No file available
To read the file of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
An Online World of Bias. The Mediating Role of Cognitive Biases on Extremist Attitudes
Preprints and early-stage research may not have been peer reviewed yet.
Abstract
Extremists often aim to paint a biased picture of the world. Radical narratives e.g., in forms of Internet memes or posts, could thus potentially trigger cognitive biases in their users. These cognitive biases, in turn, might shape the users' formation of extremist attitudes. To test this association, an online experiment (N=392) was conducted with three types of right-wing radical narratives (elite-critique, ingroup-outgroup, violence) in contrast to two control conditions (nonpolitical and neutral political control condition). We then measured the impact of these narratives on the activation of three cognitive biases of relevance in the formation of extremist attitudes: the ingroup-outgroup bias, the negativity bias, and the just-world hypothesis. The results indicate that violence narratives seem to be particularly harmful as they heighten participants' negativity bias and increase just-world views. Just-world views in turn show a positive relationship to extremist attitudes which highlights the need of regulating violence invocations on social media.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
This article argues that one should consider online and offline radicalization in an integrated way. Occasionally, the design of some counter-measure initiatives treats the internet and the “real” world as two separate and independent realms. New information communication technologies (ICTs) allow extremists to fuse digital and physical settings. As a result, our research contends that radicalization takes place in onlife spaces: hybrid environments that incorporate elements from individuals’ online and offline experiences. This study substantiates this claim, and it examines how algorithms structure information on social media by tracking users’ online and offline activities. Then, it analyzes how the Islamic State promoted onlife radicalization. We focus on how the Islamic State used Telegram, specific media techniques, and videos to connect the Web to the territories it controlled in Syria. Ultimately, the article contributes to the recalibration of the current debate on the relationship between online and offline radicalization on a theoretical level and suggests, on a practical level, potential counter measures.
Eudaimonic entertainment, which motivates a reflection on topics such as virtue or meaning, has many benefits, such as fostering wellbeing and inspiring prosocial behavior. Yet, it may also have a darker side when Islamic extremists use accordant elements in online propaganda. So far, this “dark inspiration” has attracted little scholarly interest. The current article fills this gap via a mixed-methods case study of an Islamic extremist influencer on Instagram. The study combined a qualitative content analysis of the account’s postings from 2016 to 2018 (n = 301 posts), with a hierarchical cluster analysis and digital data on aggregated user response to these posts. I found four types of post, ranging from calls for conservativism to calls for violent jihad. Different eudaimonic cues were used in all four types. Likes and comments varied as a function of type, with the violence promoting posts motivating the largest number of user responses.
According to cultural cognition theory, individuals hold opinions about politically contested issues like climate change that are consistent with their “cultural way of life,” conforming their opinions to how they think society should be organized and to what they perceive are the attitudes of their cultural peers. Yet despite dozens of cultural cognition studies, none have directly examined the role of the news media in facilitating these differential interpretations. To address this gap, drawing on a national survey of US adults administered in 2015, we statistically modeled the cultural cognition process in relation to news choices and media effects on public attitudes about climate change. Individuals possessing strongly held cultural worldviews, our findings show, not only choose news outlets where they expect to find culturally congruent arguments about climate change, but they also selectively process the arguments they encounter. Overall, our study demonstrates the substantial role that cultural cognition in combination with news media choices play in contributing to opinion polarization on climate change and other politicized science topics.
The main objective of this systematic review is to synthesize the empirical evidence on how the Internet and social media may, or may not, constitute spaces for exchange that can be favorable to violent extremism. Of the 5,182 studies generated from the searches, 11 studies were eligible for inclusion in this review. We considered empirical studies with qualitative, quantitative, and mixed designs, but did not conduct meta-analysis due to the heterogeneous and at times incomparable nature of the data. The reviewed studies provide tentative evidence that exposure to radical violent online material is associated with extremist online and offline attitudes, as well as the risk of committing political violence among white supremacist, neo-Nazi, and radical Islamist groups. Active seekers of violent radical material also seem to be at higher risk of engaging in political violence as compared to passive seekers. The Internet's role thus seems to be one of decision-shaping, which, in association with offline factors, can be associated to decision-making. The methodological limitations of the reviewed studies are discussed, and recommendations are made for future research.
