No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Unraveling American Sympathies toward Israelis and Palestinians
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Why are democratic publics reluctant to use force against fellow democracies? We hypothesize that the democratic peace in public opinion owes, in large part, to racialized assumptions about democracy. Rather than regime type per se doing the causal work, the term “democracy” inadvertently primes the presumption that target countries are predominantly white. This implicit racialization, in turn, explains the reluctance of the American public to support aggression against fellow democracies, most notably among respondents higher in ethnocentrism who disproportionately drive the democratic peace treatment effect. Two original survey experiments, a large-scale word embedding analysis of English texts, and reanalyses of published studies support this expectation. Our results suggest that the democratic peace in public opinion is, largely, an ethnocentric and racialized peace. The findings hold implications for the role of racism and racialization in foreign policy opinion research generally.
Does public support for armed humanitarian intervention depend on the race and religion of those it seeks to save? Social identity theory predicts that people prefer helping strangers with whom they share an identity, but norms of paternalism and cosmopolitanism could moderate such favoritism. We test these propositions via survey experiments administered to a nationally representative sample of Americans that randomized the racial and religious characteristics of foreigners in a hypothetical civil war. The data reveal that Americans, especially Christians, prefer to intervene on behalf of Christians over Muslims. Ingroup affinity rather than outgroup Islamophobia explains this effect. Meanwhile, Americans exhibit less consistent prejudice along racial lines. Finally, while scholars find paternalist norms affect attitudes toward economic assistance, we find no similar effect for military intervention. Cosmopolitan Americans, however, express less identity-based bias. We conclude that people act on their basic socio-psychological instincts, but norms could attenuate these biases.
The 2016 presidential campaign saw high levels of anti-Muslim online and offline hate. But, by the August 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ rally, anti-Muslim discourse and hate crimes had partly receded, despite the group remaining politically salient and despite a sharp increase in White ‘nationalist’ activity targeting another religious minority, Jews. Was this by chance? Because we might expect White nationalist activity to increase hate against all groups, the counter-intuitive decline in anti-Muslim hate could have been coincidental. We argue instead that those shifts in animus toward Muslims and Jews should be considered in tandem, and that these over-time patterns of hate reflected different manifestations of elevated and constant religious ethnocentrism, especially among far-right extremists. Using data on fringe and mainstream social media sites and hate crime databases, we present two core sets of findings. First, increased anti-Jewish speech was partly driven by the same far-right communities and extremists who previously promoted anti-Muslim speech. Moreover, combined anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish rhetoric in fringe far-right social media over this period was sustained at a high and largely constant level, seeing shifts primarily in the targets of hate speech. Second, similar patterns manifest offline: hate crimes were more strongly associated with which group was targeted by hate speech, but not the overall prevalence of hate speech. Together, this study demonstrates a robust link between the dislike toward Muslims and dislike toward Jews, and how fringe groups organize the dissemination of hate.
How do White Americans evaluate the politics of belonging in the United States across different ethnoreligious identity categories? This paper examines this question through two competing frameworks. On the one hand, given the salience of anti-Muslim attitudes in the United States, we consider whether White Americans penalize Muslim immigrants to the United States regardless of their ethnoracial background. On the other hand, Muslim identity is often conflated by the general public with Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) ethnoracial identity. We argue MENA-Muslim identity should be understood through the lens of intersectionality. In this case, White Americans may penalize MENA-Muslims immigrants to the United States more than Muslims from other ethnoracial groups. We test these two frameworks through a conjoint experimental design wherein respondents are asked to evaluate immigrants and indicate to whom the United States should give a green card—signaling legal belonging—and how likely the immigrant is to assimilate into America—signaling cultural belonging. Although White Americans believe White Muslims may assimilate better to the United States relative to MENA-Muslims, race does not moderate how White Americans evaluate who should be allowed to belong in the United States.
