The complex relationship between conspiracy belief and the politics of social change.

Conspiracy belief intersects with the politics of social change in complex and sometimes contradictory ways. On one hand, social change is experienced as stressful by many, and it can generate feelings of uncertainty, insecurity, and loss of control that elicit beliefs that may impede needed change and even generate new problems. On the other hand, conspiracy belief and conspiratorial thinking, by shedding doubt on the benevolence of powerful individuals and institutions, may fuel radical resistance to the status quo on both the political left and right. In this article, I explore recent theory and research on these two seemingly-opposed ways of thinking about the connection between conspiracy theories and the politics of social change.

Exposure and Aversion to Human Transmissible Diseases Predict Conservative Ideological and Partisan Preferences.

The objective prevalence of and subjective vulnerability to infectious diseases are associated with greater ingroup preference, conformity, and traditionalism. However, evidence directly testing the link between infectious diseases and political ideology and partisanship is lacking. Across four studies, including a large sample representative of the U.S. population (N > 12,000), we demonstrate that higher environmental levels of human transmissible diseases and avoidance of germs from human carriers predict conservative ideological and partisan preferences. During the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 848), we replicated this germ aversion finding and determined that these conservative preferences were primarily driven by avoidance of germs from outgroups (foreigners) rather than ingroups (locals). Moreover, socially conservative individuals expressed lower concerns of being susceptible to contracting infectious diseases during the pandemic and worried less about COVID-19. These effects were robust to individual-level and state-level controls. We discuss these findings in light of theory on parasite stress and the behavioral immune system and with regard to the political implications of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Individual and contextual moderators of the relationship between authoritarianism and religiosity.

Social scientists have devoted much attention to explaining individual and contextual variation in religiosity. Among other things, authoritarianism is reliably found to be associated with greater religiosity. Though education and human development are often thought to reduce religiosity, we show in this study that the relationship between authoritarianism and various indices of religiosity is stronger in the presence of greater educational attainment and living in a society with a higher level of human development. Using two large cross-cultural data sets from the World Values Survey, we find evidence that authoritarianism is more strongly associated with religious involvement and practice among individuals at higher levels of education and individuals living in societies with higher level of human development. Thus, we demonstrate that the connection between authoritarianism and religiosity is contingent on both individual-level and societal moderators.

Low self-esteem predicts out-group derogation via collective narcissism, but this relationship is obscured by in-group satisfaction.

According to social identity theory, low self-esteem motivates group members to derogate out-groups, thus achieving positive in-group distinctiveness and boosting self-esteem. According to the Frankfurt School and status politics theorists, low self-esteem motivates collective narcissism (i.e., resentment for insufficient external recognition of the in-group's importance), which predicts out-group derogation. Empirical support for these propositions has been weak. We revisit them addressing whether (a) low self-esteem predicts out-group derogation via collective narcissism and (b) this indirect relationship is only observed after partialing out the positive overlap between collective narcissism and in-group satisfaction (i.e., belief that the in-group is of high value and a reason to be proud). Results based on cross-sectional (Study 1, N = 427) and longitudinal (Study 2, N = 853) designs indicated that self-esteem is uniquely, negatively linked to collective narcissism and uniquely, positively linked to in-group satisfaction. Results based on cross-sectional (Study 3, N = 506; Study 4, N = 1,059; Study 5, N = 471), longitudinal (Study 6, N = 410), and experimental (Study 7, N = 253) designs corroborated these inferences. Further, they revealed that the positive overlap between collective narcissism and in-group satisfaction obscures the link between self-esteem and out-group derogation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Personality and political preferences over time: Evidence from a multiwave longitudinal study.

OBJECTIVE: We investigate how the relations between the Big Five personality traits and political preferences develop over a campaign. METHOD: We rely on a six-wave nationwide longitudinal survey from the 2008 U.S. election that included 20,000 respondents (Mage = 49, SD = 15; 53% women, 47% men; 82% White, 8% Black, 6% Hispanic/Latino, 1% Asian, 1% Native American, 2% other). Survey weights were applied to approximate a representative sample of the U.S. POPULATION: Ns for reported analyses range from 5,160 to 12,535. RESULTS: First, Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience were significantly associated with changes in outcomes over time, such that individuals higher in Conscientiousness and lower in Openness tended to become more conservative, identify as more Republican, and evaluate John McCain more favorably relative to Barack Obama. Second, the effects of personality on candidate evaluations were mediated by partisanship and ideology. Finally, we find that the relations between traits and late-campaign candidate evaluations are stronger than those between traits and early-campaign candidate evaluations. CONCLUSIONS: Personality plays an important, dynamic role in the formation and change of political preferences over the course of political campaigns-a role not entirely visible in cross-sectional analyses.

