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A New Measure of Conservatism
Abstract
A variable of personality which has been shown to have considerable predictive value in both social and clinical psychology is that which is variously labelled authoritarianism, dogmatism, fascism, and anti-scientific attitude. The term ‘conservatism’ is preferred because it is less value-toned than other alternatives. Previous tests of this dimension are criticized on a number of grounds and the development of a new test which circumvents these deficiencies is described. The ‘Conservatism Scale’ is found to be a remarkably reliable, valid, and economical instrument.
... The popularity of single-item scales might stem from the lack of modern questionnaires that fit the current time and culture. Available measures of political orientation date back to the 1960s and 1980s and hardly cover today's important political issues (e.g., Altemeyer, 1981;Wilson & Patterson, 1968). In addition, previous research on political orientation has been conducted almost exclusively in the United States and is largely influenced by the U.S. political system. ...
... With regard to the validation of the questionnaire, we had the following hypothesis: To evaluate the convergent validity of a questionnaire, it should have a high correlation with other questionnaires that measure the same or a similar construct. Our hypothesis was that our newly developed Contemporary German Political Orientation Questionnaire (CGPOQ) should correlate with an older translation of Wilson and Patterson's (1968) scale measuring conservatism (König & Frank, 2000) and self-reported political orientation on a single-item conservatism-liberalism scale. ...
... The first factor, Tradition and National Security, includes 12 items and explains the most variance (22.73%). A strong first factor has also been found in other scales measuring political orientation or conservatism (e.g., Everett, 2013;König & Frank, 2000;Wilson & Patterson, 1968) and can probably be subsumed as a social conservatism/tradition factor. In all questionnaires, this factor includes items concerning the role of the family in society and traditional and religious (Christian) values, as well as items that focus on the preservation of "own" versus "foreign" culture. ...
Political orientation profoundly influences individual and social decisions. Yet adequate and culturally adaptable tools to quantify it are missing. In personality research, it is common to use questionnaires to capture the multifaceted nature of a construct. Thus, surprisingly, most studies assess political orientation using single‐item scales that fail to account for cultural contexts beyond two‐party systems. Using a bottom‐up approach in which the core content of political orientation was defined by a German sample ( N = 117), the current preregistered study developed a contemporary German questionnaire of political orientation (CGPOQ). The CGPOQ consists of 20 items that together form three main factors: “Tradition and National Security,” Gender and Sexuality,” and “Global Thinking.” The factor structure that was determined by exploratory factor analysis ( N = 1,089) was validated by confirmatory factor analysis in an independent sample ( N = 303). Good fit was demonstrated by comparing the CGPOQ with several convergent (self‐identification, older conservatism questionnaire, voting intention, social dominance orientation, right‐wing authoritarianism) and divergent (religiosity, empathy) measures. The results indicate that the CGPOQ is a valid and reliable instrument for measuring political orientation in a German population. Furthermore, it challenges the assumption that political orientation relies on the same two dimensions across cultures.
... After participants had selected their chosen policy issues and completed the related surveys, they were presented with the Wilson Patterson Attitude Inventory (Wilson & Patterson, 1968) and the Society Works Best Instrument (Smith et al., 2011) which are measures of the INFORMATION SEARCH AND POLITICAL IDEOLOGY 13 political ideology of participants (see Measures of Political Ideology below). The presentation of these measures was counterbalanced across participants. ...
... Participants completed two measures of political identity, the Wilson Patterson Attitude Inventory, and the Society Works Best Instrument (Wilson & Patterson, 1968;Smith et al, 2011; see Appendices 3-4). All participants completed both of these measures of political identity, and the order in which they were presented was counterbalanced. ...
... All participants completed both of these measures of political identity, and the order in which they were presented was counterbalanced. (Wilson & Patterson, 1968 (Smith et al, 2011). The Society Works Best Instrument presents participants with a series of binary choices, all preceded by the phrase "Society works best when…". ...
