Shree Vallabha’s research while affiliated with Michigan State University and other places

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Publications (12)


Registered report: Cognitive ability, but not cognitive reflection, predicts expressing greater political animosity and favouritism
  • Article

November 2024

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24 Reads

British Journal of Social Psychology

Abigail L Cassario

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Shree Vallabha

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Jordan L Thompson

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[...]

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Mark J Brandt

Liberals and conservatives both express political animosity and favouritism. However, less is known about whether the same or different factors contribute to this phenomenon among liberals and conservatives. We test three different relationships that could emerge among cognitive ability, cognitive reflection and political group‐based attitudes. Analysing two nationally representative surveys of US Americans ( N = 9035) containing a measure of cognitive ability, we find evidence that compared to people lower in cognitive ability, people higher in cognitive ability express more animosity towards ideologically discordant groups and more favouritism towards ideologically concordant groups. This pattern was particularly pronounced among liberals. In a registered report study, we then test whether the same is true of cognitive reflection in another large dataset ( N = 3498). In contrast to cognitive ability, we find no relationship between cognitive reflection, political animosity and favouritism. Together, these studies provide a comprehensive test of how cognitive ability and cognitive reflection are related to political animosity and favouritism for liberals and conservatives in the United States.


Registered Report: Cognitive Ability, But Not Cognitive Reflection Predicts Expressing Greater Political Animosity and Favouritism

October 2024

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19 Reads

Liberals and conservatives both express political animosity and favouritism. However, less is known about whether the same or different factors contribute to this phenomenon among liberals and conservatives. We test three different relationships that could emerge between cognitive ability and cognitive reflection, and political group-based attitudes. Analyzing two nationally representative surveys of US Americans (N= 9,035) containing a measure of cognitive ability, we find evidence that compared to people lower in cognitive ability, people higher in cognitive ability express more animosity towards ideologically discordant groups, and more favouritism towards ideologically concordant groups. This pattern was particularly pronounced among liberals. In a registered report study, we then test whether the same is true of cognitive reflection in another large dataset (N = 3,498). In contrast to cognitive ability, we find no relationship between cognitive reflection and political animosity and favouritism. Together, these studies provide a comprehensive test of how cognitive ability and cognitive reflection are related to political animosity and favouritism for liberals and conservatives in the United States.


Depiction of actual and model estimated slopes
Error bars are 95% confidence interval.
Predictive equations of prejudice from Brandt’s [1] work and preliminary MSEs (Study 1)
Demographics from the ideology 2.0 dataset
Absolute measures of prejudice in the ideology 2.0 dataset
Number of absolute measure responses per distinct group in the data

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Registered report protocol: Stress testing predictive models of ideological prejudice
  • Article
  • Full-text available

August 2024

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39 Reads

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1 Citation

In this registered report, we propose to stress-test existing models for predicting the ideology-prejudice association, which varies in size and direction across target groups. Previous models of this relationship use the perceived ideology, status, and choice in group membership of target groups to predict the ideology-prejudice association across target groups. These analyses show that models using only the perceived ideology of the target group are more accurate and parsimonious in predicting the ideology-prejudice association than models using perceived status, choice, and all of the characteristics in a single model. Here, we stress-test the original models by testing the models’ predictive utility with new measures of explicit prejudice, a comparative operationalization of prejudice, the Implicit Association Test, and additional target groups. In Study 1, we propose to directly test the previous models using an absolute measure of prejudice that closely resembles the measure used in the original study. This will tell us if the models replicate with distinct, yet conceptually similar measures of prejudice. In Study 2, we propose to develop new ideology-prejudice models for a comparative operationalization of prejudice using both explicit measures and the Implicit Association Test. We will then test these new models using data from the Ideology 2.0 project collected by Project Implicit. We do not have full access to this data yet, but upon acceptance of our Stage 1 registered report, we will gain access to the complete dataset. Currently, we have access to an exploratory subset of the data that we use to demonstrate the feasibility of the study, but its limited number of target groups prevents conclusions from being made.