In order to serve as an antidote to extremist messages, counter-messages (CM) are placed in the same online environment as extremist content. Often, they are even tagged with similar keywords. Given that automated algorithms may define putative relationships between videos based on mutual topics, CM can appear directly linked to extremist content. This poses severe challenges for prevention programs using CM. This study investigates the extent to which algorithms influence the interrelatedness of counter- and extremist messages. By means of two exemplary information network analyses based on YouTube videos of two CM campaigns, we demonstrate that CM are closely—or even directly—connected to extremist content. The results hint at the problematic role of algorithms for prevention campaigns.
Selective reading of political online information was examined based on cognitive dissonance, social identity, and news values frameworks. Online reports were displayed to 156 Americans while selective exposure was tracked. The news articles that participants chose from were either conservative or liberal and also either positive or negative regarding American political policies. In addition, information processing styles (cognitive reflection and need-for-cognition) were measured. Results revealed confirmation and negativity biases, per cognitive dissonance and news values, but did not corroborate the hypothesis derived from social identity theory. Greater cognitive reflection, greater need-for-cognition, and worse affective state fostered the confirmation bias; stronger social comparison tendency reduced the negativity bias.
Populism is a relevant but contested concept in political communication research. It has been well-researched in political manifestos and the mass media. The present study focuses on another part of the hybrid media system and explores how politicians in four countries (AT, CH, IT, UK) use Facebook and Twitter for populist purposes. Five key elements of populism are derived from the literature: emphasizing the sovereignty of the people, advocating for the people, attacking the elite, ostracizing others, and invoking the ‘heartland’. A qualitative text analysis reveals that populism manifests itself in a fragmented form on social media. Populist statements can be found across countries, parties, and politicians’ status levels. While a broad range of politicians advocate for the people, attacks on the economic elite are preferred by left-wing populists. Attacks on the media elite and ostracism of others, however, are predominantly conducted by right-wing speakers. Overall, the paper provides an in-depth analysis of populism on social media. It shows that social media give the populist actors the freedom to articulate their ideology and spread their messages. The paper also contributes to a refined conceptualization and measurement of populism in future studies.
People are able to make many quick and efficient decisions each day by, often non-consciously, relying on cognitive schemas or short cuts. These short cuts allow people to come up with judgments that are ‘good enough’ and, frequently, correct. That said, they also leave people prone to predictable cognitive biases. This article highlights some of the most common cognitive short cuts and resulting biases. We offer definitions, examples, and summaries of research regarding the underlying mechanisms of cognitive bias.
This study addressed questions of whether right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) would be related to perceptions of terrorists as either symbolic or realistic threats to the United States. RWA was expected to be positively associated with the perception of terrorists as a symbolic threat, whereas SDO was expected to be positively associated with the perception of terrorists as a realistic threat. One-hundred and seventy six community adults were surveyed as part of this study on measures of RWA, SDO, self-rated political conservatism, and perceived symbolic and realistic threat. RWA and SDO were both positively correlated with perceived symbolic and realistic threat in the study. During regression analyses, RWA emerged as a strong predictor of the perception of symbolic threat from terrorists, yet failed to predict scores on perceived realistic threat. SDO failed to predict both forms of perceived threat.
Research on parochial altruism demonstrated that hostility toward out-groups (parochialism) represents the dark side of the willingness to benefit one’s in-group even at own costs (altruism). Parochial aggression thereby emerged mainly under conditions of threat. Extremist propaganda videos, for instance by right-wing extremists, try to capitalize on parochial altruistic mechanism by telling recipients sharing their national identity that this nation is under threat wherefore they for have to join the extremist’s cause to prevent the extinction of their nation. Most of the time, propaganda videos are rated as uninteresting and non-persuasive by the target audience. Yet, evolutionary media psychology posits that the interest in and effectiveness of media increases when evolutionarily relevant problems are addressed. Consequently, interest in parochial altruistic right-wing extremist messages should increase under conditions of threat. The current study tested this assumption by randomly assigning German non-Muslims (N = 109) to either an existential threat (here: mortality salience) or a control condition and asking them to evaluate extremist propaganda that addressed them as either in-group members (right-wing extremists) or as out-group members (Islamic extremists). In support of the hypotheses, subjects under conditions of threat reported a higher interest in the right-wing extremist propaganda and perceived it as more persuasive. We discuss the results concerning the implications for evolutionary media psychology and the transmission of parochial altruism in propaganda videos.
