among par...
We aimed at explaining the «fear-victimization paradox» (the less victimized social categories show the highest levels of fear) applying multilevel analysis on an Italian national sample (N = 1.868; mean age = 41.38, SD = 16.21; 56.5% women). A cross-level interaction highlighted that indirect victimization influenced fear of crime just for people...
In an Italian sample (N = 483, 78.23% women, mean age = 27.61 years old), we used structural equation modeling with latent variables and interactions to analyze the direct, indirect, and interactive effects exerted on right-wing authoritarianism by the Big Five factors of personality and by dangerous world beliefs. Openness, Neuroticism, and Consci...
Italian: In un campione di 318 studenti di psicologia, abbiamo analizzato le relazioni fra «Big Five», minaccia sociale percepita proveniente dalla micro- criminalità e dal terrorismo e autoritarismo di destra (RWA). Per entrambe le forme di minaccia, coerentemente con le nostre ipotesi, l’Apertura ha influenzato l’RWA, sia direttamente sia indiret...