Is Israeli democracy at risk? This was a question raised by analysts and opinion makers after the results of the November 2022 Knesset elections in Israel, and the victory of Benjamin Netanyahu and far right parties aligned with him. In this Middle East Brief, Michal Ben-Josef Hirsch argues that while the election results raise the short-term risk of populist authoritarianism in Israel, the more significant and longer-term risks are the erosion of democratic institutions and decline in democratic values, particularly among Israeli youth. She concludes that these risks further shape and are being shaped by Israel’s ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Scholars continue to debate whether public opinion in democracies influences the foreign policy preferences of their leaders. We intervene into this literature through a survey experiment in which we asked 101 British members of Parliament (MPs) for their views about the UK military presence in the South China Sea. Using random assignment, some of the MPs received information from a public opinion poll about this issue. MPs who received the polling information, compared with those who did not, voiced opinions closer to those of the public. This finding advances the state of knowledge because we uncover causally identified evidence and employ a realistic research design (we surveyed policy makers of a global power using real public opinion data about an active policy issue). Our study suggests that leaders respond to public opinion, which has implications for theories about democratic responsiveness and the impact of domestic audiences on foreign policy.
This study considers the sources of evangelical support for Israel, utilizing an original survey of 1,000 evangelical and born-again respondents. The results show that the three strongest predictors of evangelical and born-again Christian support for Israel are (1) age (older respondents are more supportive); (2) opinion of Jews; and (3) socialization (frequency of hearing other evangelicals talking about Israel). Our results also show that evangelical support for Israel is driven by respondents' beliefs rooted in evangelical Christian theology on eschatology and Biblical literalism. Thus, the most significant ideological statements that were found in the research were that the “State of Israel is proof of the fulfillment of prophesy regarding the nearing of Jesus' Second Coming” and that “Jews are God's chosen people.” Another important finding is that there is less support toward Israel among young evangelicals (ages 18–29).
What types of refugees do Americans prefer for admission into the United States? Scholars have explored the immigrant characteristics that appeal to Americans and the characteristics that Europeans prioritize in asylum-seekers, but we currently do not know which refugee characteristics Americans prefer. We conduct a conjoint experiment on a representative sample of 1800 US adults, manipulating refugee attributes in pairs of Syrian refugee profiles, and ask respondents to rate each refugee’s appeal. Our focus on Syrian refugees in a 2016 survey experiment allows us to speak to the concurrent refugee crisis on the eve of a polarizing election, while also identifying religious discrimination, holding constant the refugee’s national origin. We find that Americans prefer Syrian refugees who are female, high-skilled, English-speaking, and Christian, suggesting they prioritize refugee integration into the U.S. labor and cultural markets. We find that the preference for female refugees is not driven by the desire to exclude Muslim male refugees, casting doubt that American preferences at the time were motivated by security concerns. Finally, we find that anti-Muslim bias in refugee preferences varies in magnitude across key subgroups, though it prevails across all sample demographics.
The Behavioral Revolution and International Relations - Volume 71 Issue S1 - Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Stephan Haggard, David A. Lake, David G. Victor
This book has several main themes and arguments. International Relations has been westerncentric, which has contributed to its ignoring religion; while religion is not the main driving force behind IR, international politics cannot be understood without taking religion into account; the role of religion is related to the fact that IR has evolved to become more than just interstate relations and now included elements of domestic politics. The book proceeds in three stages. First, it looks at why religion was ignored by IR theory and theorists. Second, it examines the multiple ways religion influences IR, including through religious legitimacy and the many ways domestic religious issues can cross borders. In this discussion a number of topics including but not limited to international intervention, international organizations, religious fundamentalism, political Islam, Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' theory, and terrorism are addressed. Third, these factors are examined empirically using both quantitative and case study methodology.
This article focuses on the ways religious factors might influence public opinion on foreign policy issues. It reviews the latest political science perspectives on the shape of public opinion on foreign policy that have emphasized the coherence of competing public orientations toward American policy in the world. One section considers the existing work on religion and public opinion, and discovers-through incidental evidence- that religion has had considerable impact on those orientations.