The relationship between belief in a just world (BJW) and forgiveness was examined in 275 participants.
Personal BJW was positively related, and unjust world beliefs negatively related, to forgiveness of others.
Personal and general BJW were each positively related to self-forgiveness. Gratitude mediated the relationships between personal BJW and forgiveness of others, and unjust world beliefs and forgiveness of others. Self-esteem mediated the relationships between personal BJW and self-forgiveness, and general BJW and self-forgiveness. It appears that BJW reflects a general disposition to respond to transgressions in a prosocial and adaptive manner, suggesting that the relationship between justice and forgiveness may not be as
incompatible as what a first glance suggests. That is, people who are motivated by a concern for justice
may also be more likely to possess a forgiving disposition.
In this article, we use the issue of immigration to explore the role of anxiety in responses to political appeals. According to previous literature, anxiety motivates citizens to learn and pay more attention to news coverage. Literature in psychology demonstrates that anxiety is associated with a tendency to pay closer attention to threatening information. We predict that anxious citizens will seek more information but that they will seek out and be attracted to threatening information. In an experiment, we induce anxiety about immigration and then subjects have the opportunity to search for additional information in a website designed to mimic online news sources. The website has both immigration and nonimmigration stories, and the immigration stories are split between threatening coverage and nonthreatening coverage. We find that anxious subjects exhibit biased information processing; they read, remember, and agree with threatening information.
Traditionally Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) has been seen as a unidimensional construct. Recently, however, researchers have begun to measure three distinct RWA dimensions (Feldman, 2003; Funke, 2005; Van Hiel, Cornelis, Roets, & De Clercq, 2006). One of these new multidimensional RWA approaches has conceptualized these three dimensions as Authoritarianism, Conservatism, and Traditionalism (ACT), which are viewed as expressions of basic social values or motivational goals that represent different, though related, strategies for attaining collective security at the expense of individual autonomy. Findings are reported from two studies to assess the validity and predictive utility of the multidimensional ACT approach. First, a direct cross-national comparison showed that the three ACT dimensions were reliable and factorially distinct and demonstrated the measurement invariance of the three latent constructs across Serbian and NZ (New Zealand) samples. The three ACT dimensions predicted self-reported behavior differentially in both samples, and a comparison of latent means showed the Serbian sample higher than the NZ sample on the ACT dimensions of Authoritarianism and Traditionalism but markedly lower on Conservatism. Second, a reanalysis of previously collected NZ data showed that the three ACT scales differentially predicted three dimensions of generalized prejudice in a theoretically meaningful manner. These findings underline the importance of studying ideological attitudes, such as RWA, multidimensionally.
The use of social media tools by individuals and organizations to radicalize individuals for political and social change has become increasingly popular as the Internet penetrates more of the world and mobile computing devices are more accessible. To establish a construct for radicalization,the power and reach of social media will be described so there is common understanding of what social media is and how it is utilized by various individuals and groups. The second section will answer the question of why social media applications are the perfect platform for the radical voice. Finally, the use of social media and its influence in radicalizing populations in Northern Africa and the Middle East during 2011 will be analyzed and recommendations proposed.
With headlines and texts held constant, the subheads of articles embedded in an Internet newsmagazine were manipulated in an overview from which articles could be selected. In a control condition, the lead, indicating deplorable happenings,was framed in a factual manner.In the other conditions,the leads were framed either in terms of conflict between feuding parties, the unfolding of disastrous occurrences, the emotional upheaval and agony suffered by the victims of these occurrences, or the economic implications of the incidents. Selective exposure to the articles was accumulated in minute intervals and automatically recorded. Leads projecting aggravated conflict or the agony over suffered misfortunes were found to foster increased reading times of the associated articles. The effects of highlighting misfortunes by themselves or of emphasizing the misfortunes’ economic implications proved to be negligible, however.
