No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Conservatives are happier than liberals but why? Personality, Political ideology and life satisfaction
Abstract
Political conservatives are happier than liberals. We proposed that this happiness gap is accounted for by specific attitude and personality differences associated with positive adjustment and mental health. In contrast, a predominant social psychological explanation of the gap is that conservatives, who are described as fearful, defensive, and low in self-esteem, will rationalize away social inequalities in order to justify the status quo (system justification). In four studies, conservatives expressed greater personal agency (e.g., personal control, responsibility), more positive outlook (e.g., optimism, self-worth), more
transcendent moral beliefs (e.g., greater religiosity, greater moral clarity, less tolerance of transgressions), and a generalized belief in fairness, and these differences accounted for the happiness gap. These patterns are consistent with the positive adjustment explanation.
... Following this logic, participation should be highest when subjective wellbeing is high but not complete, since being fully and completely satisfied provides little motivation for changing politics in society or changing the status quo (Schlenker et al., 2012). A similar stance is taken in the literature on emotional theories of protest. ...
... In addition, research has identified subjective wellbeing, and life satisfaction in particular, as a determinant of party support and, to some extent, also ideology. A few studies suggest that life satisfaction influences conservative party preferences (Flavin and Keane, 2011;Napier and Jost, 2008) and especially support for the status quo in society (Schlenker et al., 2012), thus echoing the conclusions of literature on health and politics that found healthy voters to be more inclined to vote for the political right (Pacheco and Fletcher, 2015;Rapeli et al., 2020). In a similar vein, happier people tend to be less radical in their political opinions than less happy persons (Lyubomirsky et al., 2005), whereas low wellbeing make persons more open to changing their predispositions and (political) opinions (Valentino et al., 2008). ...
... We have also discussed how research has positively associated life satisfaction with electoral turnout (Flavin and Keane, 2011;Liberini et al., 2017;Owen et al., 2008;Radcliff, 2001;Tella and MacCulloch, 2005), and with the functioning of political institutions (Frey andStutzer, 2010, 2000;Owen et al., 2008;Radcliff, 2001) and with citizen's satisfaction with the output of institutions (Tella and MacCulloch, 2005;Esaiasson et al., 2020), yet less attention has been paid to explaining the influence of subjective wellbeing on the partisan choices of the individual. Despite some evidence of life satisfaction influencing party preferences (Flavin and Keane, 2011;Napier and Jost, 2008) and support for the status quo (Schlenker et al., 2012), to date, no systematic attention has been paid to how life satisfaction influences populist voting. ...
This thesis sheds light on the relationship between subjective wellbeing and political behaviour and attitudes in contemporary European democracies. The profound societal changes of the last half a decade and the unanswered questions about why some citizens engage more politically while others do not, and how persons develop into politically efficacious citizens, as well as why a part of the electorate is attracted to right-wing populist parties and ideas, have paved the way for considering citizen’s subjective wellbeing as a powerful, yet so far overlooked, predictor of political attitudes and behaviour. Through four empirical studies, this research links several dimensions of subjective wellbeing, including its evaluative, emotional, eudemonic and social components, to a sense of political efficacy (Study 1), to political participation (Studies 2 and 3) and to a right-wing populist vote choice (Study 4). The empirical studies reveal how subjective wellbeing is a significant driver of citizen’s political orientations, their participation patterns, as well as their electoral choices, thereby being highly relevant at all stages of the development of the political citizen. The implications of this relationship are profound, both from a scholarly and a policy-making perspective, in order to better understand persisting political inequality in contemporary democracies, to identify the origins of democratic support or instability, as well as to shed light on the development of illiberal political ideas and threats to liberal democracy. In this way, subjective wellbeing emerges as a crucial research agenda for the future of political science.
... Regarding opinions on policy and evaluations of government response, greater support for restrictions and perception of under-reaction among Democrats tracked closely with the differences in partisan messaging regarding the topic (Panda et al., 2020;Pickup et al., 2020) as well as the normative value differences of members of the two parties. Democrats tend to show greater support for government and top-down government interventionist strategies (Schlenker et al., 2012). Further supporting this hypothesis is the correlation between the quality of the government's responses (RESPQUAL) and the perceived calibration of those responses (RESPCAL). ...
... Accordingly, as the findings indicate, Democrats tend to agree in their perceptions of government underreach in pandemic risk mitigation as a basis for poor performance, whereas Republican was less homogeneous as a group in their attribution of poor performance. This pattern reflects the more general tendency of Democrats to place greater value on collective welfare and to offer greater support for government intervention, whereas Republicans tend to place greater value on individualism and are skeptical of government overreach (Schlenker et al., 2012). ...
... Republicans are not necessarily insensitive to the threat posed by the virus (Lilienfeld and Latzman, 2014), nor the desire to mitigate the spread of the disease and protect the ingroup (Schaller and Park, 2011). However, they may be motivated to engage in cognitively complex reasoning to balance those concerns against fears of government encroachments on personal freedoms (Schlenker et al., 2012), increasing the variability in their responses and strengthening correlations between self-relevant information and subsequent support for pandemic management measures. This notion provides a tenable explanation for the greater r 2 among Republicans. ...
Research suggests political identity has strong influence over individuals’ attitudes and beliefs, which in turn can affect their behavior. Likewise, firsthand experience with an issue can also affect attitudes and beliefs. A large (N = 10,362) survey (Pew Research and Ipsos W64) of Americans was analyzed to investigate the effects of both political identity and personal impact on individuals’ reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that political identity (i.e., Democrat or Republican) and personal impact (i.e., personally affected or not) influenced different aspects of the American public’s reaction to COVID-19. Political identity exerted a strong influence on self-reports of emotional distress, threat perception, discomfort with exposure, support for restrictions, and perception of under/overreaction by individuals and institutions. Personal impact exerted a comparatively weaker influence on reported emotional distress and threat perception. Both factors had a weak influence on appraisal of individual and organizational and community responses. The dominating influence of political identity carried over into the bivariate relations among these responses. In particular, the appraisal of organizational response divided along party lines, tied to opposing views of whether there has been over- or under-reaction to the pandemic. The dominance of political identity has important implications for crisis management and reflects the influence of normative value differences between the parties, partisan messaging on the pandemic, and polarization in American politics.
... Initially, authors presumed that that right-wing ideological attitude was negatively related to SWB because psychological rigidity (viewed as a psychological reflection of the right-wing ideology) would foster the appearance of psychological disorders (e.g., Adorno et al. 1950). Although some empirical evidence supported such a hypothesis (e.g., Duriez et al. 2011), studies revealed that right-wing ideological attitude could be beneficial for SWB (Napier and Jost 2008;Schlenker et al. 2012). This inconsistency encouraged Onraet et al. (2013) to conduct a meta-analysis that showed that right-wing ideological attitude was generally unrelated to SWB, suggesting that moderators could determine the nature of this relationship. ...
... However, at the individual level, and thus independently of the liberal vs. conservative type of country, conservative people appeared to score higher on SWB than did people who embraced a liberal political ideology (e.g., Okulicz-Kozaryn et al. 2014;Onraet et al. 2013Onraet et al. , 2017. This result would be due to the fact that conservatives (or liberals) would activate more (or less) protective or facilitative cognitive mechanisms (e.g., Napier and Jost 2008;Schlenker et al. 2012). Taken together, these results suggest that living in a liberal country and adopting a cognitive functioning that can be activated by a conservative political ideology would promote the development of SWB. ...
... This suggests that the rationalization of inequality would act as a buffer against the negative incidence of socioeconomic inequalities on people's affects. Furthermore, Schlenker et al. (2012) observed that the positive link between conservatism and life satisfaction could be accounted for by higher levels of health-related factors (e.g., optimism, personal control, positive outlook). The authors suggested that such effects would be due to the fact that conservatives would endorse values and principles (e.g., religion, moral commitment) inciting them to adopt adaptive and healthy psychosocial functioning and behaviors (e.g., temptation resistance, self-control, loyalty, honesty, prosociality, safe behaviors). ...
Authors presume that conservatives would be happier than liberals because they would develop better mental adjustment especially under contextual threat. The present study aimed at examining whether self-regulatory factors (i.e., dispositional self-control, perception of goal progress, dispositional flow, and dispositional neurotic self-attentiveness) could mediate the link between conservatism and subjective well-being (SWB). It also aimed at testing the view that contextual threat (operationalized through undesired unemployment) may moderate the relationship between conservatism and the mediators under study. In order to examine this, 418 North-American participants from the United States (66.7% females and 33.3% males; Mage = 33.63, SDage = 11.64) answered questionnaires via an online platform, and structural equation model or path analyses were conducted. Main results revealed that: (a) conservatism positively predicted SWB, whereas undesired unemployment negatively predicted SWB; (b) perception of goal progress and dispositional flow fully mediated the conservative-SWB gap; and (c) dispositional self-control was highest in conservatives under contextual threat of undesired unemployment. Finally, this study suggests that conservatives can experience higher SWB because of adaptive cognitive adjustments. Moreover, this study suggests that the rationalization of inequality can have a self-enhancement function that bolsters self-regulation process when exposed to threatening contexts.
... Since that time, many researchers have replicated the results of this work in samples across the globe, demonstrating that conservatives (or right-wingers) are happier than liberals (or left-wingers), and this relationship is mediated by system-justifying beliefs that legitimize existing inequality [6][7][8][9][10]. A longitudinal study of citizens from 18 countries found that system justification at time 1 predicted several indicators of subjective well-being six months later, above and beyond baseline subjective wellbeing measures [11 ]. ...
... A longitudinal study of citizens from 18 countries found that system justification at time 1 predicted several indicators of subjective well-being six months later, above and beyond baseline subjective wellbeing measures [11 ]. The search to find other explanations for this effect has only illuminated its robustness, insofar as it emerges even in so-called 'kitchen sink' models [7,9]. For instance, a series of studies using samples from the US found that system justification significantly mediated the relationship between ideology subjective well-being even after adjusting for variables closely related to both political conservatism (e.g., moral intolerance; nationalism) and subjective well-being (e.g., optimism; self-worth; personal agency) [9]. ...
... The search to find other explanations for this effect has only illuminated its robustness, insofar as it emerges even in so-called 'kitchen sink' models [7,9]. For instance, a series of studies using samples from the US found that system justification significantly mediated the relationship between ideology subjective well-being even after adjusting for variables closely related to both political conservatism (e.g., moral intolerance; nationalism) and subjective well-being (e.g., optimism; self-worth; personal agency) [9]. Researchers have also shed light on the process, demonstrating that exposure to tragic outcomes of inequality (i.e., people experiencing homelessness) elicits less negative affect, on both self-report and physiological measures, among those who believe that economic inequality is legitimate and appropriate [12 ]. ...
Beliefs that justify or rationalizing existing inequalities appear to serve a ‘palliative function’, insofar as they are associated with better subjective well-being and physical health. We review the most recent work on the relationship between system-justifying ideologies and subjective well-being, with a particular focus on (1) system justifying beliefs among members of disadvantaged groups, and (2) the contextual variation in the relationship between system justifying beliefs and subjective well-being. We then turn to open questions for future research, including questions about causality, the role of religiosity, measurement of subjective well-being, and long-term versus short-term effects of system justification on well-being.