The expansion of news media in television and online allows the public to tailor their consumption of political news to their specific interests. Understanding how the public engages in political information search with respect to their political identities can provide insight into the type and amount of information an individual pursues before making a political decision. The present study examines how people of various political ideologies gather information related to political issues. Participants completed surveys gauging their attitudes toward a number of political policy issues following a task in which they were allowed to select political issue topics and control the amount of information they read about each. Of primary interest was how an individual’s political ideology influenced which policy issues they selected, and the amount of information participants read before making a decision. The results suggest that as an individual’s ideological extremity increases, they become more likely to select ingroup issues, or issues that are typically supported by their political ideology. Additionally, individuals who identify as liberal reviewed more information than their conservative counterparts before making a decision regarding political issues. Finally, preliminary evidence suggests that individuals who identify as moderate sampled an array of political policy issues which was more diverse than liberals, but not more diverse than conservatives.
... Conservatism is a disposition towards traditions, social orders and institutions and people with conservative approach generally reluctant to change [20] as a result conservative consumer generally reject foreign brands and they prefer to have traditional and familiar brands it is characterized as fundamentalist, strict rules, anti-hedonic and has preference for traditional outlook [42] [34]. As far as Indian traditions are concerned, they are conservative societies and still their conservative belief about life. ...
... Conservative peoples are those people who use to appreciate inherited tradition and social institutions that survived the test of time and changes are being introduced in reluctant way gradually [22]. Studies done in the past shows that people or individual with conservative tendencies are more ethnocentric as compared to non-conservative [42] [43] [22]. Thus, the hypothesis will be: ...
The purpose of this research paper is to explore and investigate the factors influencing consumer ethnocentrism and find out which factor having most significant impact along with also examines how different demographic variables related with consumers ethnocentrism. The data for this study were collected from north India (DELHI-NCR) and convenience sampling method was employed and size of data was 325 which further analyzed through SPSS 20.0. The findings of this study show that cultural openness is the strongest predictor of consumer ethnocentrism towards domestic brand while collectivism is the weakest predictor and Indian consumers are ethnocentric as well. whereas in case of demographic characteristics only gender (females) is showing significant relationship with consumer ethnocentrism while other i.e. age, education and income doesn't show significant relationship with consumer ethnocentrism. As far as limitations are concerned this study is a cross-sectional and brand selected for this study was 'Savlon', and that is why the finding of this research cannot be generalized another brands category.
... Collectively, these findings illustrate the utility of an instrument geared specifically to measure religious ideology in a multidimensional yet summative way. Even the most well-validated, widely used political ideology scales, such as Wilson and Patterson (1968) or the MFQ (Graham et al., 2011), lack the content to identify low-level aspects of ideology that drive more global orientations. By contrast, the MRI's articulated design offers granular insight into the internal structure of specifically religious ideology. ...
... The majority of the research on political ideology espouses a unidimensional, bipolar spectrum with conservative and liberal endpoints for each of the various political, economic, and social-moral-cultural forms of political ideology (e.g. Eysenck, 1975;Feldman, 2003;Fuchs & Klingemann, 1990;Jost, 2006;Knight, 1999;Kroh, 2007;Lipset, 1960;Sidanius, 1978;Sidanius & Duffy, 1988;Thorisdottir et al., 2007;Wilson, 1973;Wilson & Patterson, 1968). However, others have contended that conservatism and liberalism are related, but distinct, aspects of ideology, and each should be measured on its own dimension (Eysenck, 1975;Fleishman, 1988;Kerlinger, 1967Kerlinger, , 1984Kerr, 1952;Saucier, 2013). ...
The Multidimensional Religious Ideology (MRI) scale is a new 43-item measure that quantifies conservative versus liberal aspects of religious ideology. The MRI focuses on recurring features of ideology rooted in innate moral instincts while capturing salient differences in the ideological profiles of distinct groups and individuals. The MRI highlights how religious ideology differs from political ideology while maintaining a robust grounding in the social psychology of ideology generally. Featuring three major dimensions (religious beliefs, religious practices, and religious morality) and eight subdimensions, the MRI is sensitive enough to generate novel insights into religious ideology across demographic groups and individual differences. The MRI is also summative, yielding a single quantitative measurement of left–right religious ideology with good scale and test–retest reliability. Analysis of 839 respondents across two studies confirmed the widespread assumption that religious ideology is a parallel construct to political ideology, emerging from similar foundations but following a distinct set of rules. The MRI shows the importance of conceptualizing ideology in ways that access the full spectrum of real-world ideological convictions—an important reminder, given the salience of religious factors for influencing ideology generally.