This article attempts to consolidate theorizing about the radicalization of Western homegrown jihadists. Five major models of radicalization are reviewed. The commonalities and discrepancies among these models are identified and analyzed in the context of empirical evidence in the field of terrorism research and social psychology. Three psychological factors emerge as contributors to radicalization: group relative deprivation, identity conflicts, and personality characteristics. Avenues for future research concerning the radicalization of homegrown jihadists are suggested, focusing on research that may not only be practical for counter-terrorism, but also feasible given the challenges of research with radicalized individuals.
We hypothesize that there is a general bias, based on both innate predispositions and experience, in animals and humans, to give greater weight to negative entities (e.g., events, objects, personal traits). This is manifested in 4 ways: (a) negative potency (negative entities are stronger than the equivalent positive entities), (b) steeper negative gradients (the negativity of negative events grows more rapidly with approach to them in space or time than does the positivity of positive events, (c) negativity dominance (combinations of negative and positive entities yield evaluations that are more negative than the algebraic sum of individual subjective valences would predict), and (d) negative differentiation (negative entities are more varied, yield more complex conceptual representations, and engage a wider response repertoire). We review evidence for this taxonomy, with emphasis on negativity dominance, including literary, historical, religious, and cultural sources, as well as the psychological literatures on learning, attention, impression formation, contagion, moral judgment, development, and memory. We then consider a variety of theoretical accounts for negativity bias. We suggest that I feature of negative events that make them dominant is that negative entities are more contagious than positive entities.
Right-wing populist movements and related political parties are gaining ground in many EU member states. This unique, interdisciplinary book provides an overall picture of the dynamics and development of these parties across Europe and beyond. Combining theory with in-depth case studies, it offers a comparative analysis of the policies and rhetoric of existing and emerging parties including the British BNP, the Hungarian Jobbik and the Danish Folkeparti.
The case studies qualitatively and quantitatively analyse right-wing populist groups in the following countries: Austria, Germany, Britain, France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, Ukraine, Estonia, and Latvia, with one essay exclusively focused on the US.
This timely and socially relevant collection is essential reading for scholars, students and practitioners wanting to understand the recent rise of populist right wing parties at local, countrywide and regional levels.
Understanding how extremist Salafists communicate, and not only what, is key to gaining insights into the ways they construct their social order and use psychological forces to radicalize potential sympathizers on social media. With a view to contributing to the existing body of research which mainly focuses on terrorist organizations, we analyzed accounts that advocate violent jihad without supporting (at least publicly) any terrorist group and hence might be able to reach a large and not yet radicalized audience. We constructed a critical multimodal and multidisciplinary framework of discourse patterns that may work as potential triggers to a selection of key cognitive biases and we applied it to a corpus of Facebook posts published by seven extremist Salafists. Results reveal how these posts are either based on an intense crisis construct (through negative outgroup nomination, intensification and emotion) or on simplistic solutions composed of taken-for-granted statements. Devoid of any grey zone, these posts do not seek to convince the reader; polarization is framed as a presuppositional established reality. These observations reveal that extremist Salafist communication is constructed in a way that may trigger specific cognitive biases, which are discussed in the paper.
Recent elections in Europe have demonstrated a steady rise in the success of right-wing populist parties. While advancing an anti-immigration agenda, these parties have been adamant to distance themselves from ‘right-wing extremism’. This article analyses a sample of tweets collected from the Twitter accounts of the German AfD, Identitarian Movement and the Autonomous Nationalists by employing frame analysis. We conclude that the frames of far-right actors classified as extremist, New Right, and populist in fact converge and we discuss our findings in the context of related case studies in other European countries.
There is a considerable body of work across the social sciences suggesting negativity biases in human attentiveness and decision-making. Recent research suggests that individual variation in negativity biases is correlated with political ideology: persons who have stronger physiological reactions to negative stimuli, this work argues, hold more conservative attitudes. However, such results have mostly been encountered in the United States. Does the link between psychophysiological negativity biases and political ideology apply elsewhere? We answer this question with the most extensive cross-national psychophysiological study to date. Respondents across 17 countries and six continents were exposed to negative and positive televised news reports and static images. Sensors tracked participants’ skin conductance, and a survey captured their left–right political orientation. Analyses performed at three levels of aggregation—respondent-as-a-case, stimuli-as-a-case, and second-by-second time-series—fail to find strong support for the link between negativity biases and political ideology.