... This is precisely why I argue that challenging the systemand pushing for social change aggravates feelings of uncertainty and threat and triggers backlash (Hennes et al., 2012;Jost & Hunyady, 2005;Jost et al., 2008aJost et al., , 2017b. Haesevoets, & Van Hiel, 2016;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012;Wojcik et al., 2015). These replications have not, however, prevented critics from disputing the basic notion that system justification serves a palliative function. ...
... Jetten et al.'s (2012) alternative explanation simply cannot account for the findings of Napier and Jost (2008), because we adjusted statistically for personal income in all of our analyses, and the happiness gap remained significant. To delve deeper into the issue, Butz et al. (2017) analysed data from a nationally representative sample in Germany and found that the justification of social and economic inequality mediated the relationship between conservatism and life satisfaction, providing clear support for system justification theory, whereas other variables that were proposed as alternative explanationssuch as number of group memberships (Jetten et al., 2012) and general optimism (Schlenker et al., 2012) did not. ...
... According to Haidt, liberals endorse the first two foundations while conservatives draw evenly on all five. In parallel, there is a growing body of research that seeks to uncover possible associations between emotional and ideological tendencies (Brooks 2008;Napier and Jost 2008;Onraet et al. 2013;Schlenker et al. 2012). One of the most recent findings claims that liberals have a stronger emotional tendency to display happiness (positive emotion) than their conservative counterparts (Wojcik et al. 2015). ...
... Some argue that emotion-related behavioral indicators extracted from texts may be more reliable compared to traditional self-report measures (Wojcik et al. 2015). For example, the use of "big data" (Wojcik et al. 2015) has led to an intriguing finding: conservatives display happiness (a positive emotion) less than liberals, which directly opposes the conventional wisdom in the field (Napier and Jost 2008;Schlenker et al. 2012). However, most of these types of studies rely on data from the U.S., which is similar to the situation of moral analysis, and thus need to be reexamined in a cross-national perspective. ...
There is a growing body of research that focuses on the supposedly close association between an individual’s moral–emotional behavior and his/her political ideology. A prominent example is Haidt’s “moral psychology,” which claims that political liberals and conservatives draw on mutually different sets of moral foundations. However, this and other arguments, which have mostly been advanced in the social context of the United States, lack a comparative perspective. In this study, we examine these arguments in broader spatio-temporal settings by way of a comparative analysis of public deliberations in the U.S. and Japanese legislatures. More specifically, with the help of well-established moral- and emotional-word dictionaries, and employing advanced computational techniques for systematic data collection, we analyze a large volume of speech data that records floor debates over decades in the U.S. Congress and the Japanese Diet to derive longitudinal moral–emotional dynamics. We then use multilevel modeling to regress the derived moral–emotional patterns of legislative deliberations in each country on various covariates to locate possible drivers of these patterns. The results of these analyses reveal more qualified relationships between a moral–emotional framework and political ideology than preceding arguments have suggested, casting serious doubt on the widespread tendency in the literature to quickly rely on an ideological explanation. The findings suggest the need for a more comprehensive approach to handling moral–emotional phenomena in political science.
... These operationalizations are in line with the literature, which conceptualizes the cognitive, ideological, and affective dimensions of national attachment as distinct yet interrelated dimensions differentially associated with political beliefs and attitudes, prejudice, and happiness (e.g., Blank & Schmidt, 2003;Ha & Jang, 2015;Huddy & Khatib, 2007;Mummendey et al., 2001;Schatz, Staub, & Lavine, 1999). For example, feeling American is not contingent on support for a particular political ideology (Huddy & Khatib, 2007), and conservatives (versus liberals) tend to report higher levels of subjective well-being (e.g., Napier & Jost, 2008;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012). One explanation for why research to date has only uncovered a positive association between the affective and ideological (as opposed to cognitive) dimensions of national attachment and well-being is because these dimensions are more proximal to well-being, encapsulating positive emotions, and positive affect indeed impacts well-being over time (e.g., Fredrickson & Joiner, 2002). ...
... The inclusion of wider and more intricate operationalizations of national identification, capturing different meaning systems that people(s) associate in their identification with the nation, can determine whether particular sets of beliefs explain the effect, or a greater proportion of the effect. Research has indeed shown that conservatives tend to experience higher levels of well-being (e.g., Napier & Jost, 2008;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012) and that the endorsement of civic nationalism is more strongly associated with well-being than ethnic nationalism (Reeskens & Wright, 2011). Moving beyond subjective individual-level factors, integrating society-level factors would enable assessment of how the relationship interacts with objective macrolevel conditions. ...
Social group membership and its social‐relational corollaries, for example, social contact, trust, and support, are prophylactic for health. Research has tended to focus on how direct social interactions between members of small‐scale groups (i.e., a local sports team or community group) are conducive to positive health outcomes. The current study provides evidence from a longitudinal cross‐cultural sample (N = 6,748; 18 countries/societies) that the prophylactic effect of group membership is not isolated to small‐scale groups, and that members of groups do not have to directly interact, or in fact know of each other to benefit from membership. Our longitudinal analyses suggest that national identification (strength of association with the nation state in which an individual resides) predicts lower anxiety and improved health; national identification was in fact almost as positively predictive of health status as anxiety was negatively predictive. The findings indicate that identification with large‐scale groups, like small‐scale groups, is palliative, and are discussed in terms of globalization and banal nationalism.
... Are conservatives happier? Indeed, there is a large literature examining this "happiness gap" in favor of conservatives (Schlenker et al., 2012). On the opposite end of the spectrum, but still within normal range, we find that conservatives are lower in the Big Five personality trait of neuroticism (Burton et al., 2015), which is a known correlate of mental illness diagnoses (Kotov et al., 2010;Nagel et al., 2018). ...
It has been claimed that left-wingers or liberals (US sense) tend to be more mentally ill than right-wingers or conservatives. This potential link was investigated using the General Social Survey. A search found 5 items measuring one's own mental illness in different ways (e.g."Do you have any emotional or mental disability?"). All of these items were associated with left-wing political ideology as measured by self-report. These results held up mostly in regressions that adjusted for age, sex, and race. For the variable with the most data, the difference in mental illness between "extremely liberal" and "extremely conservative" was 0.39 d. This finding is congruent with numerous findings based on related constructs.
... A final possibility is that people of different political persuasions agree fairly well on the ideal level of redistribution, but have different beliefs about the possibility of actually achieving the ideal. Though not pessimistic in a general way (Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012), rightwing people are more focussed on threats as compared to opportunities (Janoff-Bulman, 2009). In our study 6, people who self-identified as right-wing thought that implementing high redistribution would be less effective at improving individual welfare and collective efficacy; and would be attended by greater disincentive effects, greater reluctance to pay in, and an increase in conflict and division. ...
Many human societies feature institutions for redistributing resources from some individuals to others, but preferred levels of redistribution vary greatly within and between populations. We postulate that support for redistribution is the output of a structured cognitive system that is sensitive to features of the social situation. We developed an experimental approach in which participants prescribe appropriate redistribution for hypothetical villages whose features vary. Over seven experiments involving 2400 adults from the UK, we show that participants shift their redistribution preferences systematically as situational features change. Higher levels of redistribution are favoured when luck is more important in the initial distribution of resources; when social groups are more homogeneous; when the group is at war; and when resources are abundant rather than scarce. Judgements about the right level of redistribution carry moderate or high levels of moral conviction. Participants have systematic intuitions about when the implementation of redistribution will prove problematic, distinct from their intuitions about when it is desirable. Individuals are only weakly consistent in the level of redistribution they prefer, and political orientation explains rather little variation in preferred redistribution for a given situation. We argue that people have divergent views on redistribution at least in part because they have different appraisals of the features of their societies. Understanding the operating principles of the psychology of redistribution may help explain variation and change in support for, and hence existence of, redistributive institutions across societies and over time.
... Liberals tend to show considerable racial sympathy toward Black targets (Carney & Enos, 2017), possibly because they are especially responsive to righting past wrongs (Craemer, 2009). This is consistent with their emphasis on moral principles that stress compassion for groups perceived as vulnerable and stress equal outcomes as the basis of fairness (Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2009;Schlenker et al., 2012). In addition, it is possible that low scorers on symbolic racism favor Blacks over Whites partly for reasons of impression management. ...
We examined whether symbolic racism is associated with anti-Black affect or more general anti-liberal affect. Across six studies (N = 14,078), we determined that symbolic racism is associated with more positive attitudes toward conservatives and more negative attitudes toward liberals, regardless of the target’s race. While high scorers on the symbolic racism scale show a slight preference for White vs. Black conservatives (d = .15) and White vs. Black liberals (d = .12), low scorers show a considerable preference for Black vs. White liberals (d = .42) and Black vs. White conservatives (d = .50). Lingering questions about the validity of the symbolic racism construct are justified on the basis that symbolic racism does not reliably measure anti-Black affect.
... Specifically, they found that conservatives reported more life satisfaction and greater subjective well-being than liberals, and that this effect was partially attributable to the belief that inequality in society is fair and just. The ideological gap in self-reported happiness has been replicated many times (Bixter, 2015;Burton, Plaks, & Peterson, 2015;Butz, Kieslich, & Bless, 2017;Choma, Busseri, & Sadava, 2009;Cichocka & Jost, 2014;Okulicz-Kozaryn, Holmes, & Avery, 2014;Onraet, Van Assche, Roets, Haesevoets, & Van Hiel, 2017;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012). Nevertheless, when Wojcik et al. (2015) investigated the language used by liberal and conservative citizens and legislators, they observed that liberals were more likely than conservatives to use positive emotion words. ...
For nearly a century social scientists have sought to understand left-right ideological differences in values, motives, and thinking styles. Much progress has been made, but-as in other areas of research-this work has been criticized for relying on small and statistically unrepresentative samples and the use of reactive, self-report measures that lack ecological validity. In an effort to overcome these limitations, we employed automated text analytic methods to investigate the spontaneous, naturally occurring use of language in nearly 25,000 Twitter users. We derived 27 hypotheses from the literature on political psychology and tested them using 32 individual dictionaries. In 23 cases, we observed significant differences in the linguistic styles of liberals and conservatives. For instance, liberals used more language that conveyed benevolence, whereas conservatives used more language pertaining to threat, power, tradition, resistance to change, certainty, security, anger, anxiety, and negative emotion in general. In 17 cases, there were also significant effects of ideological extremity. For instance, moderates used more benevolent language, whereas extremists used more language pertaining to inhibition, tentativeness, affiliation, resistance to change, certainty, security, anger, anxiety, negative affect, swear words, and death-related language. These research methods, which are easily adaptable, open up new and unprecedented opportunities for conducting unobtrusive research in psycholinguistics and political psychology with large and diverse samples. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
... 18 A potential mediator between political ideology and SRH is happiness. A robust correlation, for example, has been found between conservatives and happiness [19][20][21] and between happiness and physical well-being. 22 23 This correlation has been attributed to factors including differences in stronger feelings of intrinsic value and optimism, 20 higher emotional stability, 19 the ability to rationalise inequality in society 21 and more access to group memberships. ...
Background
Individuals who hew to a conservative political ideology have been previously reported to have better self-rated health compared to liberals. No studies have examined whether the correlation between right-wing ideology and health also holds for populism, a brand of politics that is gaining momentum throughout the world. We tested whether the association still holds for right-wing populists.