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Moral Humility Reduces Political Divisions

April 2024

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7 Reads

Political and intergroup conflicts are often rooted in moral differences. People claim their side to be morally superior and derogate moral outgroups. Therefore, we propose that moral humility, a domain-specific form of humility, might serve as one antidote to such morally fueled conflicts. We test this in the context of political polarization in the USA. Across 3 studies involving diverse national and student samples (N = 2766), we found higher moral humility to be linked to reduced political animosity, increased support for political compromise and pluralistic norms, greater empathy and respect for the political outgroup, greater perceptions of the political group as moral and non-threatening, amongst others. Importantly, these effects persisted after accounting for domain-general intellectual humility, moral relativism, political identity and extremity, and other controls. This research demonstrates moral humility’s relevance for understanding political polarization, and points the way for a strength-based approach to addressing conflicts


When the Specter of the Past Haunts Current Groups: Psychological Antecedents of Historical Blame

February 2024

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21 Reads

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2 Citations

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Groups have committed historical wrongs (e.g., genocide, slavery). We investigated why people blame current groups who were not involved in the original historical wrong for the actions of their predecessors who committed these wrongs and are no longer alive. Current models of individual and group blame overlook the dimension of time and therefore have difficulty explaining this phenomenon using their existing criteria like causality, intentionality, or preventability. We hypothesized that factors that help psychologically bridge the past and present, like perceiving higher (a) connectedness between past and present perpetrator groups, (b) continued privilege of perpetrator groups, (c) continued harm of victim groups, and (d) unfulfilled forward obligations of perpetrator groups would facilitate higher blame judgments against current groups for the past. In two repeated-measures surveys using real events (N1 = 518, N2 = 495) and two conjoint experiments using hypothetical events (N3 = 598, N4 = 605), we find correlational and causal evidence for our hypotheses. These factors link present groups to their past and cause more historical blame and support for compensation policies. This work brings the dimension of time into theories of blame, uncovers overlooked criteria for blame judgments, and questions the assumptions of existing blame models. Additionally, it helps us understand the psychological processes undergirding intergroup relations and historical narratives mired in historical conflict. Our work provides psychological insight into the debates on intergenerational justice by suggesting methods people can use to ameliorate the psychological legacies of historical wrongs and atrocities.


Intraindividual Changes in Political Identity Strength (But Not Direction) Are Associated With Political Animosity in the United States and the Netherlands

October 2023

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28 Reads

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2 Citations

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

We test if within-person changes in political identities are associated with within-person changes in political animosity in two longitudinal studies (United States N = 552, Waves = 26; Netherlands N = 1,670, Waves = 12). Typical studies examine cross-sectional associations without assessing within-person change. Our work provides a stronger test of the relationship. We find that within-person changes in the strength of people’s ideological and partisan identities are associated with increased political animosity. We found no such associations with within-person changes in identity direction. These patterns were robust to covariates and emerged in both studies. In addition to these average effects, we found substantial heterogeneity across participants in the associations among identity strength, identity direction, and political animosity. We did not find robust and replicable moderators for this heterogeneity. These findings suggest that identity strength (but not identity direction) is a key, if heterogenous, factor in changes in political animosity.


The Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic Made People Feel Threatened, but Had a Limited Impact on Political Attitudes in the United States

August 2023

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28 Reads

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5 Citations

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

We investigated if the COVID-19 pandemic's onset caused changes in political attitudes. Influential theories predict that the pandemic's onset will cause people to adopt more conservative attitudes, more culturally conservative attitudes, or more extreme attitudes. We comprehensively tested the external validity of these predictions by estimating the causal effect of the pandemic's onset on 84 political attitudes and eight perceived threats using fine-grained repeated cross-sectional data (Study 1, N = 232,684) and panel data (Study 2, N = 552) collected in the United States. Although the pandemic's onset caused feelings of threat, the onset only caused limited attitude change (six conservative shifts, four extremity shifts, 12 liberal shifts, 62 no change). Prominent theories of threat and politics did not make accurate predictions for this major societal threat. Our results highlight the necessity of testing psychological theories' predictive powers in real-life circumstances.


