Political conservatism as motivated social cognition.

Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psychological variables predict political conservatism: death anxiety (weighted mean r=.50); system instability (.47); dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity (.34); openness to experience (-.32); uncertainty tolerance (-.27); needs for order, structure, and closure (.26); integrative complexity (-.20); fear of threat and loss (.18); and self-esteem (-.09). The core ideology of conservatism stresses resistance to change and justification of inequality and is motivated by needs that vary situationally and dispositionally to manage uncertainty and threat. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The end of the end of ideology.

The "end of ideology" was declared by social scientists in the aftermath of World War II. They argued that (a) ordinary citizens' political attitudes lack the kind of stability, consistency, and constraint that ideology requires; (b) ideological constructs such as liberalism and conservatism lack motivational potency and behavioral significance; (c) there are no major differences in content (or substance) between liberal and conservative points of view; and (d) there are few important differences in psychological processes (or styles) that underlie liberal versus conservative orientations. The end-of-ideologists were so influential that researchers ignored the topic of ideology for many years. However, current political realities, recent data from the American National Election Studies, and results from an emerging psychological paradigm provide strong grounds for returning to the study of ideology. Studies reveal that there are indeed meaningful political and psychological differences that covary with ideological self-placement. Situational variables--including system threat and mortality salience--and dispositional variables--including openness and conscientiousness--affect the degree to which an individual is drawn to liberal versus conservative leaders, parties, and opinions. A psychological analysis is also useful for understanding the political divide between "red states" and "blue states." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Racism, conservatism, Affirmative Action, and intellectual sophistication: A matter of principled conservatism or group dominance?

Using data from 3 different samples, the authors found that: (a) the relationships between political conservatism and racism generally increases as a function of educational sophistication; however, the relationship between political conservatism and anti-Black affect did not increase with educational sophistication. (b) The correlation between political conservatism and racism could be entirely accounted for by their mutual relationship with social dominance orientation. (c) Generally, the net effect of political conservatism, racism, and social dominance orientation on opposition to affirmative action increased with increasing education. These findings contradict much of the case for the principled conservatism hypothesis, which maintains that political values that are largely devoid of racism, especially among highly educated people, are the major source of White's opposition to affirmative action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Altemeyer replies.

Replies to commentary by J. J. Ray (see record 2007-08928-001) regarding the current author's book, Enemies of freedom: Understanding right wing authoritarianism (see record 1988-98419-000). The foremost of Ray's six criticisms is that "insofar as (I have) studied anything at all, (I have) probably studied some form of conservatism." The constructs of "right-wing authoritarianism" and "conservatism" can be defined as one wishes, and one can declare that they are the same thing. I prefer to draw several conceptual distinctions however, perhaps because one brand of "conservatism", especially visible in the United States, resents government authority. Next, Professor Ray quite correctly points out that my explanation of the development of personal authoritarianism ignored genetic possibilities. The twins-studies have caught me completely flat-footed, with my back turned, though I would find evidence for a DNA-based explanation of authoritarianism quite exciting. As for attitudes toward authorities, I suspect they do wobble some during adolescence. However, neither of the two adult studies Professor Ray cites shows "a general attitude toward authority does not exist." If anything, they suggest it does. Professor Ray says the consistency of the RWA Scale only occurs because my item selection procedures have created a distortion of the real world, a world of my own "from which the most disturbing outside information has been rigorously excluded." In fact, the covariation among items mentioning different kinds of authorities goes back to the Berkeley F Scale. Finally, Professor Ray concludes that I am studying some nonpolitical form of conservatism, because the RWA Scale gives "virtually no prediction of right-wing political preference." Data is presented to dispute this allegation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Examining the principles in principled conservatism: The role of responsibility stereotypes as cues for deservingness in racial policy decisions.

Why do educated conservatives oppose affirmative action? Those in the "principled conservatism" camp say opposition is based on principled judgments of fairness about the policies. Others, however, argue that opposition is based on racism. The present article offers an alternative perspective that may reconcile these contradictory points of view. In 2 studies, the authors show 2 major findings: (a) that conservatives oppose affirmative action more for Blacks than for other groups, in this case women, and (b) that the relationship between conservatism and affirmative action attitudes is mediated best by group-based stereotypes that offer deservingness information and not by other potential mediators like old-fashioned racism or the perceived threat that affirmative action poses to oneself. The authors conclude that educated conservatives are indeed principled in their opposition to affirmative action, but those principles are group based not policy based. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Compensatory conviction in the face of personal uncertainty: Going to extremes and being oneself.