Methods
We analysed data from 24617 respondents nested within 18 European countries included in the 2016 European Social Survey. Multilevel analyses were conducted to assess the relationship between political ideology and self-rated health, adjusting for other individual covariates (happiness and social capital) and country-level characteristics (democracy type).
Results
Individuals who voted for right-wing populist parties were 43% more likely to report fair/poor health compared to traditional conservatives (OR = 1.43, 95% confidence interval 1.23 to 1.67). The association was attenuated after controlling for individual-level variables, including happiness and access to social capital (OR = 1.21, confidence interval 1.03 to 1.42). Higher levels of social capital (informal networks, OR = 0.40, 95% confidence interval 0.29 to 0.56; trust, OR = 0.82, 95% confidence interval 0.74 to 0.92) and happiness (OR = 0.18, 95% confidence interval 0.15 to 0.22) were protectively correlated with fair/poor self-rated health.
Conclusions
Individuals voting for right-wing populist parties report worse health compared to conservatives. It remains unclear whether ideology is just a marker for health-related practices, or whether the values and beliefs associated with a particular brand of ideology leads to worse health.
Key messages
There is a significant association between voting for right-wing populist parties and self-rated poor health. Social capital was protectively correlated with self-rated health calling for renewed attention on the effects of social capital on political ideology and health.
... As noted earlier, an SJT perspective posits that people who justify the social system have a greater sense of certainty and hope and believe they have control over their future outcomes (Jost & Hunyady, 2002). Some studies reveal that system-justifying beliefs predict higher psychological well-being through an increased level of perceived control (McCoy et al., 2013;Quinn & Crocker, 1999;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012;Vargas-Salfate, 2019). Here, we propose perceived individual upward mobility as another potential mechanism. ...
Across three studies, we examine whether system justification enhances psychological well-being among members of both advantaged and disadvantaged groups. In addition, we test the novel hypothesis that perceived individual upward mobility explains this positive effect of system justification. We address these issues by focusing on system justification and life satisfaction among individuals with high and low social class in China, an understudied non-Western society. Findings suggest that system justification positively predicts both high-class and low-class individuals’ life satisfaction, and this result holds for both adults (Study 1, N = 10,196) and adolescents (Study 2, N = 4,037). Moreover, we experimentally demonstrate that system justification has a causal effect on life satisfaction through an increased level of perceived individual upward mobility (Study 3, N = 172). These findings help explain why people, especially those from lower social class, are willing to justify the status quo.
... Political orientation It has been reported that conservatives are, on average, happier than those with other political affiliations (Bixter 2015;Burton et al. 2015;Di Tella and MacCulloch 2005;Napier and Jost 2008;Onraet et al. 2013;Schlenker et al. 2012). This was confirmed in the present analysis with respect to respondents' political orientation. ...
Using the European Social Survey (2002–2014, 16 countries, N = 146,579), I examine whether significant associations between self-reported subjective well-being (SWB) and thirteen individual-level socioeconomic characteristics still hold in specific population sub-groups. The determinants are age, gender, children at home, education, work status, religiosity, political orientation, trust towards the parliament and the legal system, meeting friends, marital status, health and finances. Based on each characteristic’s values, I divide the sample into sub-groups and run separate regressions. Compared to regressions using the whole sample, only six of the aforementioned characteristics maintain the same association with SWB. For age, gender, children at home, education, religiosity and trust the previous associations with SWB now disappear. These results contradict prior theoretical and empirical findings.
... " But supporters of the Moderate Party also gave a comparatively high level of support to the statement "People with depression could snap out of it if they wanted, " which is in line with a worldview emphasizing personal agency and responsibility. 28 Sweden Democrats seemed to stereotype based on fear and a vision of a homogeneous society. After controlling for gender, education, age, and self-reported health, we found a statistically significant difference between supporters of the Moderate Party and the Sweden Democrats for the statement "People with depression are dangerous, " with Sweden Democrats displaying the highest levels of support. ...
Background:
Stigmatizing attitudes toward persons with mental disorders is a well-established and global phenomenon often leading to discrimination and social exclusion. Although previous research in the United States showed that conservative ideology has been related to stigmatizing attitudes toward mental disorders, there is reason to believe that this mechanism plays a different role in the context of a universal welfare state with a multi-party system such as Sweden. Furthermore, "mental disorders" may signify severe psychotic disorders, which may evoke more negative attitudes. This suggests the importance of specific studies focusing on the more common phenomenon of depression. This paper investigates the relationship between political ideology and stigmatizing attitudes toward depression in Sweden.
Methods:
This study is part of the New Ways research program. Data were collected by the Laboratory of Opinion Research (LORE) at the University of Gothenburg in 2014 (N = 3246). Independent variables were political ideology and party affiliation. The dependent variable was the Depression Stigma Scale (DSS). Data were analyzed with linear regression analyses and analyses of variance.
Results:
More conservative ideology (B = 0.68, standard error [SE] = 0.04, P<.001) and more conservative party affiliation (F(8 2920) = 38.45, P<.001) showed more stigmatizing attitudes toward depression. Item-level analyses revealed a difference where the supporters of the conservative party differed (P<.05) from supporters of the liberal party, with a higher proportion agreeing that "people could snap out of " depression if they wanted to; the populist right-wing party differed from the conservative party with a higher proportion agreeing on items displaying people with depression as "dangerous" and "unpredictable." Even self-stigma was highest among the populist right-wing party with 22.3% agreeing that "if I had depression I wouldn't tell…."
Conclusion:
Political ideology was associated with stigmatizing attitudes toward depression in Sweden. The results also confirm the need to distinguish between different forms of conservatism by observing social distance as being a more important driver among voters for the populist right-wing party compared with personal agency and responsibility among voters for the more traditional conservative party.
... An ordered variable indicating that an individual lives in 0 a rural area or village, 1 a small or middle-sized town, or 2 a large town is used to control for area of residence due to the ongoing debate between rural and urban environments in contributing to the subjective well-being of individuals (Hand, 2020;Lenzi & Perucca, 2018;Requena, 2016). There is also a bed of empirical evidence which suggests that political orientation or ideology has a significant influence on life satisfaction and/or subjective well-being (Newman, Schwarz, Graham, & Stone, 2019;Ozmen, Brelsford, & Danieu, 2018;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012) and as a result this paper controls for political orientation using a measurement which asks individuals how left or right leaning their political views are. Marital status is frequently examined and found to play a significant role in determining individual life satisfaction and well-being (Carr, Freedman, Cornman, & Schwarz, 2014;Grover & Helliwell, 2019;Stanley, Ragan, Rhoades, & Markman, 2012) and as a result this paper uses a binary indictor control variable indicating whether an individual is married or not. ...
This paper examines the effect which social network use (SNU) has on individual life satisfaction across 27 different European countries using the 2016 Eurobarometer 86.2 survey from the European Commission (N = 15,039). An ordered probit estimation technique is used to estimate the relationship between SNU and individual life satisfaction. An interaction variable between SNU and country is created and is included in this paper’s estimation to show how SNU affects life satisfaction differently across countries. Findings indicate that there are considerable variations across countries regarding the effect which SNU has on life satisfaction. Overall results show that frequent SNU negatively impacts individual life satisfaction, while moderate SNU positively impacts life satisfaction. However, the negative effect associated with frequent SNU is strongest amongst individuals from countries with higher performing economies while individuals from countries with lower performing economies prove more resilient to the negative effects of SNU. This indicates that excessive SNU is most damaging for individuals from high performing economies. We propose that this effect is due to the poorer endowment of social capital in countries with lower performing economies relative to countries with higher performing economies. This lesser level of social capital means that the beneficial effect which SNU provides to social capital, and in turn life satisfaction, is greater in countries with lower performing economies than it is in countries with higher performing economies. This paper provides an important contribution to literature concerning SNU and life satisfaction by examining and reporting disparities between the effect of SNU on life satisfaction across different countries.
... The score at IS is correlated with a wide range of behaviors and traits. It is positively related with helping others, the frequency of volunteering, the preference for respect, the preference for consistency, role satisfaction and religiosity in Schlenker (2008), with conservatism and life satisfaction in Schlenker, Chambers, and Le (2012), and with religiousness, moral compass (i.e., knowing what is right and wrong), considering lying as unacceptable in Shepperd, Miller, Smith, and Algina (2014). It is also negatively correlated with unethical behavior like plagiarism (Lewis and Zhong, 2011) or cheating (Wowra, 2007). ...
Why do people pay taxes? Rational choice theory has fallen short in answering this question. Another explanation, called “tax morale”, has been promoted. Tax morale captures the behavioral idea that non-monetary preferences (like norm-submission, moral emotions and moral judgments) might be better determinants of tax compliance than monetary trade-offs. Herein we report on two lab experiments designed to assess whether norm-submission, moral emotions (e.g. affective empathy, cognitive empathy, propensity to feel guilt and shame) or moral judgments (e.g. ethics principles, integrity, and moralization of everyday life) can help explain compliance behavior. Although we find statistically significant correlations of tax compliance behavior with empathy and shame, the economic significance of these correlations are low–—more than 80% of the variability in compliance remains unexplained. These results suggest that tax authorities should focus on the institutional context, rather than individual preference characteristics, to handle tax evasion.
... Studies have shown that the political left and right differ in their underlying psychological motives, needs, and emotions that drive political ideology, as well as their evaluations of societal and political structures and institutions (e.g. Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950;Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003;Napier & Jost, 2008;Roccato, Vieno, & Russo, 2013;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012; van Lange, Bekkers, Chirumbolo, & Leone, 2011). In this study, however, we focus on how similar the radical left and the right are to each other in terms of their psychological make-up and political attitudes. ...
Institutional and political distrust are often associated with the improved electoral performance of extremist parties. This study analyses to what extent political distrust and Euroscepticism are associated with extreme left and right ideological positions. We specifically examine voters in the Netherlands – a country with wide array of political parties spanning a broad ideological spectrum. The study utilises probability samples from the Dutch National Election Survey and the European Election Studies, as well as opt-in samples collected through Vote Advice Applications (VAAs), amounting to a total of 20,548 analysed respondents. By employing hierarchical regression analyses, we find that across multiple elections at the national and European level, both radical left and radical right respondents are more prone to be politically distrustful and Eurosceptic, than respondents who profess a centrist political ideology. In addition, our analyses suggest that distrust and Euroscepticism can be explained by respondents' party preference.
... Another body of research has found that conservatives, compared to liberals, tend to be happier and more satisfied with the political status quo (e.g., Napier & Jost, 2008;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012). These findings suggest that conservatives, compared to liberals, might report a greater degree of positive emotional biases towards politicians who they see as ideologically-congruent (e.g., Republican congresspersons). ...