... The Wilson-Patterson scale of political attitudes (Wilson 1968;updated by Smith et al. 2011) is a battery of twenty issue attitude items, which are additively combined into a general conservatism scale (α = .80). As ideology is sometimes conceptualized as multidimensional, I also created social conservatism (α = .76) ...
... As a brief reminder, first, I utilize the conventional seven point self-placement scale from the American National Election Studies, which spans from "Very liberal" (1) to "Very conservative" (7). Second, I use the full Wilson-Patterson issue attitude battery (Wilson 1968;updated by Smith et al. 2011), which asks simple agree/disagree questions on 20 different topics in contemporary politics. The full scale is the aggregate number of conservative answers given in the 20 questions (ergo, a low score is more liberal and a high score is more conservative). ...
I explore how political ideology is related to several related dispositional measures of behavioral avoidance, behavioral inhibition, and negative affectivity. My explorations include survey data, behavioral experiments, and electroencephalography (reading electrical signals off the scalp). Overall, and in contrast to literature expectations, my evidence suggests that liberals and conservatives do not have persistent differences in avoidance sensitivity or negativity bias.
... There is ample evidence that political conservatism is in fact related to psychological conservatism. As Table 3 shows, individuals with conservative social and political attitudes-measured in most of these studies by Wilson and Patterson's (1968) Conservatism Scale-tend to be characterized by a number of related features that go beyond ideology. Conservative individuals tend to be unadventurous, behaviorally rigid, socially con- forming, and conventional in their moral reasoning; they enjoy jokes about sex but not nonsensical humor; they prefer simple and regular visual designs. ...
Openness to Experience is one of the 5 broad factors that subsume most personality traits. Openness is usually considered an intrapsychic dimension, defined in terms of characteristics of consciousness. However, different ways of approaching and processing experience lead to different value systems that exercise a profound effect on social interactions. In this article, the author reviews the effects of Openness versus Closedness in cultural innovation, political ideology, social attitudes, marital choice, and interpersonal relations. The construct of Openness and its measures could profitably be incorporated into research conducted by social psychologists, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and historians.
... Finally, we measured political orientation as part of the demographic questions, using a modification of Dodd [63] issues index. Participants were asked to indicate whether they agree, disagree or are uncertain about various prominent issues in contemporary U.S. politics (e.g. ...
Witnessing altruistic behaviour can elicit moral elevation, an emotion that motivates prosocial cooperation. This emotion is evoked more strongly when the observer anticipates that other people will be reciprocally cooperative. Coalitionality should therefore moderate feelings of elevation, as whether the observer shares the coalitional affiliation of those observed should influence the observer's assessment of the likelihood that the latter will cooperate with the observer. We examined this thesis in studies contemporaneous with the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. Although BLM protests were predominantly peaceful, they were depicted by conservative media as destructive and antisocial. In two large-scale, pre-registered online studies (total N = 2172), political orientation strongly moderated feelings of state elevation elicited by a video of a peaceful BLM protest (Studies 1 and 2) or a peaceful Back the Blue (BtB) counter-protest (Study 2). Political conservatism predicted less elevation following the BLM video and more elevation following the BtB video. Elevation elicited by the BLM video correlated with preferences to defund police, whereas elevation elicited by the BtB video correlated with preferences to increase police funding. These findings extend prior work on elevation into the area of prosocial cooperation in the context of coalitional conflict.
... BRF = Behavior Report Form (Paunonen, 2003). C-Scale = Conservatism Scale (Wilson & Patterson, 1968). CRI = Coping Responses Inventory (Moos, 1988). ...