How do citizens respond to dramatic foreign policy events, such as the recent changes in Soviet U.S. relations, when a traditional foe exhibits strong signs of conciliatory behavior? Using panel data collected before and after the nuclear arms summits of 1987 and 1988, we explore both the consequences and antecedents of changing images of the Soviet Union. Having shown in a prior cross-sectional study that Soviet images constrain policy attitudes in a static sense, the current panel study finds evidence of what Converse (1964) labeled dynamic constraint, in that softening perceptions of the Soviet Union appeared to precipitate more "dovish" policy attitudes. Our study also extends earlier work on enemy images in finding that some people are more resistant to change than others, notably political experts with extremely negative (i.e., "bad faith") initial images. The general importance of studying enemy images in the post-Cold War era is discussed.
What are the underpinnings and ramifications of anti‐Muslim attitudes in the United States? While scholars have emphasized the centrality of race and racial attitudes to American politics, examinations of hostility towards Muslim Americans with context‐specific measures are still lacking despite the increasing relevance of this population in the public imagination. Particularly after the tragic 9/11 attacks, Islamophobia emerged as a pervasive force in American social and political life, entangling race, religion, and nationality to further stigmatize and marginalize Muslims. By more systematically examining the relationship between anti‐Muslim attitudes and public support for a range of initiatives that aim to, or already have, further marginalize(d) American Muslims, the research presented herein aims to underscore the limitations of attitudinal measures that lack context specificity. Through two studies that utilize a nationally representative survey and a longitudinal study of public opinion towards Muslims, we make the case for the development and use of more nuanced measures that capture the distinct nature of hostility towards Muslims as encompassing both perceived realistic and symbolic threats. Additionally, we consider the range of social, psychological, and physical consequences that Islamophobia may exert on Muslim individuals themselves, as well as their interactions with the majority population. These have important implications for scholars studying the sociopolitical behavior of Muslims and policymakers seeking to counteract the adverse effects of Islamophobia in the United States or elsewhere.
Political scientists frequently interpret the results of conjoint experiments as reflective of majority preferences. In this article, we show that the target estimand of conjoint experiments, the average marginal component effect (AMCE), is not well defined in these terms. Even with individually rational experimental subjects, the AMCE can indicate the opposite of the true preference of the majority. To show this, we characterize the preference aggregation rule implied by the AMCE and demonstrate its several undesirable properties. With this result, we provide a method for placing bounds on the proportion of experimental subjects who prefer a given candidate feature. We describe conditions under which the AMCE corresponds in sign with the majority preference. Finally, we offer a structural interpretation of the AMCE and highlight that the problem we describe persists even when a model of voting is imposed.
Forced-choice conjoint experiments have become a standard component of the experimental toolbox in political science and sociology. Yet the literature has largely overlooked the fact that conjoint experiments can be used for two distinct purposes: to uncover respondents’ multidimensional preferences, and to estimate the causal effects of some attributes on a profile’s selection probability in a multidimensional choice setting. This paper makes the argument that this distinction is both analytically and practically relevant, because the quantity of interest is contingent on the purpose of the study. The vast majority of social scientists relying on conjoint analyses, including most scholars interested in studying preferences, have adopted the average marginal component effect (AMCE) as their main quantity of interest. The paper shows that the AMCE is neither conceptually nor practically suited to explore respondents’ preferences. Not only is it essentially a causal quantity conceptually at odds with the goal of describing patterns of preferences, but it also does generally not identify preferences, mixing them with compositional effects unrelated to preferences. This paper proposes a novel estimand—the average component preference—designed to explore patterns of preferences, and it presents a method for estimating it.