Prior research suggests that conservatives are more fear-motivated, disgust-sensitive, and happy than liberals. Yet when it comes to political targets (e.g., politicians), both liberals and conservatives can get very emotional. We examined whether the ideological differences in emotion seen in past research apply to emotions towards specific ideologically similar vs. dissimilar targets, or whether these emotions are instead equivalent between liberals and conservatives. Across two studies, liberals and conservatives rated their anger, contempt, disgust, fear, and happiness towards Democratic and Republican congresspersons. We compared participants’ levels of each emotion towards their respective ideologically dissimilar and ideologically similar congresspersons. Liberals and conservatives both experienced stronger negative emotions towards ideologically dissimilar congresspersons than they did towards ideologically similar ones. Neither liberals nor conservatives differed in negative emotions towards politicians overall (i.e., on average). However, there were ideological differences in emotional bias. In Study 1, liberals exhibited a greater contempt bias (i.e., a larger gap in contempt ratings between ideologically similar and ideologically dissimilar politicians) than conservatives did. In Study 2, liberals exhibited greater contempt, anger, disgust, and happiness biases than conservatives did. The need to consider context in the study of ideological differences in emotion is discussed.
... The score at IS is correlated with a wide range of behaviors and traits. It is positively related with helping others, the frequency of volunteering, the preference for respect, the preference for consistency, role satisfaction and religiosity in Schlenker (2008), with conservatism and life satisfaction in Schlenker, Chambers, and Le (2012), and with religiousness, moral compass (i.e., knowing what is right and wrong), considering lying as unacceptable in Shepperd, Miller, Smith, and Algina (2014). It is also negatively correlated with unethical behavior like plagiarism (Lewis and Zhong, 2011) or cheating (Wowra, 2007). ...
Why do people pay taxes? Rational choice theory has fallen short in answering this question. Another explanation, called tax morale, has been promoted. Tax morale captures the behavioral idea that non-monetary preferences (like norm-submission, moral emotions and moral judgments) might be better determinants of tax compliance than monetary trade-offs. Herein we report on two lab experiments designed to assess whether norm-submission, moral emotions (e.g., affective empathy, cognitive empathy, propensity to feel guilt and shame) or moral judgments (e.g., ethics principles, integrity, and moralization of everyday life) can help explain compliance behavior. Although we nd statistically significant correlations of tax compliance behavior with empathy and shame, the economic significance of these correlations are low--more than 80% of the variability in compliance remains unexplained. These results suggest that tax authorities should focus on the institutional context, rather than individual preference characteristics, to handle tax evasion.
... This is by far the most popular research theme in the empirical literature on morality, and this preference has only intensified over the years. Research based on Haidt and Graham's (2007) moral foundations theory has established that conservatives in the United States are more likely to show support for civil rights restrictions (Crowson & DeBacker, 2008), to have a prevention focus (Cornwell & Higgins, 2013), and to perceive moral clarity (Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012) than liberals. This not only predicts their political voting behavior and candidate preferences (Skitka & Bauman, 2008) but also relates to more general tendencies in how individuals relate to others, as indicated by their social dominance orientation, authoritarianism (Federico, Weber, Ergun, & Hunt, 2013), or parenting styles (McAdams et al., 2008). ...
We review empirical research on (social) psychology of morality to identify which issues and relations are well documented by existing data and which areas of inquiry are in need of further empirical evidence. An electronic literature search yielded a total of 1,278 relevant research articles published from 1940 through 2017. These were subjected to expert content analysis and standardized bibliometric analysis to classify research questions and relate these to (trends in) empirical approaches that characterize research on morality. We categorize the research questions addressed in this literature into five different themes and consider how empirical approaches within each of these themes have addressed psychological antecedents and implications of moral behavior. We conclude that some key features of theoretical questions relating to human morality are not systematically captured in empirical research and are in need of further investigation.
... In particular, we explore the possibility that one's political ideology, which plays a crucial role in determining personality (Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012), may influence and predict one's willingness to donate his or her organs. Namely, we hypothesize that a conservative ideology should make individuals less willing to donate organs upon death. ...
The low supply of organs is a global concern. It is crucial to recognize the barriers, whether cognitive or emotional, that influence individuals' willingness to sign up onto organ donation registries. In the current investigation, we hypothesize that a politically-conservative ideology reduces people's organ donation intentions. This is likely since individuals with a conservative ideology care more about the integrity of the human body, are more disgusted by the very act of organ donations, and believe that signing onto such registries would be tempting fate. We test and confirm this possibility in a study with 148 Australians. The findings indicate that political ideology can be a predictor of individuals' likelihood of becoming organ donors.
... The first hypothesis is that liberals use the most negative language. Conservatives report feeling happier than liberals (for a meta-analysis, see Onraet, Van Hiel, & Dhont, 2013) in part because conservatives are less troubled by social and economic inequality (Napier & Jost, 2008), are more likely to have personality traits associated with happiness (Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012), or are more likely to deceive themselves when reporting their feelings (Wojcik et al., 2015). Ideological happiness gap researchers have not made explicit claims regarding affective language. ...
We propose that political extremists use more negative language than moderates. Previous research found that conservatives report feeling happier than liberals and yet liberals “display greater happiness” in their language than do conservatives. However, some of the previous studies relied on questionable measures of political orientation and affective language, and no studies have examined whether political orientation and affective language are nonlinearly related. Revisiting the same contexts (Twitter, U.S. Congress), and adding three new ones (political organizations, news media, crowdsourced Americans), we found that the language of liberal and conservative extremists was more negative and angry in its emotional tone than that of moderates. Contrary to previous research, we found that liberal extremists’ language was more negative than that of conservative extremists. Additional analyses supported the explanation that extremists feel threatened by the activities of political rivals, and their angry, negative language represents efforts to communicate as much to others. © 2018 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.
... Our results coordinate well with multiple precedents in the literature, which we take up for each of the constructs examined. Considering first religiosity, we replicated the substantial association between stronger religious beliefs and conservatism in the American population (Malka et al., 2012;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012). In our study this association generalized across a broadly-defined socio-political conservatism construct as well as a specific construct targeting endorsement of laissez-faire free-market economics. ...
Some issues that have been settled by the scientific community, such as evolution, the effectiveness of vaccinations, and the role of CO2 emissions in climate change, continue to be rejected by segments of the public. This rejection is typically driven by people's worldviews, and to date most research has found that conservatives are uniformly more likely to reject scientific findings than liberals across a number of domains. We report a large (N>1,000) preregistered study that addresses two questions: First, can we find science denial on the left?Endorsement of pseudoscientific complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) has been anecdotally cited as being more consonant with liberals than conservatives. Against this claim, we found more support for CAM among conservatives than liberals. Second, we asked how liberals and conservatives resolve dilemmas in which an issue triggers two opposing facets of their worldviews. We probed attitudes on gender equality and the evolution of sex differences---two constructs that may create conflicts for liberals (who endorse evolution but also equality) and conservatives (who endorse gender differences but are sceptical of evolution). We find that many conservatives reject both gender equality and evolution of sex differences, and instead embrace ``naturally occurring'' gender differences. Many liberals, by contrast, reject evolved gender differences, as well as naturally occurring gender differences, while nonetheless strongly endorsing evolution.
... Yet few of these fifteen variables distinguish conservativism, and those that do usually do so in the wrong direction (Carney et al., 2008;Jost, 2006). For example, conservatism has been repeatedly associated with less neuroticism, less depression, more optimism, and more life satisfaction (Napier & Jost, 2008;Schlenker et al., 2012). This incongruousness has puzzled researchers (Dallago et al., 2012;Van Hiel et al., 2007). ...
If behavior is influenced by the perceived character of situations, many disciplines that study behavior may eventually need to take into account individual differences in the perceived character of the world. In the first effort to empirically map these perceptions, subjects varied on 26 dimensions, called primal world beliefs or primals, such as the belief that the world is abundant. This dissertation leverages the first comprehensive measure of primals to further discussions in political, developmental, clinical, and positive psychology. Chapter I challenges the consensus that political conservativism is distinguished by the belief that the world is dangerous. Results suggest previous research relied on a measure highlighting dangers conservatives fear and neglecting dangers liberals fear, when both perceive the world as almost equally dangerous (8 samples; total N=3,734). A novel account of political ideology is proposed based on more predictive primals. Chapter II discusses how primals might develop. The author distinguishes retrospective theories—where primals reflect the content of past experiences—from interpretive theories—where primals act as lenses for interpreting experiences while remaining uninfluenced by them—and suggests twelve ways each theory’s relative merit can be empirically tested. A novel comprehensive framework for considering experiences in relation to any new construct is also proposed. Chapter III explores primals’ wellbeing-related correlates. By showing that many parents aim to teach negative primals to their children, some prevalence for meta-beliefs (i.e., beliefs about beliefs) associating negative primals with positive outcomes is established. Study 2 tests these meta-beliefs in six samples (total N=4,535) in regards to eight outcomes: job success, job satisfaction, emotion, depression, suicide, physical health, life satisfaction, and flourishing. Results indicate that negative primals are almost always associated with modestly to dramatically worse outcomes, across and within professions. In addition to filling a literature gap, and establishing bases for future comparison studies, findings could be used to strengthen interventions by undermining counterproductive meta-beliefs. Findings also underscore the urgent need for further research on the impact of primal world beliefs—teaching children or anyone that the world is a bad place in order to protect or prepare them may be ill-advised.
... This was due to the concern that such nuanced terms in the original measure may be associated with specific moral foundations and biased towards certain groups of people. In fact, conservatives have been found to score higher on measures of conscientiousness 12 whereas liberals have been found to rely primarily on the value of fairness, which is closely related to honesty, when dealing with moral issues (see research on Moral Foundation Theory; e.g., 13). Thus, we used "morals and characters" in order for participants to be able to define morality without bias. ...
Background : Moral Growth Mindset (MGM) is a belief about whether one can become a morally better person through efforts. Prior research showed that MGM is positively associated with promotion of moral motivation among adolescents and young adults. We developed and tested the English version of the MGM measure in this study with data collected from college student participants.
Methods : In Study 1, we tested the reliability and validity of the MGM measure with two-wave data ( N = 212, Age mean = 24.18 years, SD = 7.82 years). In Study 2, we retested the construct validity of the MGM measure once again and its association with other moral and positive psychological indicators to test its convergent and discriminant validity ( N = 275, Age mean = 22.02 years, SD = 6.34 years).
Results : We found that the MGM measure was reliable and valid from Study 1. In Study 2, the results indicated that the MGM was well correlated with other moral and positive psychological indicators as expected.
Conclusions : We developed and validated the English version of the MGM measure in the present study. The results from studies 1 and 2 supported the reliability and validity of the MGM measure. Given these, we found that the English version of the MGM measure can well measure one’s MGM as we intended.
... The current research also sheds light on the ongoing debate concerning the relationship between well-being and political ideology. In the political psychology literature, differences between Liberals and Conservatives in well-being are robust findings (Napier & Jost, 2008;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012). However, in a recent study (Wojcik et al., 2015), it was claimed that this effect is caused by Conservatives' greater reluctance to expose (or acknowledge) their weaknesses. ...