The Political Self: How Identity Aligns Preferences With Epistemic Needs.

Numerous studies have indicated that the need for closure predicts political preferences. We examined a potential moderator of this relationship: political-identity centrality, or the extent to which individuals' political preferences are central to their self-concept. We tested three hypotheses. First, we predicted that need for closure would be more strongly related to political identity (symbolic ideology and party identification; Hypothesis 1) and issue positions (operational ideology; Hypothesis 2) among individuals who see their political preferences as more self-central. Then we predicted that the stronger relationship between need for closure and issue positions among individuals high in centrality would be accounted for by stronger relationships between need for closure and political identity and between political identity and issue positions (Hypothesis 3). Data from a nationally representative survey provide evidence for these hypotheses, suggesting that the relationship between epistemic needs and political preferences differs as a function of how self-relevant politics is.

Authoritarianism, Institutional Confidence, and Willingness to Engage in Collective Action: A Multinational Analysis.

The antecedents of collective action have received considerable attention in psychology, political science, and sociology. However, few studies have addressed the extent to which individual differences in psychological needs, motives, and traits predict collective action tendencies. In the present study, we focus on an especially important individual difference: authoritarianism. We examined three key hypotheses: (1) that authoritarianism would be associated with lower willingness to engage in collective action (net of other factors known to predict protest), (2) that the negative relationship between authoritarianism and collective action would be stronger among the politically engaged; and (3) that the negative relationship between authoritarianism and collective action would be weaker among those who lacked confidence in major social institutions. Using data from three independent waves of the World Values Survey, we find cross-national evidence supporting all three hypotheses.

Context, engagement, and the (multiple) functions of negativity bias.

Hibbing and colleagues argue that political attitudes may be rooted in individual differences in negativity bias. Here, we highlight the complex, conditional nature of the relationship between negativity bias and ideology by arguing that the political impact of negativity bias should vary as a function of (1) issue domain and (2) political engagement.

Heralding the authoritarian? Orientation toward authority in early childhood.

In the research reported here, we examined whether individual differences in authoritarianism have expressions in early childhood. We expected that young children would be more responsive to cues of deviance and status to the extent that their parents endorsed authoritarian values. Using a sample of 43 preschoolers and their parents, we found support for both expectations. Children of parents high in authoritarianism trusted adults who adhered to convention (vs. adults who did not) more than did children of parents low in authoritarianism. Furthermore, compared with children of parents low in authoritarianism, children of parents high in authoritarianism gave greater weight to a status-based "adult = reliable" heuristic in trusting an ambiguously conventional adult. Findings were consistent using two different measures of parents' authoritarian values. These findings demonstrate that children's trust-related behaviors vary reliably with their parents' orientations toward authority and convention, and suggest that individual differences in authoritarianism express themselves well before early adulthood.

Ideological asymmetry in the relationship between epistemic motivation and political attitudes.

Research on the psychological bases of political attitudes tends to dwell on the attitudes of conservatives, rarely placing a conscious thematic emphasis on what motivates liberals to adopt the attitudes they do. This research begins to address this imbalance by examining whether the need for cognitive closure is equally associated with conservatism in policy attitudes among those who broadly identify with the liberal and conservative labels. Counterintuitively, we predict and find that the need for closure is most strongly associated with policy conservatism among those who symbolically identify as liberals or for whom liberal considerations are made salient. In turn, we also find that the need for closure is associated with reduced ideological consistency in issue attitudes among liberal identifiers but not conservative identifiers. Although supportive of our predictions, these results run counter to a simple "rigidity of the right" hypothesis, which would predict a positive link between need for closure and policy conservatism regardless of ideological self-description, and the "ideologue" hypothesis, which would predict a positive link between these variables among conservative identifiers and a negative one among liberal identifiers. We discuss the implications these findings for understanding the motivations underlying liberals' and conservatives' attitudes and suggest that future research attend to the important distinction between ideology in the sense of symbolic identification with conservatism versus liberalism and ideology in the sense of an average tilt to the right or left in one's policy attitudes.