Social media offers a forum for individuals to share experiences after being wronged by an individual, an organization, a group, or a government. While some individuals gain support through sharing experiences on social media, other victims become the subject of attacks or receive little to no response from others regarding their injustice. An individual’s response to a victim’s social media post may be explained by the just world hypothesis. In this article, we explain the just world hypothesis and how this theory applies to when individuals respond to victims on social media. The just world hypothesis offers a means to understand factors that encourage negative social media behaviors. In this conceptual article, we explain how future research may leverage the just world hypothesis as a theoretical lens to examine why individuals engage in victim blaming, victim apathy, or victim support using social media.
This study is the first to examine how Islamists in different phases of radicalization perceive media influence. Based on interviews with 34 Islamist prisoners and 9 former Islamists, we found that radicalized individuals perceived themselves as being immune to influence by the news media, which they generally perceived as being hostile. In contrast, they believed that the media had a relatively strong effect on the general public, on political and media elites, and on judges and prison officials. Strong third-person effects can thus be interpreted as a symptom within a larger syndrome of radicalization. According to participants, these perceptions of media influence were intertwined with their exposure to propaganda that blamed the media for the societal rejection of their ingroup. Future research should therefore investigate the use of strategic communications attacking the mainstream media as both a cause and consequence of individuals’ media influence perceptions.
While a plethora of previous studies have described extremist propaganda content that seeks to radicalize individuals, there has been a lack of research on how individuals who have become Islamists perceive and describe the propaganda they have used. To address this issue and to explore the personal drivers and circumstances of propaganda usage, we conducted in-depth interviews (n = 44) with radicalized Muslim prisoners and former Islamists in Germany and Austria. Our results found that several types of propaganda are used in sequence as individuals undergo cognitive and behavioral radicalization. Propaganda during cognitive radicalization is characterized by religious frames, which strictly advocate Islam as the ‘right’ way, while propaganda used during the behavioral radicalization phase is characterized by suggestions that violence is effective, urgent, and the only way to help Muslims. This use of different kinds of propaganda can be explained by individuals’ needs and the professionalism of Islamist leaders.
Right-wing extremists and Islamist extremists try to recruit new followers by addressing their national (for instance, German) or religious (Muslim) social identity via online propaganda videos. Two studies examined whether capitalizing on a shared group-membership affects the emotional and cognitive response towards extremist propaganda. In both studies, Germans/ non-migrants , Muslim migrants and control participants (N = 235) were confronted with right-wing extremist and Islamist extremist videos. Emotional and cognitive effects of students (Study 1) and apprentices (Study 2) were assessed. Results showed a general negative evaluation of extremist videos. More relevant, in-group propaganda led to more emotional costs in both studies. Yet, the responses varied depending on educational level: students reported more negative emotions and cognitions after in-group directed videos, while apprentices reported more positive emotions and cognitions after in-group directed propaganda. Results are discussed considering negative social identities.
Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) has shown inconsistent results as a predictor of beliefs in conspiracy theories (CTs). The present investigation attempted to clarify these results by separating anti-establishment CTs, which challenge the existing social order, from pro-establishment CTs, which seek to justify and reinforce it against external threats. In two MTurk samples (N = 294, 200), RWA correlated strongly with pro-establishment CTs but weakly with anti-establishment CTs. Regression analyses suggest that after controlling for exposure to the CTs, this gap in the predictive power of RWA can be explained by differences in attitudes toward their alleged perpetrators, highlighting the importance of intergroup attitudes as an important driver of CT endorsement.