Previous studies suggested that the 2016 presidential elections gave rise to pathological levels of election-related distress in liberal Americans; however, it has also been suggested that the public discourse and the professional discourse have increasingly overgeneralized concepts of trauma and psychopathology. In light of this, in the current research, we utilized an array of big data measures and asked whether a political loss in a participatory democracy can indeed lead to psychopathology. We observed that liberals report being more depressed when asked directly about the effects of the election; however, more indirect measures show a short-lived or nonexistent effect. We examined self-report measures of clinical depression with and without a reference to the election (Studies 1A & 1B), analyzed Twitter discourse and measured users' levels of depression using a machine-learning-based model (Study 2), conducted time-series analysis of depression-related search behavior on Google (Study 3), examined the proportion of antidepressants consumption in Medicaid data (Study 4), and analyzed daily surveys of hundreds of thousands of Americans (Study 5), and saw that at the aggregate level, empirical data reject the accounts of "Trump Depression." We discuss possible interpretations of the discrepancies between the direct and indirect measures. The current investigation demonstrates how big-data sources can provide an unprecedented view of the psychological consequences of political events and sheds light on the complex relationship between the political and the personal spheres. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
... Owing to such attitudes and values, an authoritarian personality strives to maintain family relations and care for career progress more than a non-authoritarian one, and also has less doubt about the correctness of his own convictions. All this can actually increase the sense of satisfaction with life (Schlenker et al., 2012). ...
... Middle adulthood (26-46 years) is the peak of a person's achievements with his financial independence, high level of professionalism, and at the same time a possible "midlife crisis" Schlenker et al., 2012). ...
... It has been suggested that conservatives have some psychological resources in self-protective mechanisms that allow them to cope with stressful issues and achieve life satisfaction 18 . Based on a tendency to strongly endorse the belief in free will, conservatives have greater self-regulation capacity that may function as a psychological buffer to reduce their stress response to threats and anxiety and improve their life satisfaction [19][20][21] . In addition to self-regulation capacity, greater psychological well-being in conservatives is also thought to be attributable to psychological resilience, which is a protective factor controlling an agitated internal environment and associated with the regulation capacity 22,23 . ...
Conservatives are more sensitive to threatening/anxious situations in perceptual and cognitive levels, experiencing emotional responses and stress, while liberals are more responsive to but tolerant of ambiguous and uncertain information. Interestingly, conservatives have greater psychological well-being and are more satisfied with their lives than liberals despite their psychological vulnerability to stress caused by threat and anxiety sensitivities. We investigated whether conservatives have greater resilience and self-regulation capacity, which are suggested to be psychological buffers that enhance psychological well-being, than liberals and moderates. We also explored associations between intrinsic functional brain organization and these psychological resources to expand our neurobiological understanding of self-regulatory processes in neuropolitics. We found that conservatives, compared to liberals and moderates, had greater psychological resilience and self-regulation capacity that were attributable to greater impulse control and causal reasoning. Stronger intrinsic connectivities between the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and precuneus and between the insula and frontal pole/OFC in conservatives were correlated with greater resilience and self-regulation capacity. These results suggest the neural underpinnings that may allow conservatives to manage the psychological stress and achieve greater life satisfaction. This study provides neuroscientific evidence for the different responses of liberals and conservatives to politically relevant social issues.
... The essentialist belief suggests that the aging process is fixed and uncontrollable, whereas the non-essentialism belief suggests that the aging process is malleable and controllable (Weiss et al. 2016). Due to conservatives' higher sense of personal control and responsibility relative to liberals (Schlenker et al. 2012), they may also believe their actions can change the aging-related process. Conservatives' interest in preserving their youthfulness may motivate them to believe that the aging process is controllable, which can support their investment of efforts and resources for preventing their bodies from aging. ...
In an era defined by an aging population, the desire to look younger is so great, that the anti-aging industry is expected to grow by hundreds of billions of dollars within only a few years’ time. This research aims to investigate how the increasing interest to look younger is related to political ideology. We propose that accepting the ideal beauty of youthful bodies and pursuing physical youthfulness would be more prevalent among conservatives. We build this upon previous research showing that political conservatism is related to the acceptance of norms and values, as well as having strict boundaries for social perceptions and sensitivity to threat and losses. We conducted a pilot study which revealed that the queries related to anti-aging were more popular in states where political conservatism was higher in the US. Moreover, a survey among American participants revealed that conservatives tended to show a greater interest in preserving their youthfulness, and that they had more resistant attitudes toward aging. Moreover, they exhibited higher preferences for anti-aging benefits, compared to liberals and moderates. These findings contribute to extant literature on political psychology, body ideal, and ageism by demonstrating the relationship between political ideology and the pursuit of youthfulness, which is a neglected but critical dimension of the beauty ideal.
... The current research also sheds light on the ongoing debate concerning the relationship between well-being and political ideology. In the political psychology literature, differences between Liberals and Conservatives in well-being are robust findings (Napier & Jost, 2008;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012). However, in a recent study (Wojcik et al., 2015), it was claimed that this effect is caused by Conservatives' greater reluctance to expose (or acknowledge) their weaknesses. ...
Can a political loss in a participatory democracy lead to psychopathology? While some studies provide support for pathological levels of election-related distress in Liberal Americans, it has also been suggested that the public and professional discourse has increasingly over-generalized concepts of trauma and psychopathology. Here, we examine this debate in the context of the 2016 US presidential election, and investigate whether Liberal (vs. Conservative) Americans exhibited increased levels of depression in response to the Trump presidency. We observe that Liberals report being more depressed when asked directly about the effects of the election; however, more indirect measures show a short-lived or non-existent effect. We examined self-report measures of clinical depression with and without a reference to the election (Studies 1A & 1B), analyzed Twitter discourse and measured users’ levels of depression using a machine-learning-based model (Study 2), conducted time-series analysis of depression-related search behavior on Google (Study 3), examined the proportion of antidepressants consumption in Medicaid (Study 4), and analyzed daily survey data of hundreds of thousands of Americans (Study 5)—and saw that at the aggregate level, empirical data reject the accounts of “Trump Depression”. We discuss possible interpretations for the discrepancies between the direct and indirect measures. The current investigation demonstrates how big-data sources can provide an unprecedented view of the psychological consequences of political events, and sheds light on the complex relation between the political and the personal spheres.
... Are conservatives happier? Indeed, there is a large literature examining this "happiness gap" in favor of conservatives (Schlenker et al., 2012). On the opposite end of the spectrum, but still within normal range, we find that conservatives are lower in the Big Five personality trait of neuroticism (Burton et al., 2015), which is a known correlate of mental illness diagnoses (Kotov et al., 2010;Nagel et al., 2018). ...
It has been claimed that left-wingers or liberals (US sense) tend to be more mentally ill than right-wingers or conservatives. This potential link was investigated using the General Social Survey. A search found 5 items measuring one's own mental illness in different ways (e.g.”Do you have any emotional or mental disability?”). All of these items were associated with left-wing political ideology as measured by self-report. These results held up mostly in regressions that adjusted for age, sex, and race. For the variable with the most data, the difference in mental illness between “extremely liberal” and “extremely conservative” was 0.39 d. This finding is congruent with numerous findings based on related constructs.
... Our results coordinate well with multiple precedents in the literature, which we take up for each of the constructs examined. Considering first religiosity, we replicated the substantial association between stronger religious beliefs and conservatism in the American population (Malka et al., 2012;Schlenker, Chambers, & Le, 2012). In our study this association generalized across a broadly-defined socio-political conservatism construct as well as a specific construct targeting endorsement of laissez-faire free-market economics. ...
Some issues that have been settled by the scientific community, such as evolution, the effectiveness of vaccinations, and the role of CO2 emissions in climate change, continue to be rejected by segments of the public. This rejection is typically driven by people's worldviews, and to date most research has found that conservatives are uniformly more likely to reject scientific findings than liberals across a number of domains. We report a large (N>1,000) preregistered study that addresses two questions: First, can we find science denial on the left?Endorsement of pseudoscientific complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) has been anecdotally cited as being more consonant with liberals than conservatives. Against this claim, we found more support for CAM among conservatives than liberals. Second, we asked how liberals and conservatives resolve dilemmas in which an issue triggers two opposing facets of their worldviews. We probed attitudes on gender equality and the evolution of sex differences---two constructs that may create conflicts for liberals (who endorse evolution but also equality) and conservatives (who endorse gender differences but are sceptical of evolution). We find that many conservatives reject both gender equality and evolution of sex differences, and instead embrace ``naturally occurring'' gender differences. Many liberals, by contrast, reject evolved gender differences, as well as naturally occurring gender differences, while nonetheless strongly endorsing evolution.
The relationship between politics and biopsychology is complex. But first, an explanation of biopsychology itself is in order. As a biopsychologist I have frequently been asked to explain my speciality even to other psychologists. Biopsychology is all about the biology of behavior, human and animal. Biopsychologists are trained in the methodology of behavioral research and in biology but are psychologists not biologists. There are neurological underpinnings to behavior and these are being explored vigorously. Neuroscience is the study of the brain and nervous system in relation to function and behavior. Political science and neuroscience have been connecting for the last decade (Arciniegas & Anderson, 2017; Chawke & Kanai, 2016; Fowler & Schreiber, 2008; Haas, 2016; McDermott, 2009; Pedersen, Muftuler, & Larson, 2018). Biopsychology is part of that mix (Jost, Nam, Amodio, & Bavel, 2014; Kandler, Bleidorn, & Riemann, 2012; Marcus, 2013; Norris, Gollan, Berntson, & Cacioppo, 2010; Settle, Dawes, Loewen, & Panagopoulos, 2017).
The development of sex robots has sparked numerous debates on the consequences of their use in terms of human-technology relations, interpersonal relationships and changes in social norms. Ethical concerns about the potential negative influence of sex robots on women's situation in society are reinforced by the market as most sex robots are still intended for male customers. The main aim of two experimental studies was to examine whether sex robots are perceived by heterosexual women as a sexual threat and whether this potential threat could be decreased by depicting the robots as products suitable for women. We also examined whether the perception of robots as a threat is related to conservative and liberal political views. The results show that, after the presentation of a sex robot as a product suitable for women, the sense of sexual threat was lower than when a sex robot was presented as designed for men but only among participants with more liberal views. More conservative women perceived sex robots as a threat regardless of whether they are designed for women or men. Thus, incorporating political views can be crucial in examining the social perception of new and controversial technologies, such as sex robots.
Using survey data by the Seoul Metropolitan Government for 5 years (n = 228,103 individuals), this study analyzes the magnitudes of the impacts of major grouping variables on variations in the overall happiness through partial least squares regression analysis. This study then uses the importance–satisfaction analysis to explore how the between‐group variations can be reduced according to the current satisfaction as well as the ultimate importance of the five happiness components (health, finance, relationships with close relatives/friends, home life, and social life). The regression finds that self‐respect‐as‐a‐Seoul‐citizen, social class recognition, years (other than 2014), household income, and not being elderly have a positive difference in happiness. The importance of the social class recognition over the objective income suggests the validity of soft policies for increasing happiness as a subjective concept. The low happiness level in 2014 may reflect history effects or events that occurred in that year. The importance–satisfaction analysis presents customized strategies by group. Specifically, policies oriented to financial happiness are prioritized for groups with low values on self‐respect, class recognition, household income, and age while health‐ and home life‐related policies should be additionally arranged for the older population.