Political ideology: its structure, functions, and elective affinities.

Ideology has re-emerged as an important topic of inquiry among social, personality, and political psychologists. In this review, we examine recent theory and research concerning the structure, contents, and functions of ideological belief systems. We begin by defining the construct and placing it in historical and philosophical context. We then examine different perspectives on how many (and what types of) dimensions individuals use to organize their political opinions. We investigate (a) how and to what extent individuals acquire the discursive contents associated with various ideologies, and (b) the social-psychological functions that these ideologies serve for those who adopt them. Our review highlights "elective affinities" between situational and dispositional needs of individuals and groups and the structure and contents of specific ideologies. Finally, we consider the consequences of ideology, especially with respect to attitudes, evaluations, and processes of system justification.

The relationship between the need for closure and support for military action against Iraq: moderating effects of national attachment.

A variety of studies suggest that a high need for closure--that is, a desire for knowledge that is clear, stable, and unambiguous as opposed to confusing or uncertain--may be associated with greater hostility toward relevant outgroups. Using international attitudes as the context, the authors examine the hypothesis that the relationship between the need for closure and support for military action against Iraq may be moderated by identification with the national ingroup. Specifically, it is expected that this relationship will be moderated by nationalism (i.e., an aggressive form of identification based on a desire for national dominance) but not patriotism (i.e., a more neutral love of one's country). The data provided a clear pattern of support for this hypothesis and additional analyses indicated that a high need for closure reduced variability about the use of force among the highly nationalistic but not the highly patriotic.

Understanding responses to political conflict: interactive effects of the need for closure and salient conflict schemas.

Two studies examined the relationship between the need for cognitive closure and preferences for conflict-resolution strategies in 2 different samples of elite political actors. Although research has suggested that high need for closure should be associated with competitiveness, the authors argue that this relationship should be strongest among political actors with a hostile conflict schema, or representation of what a conflict is and how it should be dealt with. The authors provide evidence for this hypothesis using archival survey data on American foreign-policy officials' attitudes toward international conflict at the height of the Cold War (Study 1) and their own data on the relationship between the need for closure and conflict-strategy preferences among samples of activists from 2 political parties in Poland: a centrist party with a reputation for cooperativeness and an extremist party with a reputation for confrontation (Study 2). The broader implications of these findings are discussed.

Predicting attitude extremity: the interactive effects of schema development and the need to evaluate and their mediation by evaluative integration.

Research on attitude extremity suggests that schemas containing more information about a particular attitude domain are more likely to be associated with extreme attitudes toward objects in that domain when perceivers' responses toward features of the domain are evaluatively integrated. The present study argues that a high need to evaluate may play an important role in determining when schema development will be associated with the integrated responses to different domain features necessary for extremity. Consistent with this argument, data from a nationally representative survey of political attitudes indicated that the need to evaluate was associated with increased extremity across two different indices of the latter; that it moderated the relationships between schema development (in the form of political expertise), on one hand, and increased extremity and integration, on the other; and that the moderating effects of the need to evaluate vis-a-vis extremity were mediated by integration.

Racism, ideology, and affirmative action revisited: the antecedents and consequences of "principled objections" to affirmative action.

In 2 studies, the antecedents and consequences of "principled objections" to affirmative action (specific, "race-neutral" reasons for opposing the policy) among Whites were examined. In Study 1. data from a probability sample of Los Angeles adults indicated the following: (a) that principled-objection endorsement was driven not merely by race-neutral values but also by dominance-related concerns like racism; (b) that principled objections mediated the effects of group dominance; and (c) that education strengthened-rather than attenuated-the relationship between dominance-related concerns and principled objections. whereas it left the relationship between race-neutral values and the latter essentially unchanged. In Study 2, the education findings were conceptually replicated in a panel study of undergraduates: The completion of additional years of college boosted the correlation between racism and principled objections, whereas it had no effect on the predictive power of conservatism. These results provide support for a general group-dominance approach, which suggests that factors like racism continue to shape White opposition to race-targeted policies.