We investigate how right-wing extremists use, perceive, and try to provoke news media coverage. Findings from qualitative interviews with former leaders of right-wing extremist groups in Germany, who served as key informants, show that reports on right-wing extremism are used and trigger feelings of being personally affected. Consequently, right-wing extremists show hostile-media and third-person perceptions. These perceptions influence both emotions and behaviors among right-wing extremists, for example, they cause right-wing leaders to strategically monitor news media to exploit them for political goals. Our findings are presented along with a model and are accompanied by a discussion of the implications for responsible journalism.
Prior research on extremism has identified a host of psychological, emotional, material, and group-based mechanisms that are potentially important drivers of individual radicalization. However, taken on their own, none of these factors have been shown to lead to extremist behaviors. Instead, radicalization is best understood as a set of complex causal processes in which multiple factors work together to produce extremist outcomes. This paper builds on prior research by showing how radicalization mechanisms drawn from five prominent research traditions combine to form multiple sufficient pathways to extremist violence. We identify these pathways by applying fuzzy-set/Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) to a sample of life-course narratives that includes violent and nonviolent extremists in the United States. We find that both a sense of community victimization and a fundamental shift in individuals’ cognitive frames are present in all pathways and act as necessary conditions for radicalization to violence. These conditions combine with a set of psychological, emotional, group, and material variables to produce eight pathways that are sufficient for explaining violent outcomes. Of these, the pathways that combine psychological rewards and group biases account for the radicalization processes of the majority of the cases in our sample.
Commonly used measures of authoritarian predispositions have received mixed support as a predictor of political preferences in American elections. Using new survey data (N = 1,444), we demonstrated how imprecise conceptualization and measurement of authoritarianism can obscure its relationship to candidate preferences. First, authoritarians have largely sorted into the Republican Party and self-identified as conservative, thereby attenuating the predictive power of authoritarianism when such features are used as controls or selection criteria. Second, the authoritarianism measure typically used in election studies covers a limited range of the construct, specifically focusing on the facet of authoritarianism we observed to be least associated with support for Republicans candidates in the 2016 American electoral context. We find predictive gains both from more comprehensive measurement of authoritarianism and from analyzing facet-level authoritarianism.
Partisan incivility is prevalent in news comments, but we have limited insight into how journalists and news users engage with it. Gatekeeping, cognitive bias, and social identity theories suggest that journalists may tolerate incivility while users actively promote partisan incivility. Using 9.6 million comments from The New York Times, we analyze whether the presence of uncivil and partisan terms affects how journalists and news users engage with comments. Results show that partisanship and incivility increase recommendations and the likelihood of receiving an abuse flag. Swearing increases the likelihood of a comment being rejected and reduces the chances of being highlighted as a NYT Pick. These findings suggest that journalists and news users interact with partisan incivility differently, and that some forms of incivility may be promoted or tacitly accepted in comments.
This volume introduces the concept of Islamist extremist ‘master narratives’ and offers a method for identifying and analyzing them. Drawing on rhetorical and narrative theories, the chapters examine thirteen master narratives and explain how extremists use them to solidify their base, recruit new members, and motivate actions. © Jeffry R. Halverson, H. L. Goodall Jr., and Steven R. Corman, 2011.
On the surface, cognitive biases appear to be puzzling when viewed through an evolutionary lens. Because they depart from standards of logic and accuracy, they appear to be design flaws instead of examples of good evolutionary engineering. Biases are often ascribed to cognitive ?constraints? or flaws in the design of the mind that were somehow not overcome by evolution. To the evolutionary psychologist, however, evolved psychological mechanisms are expected to solve particular problems well, in ways that contributed to fitness ancestrally. Viewed in this way, cognitive biasescould have evolved because they positively impacted fitness. They are, then, not necessarily designflaws?instead, they could be design features. This chapter describes research documenting adaptive biases across many domains. These include inferences about danger, the cooperativeness of others, and the sexual and romantic interests of prospective mates. This chapter also addresses the question of why biases often seem to be implemented at the cognitive level, producing genuine misperceptions, rather than merely biases in enacted behavior.
In this article, we review the literature and present a model of radicalization and de-radicalization. In this model, we distinguish three phases in radicalization: (1) a sensitivity phase, (2) a group membership phase and (3) an action phase. We describe the micro-level, meso-level and macro-level factors that influence the radicalization process in these three phases. However, not all people become increasingly radical — they may also de-radicalize. We specify the micro-level, meso-level and macro-level factors in de-radicalization. We highlight the importance of the role of group membership and intergroup relations in the radicalization process.