The global movement for racial justice and the rise of anti-Asian hate at the height of the pandemic have called new attention to race and racism in international politics. Although critical theorists have decried the “norm against noticing,” other scholars of international relations have long sidestepped the possible role of race in shaping contemporary international affairs. New studies of hierarchy in international relations open the door for new understandings of race in world politics. We propose an analytic framework for the relationship between racial hierarchy, international law, and foreign policy, demonstrating that race can help explain patterns of interstate interactions that sustain an unequal global order. Positing two faces of racism in international relations, we examine how race biases international law in practice and affects the assessment of foreign threats and national interest. We discuss key methodological challenges in empirical research on race in international relations, focusing on issues of measurement, aggregation, and causation.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 25 is May 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
How can we elicit honest responses in surveys? Conjoint analysis has become a popular tool to address social desirability bias (SDB), or systematic survey misreporting on sensitive topics. However, there has been no direct evidence showing its suitability for this purpose. We propose a novel experimental design to identify conjoint analysis’s ability to mitigate SDB. Specifically, we compare a standard, fully randomized conjoint design against a partially randomized design where only the sensitive attribute is varied between the two profiles in each task. We also include a control condition to remove confounding due to the increased attention to the varying attribute under the partially randomized design. We implement this empirical strategy in two studies on attitudes about environmental conservation and preferences about congressional candidates. In both studies, our estimates indicate that the fully randomized conjoint design could reduce SDB for the average marginal component effect (AMCE) of the sensitive attribute by about two-thirds of the AMCE itself. Although encouraging, we caution that our results are exploratory and exhibit some sensitivity to alternative model specifications, suggesting the need for additional confirmatory evidence based on the proposed design.
Experimental political science has changed. In two short decades, it evolved from an emergent method to an accepted method to a primary method. The challenge now is to ensure that experimentalists design sound studies and implement them in ways that illuminate cause and effect. Ethical boundaries must also be respected, results interpreted in a transparent manner, and data and research materials must be shared to ensure others can build on what has been learned. This book explores the application of new designs; the introduction of novel data sources, measurement approaches, and statistical methods; the use of experiments in more substantive domains; and discipline-wide discussions about the robustness, generalizability, and ethics of experiments in political science. By exploring these novel opportunities while also highlighting the concomitant challenges, this volume enables scholars and practitioners to conduct high-quality experiments that will make key contributions to knowledge.
How do military alliances affect public support for war to defend victims of aggression? We offer the first experimental evidence on this fundamental question. Our experiments revealed that alliance commitments greatly increased the American public's willingness to intervene abroad. Alliances shaped public opinion by increasing public fears about the reputational costs of nonintervention and by heightening the perceived moral obligation to intervene out of concerns for fairness and loyalty. Finally, although alliances swayed public opinion across a wide range of circumstances, they made the biggest difference when the costs of intervention were high, the stakes of intervention were low, and the country needing aid was not a democracy. Thus, alliances can create pressure for war even when honoring the commitment would be extremely inconvenient, which could help explain why democratic allies tend to be so reliable. These findings shed new light on the consequences of alliances and other international legal commitments, the role of morality in foreign policy, and ongoing debates about domestic audience costs.
Conjoint analysis has become popular among social scientists for measuring multidimensional preferences. When analyzing such experiments, researchers often focus on the average marginal component effect (AMCE), which represents the causal effect of a single profile attribute while averaging over the remaining attributes. What has been overlooked, however, is the fact that the AMCE critically relies upon the distribution of the other attributes used for the averaging. Although most experiments employ the uniform distribution, which equally weights each profile, both the actual distribution of profiles in the real world and the distribution of theoretical interest are often far from uniform. This mismatch can severely compromise the external validity of conjoint analysis. We empirically demonstrate that estimates of the AMCE can be substantially different when averaging over the target profile distribution instead of uniform. We propose new experimental designs and estimation methods that incorporate substantive knowledge about the profile distribution. We illustrate our methodology through two empirical applications, one using a real-world distribution and the other based on a counterfactual distribution motivated by a theoretical consideration. The proposed methodology is implemented through an open-source software package.
Do partisan disagreements over politically relevant facts, and preferences for the information sources from which to obtain them, represent genuine differences of opinion or insincere cheerleading? The answer to this question is crucial for understanding the scope of partisan polarization. We test between these alternatives with experiments that offer incentives for correct survey responses and allow respondents to search for information before answering each question. We find that partisan cheerleading inflates divides in factual information, but only modestly. Incentives have no impact on partisan divides in information search; these divides are no different from those that occur outside the survey context when we examine web‐browsing data from the same respondents. Overall, our findings support the motivated reasoning interpretation of misinformation; partisans seek out information with congenial slant and sincerely adopt inaccurate beliefs that cast their party in a favorable light.