Personality researchers have posited multiple ways in which the relations between personality traits and life outcomes may be moderated by other traits, but there are well-known difficulties in reliable detection of such trait-by-trait interaction effects. Estimating the prevalence and magnitude base-rates of trait-by-trait interactions would help to assess whether a given study is suited to detect interaction effects. We used the Life Outcomes of Personality Replication Project dataset to estimate the prevalence, nature, and magnitude of trait-by-trait interactions across 81 self-reported life outcomes (n ≥ 1,350 per outcome). Outcome samples were divided into two halves to examine the replicability of observed interaction effects using both traditional and machine-learning indices. The study was adequately powered (1 − β ≥ .80) to detect the smallest interaction effects of interest (interactions accounting for a ΔR2 of approximately .01) for 78 of the 81 (96%) outcomes in each of the partitioned samples. Results showed that only 40 interactions (5.33% of the original 750 tests) showed evidence of strong replicability through robustness checks (i.e., demographic covariates, Tobit regression, ordinal regression). Interactions were also uniformly small in magnitude. Future directions for research on trait-by-trait interactions are discussed.
... Yet a considerable proportion of tests of the model have used proxy measures of conservatism that rest on the theoretical assumption that conservatism is heavily imbued with rigidity. In Jost et al.'s (2003) seminal metaanalysis of the rigidity of the right model, for example, 60% of the studies assessed ideology using either the Fascism (F) Scale (Adorno et al., 1950), the Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale (Altemeyer, 1996), or the Conservatism (C) Scale (Wilson & Patterson, 1968). The F Scale is intended to assess "fascist receptivity at the personality level" (e.g., "Most of our social problems would be solved if we could somehow get rid of the immoral, crooked, and feebleminded people," "A person who has bad manners, habits, and breeding can hardly expect to get along with decent people"), but, because it is strongly correlated with political conservatism (cf. ...
In this chapter, I review key conceptual and methodological sources of bias in psychological measurement, emphasizing those with particular relevance to political phenomena and providing relevant examples of measurement bias in political psychological research. I then review the case of authoritarianism, which until recently was predominantly assessed among political conservatives. This emphasis on right-wing authoritarianism and the paucity of research concerning left-wing authoritarianism have led to widespread conceptual obstacles to understanding the psychological underpinnings of authoritarianism, illustrating the degree to which measurement bias has key implications for theory development and testing. In closing, I provide several recommendations for reducing political bias in psychological measurement.
... Our key survey measure is political ideology, but we are particularly concerned with specific domains of political orientation: policing/criminal justice, immigration, economic redistribution, and religious conservatism. Existing work has relied heavily on modified versions of the Wilson-Patterson (W-P) Conservatism index (Wilson & Patterson, 1968), which asks respondents how they feel toward a variety of "hot-button" issues in contemporary American politics . In order to maximize comparability with existing research, we will utilize a modified and extended version of this scale and ask people to rate agreement with 25 issues, including some items from prior work (see Hibbing et al., 2013) but also items tapping the four aforementioned domains specifically (separately for policing and criminal justice; see explanation later in this section). ...
This is a registered report for a study of racial and ethnic variation in the relationship between negativity bias and political attitudes. Pioneering work on the psychological and biological roots of political orientation has suggested that political conservatism is driven in large part by enhanced negativity bias. This work has been criticized on several theoretical fronts, and recent replication attempts have failed. To dig deeper into the contours of when (and among whom) negativity bias predicts conservatism, we investigate a surprisingly overlooked factor in existing literature: race and ethnicity. We propose that political issues represent threat or disgust in different ways depending on one’s race and ethnicity. We recruited 174 White, Latinx, and Asian American individuals (in equal numbers) to examine how the relationship between negativity bias and political orientation varies by race/ethnicity across four domains: policing/criminal justice, immigration, economic redistribution, and religious social conservatism.
... Many researchers have treated various ideologies as bipolar. For example, many researchers measure liberalism/conservatism on bipolar scales (e.g., Robinson, Rusk, & Head, 1968;Wilson & Patterson, 1968 Although many researchers treat ideologies as if they have bipolar structure, some have argued that ideologies are unipolar (Conover & Feldman, 1981;Katz & Hass, 1988;Kerlinger, 1984). For example, Kerlinger argues that liberalism and conservatism are orthogonal, unipolar ideologies, and he uses factor analysis and cluster analysis to argue for the independent measurement of liberalism and conservatism (Kerlinger, 1984). ...