Authoritarian personality has been repeatedly shown to be associated with greater subjective well-being largely in the western countries. Contextual factors have been demonstrated to be capable of moderating this association at the macro level, and yet whether micro level organizational culture context could have a similar moderation effect remains elusive. The present study aims to verify authoritarian personality - subjective well-being association among a sample of Chinese college students, as well as testing the potential moderating role of the authoritarian organizational culture context. 1007 Chinese male undergraduates from both military and non-military medical universities were recruited, and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), happiness index and life satisfaction were measured. We found that higher score on authoritarian personality is significantly correlated with greater subjective well-being, and this association indeed can be moderated by the organizational culture context (military vs civilian). Overall, this study verifies and extends the findings of a positive authoritarian personality - subjective well-being relationship to an oriental cultural context.
Istraživanje načina na koji pojedinci konceptualiziraju sreću, odnosno njihovih uvjerenja o tome što čini sretan život predstavlja važan element razumijevanja subjektivne dobrobiti jer ova uvjerenja ne reflektiraju samo njihova razmišljanja već i utječu na subjektivni osjećaj sreće. Istraživanja takvih uvjerenja pokazala su da postoje tri temeljne orijentacije koje naglašavaju mogućnost dostizanja sreće putem ugodnog, smislenog ili angažiranog života. S obzirom na to da nije dovoljno poznato koji činitelji doprinose razvoju spomenutih orijentacija, na uzorku od 415 sudionika provedeno je istraživanje čiji je cilj bio odrediti ulogu religioznosti, društvene ideologije i pet moralnih temelja koji uključuju brižnost, pravednost, lojalnost prema vlastitoj skupini, poštovanje autoriteta te tjelesnu i duhovnu čistoću u objašnjenju orijentacija prema sreći. Dobiveni rezultati izdvojili su moralne temelje lojalnosti i podložnosti autoritetu te liberalniju društvenu ideologiju i mlađu životnu dob kao statistički značajne prediktore orijentacije prema ugodnom životu. Uz to, moralni temelji brižnosti, lojalnosti i čistoće, kao i liberalnija društvena orijentacija, predviđali su izraženiju orijentiranost prema angažiranom životu, pri čemu se brižnost, zajedno s religioznošću, pokazala i kao značajan prediktor orijentacije prema smislenom životu. Dobiveni rezultati pokazuju da orijentacijama prema sreći, odnosno uvjerenjima pojedinaca o tome što predstavlja najbolji put prema sreći, doprinose njihova temeljna moralna, vjerska i društvena uvjerenja te upućuju na potrebu daljnjih istraživanja međuodnosa vrijednosnih orijentacija, zadovoljstva životom i orijentacija prema sreći. Ključne riječi: društvena ideologija, moralni temelji, orijentacije prema sreći, religioznost, subjektivna dobrobit
This study explores the potential impact of cultural orientation on the relationship between financial satisfaction, life satisfaction, and political action within the United States and South Korea. The total sample size was 3,432 individuals (United States = 2,232, South Korea = 1,200). 1 confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model and a path analysis model were assessed using a maximum likelihood estimation. The findings showed a strong positive relationship between financial satisfaction and life satisfaction in both countries. Also, in both countries, more progressive individuals participated in more political actions. When exploring political action, we find an inverse relationship—with greater political action among lower‐income individuals in the United States and greater political action among higher‐income in South Korea. In South Korea (culturally “collectivistic”), middle‐income individuals were also found to participate in political actions that likely benefit larger segments of society. From a cultural dimensions theory perspective, these data suggest political actions in the United States (classified as “individualistic”) were largely conducted by low‐income individuals, potentially as means to enhance their individual well‐being.
Objectives. Analysis of the relationship between social beliefs, political trust and readiness to participate in normative and non-normative forms of political actions. Background. Amid growing politicization of citizens in different countries, the demand for an analysis of factors linked to the readiness of citizens to participate in various forms of political activity, from voting to street protests, is increasing. It is extremely important to identify universal and culturally specific factors that influence political behavior. Study design. The study examined the relationship between social beliefs, political trust, and readiness to participate in political activity. The presence and nature of the relationship was verified through correlation analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM). Participants. Russian sample: 440 people (76.4% of men, 23.4% of women) from 23 to 77 years old (M = 38.99; SD = 11.62). Ukrainian sample: 249 people (59.8% of men and 40.2% of women) from 23 to 65 years old (M = 35.55; SD = 10.76). Measurements. Russian-language versions of the scales of Belief in a dangerous world by J. Duckitt and Belief in a just world by C. Dalbert. Author’s scale of political trust and readiness to participate in political activity. Results. Belief in a just world increases political trust; belief in a dangerous world reduces it. Political trust positively predicts readiness to participate in various forms of normative political activity. The presence of cross-cultural differences in the characteristics of the model between the Russian and Ukrainian samples is established. Conclusions. There is a significant relationship between social beliefs, political trust and readiness to participate in various forms of political activity.
Past studies have emphasized members’ personality as an important predictor of departure from organizations, but the measurement of this factor has mostly relied on self-judged personality. As alternatives to self-judged personality, our study examines how two unobtrusive measures—others-judged personality and computerized text analytic results through Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 (Pennebaker et al., 2015)—are related to members’ departure from organizations ( N = 49). Drawing from internal personnel evaluations (i.e., others-judged personality), text (i.e., self-introduction documents that applicants submitted when applying to the organization), and behavioral data (i.e., actual stay in the organization), this study indicates that unobtrusive measures significantly predict members’ length of stay and that simultaneous use of both measures better predicts members’ length of stay in the organization than either one separately. However, text analytic results through Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count 2015 predict members’ departure more robustly. This study expands the theoretical meaning of personality and provides practical ways to predict people’s organizational behaviors.
I explore how political ideology is related to several related dispositional measures of behavioral avoidance, behavioral inhibition, and negative affectivity. My explorations include survey data, behavioral experiments, and electroencephalography (reading electrical signals off the scalp). Overall, and in contrast to literature expectations, my evidence suggests that liberals and conservatives do not have persistent differences in avoidance sensitivity or negativity bias.
Background
Individuals who identify as politically conservative have been previously shown to report better self-rated health compared with liberals. We tested whether this association still holds for right-wing populists, which are gaining strength as a political force in Europe in recent decades.
Methods
We analysed data from 24 617 respondents nested within 18 European countries included in the 2016 European Social Survey. Multilevel analyses were conducted to assess the association between political ideology and self-rated health, adjusting for other individual covariates (happiness and social capital).
Results
Individuals who voted for right-wing populist parties were 43% more likely to report fair/poor health compared with traditional conservatives (OR=1.43, 95% CI 1.23 to 1.67). The association was attenuated (OR=1.21, 95% CI 1.03 to 1.42) after controlling for additional individual-level variables, including happiness and access to social capital. Higher levels of social capital (informal networks, OR=0.40, 95% CI 0.29 to 0.56; trust, OR=0.82, 95% CI 0.74 to 0.92) and happiness (OR=0.18, 95% CI 0.15 to 0.22) were protectively correlated with fair/poor self-rated health.
Conclusions
Individuals voting for right-wing populist parties report worse health compared with conservatives. It remains unclear whether ideology is just a marker for health-related practices, or whether the values and beliefs associated with a particular brand of ideology lead to worse health.
The research describes the core sociological approaches to the theoretical interpretation of interrelated key issues of modern sociology of morality — the sources of the significance of multiple regulatory orders, the relations of morality and power, the role of morality as a universal intermediary in potential conflicts among regulatory systems (in particular, between state and non-state laws, professional ethics, religion, corporate codes of conduct, etc.). Based on the critical scrutiny of classical and modern approaches to the sources of norms and relations between multiple regulatory systems, in particular law and morality, the author outlines perspective directions of the theoretical interpretation of the relationship between morality and law. Using the reconstructed reasoning against the thesis of moral relativism in the social sciences recently offered by S. Lukes, the research studies the possibility of describing “moral” and “conventional” as analytically different dimensions of social norms, as well as the prospects of using the concept of “participating reactive mindsets” as a theoretical interpretation of the general source of moral emotions and judgments.
Background : Moral Growth Mindset (MGM) is a belief about whether one can become a morally better person through efforts. Prior research showed that MGM is positively associated with promotion of moral motivation among adolescents and young adults. We developed and tested the English version of the MGM measure in this study with data collected from college student participants.
Methods : In Study 1, we tested the reliability and validity of the MGM measure with two-wave data ( N = 212, Age mean = 24.18 years, SD = 7.82 years). In Study 2, we retested the construct validity of the MGM measure once again and its association with other moral and positive psychological indicators to test its convergent and discriminant validity ( N = 275, Age mean = 22.02 years, SD = 6.34 years).
Results : We found that the MGM measure was reliable and valid from Study 1. In Study 2, the results indicated that the MGM was well correlated with other moral and positive psychological indicators as expected.
Conclusions : We developed and validated the English version of the MGM measure in the present study. The results from studies 1 and 2 supported the reliability and validity of the MGM measure. Given this, we found that the English version of the MGM measure can measure one’s MGM as we intended.
