Nicole Satherley

• PhD
• Honorary Academic at University of Auckland

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...

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...

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...

Sexual orientation has been defined as an enduring aspect of the self, but emerging evidence reveals that people’s sexual attractions, behaviors, and identities can shift over time. To examine this possibility, we present a large longitudinal analysis of sexual orientation identity fluidity among New Zealand adults (Ntotal = 45,856; age = 18–99; le...

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...

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...

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...

Previous research on cyberbullying has focused almost entirely on examining its prevalence among dominant ethnic populations, leaving it unclear how common cyberbullying is among indigenous peoples. Our study draws on a large sample of Māori adults aged 18-83 years (n = 6,529) who completed the questionnaire-based Māori Identity and Financial Attit...

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...

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 right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) are the two most studied individual difference correlates of prejudice, debate remains over their status as enduring constructs that precede generalized prejudice. We contribute to this discussion using 10 annual waves of longitudinal data from a nationwide random sam...

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...

Voter polarisation, or the widening of differences between supporters of different political parties, is of growing concern in many nations. However, little is known about whether polarisation is on the rise in New Zealand. We address this lacuna by investigating temporal trends in voter polarisation in New Zealand (namely, those voting for the Nat...

Although an extensive literature on political ideology and party support has developed, studies examining the temporal ordering of these variables remain lacking. We address this oversight and argue that because ideologies provide a framework for understanding the world, they should forecast changes in party support over time. Accordingly, a random...

Following the March 15th Christchurch terrorist attack, members of our research team have been repeatedly asked to comment or provide summary statistics from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS) on prejudice toward Muslims. As the curators of the NZAVS, we think that these findings should be in the public domain and accessible to as w...

The contagiousness and deadliness of COVID-19 have necessitated drastic social management to halt transmission. The immediate effects of a nationwide lockdown were investigated by comparing matched samples of New Zealanders assessed before (Nprelockdown = 1,003) and during the first 18 days of lockdown (Nlockdown = 1,003). Two categories of outcome...

The contagiousness and deadliness of COVID-19 have necessitated drastic social management to halt transmission. The immediate effects of a nationwide lockdown were investigated by comparing matched samples of New Zealanders assessed before (Npre-lockdown = 1,003) and during the first 18 days of lockdown (Nlockdown = 1,003). Two categories of outcom...

Affective polarization (i.e., differences in evaluations of the in-party and out-party) has important implications for political outcomes including civic engagement and partisan-motivated attitudes and behaviours. In this study, we add to the burgeoning literature on affective polarization by examining moderators of the effect of in-party support o...

Research has long suggested that there may be distinct subpopulations of authoritarian leaders and followers within the broader population. We describe a latent profile analysis of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) in a New Zealand national probability sample (N = 18,248) that — for the first time — reliably i...

Patriotism and nationalism represent distinct forms of national attachment that often predict divergent attitudes. However, various combinations of high/low patriotism and nationalism might indicate different types of national attachment with distinct implications for socio-political attitudes. Applying Latent Profile Analysis to a large national s...

Although white nationalism is increasing globally, little is known about the interactive effects of white identity and national attachment on intergroup attitudes. We address this oversight and theorise that nationalism (i.e., an unquestioning belief in the superiority of one’s nation) should strengthen, whereas patriotism (i.e., a positive, albeit...

Questions about sexual orientation are increasingly utilized in population-based surveys. The New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (NZAVS), a national probability longitudinal panel, used an open-ended measure which asked participants to describe their sexual orientation in their own words. The resulting data allowed us to explore 3 waves of miss...

Real-world tests of the impact of partisan cues on voters are scarce because they require assessing how citizens' attitudes changed toward an issue from before to after it became politically divisive. During the 2015-2016 New Zealand flag referendums, the leader of the (center-right) National Party and then-Prime Minister, John Key, championed chan...

Although national flags arguably reflect a unified nation, support for a particular flag design may vary across ideological cleavages within the electorate. Here, we examined the impact of system‐challenging and system‐justifying ideologies, as well as political party support, on support for flag‐change in a large (N = 13,559) nationally representa...

We propose a culturally-specific ten-item short-form self-report measure of modern racism toward Māori (the indigenous peoples of New Zealand) that consists of five key sub-components: negative affect, anxiety, denial of historical reparation, symbolic exclusion, and denial of contemporary injustice. Our measure draws upon past qualitative and quan...

We present an integrative model outlining how the threat and competition-based motives identified in the Dual Process Model of Ideology and Prejudice are linked to the context-specific ideologies of historical negation and symbolic exclusion identified by the Dark Duo Model of post-colonial ideology. Using nationally representative data from the Ne...

In this study, we asked participants to “describe their sexual orientation” in an open-ended measure of self-generated sexual orientation. The question was included as part of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (N = 18,261) 2013/2014 wave, a national probability survey conducted shortly after the first legal same-sex marriages in New Zealan...

We integrate the Dual Process Model of Ideology and Prejudice to examine the motivations associated with attitudes toward intergroup relations with Chinese people in New Zealand. We conducted a Structural Equation Model using data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study (N = 15,608) to predict (a) warmth toward Chinese people, (b) support f...

This study examines attrition rates over the first four years of the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a longitudinal national panel sample of New Zealand adults. We report the base rate and covariates for the following four distinct classes of respondents: explicit withdrawals , lost respondents, intermittent respondents and constant respond...