To keep pace with the changing business environment as globalization permeates both consumer and labor markets, this handbook offers the most current research in the workplace diversity, exploring what diversity means and its impact on group and organizational functioning. The volume is comprised of eight sections. The first section provides a fundamental introduction and overview to the history and current state of workplace diversity. The second section explores various conceptualizations of diversity. The third section focuses on psychological perspectives on diversity, touching on the self in diverse work contexts, intergroup bias, and the experience of stigma. The fourth section deals with interactionist perspectives on diversity, including chapters on diversity as knowledge exchange, diversity as disagreement, and diversity as network connections. The fifth section provides contextual perspectives on diversity, e.g., how context shapes diversity outcomes, diversity cognition and climate, and viewing diversity as a competitive advantage. Sections six and seven consider practice perspectives and systems perspectives in diversity, touching on leadership, diversity training, work-life interface, and law and diversity. Finally, the book concludes with a chapter on future directions for diversity theory and research.
... Based on the operational definition, Conservatism (KON) is the attitude of the respondents in respecting the traditions, products, and social institutions of the Indonesian state. This latent variable was measured by using questionnaire developed from Wilson & Patterson (1968) and has 4 indicators, namely: (1) using local cosmetic products is essentially preserving the nation's cultural heritage (KON1); (2) local cosmetic products are a force in building the community's economy (KON2); (3) local cosmetic products develop from the habits/traditions of various cultures in Indonesia (KON3); and (4) foreign cosmetics are not following the uniqueness of Indonesia (KON4) Based on the operational definition, Collectivism (KOL) is the tendency of respondents to include their goals in the goals of a group. This latent variable was measured by using questionnaire developed from Sharma et al. (1995) and has 4 indicators, namely: (1) confidence in a decision not solely from oneself (KOL1); (2) in making purchasing decisions, parental advice is still a consideration (KOL 2); ...
Cosmetics and beauty products rank third as the group of goods with the most sales through e-commerce transactions in 2020. E-Commerce offers various cosmetics products and provides wider opportunities for consumers to choose local and foreign products. Ethnocentrism refers to consumers' preference for local products. This study aimed to analyze the effect of socio-psychological factors on consumer ethnocentrism and the effect of consumer ethnocentrism on purchase intention in local cosmetics through online shopping. The number of samples in this study was 210 respondents, selected using the voluntary sampling method. Data collection was obtained through an online questionnaire on Google Forms. Data analysis was carried out using the SEM-LISREL analysis tool. The results showed that socio-psychological factors, including cultural openness, patriotism, conservatism, and collectivism, significantly affected consumer ethnocentrism. Other results also showed that consumer ethnocentrism significantly affected purchase intention in local cosmetics.
... Specifically, a large proportion of studies reviewed in prior meta-analyses have used measures of "conservatism" that rest on the theoretical assumption that conservatism is heavily imbued with rigidity or associated nonpolitical content. These measures-which include the Fascism Scale (e.g., Adorno et al., 1950), the RWA Scale (e.g., Altemeyer, 1996), and the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale (e.g., Wilson & Patterson, 1968)-were designed to assess rigidity and conservatism simultaneously (e.g., Wilson, 1973). For instance, the Fascism Scale assesses unquestioned faith in a supernatural power and a critical view of bad manners, the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale includes nonpolitical items that are intended to assess uncertainty avoidance (e.g., dislike of jazz music), and the RWA Scale includes content pertaining to religiosity, aggression, and obsequious deference to authority (Duckitt et al., 2010). ...
The rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis (RRH), which posits that cognitive, motivational, and ideological rigidity resonate with political conservatism, is an influential but controversial psychological account of political ideology. Here, we leverage several methodological and theoretical sources of this controversy to conduct an extensive quantitative review—with the dual aims of probing the RRH’s basic assumptions and parsing the RRH literature’s heterogeneity. Using multi-level meta-analyses of relations between varieties of rigidity and ideology measures alongside a bevy of potential moderators (s = 329, k = 708, N = 187,612), we find that associations between conservatism and rigidity are tremendously heterogeneous, suggesting a complex—yet conceptually fertile—network of relations between these constructs. Most notably, whereas social conservatism was robustly associated with rigidity, associations between economic conservatism and rigidity indicators were inconsistent, small, and not statistically significant outside of the United States. Moderator analyses revealed that non-representative sampling, criterion contamination, and disproportionate use of American samples have yielded over-estimates of associations between rigidity-related constructs and conservatism in past research. We resolve that drilling into this complexity, thereby moving beyond the question of if conservatives are essentially rigid to when and why they might or might not be, will help provide a more realistic account of the psychological underpinnings of political ideology.