Inter‐attitude centrality does not appear to reduce persuasion for political attitudes

July 2023

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9 Reads

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2 Citations

European Journal of Social Psychology

Are attitudes more resistant to change when they are more central to a belief system? Theories of inter‐attitude structure and belief system dynamics both suggest that the answer is yes. We demonstrate how to combine belief system network methods with pretest‐posttest experiments to empirically test this idea. We aimed to persuade US conservatives (Experiment 1 N = 890) and US liberals (Experiment 2 N = 1305, Experiment 3 N = 1293) using moral reframing persuasive strategies. Although we find that moral reframing was persuasive (9 of 12 attempts), there was no evidence that central attitudes were more difficult to change than peripheral attitudes. This was the case across all experiments, target attitudes and methods for assessing belief system structure. The results suggest that moral reframing persuades people, but that theories of inter‐attitude structure and belief system dynamics both do not make accurate predictions in this situation.


The Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic Made People Feel Threatened, but had a Limited Impact on Political Attitudes

January 2023

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7 Reads

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1 Citation

The COVID-19 pandemic threatens people’s physical, mental, and economic well-being. We investigated if the pandemic’s onset caused changes in political attitudes. Theories of threat and politics predict that the pandemic’s onset will change people’s attitudes by causing people to adopt more conservative attitudes, more culturally conservative attitudes, or more extreme attitudes. We comprehensively tested the external validity of these predictions by estimating the causal effect of the pandemic’s onset on 84 political attitudes and 8 perceived threats using fine-grained repeated cross-sectional data (Study 1, N = 232,684) and panel data (Study 2, N = 552) collected in the United States. Although the pandemic’s onset caused feelings of threat, the onset only caused limited attitude change. Only 6 attitudes shifted in a conservative direction and none of these shifts were for culturally conservative attitudes. Only 4 attitudes became more extreme. The most consistent finding was that most attitudes did not change. The reliable changes that did emerge were typically in a liberal direction. These were on social welfare and healthcare related attitudes, suggesting that people adopted attitudes that would help directly address the healthcare and economic threats of the pandemic. The data suggest that the prominent theories of threat and politics did not make accurate predictions for a major societal threat. This calls into question the generalizability of these theories to a threatening event which scholars and policy makers want to make predictions about. Our results highlight the necessity of testing psychological theories’ predictive powers in real life circumstances.


Citations (5)


... Thompson et al. 38 examine how common bias against women is present in different kinds of AI. The following Table 4 shows a list of the percentages of ways that are unfair to women in different areas: A number of cases of gender bias in AI is shown by these statistics. ...

Reference:

Gender Bias in Artificial Intelligence: Empowering Women Through Digital Literacy
Registered report protocol: Stress testing predictive models of ideological prejudice

... Moreover, blame does not only exist in interpersonal contexts; it is also common in intergroup contexts (e.g., between racial/ethnic groups, social classes, political parties, and nations) (Bruneau et al., 2020;Lickel et al., 2006;Ma & Ma, 2023;Vallabha et al., 2024). Does the moral past of an organization shape its members' standing to blame? ...

When the Specter of the Past Haunts Current Groups: Psychological Antecedents of Historical Blame

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

... And another revealed that anti-immigrant prejudice in the Netherlands was no higher during in May 2020 than in 2017 (Muis & Reeskens, 2022). These findings echo conclusions from a systematic review indicating that the pandemic caused changes in feelings of threat but very limited changes in attitudes (Brandt et al., 2023). These (lack of) changes have especially important implications for how we understand the behavioural immune system. ...

The Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic Made People Feel Threatened, but Had a Limited Impact on Political Attitudes in the United States
  • Citing Article
  • August 2023

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

... The more curious finding was that there was not a clear linear association between node centrality and the amount of change. Furthermore, central nodes were not any harder to change than peripheral nodes (echoing findings from Brandt and Vallabha 2023). Additional research would help clarify these results. ...

Inter‐attitude centrality does not appear to reduce persuasion for political attitudes
  • Citing Article
  • July 2023

European Journal of Social Psychology

... Of course, the cultural contexts differ markedly between New Zealand and Germany but one possibility for their shared trends in RWA is that both nations had more progres- conservatism-from increasing during this time. Accordingly, our study challenges the assumption that complex threats will invariably shift the public toward more anti-egalitarian or authoritarian impulses (see also Brandt et al., 2023). (Duckitt, 2001) and echo the elevated levels of authoritarianism documented early in the pandemic in countries that imposed fewer restrictions compared to New Zealand (e.g., Fischer et al., 2023;Golec de Zavala, 2021). ...

The Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic Made People Feel Threatened, but had a Limited Impact on Political Attitudes
  • Citing Preprint
  • January 2023