In this article, we attempt to distinguish between the properties of moderator and mediator variables at a number of levels. First, we seek to make theorists and researchers aware of the importance of not using the terms moderator and mediator interchangeably by carefully elaborating, both conceptually and strategically, the many ways in which moderators and mediators differ. We then go beyond this largely pedagogical function and delineate the conceptual and strategic implications of making use of such distinctions with regard to a wide range of phenomena, including control and stress, attitudes, and personality traits. We also provide a specific compendium of analytic procedures appropriate for making the most effective use of the moderator and mediator distinction, both separately and in terms of a broader causal system that includes both moderators and mediators. (46 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Examined the extent to which the 36 items of the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS) provide comprehensive and representative coverage of the value domain in 2 experiments. In Exp I, intensive semistructured interviews, based on the RVS, were conducted with 73 adults drawn from an electoral roll. Test–retest reliabilities were examined over 4 wks with 208 university students. In Exp II, factor structure was explored with 483 adults from the general population and with 688 university students. All Ss completed inventories of goal values, mode values, and social values. Data provide qualified support for the comprehensiveness of the instrument. The major weaknesses in sampling involved the facets of physical well-being and individual rights. Other areas not represented were thriftiness and carefreeness. The need for multi-item indices for value constructs is discussed, as are the advantages of a rating procedure over a ranking procedure from both psychometric and empirically valid perspective. An alternative instrument based on the work of Rokeach is proposed. (31 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This research examined the role of mechanisms of moral disengagement in the exercise of moral agency. Regulatory self-sanctions can be selectively disengaged from detrimental conduct by converting harmful acts to moral ones through linkage to worthy purposes, obscuring personal causal agency by diffusion and displacement of responsibility, misrepresenting or disregarding the injurious effects inflicted on others, and vilifying the recipients of maltreatment by blaming and dehumanizing them. The study examined the structure and impact of moral disengagement on detrimental conduct and the psychological processes through which it exerts its effects. Path analyses reveal that moral disengagement fosters detrimental conduct by reducing prosocialness and anticipatory self-censure and by promoting cognitive and affective reactions conducive to aggression. The structure of the paths of influence is very similar for interpersonal aggression and delinquent conduct. Although the various mechanisms of moral disengagement operate in concert, moral reconstruals of harmful conduct by linking it to worthy purposes and vilification of victims seem to contribute most heavily to engagement in detrimental activities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Political economists agree that a trade-off exists between equality and efficiency. Using a hypothetical society paradigm, the mean income (representing efficiency) and income variability (representing equality) of distributions of wealth and the correlation between wealth and effort within a society were manipulated. Ss made all pairwise comparisons of distributions within societies of differing meritocracy. A "maximin" principle best described trade-off resolution strategies when effort and outcome were weakly linked: People maximized the minimum standard of living within a society. A compromise principle best described preferences when income was tightly linked to effort: People rejected distributions in which some citizens fell below the "poverty line" but maximized efficiency above this constraint. Ideological polarization was pronounced under moderate meritocracy; here liberals could focus on the role of chance and conservatives on the role of effort and ability. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Two studies addressed the relationship between Protestant ethic (PE) ideology and psychological well-being for self-perceived overweight and normal weight women. In Study 1, PE beliefs interacted with self-perceived weight status: For very overweight women, higher PE beliefs were related to lower psychological well-being, whereas the opposite pattern emerged for normal weight women. The relationship of PE to well-being was not mediated by beliefs about controllability of weight or dislike of the overweight. In Study 2, either a PE ideology or an inclusive ideology was primed within the context of the stigma of overweight. For overweight participants, printing PE ideology led to decreased psychological well-being, whereas priming an inclusive ideology led to increased psychological well-being. Normal weight participants were unaffected. PE ideology as a vulnerability factor for the psychological well-being of the overweight is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) (journal abstract)
The prominent position of the church in the Black community coupled with high levels of religious involvement among elderly Blacks suggests that religiosity may be an important coping resource for members of this minority group. However, there has been little research on this topic. Findings from a recent nationwide survey of older Blacks indicate that religiosity tends to counterbalance or offset the deleterious effects of physical health problems and deaths among family members by bolstering feelings of self-worth among elderly Blacks. These findings were observed after the effects of informal emotional support had been controlled statistically. Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/66998/2/10.1177_089826439200400305.pdf
Social dominance orientation (SDO), one's degree of preference for inequality among social groups, is introduced. On the basis of social dominance theory, it is shown that (a) men are more social dominance-oriented than women, (b) high-SDO people seek hierarchy-enhancing professional roles and low-SDO people seek hierarchy-attenuating roles, (c) SDO was related to beliefs in a large number of social and political ideologies that support group-based hierarchy (e.g., meritocracy and racism) and to support for policies that have implications for intergroup relations (e.g., war, civil rights, and social programs), including new policies. SDO was distinguished from interpersonal dominance, conservatism, and authoritariansim. SDO was negatively correlated with empathy, tolerance, communality, and altruism. The ramifications of SDO in social context are discussed. African and African American Studies Psychology
How and why do moral judgments vary across the political spectrum? To test moral foundations theory (J. Haidt & J. Graham, 2007; J. Haidt & C. Joseph, 2004), the authors developed several ways to measure people's use of 5 sets of moral intuitions: Harm/care, Fairness/reciprocity, Ingroup/loyalty, Authority/respect, and Purity/sanctity. Across 4 studies using multiple methods, liberals consistently showed greater endorsement and use of the Harm/care and Fairness/reciprocity foundations compared to the other 3 foundations, whereas conservatives endorsed and used the 5 foundations more equally. This difference was observed in abstract assessments of the moral relevance of foundation-related concerns such as violence or loyalty (Study 1), moral judgments of statements and scenarios (Study 2), "sacredness" reactions to taboo trade-offs (Study 3), and use of foundation-related words in the moral texts of religious sermons (Study 4). These findings help to illuminate the nature and intractability of moral disagreements in the American "culture war."
In this article, we attempt to distinguish between the properties of moderator and mediator variables at a number of levels. First, we seek to make theorists and researchers aware of the importance of not using the terms moderator and mediator interchangeably by carefully elaborating, both conceptually and strategically, the many ways in which moderators and mediators differ. We then go beyond this largely pedagogical function and delineate the conceptual and strategic implications of making use of such distinctions with regard to a wide range of phenomena, including control and stress, attitudes, and personality traits. We also provide a specific compendium of analytic procedures appropriate for making the most effective use of the moderator and mediator distinction, both separately and in terms of a broader causal system that includes both moderators and mediators.
Research on dispositional optimism as assessed by the Life Orientation Test (Scheier & Carver, 1985) has been challenged on the grounds that effects attributed to optimism are indistinguishable from those of unmeasured third variables, most notably, neuroticism. Data from 4,309 subjects show that associations between optimism and both depression and aspects of coping remain significant even when the effects of neuroticism, as well as the effects of trait anxiety, self-mastery, and self-esteem, are statistically controlled. Thus, the Life Orientation Test does appear to possess adequate predictive and discriminant validity. Examination of the scale on somewhat different grounds, however, does suggest that future applications can benefit from its revision. Thus, we also describe a minor modification to the Life Orientation Test, along with data bearing on the revised scale's psychometric properties.
Developed, on the basis of responses from 608 undergraduate students to the 33-item Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, three short forms of 11, 12, and 13 items. The psychometric characteristics of these three forms and three other short forms developed by Strahan and Gerbasi (1972) were investigated and comparisons made. Results, in the form of internal consistency reliability, item factor loadings, short form with Marlowe-Crowne total scale correlations, and correlations between Marlowe-Crowne short forms and the Edwards Social Desirability Scale, indicate that psychometrically sound short forms can be constructed. Comparisons made between the short forms examined in this investigation suggest the 13-item form as a viable substitute for the regular 33-item Marlowe-Crowne scale.
A shocking snapshot of the most current impulses in American religion. Rodney Stark reports the surprising findings of the 2007 Baylor Surveys of Religion, a follow up to the 2005 survey revealing most Americans believe in God or a higher power. This new volume highlights even more hot-button issues of religious life in our country. A must-read for anyone interested in Americans' religious beliefs and practices.
This article proceeds from the premise that a completely value-neutral political psychology is impossible. Testing hypotheses about the efficacy of deterrence or the pervasiveness of racism or the quality of decision making inevitably requires value-charged trade-offs between Type I errors (rejecting the null hypothesis when it is true) and Type II errors (failing to reject the null hypothesis when it is false). The article goes on, however, to argue that our collective credibility as a science depends on self-critical efforts to monitor and minimize the influence of scientifically irrelevant values on inquiry. I identify two examples of research programs-White's work on deterrence and the Sears and Kinder work on symbolic racism-in which the moral-political values of the investigators appear to have profoundly shaped standards of evidence and proof in testing competing hypotheses. I also identify logical and empirical strategies that investigators can use to check the influence of extraneous values. These strategies include rigorous skepticism toward counterfactuals that underlie causal claims in historical analyses, embedding of experimental manipulations in representative sample surveys to isolate determinants of public opinion, developing methods to translate case studies into standardized data languages so that we can more readily identify potential sources of bias, and continual open-mindedness to the possibility that patterns of thinking that scholarly observers laud as cognitively or morally superior in one set of political settings may look quite maladaptive or immoral in other political settings. The article closes with a transparently valueladen appeal to preserve the autonomy of political psychology as a science by distinguishing sharply between when we speak for a scientific discipline and when we speak as concerned citizens.
This article reports the development and validation of a scale to measure global life satisfaction, the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS). Among the various components of subjective well-being, the SWLS is narrowly focused to assess global life satisfaction and does not tap related constructs such as positive affect or loneliness. The SWLS is shown to have favorable psychometric properties, including high internal consistency and high temporal reliability. Scores on the SWLS correlate moderately to highly with other measures of subjective well-being, and correlate predictably with specific personality characteristics. It is noted that the SWLS is suited for use with different age groups, and other potential uses of the scale are discussed.
A common theme in the literature of marriage and the family is that the marital relationship protects the individual from the normlessness and alienation of an impersonal world. Using data from the 1976 National Opinion Research Center (NORC) General Social Survey, this research examines the effects of marital status and marital happiness on anomia, as measured by the Srole Scale. Controlling for relevant background variables, the results indicate that neither marital status nor marital happiness is related to anomia. There is, however, a moderately strong negative relationship between education and anomia and a weak negative relationship between overall life satisfaction and anomia. These results indicate that socio-economic status remains the primary determinant of anomia for most Americans.
Refinements in Darwin's theory of the origin of a moral sense create a framework equipped to organize and integrate contemporary theory and research on morality. Morality originated in deferential, cooperative, and altruistic "social instincts," or decision-making strategies, that enabled early humans to maximize their gains from social living and resolve their conflicts of interest in adaptive ways. Moral judgments, moral norms, and conscience originated from strategic interactions among members of groups who experienced confluences and conflicts of interest. Moral argumentation buttressed by moral reasoning is equipped to generate universal and impartial moral standards. Moral beliefs and standards are products of automatic and controlled information-processing and decision-making mechanisms. To understand how people make moral decisions, we must understand how early evolved mechanisms in the old brain and recently evolved mechanisms in the new brain are activated and how they interact. Understanding what a sense of morality is for helps us understand what it is.
© 2008 Association for Psychological Science.
Objective:
While considerable attention has focused on improving the detection of depression, assessment of severity is also important in guiding treatment decisions. Therefore, we examined the validity of a brief, new measure of depression severity.
Measurements:
The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) is a self-administered version of the PRIME-MD diagnostic instrument for common mental disorders. The PHQ-9 is the depression module, which scores each of the 9 DSM-IV criteria as "0" (not at all) to "3" (nearly every day). The PHQ-9 was completed by 6,000 patients in 8 primary care clinics and 7 obstetrics-gynecology clinics. Construct validity was assessed using the 20-item Short-Form General Health Survey, self-reported sick days and clinic visits, and symptom-related difficulty. Criterion validity was assessed against an independent structured mental health professional (MHP) interview in a sample of 580 patients.
Results:
As PHQ-9 depression severity increased, there was a substantial decrease in functional status on all 6 SF-20 subscales. Also, symptom-related difficulty, sick days, and health care utilization increased. Using the MHP reinterview as the criterion standard, a PHQ-9 score > or =10 had a sensitivity of 88% and a specificity of 88% for major depression. PHQ-9 scores of 5, 10, 15, and 20 represented mild, moderate, moderately severe, and severe depression, respectively. Results were similar in the primary care and obstetrics-gynecology samples.
Conclusion:
In addition to making criteria-based diagnoses of depressive disorders, the PHQ-9 is also a reliable and valid measure of depression severity. These characteristics plus its brevity make the PHQ-9 a useful clinical and research tool.
It is the thesis of this chapter that personal commitment to a principled ethical ideology, as opposed to a more expedient ideology, determines the strength of the relationship between moral beliefs and behavior. Personal commitment links the self-system to moral principles, producing a sense of obligation to perform consistently with those principles, a sense of responsibility for relevant conduct, and an unwillingness to condone and rationalize ethical failures and transgressions. With high personal commitment, a principled ethical ideology becomes a dominant schema for interpreting events and for guiding conduct. As such, the strength of commitment to a principled ideology has implications for a wide range of social activities. The remainder of this chapter will elaborate these ideas. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)(chapter)
The SWLS consists of 5-items that require a ratingon a 7-point Likert scale. Administration is rarely morethan a minute or 2 and can be completed by interview(including phone) or paper and pencil response. The in-strumentshouldnotbecompletedbyaproxyansweringfortheperson.Itemsofthe SWLSaresummedtocreatea total score that can range from 5 to 35.The SWLS is in the public domain. Permission isnot needed to use it. Further information regardingthe use and interpretation of the SWLS can be foundat the author’s Web site http://internal.psychology.illinois.edu/∼ediener/SWLS.html. The Web site alsoincludes links to translations of the scale into 27languages.