Cambridge Core - Sociology of Race and Ethnicity - Outsiders at Home - by Nazita Lajevardi
Canonical models of costly signaling in international relations (IR) tend to assume costly signals speak for themselves: a signal's costliness is typically understood to be a function of the signal, not the perceptions of the recipient. Integrating the study of signaling in IR with research on motivated skepticism and asymmetric updating from political psychology, we show that individuals’ tendencies to embrace information consistent with their overarching belief systems (and dismiss information inconsistent with it) has important implications for how signals are interpreted. We test our theory in the context of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on Iran, combining two survey experiments fielded on members of the American mass public. We find patterns consistent with motivated skepticism: the individuals most likely to update their beliefs are those who need reassurance the least, such that costly signals cause polarization rather than convergence. Successful signaling therefore requires knowing something about the orientations of the signal's recipient.
Much of what we know theoretically and empirically about attitudes toward racialized minorities in the US is predicated on early research on white opinion toward Black Americans. Although Muslim Americans have garnered considerable political attention and have been exposed to tremendous scrutiny and discrimination since 9/11, not many theoretical insights apart from generalized ethnocentric accounts have been offered to explain unfavorable attitudes toward this population, let alone the prevalence of community-level opposition toward proposed mosque projects. We offer a theoretical perspective grounded in orientalist notions of Islam and set group-specific measures focused on the perceived beliefs and behaviors of Muslim Americans against indicators of generalized ethnocentrism. Our findings highlight the limitations of applying general models of intergroup relations to understanding the dynamics of prejudice toward Muslim Americans. We conclude by encouraging scholars to consider more distinctive, group-specific constructs that could aid advocacy groups and policymakers to combat prejudice and discrimination against American Muslims.
If citizens are to hold politicians accountable for their performance, they probably must have some sense of the relevant facts, such as whether the economy is growing. In surveys, Democrats and Republicans often claim to hold different beliefs about these facts, which raises normative concerns. However, it is not clear that their divergent survey responses reflect actual divergence of beliefs. In this review, we conclude that partisan divergence in survey responses is often not due to sincere, considered differences of belief that fall along party lines—but determining what it is due to is difficult. We review the evidence for possible explanations, especially insincere responding and congenial inference. Research in this area is still nascent, and much more will be required before we can speak with precision about the causes of partisan divergence in responses to factual questions.
Do costly signals work? Despite their widespread popularity, both hands-tying and sunk-cost signaling have come under criticism, and there’s little direct evidence that leaders understand costly signals the way our models tell us they should. We present evidence from a survey experiment fielded on a unique sample of elite decision makers from the Israeli Knesset. We find that both types of costly signaling are effective in shaping assessments of resolve for both leaders and the public. However, although theories of signaling tend to assume homogenous audiences, we show that leaders vary significantly in how credible they perceive signals to be, depending on their foreign policy dispositions, rather than their levels of military or political experience. Our results thus encourage international relations scholars to more fully bring heterogeneous recipients into our theories of signaling and point to the important role of dispositional orientations for the study of leaders.