Study 1 participants' self-integrity (C. M. Steele, 1988) was threatened by deliberative mind-set (S. E. Taylor & P. M. Gollwitzer, 1995) induced uncertainty. They masked the uncertainty with more extreme conviction about social issues. An integrity-repair exercise after the threat, however, eliminated uncertainty and the conviction response. In Study 2, the same threat caused clarified values and more self-consistent personal goals. Two other uncertainty-related threats, mortality salience and temporal discontinuity, caused similar responses: more extreme intergroup bias in Study 3, and more self consistent personal goals and identifications in Study 4. Going to extremes and being oneself are seen as 2 modes of compensatory conviction used to defend against personal uncertainty. Relevance to cognitive dissonance and authoritarianism theories is discussed, and a new perspective on terror management theory (J. Greenberg, S. Solomom, & T. Pyszczynski, 1997) is proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The need for a global talking cure for practitioners: Reply to Ghannam (2005).

Replies to comments made by J. Ghannam (see record 2005-01622-015) on the current author's original article (see record 2003-09630-009). Ghannam's comment reveals just how necessary a global "talking cure" is, not just for people outside the field of psychoanalysis but for practitioners within it and related fields as well. One challenge for an international psychoanalysis with regard to the political scene is to devise guidelines that will help analysts to deal with the anger that leads less to truth than to its retreat. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Biological versus social evolution.

Comments on the number of responses (e.g., L. G. Wispe and J. N. Thompson, Jr.; see record 1977-06633-001) to D. T. Campbell's (see record 1976-12046-001) American Psychological Association presidential address on the issue of biological vs social evolution. The author agrees with Wispe and Thompson on the link between evolutionary theory and political conservatism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Epistemological consistency and its scientific implications.

Comments on the contributions of G. A. Kimble (see record 1986-07921-001) and L. Krasner and A. C. Houts (see record 1986-10225-001) concerning the relationship between values and science. Using a measure of epistemological assumptions and disciplinary trends with 20 activist psychologists and 159 undergraduates, the present author found a relationship between political persuasion and attitudes about reality. A relationship was also demonstrated between political conservatism and beliefs about biological determinism. (9 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Does working memory load lead to greater impulsivity? Commentary on Hinson, Jameson, and Whitney (2003).

Previous research by J. M. Hinson, T. L. Jameson, and P. Whitney (2003; see record 2003-02055-011) demonstrated that a secondary task in a delayed discounting paradigm increased subjects' preference for the immediate reward. J. M. Hinson et al. interpreted their findings as evidence that working memory load results in greater impulsivity. The present authors conducted a reanalysis of the data from J. M. Hinson et al.'s Experiment 1 at the individual-subject level. Difference scores were calculated by subtracting the digit memory load condition from the control condition for k (discounting parameter) and a measure of "erroneous" responses. The results indicated that the secondary task increased random responding, which in turn can account for the increased mean estimates of k. Thus, the data do not support the claim that cognitive load affects impulsivity per se. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Signal detection by human observers: a cutoff reinforcement learning model of categorization decisions under uncertainty

Previous experimental examinations of binary categorization decisions have documented robust behavioral regularities that cannot be predicted by signal detection theory (D.M. Green & J.A. Swets, 1966/1988). The present article reviews the known regularities and demonstrates that they can be accounted for by a minimal modification of signal detection theory: the replacement of the "ideal observer" cutoff placement rule with a cutoff reinforcement learning rule. This modification is derived from a cognitive game theoretic analysis (A.E. Roth & I. Erev, 1995). The modified model reproduces all 19 experimental regularities that have been considered. In all cases,it outperforms the original explanations. Some of these previous explanations are based on important concepts such as conservatism, probability matching, and "the gambler's fallacy" that receive new meanings given the current results. Implications for decision-making research and for applications of traditional signal detection theory are discussed.     

A two-dimensional model that employs explicit and implicit attitudes to characterize prejudice.

In the authors' 2-dimensional model of prejudice, explicit and implicit attitudes are used to create 4 profiles: truly low prejudiced (TLP: double lows), aversive racists (AR: low explicit modern racism/high implicit prejudice), principled conservatives (PC: high explicit modern racism/low implicit prejudice), and modern racists (MR: double highs). Students completed an Asian Modern Racism Scale and an Asian/White Implicit Association Test. The authors compared the 4 groups' prejudice-related ideologies (i.e., egalitarianism/humanism and social conservatism) and economic/political conservatism (Study 1, N=132). The authors also tested whether MR but not PC (Study 2, N=65) and AR but not TLP (Study 3, N=143) are more likely to negatively evaluate an Asian target when attributional ambiguity is high (vs. low). In support of the model, TLP did not hold prejudice-related ideologies and did not discriminate; AR were low in conservatism and demonstrated the attributional-ambiguity effect; PC did not strongly endorse prejudice-related ideologies and did not discriminate; MR strongly endorsed prejudice-related ideologies, were conservative, and demonstrated the attributional-ambiguity effect. The authors discuss implications for operationalizing and understanding the nature of prejudice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thurstonian and Brunswikian origins of uncertainty in judgment: A sampling model of confidence in sensory discrimination.