Employing a national probability survey in 2012, this study tests relationships between social media, social network service (SNS) network heterogeneity, and opinion polarization. The results show that the use of social media is a positive predictor of the level of network heterogeneity on SNSs and that the relationship is mediated by several news-related activities, such as getting news, news posting, and talking about politics on SNSs. Testing the association between SNS network heterogeneity and polarization, this study considers 3 different dimensions of opinion polarization: partisan, ideological, and issue. The findings indicate that political discussion moderates the relationship between network heterogeneity and the level of partisan and ideological polarizations. The implications of this study are discussed.
This study analyzes cross-sectional data obtained from respondents in neo-Nazi online discussion forums and textual data from postings to these forums. It assesses the impact of participation in radical and homogeneous online groups on opinion extremism and probes whether this impact depends on political dissimilarity of strong and weak offline ties. Specifically, does dissimilarity attenuate (as deliberative theorists hope) or rather exacerbate (as research on biased processing predicts) extreme opinions? As expected, extremism increases with increased online participation, likely due to the informational and normative influences operating within online groups. Supporting the deliberative and biased processing models, both like-minded and dissimilar social ties offline exacerbate extremism. Consistent with the biased processing model, dissimilar offline ties exacerbate the effects of online groups. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Though there appear to have been a number of psychological studies done in the 1930s and 1970s on the consequence of unemployment, there seem to be very few studies on attitudes toward the unemployed receiving social security benefits or attitudes toward welfare in general. This study examined the effect of sex, education, and voting pattern of over 170 subjects on their attitudes toward people receiving social security benefits. Both education and vote appeared to be important factors in predicting people's attitudes, though there were few sex or interaction effects. A factor analysis of the attitude items revealed three factors indicating that the attitudes centered around the difficulty of coping with the amount of benefit provided; beliefs about people being dishonest about their needs and abusing benefit payments; and the loss of self-esteem and stigma associated with being on social security. Results are discussed in terms of the psychology of explanations, and the implications for social change were noted.
This article examines the impact of social status on two well-known effects in intergroup perception, the out-group homogeneity effect and the ethnocentrism effect. Researchers have recently argued that these effects are asymmetrical and depend on the social status of the participants. However, this conclusion is based on studies that included only two participant groups and two target groups. We argue that conclusions about asymmetries in intergroup perception cannot be drawn from studies conforming to such a design. A new study involving four groups was therefore conducted to examine the relation between intergroup perception and social status. Members of two high-social-status groups (doctors and lawyers) and two low-social-status groups (hairdressers and waiters) participated. Both out-group homogeneity and ethnocentrism were assessed. Comparison of the effect sizes for the Participant Group × Target Group interactions constituted the test of asymmetry. The classic (symmetric) view accounted well for differences in perceived variability: all groups showed the out-group homogeneity bias. Ethnocentrism also appeared to be a symmetrical effect, though it was somewhat more pronounced for low-status groups. The dominant finding in the current literature, namely that out-group homogeneity and ethnocentrism are more pronounced for high-status groups, received no support.
This study analyzes survey data obtained from members in neo-Nazi and environmentalist discussion forums. It assesses the links between participation in radical and ideologically homogeneous online groups and two forms of political engagement (Movement Support and Movement Promotion). This study also tests whether perceived political dissimilarity of offline friends and family (core ties) and of more distant interpersonal associates (significant ties) encourages or thwarts political engagement and whether it moderates the influence exerted by online groups. As expected, political engagement among the analyzed respondents increases with online participation, also controlling for extremism, political discussion and news media use. Although dissimilar core ties neither encourage nor discourage political engagement, they moderate the mobilizing influence from neo-Nazi and radical environmentalist online groups. Dissimilar significant ties, in turn, do not directly affect political engagement and do not interact with online participation. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Today, people can easily select media outlets sharing their political predispositions, a behavior known as partisan selective exposure. Additional research is needed, however, to better understand the causes and consequences of partisan selective exposure. This study investigates the relationship between partisan selective exposure and political polarization using data from the National Annenberg Election Survey. Cross-sectional results show strong evidence that partisan selective exposure is related to polarization. Over-time analyses document that partisan selective exposure leads to polarization. Some evidence supports the reverse causal direction, namely that polarization leads to partisan selective exposure. Implications for the study of media effects and normative implications—both positive and negative—are discussed.