Contemporary concerns with the prospects for capitalism and its potentially deleterious effects are an episode in an ongoing debate over commercial society going back nearly three centuries. Adam Smith and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were leading figures on opposed sides in the eighteenth-century debate, and yet scholars have recently highlighted the remarkably similar way Smith and Rousseau both diagnose the potential psychological, moral, and economic ills of commercial society. Why, then, does Smith advocate commercial society, while Rousseau opposes it? We argue that Smith’s divergence from Rousseau is decisively based on his distinct account of human psychology. Specifically, we demonstrate that Smith’s theory of mutual sympathy differs from Rousseau’s understanding of pity (pitié) such that Smith is led to be cautiously optimistic about the potential for positive-sum moral, social, and economic interactions among individuals, or what we term the “moral economy.”. © 2018 by the Southern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
Survey experiments often manipulate the description of attributes in a hypothetical scenario, with the goal of learning about those attributes’ real-world effects. Such inferences rely on an underappreciated assumption: experimental conditions must be information equivalent (IE) with respect to background features of the scenario. IE is often violated because subjects, when presented with information about one attribute, update their beliefs about others too. Labeling a country “a democracy,” for example, affects subjects’ beliefs about the country’s geographic location. When IE is violated, the effect of the manipulation need not correspond to the quantity of interest (the effect of beliefs about the focal attribute). We formally define the IE assumption, relating it to the exclusion restriction in instrumental-variable analysis. We show how to predict IE violations ex ante and diagnose them ex post with placebo tests. We evaluate three strategies for achieving IE. Abstract encouragement is ineffective. Specifying background details reduces imbalance on the specified details and highly correlated details, but not others. Embedding a natural experiment in the scenario can reduce imbalance on all background beliefs, but raises other issues. We illustrate with four survey experiments, focusing on an extension of a prominent study of the democratic peace.
How do states know what they want? Asking how interests are defined and how changes in them are accommodated, Martha Finnemore shows the fruitfulness of a constructivist approach to international politics. She draws on insights from sociological institutionalism to develop a systemic approach to state interests and state behavior by investigating an international structure not of power but of meaning and social value. An understanding of what states want, she argues, requires insight into the international social structure of which they are a part. States are embedded in dense networks of transnational and international social relations that shape their perceptions and their preferences in consistent ways. Finnemore focuses on international organizations as one important component of social structure and investigates the ways in which they redefine state preferences. She details three examples in different issue areas. In state structure, she discusses UNESCO and the changing international organization of science. In security, she analyzes the role of the Red Cross and the acceptance of the Geneva Convention rules of war. Finally, she focuses on the World Bank and explores the changing definitions of development in the Third World. Each case shows how international organizations socialize states to accept new political goals and new social values in ways that have lasting impact on the conduct of war, the workings of the international political economy, and the structure of states themselves.
Foreign aid allocations represent one of several important economic policy tools used by governments to realize their foreign policy objectives. Using a conjoint survey of respondents in the United States, this paper shows that recipient country religion is a significant determinant of individual-level foreign aid preferences. In particular, respondents express a preference for giving to Christian-majority countries in contrast to Muslim- or Buddhist-majority countries. This effect is comparable with that of other important determinants of support for foreign aid, such as a country's status as a U.S. ally or trade partner. Importantly, the preference for Christian recipient countries is especially pronounced among Christian, and most notably Evangelical Christian, respondents. This paper explores two potential mechanisms for the effect of religion: country religion as a heuristic and an individual-level preference for giving to co-religionists.
Humanitarian interventions (HIs) are a common aspect of US foreign policy. Policy makers acknowledge the importance of public support for interventions, but scholars remain divided about the extent and basis of that support. Using a series of survey experiments, we evaluate attitudes about HIs, assess whether the public supports these interventions for instrumental or moral reasons, and test which aspects of morality are most salient. The findings indicate that interventions addressing humanitarian crises boost public support, with the basis of that support residing primarily in normative contentions that the United States has a moral obligation to protect civilians. This research advances understandings of morality in foreign policy, mediates debates about the determinants of public attitudes—including when the public makes moral rather than prudent decisions about interventions—and has important policy implications. It suggests a morally motivated public may be more likely to support risky HIs, increasing the likelihood of using force.