As a preliminary step towards the presentation of a model of confidence in sensory discrimination, the authors propose a distinction between 2 different origins of uncertainty named after 2 of the great probabilists in the history of psychology, L. L. Thurstone and Egon Brunswik. The authors review data that suggest that there are empirical as well as conceptual differences between the 2 modes of uncertainty and thus that separate models of confidence are needed in tasks dominated by Thurstonian and Brunswikian uncertainty. The article presents a computational model for 1 class of tasks dominated by Thurstonian uncertainty: sensory discrimination with pair comparisons. The sensory sampling model predicts decisions, confidence assessments, and the complex pattern of response times in simple psychophysical discrimination tasks (J. V. Baranski and W. M. Petrusic, 1994). The model also accounts for the disposition towards underconfidence often observed in sensory discrimination with pair comparisons (M. Bjorkman, P. Juslin, & A. Winman, 1993; C. S. Peirce & J. Jastrow, 1884). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Measures of compounding conservatism in probabilistic risk assessment

Concern about the degree of uncertainty and potential conservatism in deterministic point estimates of risk has prompted researchers to turn increasingly to probabilistic methods for risk assessment. With Monte Carlo simulation techniques, distributions of risk reflecting uncertainty and/or variability are generated as an alternative. In this paper the compounding of conservatism between the level associated with point estimate inputs selected from probability distributions and the level associated with the deterministic value of risk calculated using these inputs is explored. Two measures of compounded conservatism are compared and contrasted. The first measure considered, F, is defined as the ratio of the risk value, Rd, calculated deterministically as a function of n inputs each at the jth percentile of its probability distribution, and the risk value, Rj, that falls at the jth percentile of the simulated risk distribution (i.e., F = Rd/Rj). The percentile of the simulated risk distribution which corresponds to the deterministic value, Rd, serves as a second measure of compounded conservatism. Analytical results for simple products of lognormal distributions are presented. In addition, a numerical treatment of several complex cases is presented using five simulation analyses from the literature to illustrate. Overall, there are cases in which conservatism compounds dramatically for deterministic point estimates of risk constructed from upper percentiles of input parameters, as well as those for which the effect is less notable. The analytical and numerical techniques discussed are intended to help analysts explore the factors that influence the magnitude of compounding conservation in specific cases.     

Anxious uncertainty and reactive approach motivation (RAM).

In 4 experiments anxious uncertainty threats caused reactive approach motivation (RAM). In Studies 1 and 2, academic anxious uncertainty threats caused RAM as assessed by behavioral neuroscience and implicit measures of approach motivation. In Study 3 the effect of a relational anxious uncertainty threat on approach-motivated personal projects in participants' everyday lives was mediated by the idealism of those projects. In Study 4 the effect of a different relational anxious uncertainty threat on implicit approach motivation was heightened by manipulated salience of personal ideals. Results suggest a RAM account for idealistic and ideological reactions in the threat and defense literature. Speculative implications are suggested for understanding diverse social and clinical phenomena ranging from worldview defense, prejudice, and meaning making to narcissism, hypomania, and aggression. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reactance and the unwillingness to help others.

Notes that a demand, explicit or implicit, to help someone, and even a felt obligation to do this, is often resented because the demand or obligation is a bothersome threat to the individual's freedom of action. Evidence is cited in accord with J. Brehm's (see PA, Vol. 41:8061) reactance theory indicating that increased pressure to aid a person in need at times reduces the individual's willingness to help the person who is dependent upon him. Experiments demonstrate that this "reactance effect" is lessened when the individual is in a good mood and increased when he is self-concerned and when the help request seems improper or unwarranted. It is proposed that people might be induced to act helpfully, in spite of the threat to their independence, by procedures that establish helpfulness as socially desirable conduct and provide practice in behaving helpfully. (29 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conceptualizing political orientation in Canadian political candidates: A tale of two (correlated) dimensions.

Political orientation is often operationalized as a unidimensional left–right continuum. However, some research suggests that this conceptualization might be overly simplistic. The present study examined the structure of political orientation in a sample of 190 politicians who were candidates in the 2006 Canadian federal election. Participants completed measures of attitudes toward specific political issues (social conservatism issues, economic competition issues), ideological beliefs (right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation), and abstract values (conservation, self-enhancement) as indicators of political orientation. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the structure of political orientation was explained best by 2 moderately correlated dimensions: social left–right and economic left–right. Differences in the political orientation indicators between political parties are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)