A model of authoritarianism on a group level of analysis based on Duckitt's concept of authoritarianism is presented. This conceptualization is called group authoritarianism (GA), which is defined as the belief about the appropriate relationship that should exist between groups and their individual members. The process model of group authoritarianism connects traditional authoritarianism theories with the Social Identity Approach. According to this model group-authoritarianism reflects the situation-specific activation of an authoritarian disposition in group contexts. Thus, group authoritarianism provides a perspective according to which personality characteristics and general psychological mechanisms described by Social-Identity Theory (SIT) and Self-Categorization Theory (SCT) interact in predicting intergroup hostility and intergroup discrimination. This article describes the development of a group authoritarianism scale as well as an experimental study that tests the main assumption of the group authoritarianism process model. The results confirm the reliability and validity of the group authoritarianism scales and the main hypothesis of the group authoritarianism model.
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.
Three experiments investigated whether a negativity bias in social perception extends to preschool-aged children's memory for the details of others' social actions and experiences. After learning about individuals who committed nice or mean social actions, children in Experiment 1 were more accurate at remembering who was mean compared with who was nice. In Experiment 2, children showed a memory advantage for the specific details of actions committed by mean individuals compared with nice individuals. In Experiment 3, children exhibited better memory for the details of mean actions compared with nice actions when the vignettes were presented from the perspective of the recipients instead of the perpetrators of these actions. Taken together, these findings suggest that children show heightened memory for the details of negative social actions over positive social actions. Such a memory bias may be advantageous in helping children to predict potentially threatening situations in the future.
This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: (i) representativeness,
which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process
B; (ii) availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a
class or the plausibility of a particular development; and (iii) adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical
prediction when a relevant value is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead
to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could
improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty.
Abstract Since the 1980s the rise of so-called ‘populist parties’ has given rise to thousands of books, articles, columns and editorials. This article aims to make a threefold contribution to the current debate on populism in liberal democracies. First, a clear and new definition of populism is presented. Second, the normal-pathology thesis is rejected; instead it is argued that today populist discourse has become mainstream in the politics of western democracies. Indeed, one can even speak of a populist Zeitgeist. Third, it is argued that the explanations of and reactions to the current populist Zeitgeist are seriously flawed and might actually strengthen rather than weaken it.
The self-esteem hypothesis in intergroup relations, as proposed by social identity theory (SIT), states that successful intergroup discrimination enhances momentary collective self-esteem. This hypothesis is a source of continuing controversy. Furthermore, although SIT is increasingly used to account for children’s group attitudes, few studies have examined the hypothesis among children. In addition, the hypothesis’s generality makes it important to study among children from different ethnic groups. The present study, conducted among Dutch and Turkish preadolescents, examined momentary collective self-feelings as a consequence of ethnic group evaluations. The results tended to support the self-esteem hypothesis. In-group favoritism was found to have a self-enhancing effect among participants high in ethnic identification. This result was found for ethnic majority (Dutch) and minority (Turkish) participants.
This article examines why people may blame innocent victims of robbery or sexual assault. We propose that in experiential mind-sets associative links are formed between the victim and the negative event. As the creation of such links is independent of explicit beliefs, people in experiential mind-sets produce negative reactions to the victim independent of their just-world beliefs. Rationalistic mind-sets, however, instigate propositional and consistency-based reasoning. For people who strongly endorse just-world beliefs (such as people who have strong predispositions to believe that the world is just or whose just-world beliefs have been threatened strongly), learning about an innocent victim creates a logically inconsistent system of beliefs. This inconsistency can be resolved by blaming the victim. For people who only weakly endorse just-world beliefs, there is no inconsistency in the first place and therefore no need to blame the victim. Two experiments support this line of reasoning.