Most observers attribute evangelical Christians' bedrock support for Israel to the apocalyptic belief that the Jews must return to Israel as a precondition for Christ's Second Coming. But the actual reasons, this book argues, are far more complicated. In Evangelicals and Israel, the book delves deeply into the Christian Zionist movement, mining information from original interviews, websites, evangelical publications, survey research, news reports, worship services, and interfaith conferences to provide a surprising look at the sources of evangelicals' alliance with Israel. He finds a complex set of motivations. In addition to end-times theology, these include gratitude to the Jews for providing the theological foundation for Christianity; remorse for the Church's past anti-Semitism; the belief that God will bless those who bless Israel and curse him who curses Israel; fear that He will judge the nations at the end of time based on how they treated the Jewish people; appreciation of Israel as a friendly democracy; and reliance on the Jewish state as the West's only firewall against Islamist terrorism. This book explores many Christian Zionists' hostility toward Islam, but also their unexpected pragmatism and flexibility concerning Israel's occupation of the West Bank. The book looks as well at George W. Bush's beliefs about the Bible and the evangelical influence on his Middle East policies.
Part I. From There to Here - Theoretical Background: 1. From visiousness to viciousness: theories of intergroup relations 2. Social dominance theory as a new synthesis Part II. Oppression and its Psycho-Ideological Elements: 3. The psychology of group dominance: social dominance orientation 4. Let's both agree that you're really stupid: the power of consensual ideology Part III. The Circle of Oppression - The Myriad Expressions of Institutional Discrimination: 5. You stay in your part of town and I'll stay in mine: discrimination in the housing and retail markets 6. They're just too lazy to work: discrimination in the labor market 7. They're just mentally and physically unfit: discrimination in education and health care 8. The more of 'them' in prison, the better: institutional terror, social control and the dynamics of the criminal justice system Part IV. Oppression as a Cooperative Game: 9. Social hierarchy and asymmetrical group behavior: social hierarchy and group difference in behavior 10. Sex and power: the intersecting political psychologies of patriarchy and empty-set hierarchy 11. Epilogue.
A core feature of intractable conflicts is the tendency to cognitively freeze on existing, pro-ingroup beliefs. In three experiments, conducted in the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, we tested the idea that an external incentive for negotiating peace helps unfreeze cognitions. In Experiment 1, making salient that peace with the Palestinians would reduce the Iranian nuclear threat (an external incentive) led to a process of unfreezing. In Experiment 2, we examined whether collective angst as an emotional sentiment (i.e., concern for the ingroup's future vitality as a temporally stable emotional disposition) moderated the aforementioned external incentive-cognitive unfreezing link. As predicted, external incentive salience promoted cognitive unfreezing, but only among people low in collective angst (i.e., people who are not concerned for the ingroup's future). In Experiment 3, we sought to replicate the results of Experiment 2. However, socio-political forces (i.e., a significant upswing in tensions between Palestinians and Israelis) likely served to freeze cognitions to such an extent that thawing was not possible by the means demonstrated in Experiments 1 and 2. The importance of confidence in a peace process is discussed in the context of efforts to unfreeze cognitions during an intractable conflict.
© 2015 The British Psychological Society.
Local television news is the public's primary source of public affairs information. News stories about crime dominate local news programming because they meet the demand for "action news." The prevalence of this type of reporting has led to a crime narrative or "script" that includes two core elements: crime is violent and perpetrators of crime are non-white males. We show that this script has become an ingrained heuristic for understanding crime and race. Using a multi-method design, we assess the impact of the crime script on the viewing public. Our central finding is that exposure to the racial element of the crime script increases support for punitive approaches to crime and heightens negative attitudes about African-Americans among white, but not black, viewers. In closing, we consider the implications of our results for intergroup relations, electoral politics, and the practice of journalism.
Although classical international relations theorists largely agreed that public opinion about foreign policy is shaped by moral sentiments, public opinion scholars have yet to explore the content of these moral values, and American IR theorists have tended to exclusively associate morality with liberal idealism. Integrating the study of American foreign policy attitudes with Moral Foundations Theory from social psychology, we present original survey data showing that the five established moral values in psychology-harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/sanctity-are strongly and systematically associated with foreign policy attitudes. The "individualizing'' foundations of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity are particularly important drivers of cooperative internationalism and the "binding'' foundations of authority/respect, ingroup/loyalty, and purity/sanctity of militant internationalism. Hawks and hardliners have morals too, just a different set of moral values than the Enlightenment ones emphasized by liberal idealists.