Principled and expedient ideologies guide people along different ethical paths. A principled ideology, indicative of higher claimed integrity, involves a stronger personal commitment to a moral identity that facilitates positive social activities and helps resist the temptation of illicit activities. Prior research shows that individual differences in integrity are accurately perceived by friends, are reflected in self-beliefs, and affect social judgment. Results of four studies showed that integrity (a) predicts reported antisocial activities (lying, cheating, stealing) even after controlling for other individual difference measures, (b) predicts reported helping and volunteering, especially for nobler reasons and after controlling for empathy, and (c) is associated with a variety of personality and attitudinal qualities that signify greater psychological well-being, buffering from stress, and effective social functioning.
A flood of new studies explores people's subjective well-being (SWB) Frequent positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and a global sense of satisfaction with life define high SWB These studies reveal that happiness and life satisfaction are similarly available to the young and the old, women and men, blacks and whites, the rich and the working-class Better clues to well-being come from knowing about a person's traits, close relationships, work experiences, culture, and religiosity We present the elements of an appraisal-based theory of happiness that recognizes the importance of adaptation, cultural world-view, and personal goals
Comments on the book Man For Himself by Erich Fromm (see record 1948-01441-000 ). hose who enjoyed the provocative manipulation of psychological concepts in Escape from Freedom no doubt will be further rewarded by Fromm's continued exploration of contemporary character-structure, but they will find little, to enlighten them on ethical theory and practice. Fromm's book is an ambitious attempt to synthesize psychoanalysis and ethics by grounding the norms of the latter in the integrated personality. The ethical agent is characterized by a “productive orientation” which permits him to realize his constructive potentialities in thought, work, and love. One of the defects of the book is the absence of any specific societal program which can affect the integrated personality. Another defect lies in a dereliction which the author shares, with all other humanists and naturalists who have dealt with ethics; i.e., the lack of emphasis upon the implicit moral character of the sciences themselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)
The empirical evidence concerning the association between various aspects of religion and adjustment to health-related stressors is reviewed, including examination of whether religion acts as a stress buffer or deterrent. Considerable literature suggests that some aspects of religion are consistently associated with adjustment to illness, and evidence for religion as a stress buffer and as a stress deterrent were found. Potential pathways by which religion may influence adjustment to illness were also delineated, including: (1) providing an interpretive framework or cognitive schema; (2) enhancing coping resources; and (3) facilitating access to social support and promoting social integration. Design, methodological and measurement limitations in the extant literature were noted. Further research is needed to elucidate how religion functions as a natural resource during health-related crises.
Subjects with some religious affiliation are more prejudiced than those without affiliation, but no significant difference between Protestants and Catholics. There is a low but significant negative relation of intelligence and education to ethnocentrism. Interviews threw light on parental relations, childhood, conception of self, and dynamics and organization of personality. Projective techniques are described and results analyzed. 63 interviews are analyzed qualitatively for prejudice, political and economic ideas, religious ideology and syndromes among high and low scorers. The development of two contrasting cases is given. Criminality and antidemocratic trends in prison inmates and a study of clinic patients complete the investigation of the authoritarian personality pattern. 121 references. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Discusses instances of projection and nonpathological paranoia in marital interaction and in group relationships. The uses of confrontation and group dynamics principles in the management of violent behavior are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Administered the Protestant Ethic Scale, the Conservatism Scale, and the Rokeach Value Survey (RVS) to 140 undergraduates to determine if Ss with a strong Protestant Ethic value (the "work ethic") also tended to have conservative social attitudes. Results show a significant postive relationship between scores on the 2 measures. Scores on both tests were also associated with the relative importance assigned to some of the terminal and instrumental values (positively to salvation, obedience, and self-control; negatively to world of beauty, mature love, being broad-minded, and imaginative) from the RVS. It is suggested that part of the causal fabric underlying economic development might involve some conservative respect for predictability, discipline, and order and that the findings support the thesis of M. Weber (1904–1905 [translated by T. Parsons, 1976]) that economic development is linked to Protestant Ethic values. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Moral identity affects interpersonal relationships by guiding how people perceive and respond to feedback, evaluate others and select task partners and friends. Self-described principled participants (high scorers on the Integrity Scale) more strongly preferred principled-prototypic others over expedient ones and believed it possible to be more principled in one's beliefs (Study 1), preferred evaluators who regarded them as principled over expedient (Study 2), had friends who saw them as principled and paired up with friends who were themselves principled (Study 3). In contrast, expedient individuals did not display mirror-image reactions but saw merit in being both expedient and principled; they were accepting of any relevant feedback and partner preferences. Moral identity is a key link between ethical beliefs and behaviours. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
This meta-analysis reviews studies on 21 samples from 15 countries (total N ¼ 8551), all using the SchwartzÕs model of values in order to investigate how religiosity is related to the importance attributed to values. Results lead to the conclusion that religious people tend: to favor values that promote conservation of social and individual order (Tradition, Conformity, and to a lesser extent, Security) and, conversely, to dislike values that promote openness to change and autonomy (Stimulation, Self-Direction); also, to favor values that allow for a limited self-transcendence (Benevolence, but not Universalism), and to dislike Hedonism and to a lesser extent values that promote self-enhancement (Achievement, Power). Many effects were constant across different religious denominations (Christians, Jews, and Muslims) and cultures but the magnitude of the effects seemed to depend on the socio-economic development of the countries concerned.
According to system justification theory, there is a psychological motive to defend and justify the status quo. There are both dispositional antecedents (e.g., need for closure, openness to experience) and situational antecedents (e.g., system threat, mortality salience) of the tendency to embrace system-justifying ideologies. Consequences of system justification sometimes differ for members of advantaged versus disadvantaged groups, with the former experiencing increased and the latter decreased self-esteem, well-being, and in-group favoritism. In accordance with the palliative function of system justification, endorsement of such ideologies is associated with reduced negative affect for everyone, as well as weakened support for social change and redistribution of resources.
Moral psychology is a rapidly growing field with two principle lineages. The main line began with Jean Piaget and includes developmental psychologists who have studied the acquisition of moral concepts and reasoning. The alternative line began in the 1990s with a new synthesis of evolutionary, neurological, and social-psychological research in which the central phenomena are moral emotions and intuitions. In this essay, I show how both of these lines have been shaped by an older debate between two 19th century narratives about modernity: one celebrating the liberation of individuals, the other mourning the loss of community and moral authority. I suggest that both lines of moral psychology have limited themselves to the moral domain prescribed by the liberation narrative, and so one future step for moral psychology should be to study alternative moral perspectives, particularly religious and politically conservative ones in which morality is, in part, about protecting groups, institutions, and souls.
© 2008 Association for Psychological Science.
Most academic efforts to understand morality and ideology come from theorists who constrain the moral domain to issues of harm and fairness. For such theorists, conservative beliefs are puzzles requiring non-moral explanations. In contrast, we present the "five foundations theory of intuitive ethics," which broadens the moral domain to match the anthropological literature on morality. We extend the theory by integrating it with a review of the sociological constructs of community, authority, and sacredness, as formulated by Emile Durkheim and others. We present data supporting the theory, which also shows that liberals may have a special difficulty in understanding the morality of conservatives. We suggest that what liberals see as a non-moral motivation for system justification may be better described as a moral motivation to protect society, groups, and the structures and constraints that are often (though not always) beneficial for individuals.
The goal of the present study was to create and validate a global belief in a just world scale and to assess the psychometric properties of the multidimensional just world scale using subjects in the United States. The desirable psychometric properties of the global belief in a just world scale make it a viable alternative to Rubin and Peplau's (Journal of Social Issues, 31, 65–90, 1975) just world scale. Analysis of the multidimensional just world scale suggests that the scale consists of three factors—interpersonal justice, socio-political justice, and cynicism/fatalism—and has poor psychometric properties. Both the global and multidimensional belief in a just world scale correlate positively with trust and internal locus of control.
The present study reports on the personality attributes of nursery school children who two decades later were reliably stratified along a liberal/conservative dimension. An unprecedented analytical opportunity existed to evaluate how the political views of these young adults related to assessments of them when in nursery school, prior to their having become political beings. Preschool children who 20 years later were relatively liberal were characterized as: developing close relationships, self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating, relatively under-controlled, and resilient. Preschool children subsequently relatively conservative at age 23 were described as: feeling easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and relatively over-controlled and vulnerable. IQ during nursery school did not relate to subsequent liberalism/conservatism but did relate in subsequent decades. Personality correlates of liberalism/conservatism for the subjects as young adults were also reported: conservatives were described in terms congruent with previous formulations in the literature; liberals displayed personality commonalities but also manifested gender differences. Some implications of the results are briefly discussed.
There are few topics so fascinating both to the research investigator and the research subject as the self-image. It is distinctively characteristic of the human animal that he is able to stand outside himself and to describe, judge, and evaluate the person he is. He is at once the observer and the observed, the judge and the judged, the evaluator and the evaluated. Since the self is probably the most important thing in the world to him, the question of what he is like and how he feels about himself engrosses him deeply. This is especially true during the adolescent stage of development.
Moral Politics takes a fresh look at how we think and talk about political and moral ideas. George Lakoff analyzed recent political discussion to find that the familyâespecially the ideal familyâis the most powerful metaphor in politics today. Revealing how family-based moral values determine views on diverse issues as crime, gun control, taxation, social programs, and the environment, George Lakoff looks at how conservatives and liberals link morality to politics through the concept of family and how these ideals diverge. Arguing that conservatives have exploited the connection between morality, the family, and politics, while liberals have failed to recognized it, Lakoff explains why conservative moral position has not been effectively challenged. A wake up call to political pundits on both the left and the right, this work redefines how Americans think and talk about politics.
There is a well-known association between religion and happiness, although it is not known which particular aspects of religiosity correlate with life satisfaction, or if the correlates are different for people of different religions. In three studies, the correlations of different facets of religiosity with happiness or life satisfaction were explored. In different samples and with different measures, congregational support and public practice of religion appear to correlate similarly with measures of life satisfaction for members of different religions. However, spirituality, religious coping, and religious belief were better predictors of happiness and quality of life for Protestants and Catholics than for Jews. It is therefore contended that religion should be an important consideration, along with religiosity, in study of satisfaction with life, and that the link between spirituality and life satisfaction be followed up, particularly among Christians.
Administered a scale comprised of items selected on the basis of a series of factor analyses and a battery of personality measures to 117 undergraduates in an effort to explore the psychological meaning of the protestant ethic. Scores on the Protestant Ethic Scale were positively related to the Mosher scales for Sex Guilt and Morality Conscience Guilt but were unrelated to the Hostile Guilt Scale. Scores were also positively associated with authoritarianism and with expectancy for internal control. In a 2nd study with 54 male and 55 female undergraduates, Protestant Ethic Scale scores were positively correlated with SUIB scales for occupations demanding a concrete, pragmatic approach to work, and negatively correlated with scales for occupations which typically require emotional sensitivity, theoretical interests, and humanistic values.
New research uncovers some anti-intuitive insights into how many people are happy--and why.