... Single words appeared on the screen one after another, and the participant's task was to rate how disgusting each word feels to them (1 = "not at all" to 5 = "extremely") and how positive/negative it feels (1 = "very negative" to 5 = "very positive"). Three questionnaires were presented after the main experiment: The Disgust Sensitivity Revised scale (DS-R) ( [37], modified by [38]), the Wilson-Patterson (W-P) Conservatism Scale [64], and a short language background questionnaire. Before submitting their data, each participant was explicitly asked whether they wanted to withdraw their data. ...
Disgust is an aversive reaction protecting an organism from disease. People differ in how prone they are to experiencing it, and this fluctuates depending on how safe the environment is. Previous research has shown that the recognition and processing of disgusting words depends not on the word's disgust per se but rather on individual sensitivity to disgust. However , the influence of dynamically changing disgust on language comprehension has not yet been researched. In a series of studies, we investigated whether the media's portrayal of COVID-19 will affect subsequent language processing via changes in disgust. The participants were exposed to news headlines either depicting COVID-19 as a threat or downplay-ing it, and then rated single words for disgust and valence (Experiment 1; N = 83) or made a lexical decision (Experiment 2; N = 86). The headline type affected only word ratings and not lexical decisions, but political ideology and disgust proneness affected both. More liberal participants assigned higher disgust ratings after the headlines discounted the threat of COVID-19, whereas more conservative participants did so after the headlines emphasized it. We explain the results through the politicization and polarization of the pandemic. Further, political ideology was more predictive of reaction times in Experiment 2 than disgust prone-ness. High conservatism correlated with longer reaction times for disgusting and negative words, and the opposite was true for low conservatism. The results suggest that disgust proneness and political ideology dynamically interact with perceived environmental safety and have a measurable effect on language processing. Importantly, they also suggest that the media's stance on the pandemic and the political framing of the issue may affect the public response by increasing or decreasing our disgust.
... We thus hypothesized that more conservative listeners may invest less effort in understanding foreign-accented speakers and thus miss their irony more often than less conservative listeners. We measured participants' political ideology along the left-right dimension using the 20-item Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale (W-P) (Wilson & Patterson, 1968). The need for cognitive closure, which clinical psychology defines as a person's desire to get straightforward, unambiguous answers (Frenkel-Brunswik, 1949), may also modulate irony detection aptitude. ...
Misunderstood ironic intents may injure the conversation and impede connecting with others. Prior research suggests that ironic compliments, a rarer type of irony, are considered less ironic when spoken with a foreign accent. Using more ecologically-valid stimuli with natural prosodic cues, we found that this effect also applied to ironic criticisms, not just to ironic compliments. English native speakers (N = 96) listened to dialogs between Canadian English speakers and their foreign-accented peers, rating targets on multiple scales (irony, certainty in the speaker's intent, appropriateness, and offensiveness). Generalized additive mixed modelling showed that 1) ironic comments were rated lower for irony when foreign-accented, whereas literal comments were unaffected by accent; 2) the listener's political orientation, but not empathy or need for cognitive closure, modulated irony detection accuracy. The results are discussed in terms of linguistic expectations, social distance, cultural stereotypes , and personality differences.
... To elaborate, a large proportion of early studies used measures of "conservatism" that rest on the theoretical assumption that conservatism is heavily imbued with rigidity. These measures-which include the Fascism Scale (e.g., Adorno et al., 1950), the Rightwing Authoritarianism Scale (e.g., Altemeyer, 1996), and the Conservatism Scale (e.g., Wilson & Patterson, 1968)-were designed to assess rigidity and conservatism simultaneously (e.g., Wilson, 1973). For instance, the Conservatism Scale asks participants to indicate their support for "general attitudes concerning uncertainty avoidance" (Jost et al., 2003, p. 340), artistic movements that often involve ambiguity (e.g., jazz music, modernism), and specific socialpolitical issues that carry authoritarian or prejudicial connotations (e.g., censorship, white superiority, church authority, women judges). ...
The rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis (RRH), which posits that cognitive, motivational, and ideological rigidity resonate with political conservatism, is an influential but controversial psychological account of political ideology. Here, we leverage several methodological and theoretical sources of this controversy to conduct an extensive quantitative review—with the dual aims of probing the RRH’s basic assumptions and parsing the RRH literature’s heterogeneity. Using multi-level meta-analyses of relations between varieties of rigidity and ideology measures alongside a bevy of potential moderators (s = 329, k = 708, N = 187,612), we find that associations between conservatism and rigidity are tremendously heterogeneous, suggesting a complex—yet conceptually fertile—network of relations between these constructs. Most notably, whereas social conservatism was robustly associated with rigidity, associations between economic conservatism and rigidity indicators were inconsistent, small, and not statistically significant outside of the United States. Moderator analyses revealed that non-representative sampling, criterion contamination, and disproportionate use of American samples have yielded over-estimates of associations between rigidity-related constructs and conservatism in past research. We resolve that drilling into this complexity, thereby moving beyond the question of if conservatives are essentially rigid to when and why they might or might not be, will help provide a more realistic account of the psychological underpinnings of political ideology.
... The Wilson-Patterson Questionnaire (Wilson & Patterson, 1968) was used to measure political ideology. The Wilson-Patterson Questionnaire is a measure of conservatism containing UNCERTAINTY & THREAT 9 24 fundamental issues (see Appendix A for items and scoring). ...
Liberals and conservatives have been widely studied in terms of their personality, emotional, and cognitive differences that underlie ideological variation. Previous work has demonstrated that conservatives are more sensitive to threats in the environment and less tolerant of uncertainty compared with liberals. For instance, conservatives have been found to respond quicker to negative stimuli and avoid ambiguous situations whenever possible. It is unclear, however, whether tolerance of uncertainty and threat sensitivity are independent predictors of ideology or if one is just a proxy for the other. The purpose of the present study is to examine the relationship between threat sensitivity and tolerance of uncertainty simultaneously in liberals and conservatives. Participants performed a visual search task with threat manipulated in terms of target facial expression (happy or angry) and uncertainty manipulated in terms of probability of target presence (.25, .50, or .75). Results indicated significant main effects of target type and target certainty, suggesting that tolerance of uncertainty and threat sensitivity are independent predictors of ideology. Additional analyses indicated significant interactions between political ideology and emotion as well as political ideology and target certainty such that conservatives responded quicker to angry faces compared to liberals, and response time during uncertain search conditions was significantly slower for liberals compared to conservatives. Overall, these results suggest that political ideology is grounded in both threat sensitivity and tolerance of uncertainty.
... In their analyses, these American political scientists used two sets of data concerning twins: Virginia 30,000 (VA 30k) and Australian 25,000 (OZ 25k). Attitudes were measured using the Wilson-Patterson (W-P) Attitude Inventory (Wilson and Patterson, 1968), consisting of 28 (the US) and 50 (Australia) items. For instance, based on the US data, the average heritability estimation for all inventory items was 0.32, while the average estimation of the influence of the shared and non-shared environments was 0.16 and 0.53, respectively. ...
In the article, we review key methodological issues and study results on the heritability of political attitudes. These studies show to what degree the variance of observed attitudes can be explained by genetic variance. We have analysed studies differing in terms of applied methods, techniques and research tools, as well as sample populations of different age and sex structures. Regardless of these differences, the studies show that political attitudes are most likely influenced to some extent by genetic factors. This research suggests that the influence of genes on attitudes is subject to change over the life cycle. It also provides knowledge regarding the mechanisms that may link genes and attitudes. The studies conducted to date offer the opportunity to broaden the culturalism-based explanations of political attitudes with biological aspects; however, they also point to several issues that will require additional attention from the researchers.
... To assess the influence of disgust sensitivity on language comprehension, the Disgust Scale -Revised [DS-R; (Haidt et al., 1994) modified by Olatunji et al. (2007)], which was also used in, for example, Inbar et al., 2009Inbar et al., , 2012Ahn et al., 2014;Hubert and Järvikivi, 2019, was administered to participants. Participant's political views were assessed using a Wilson-Patterson-type test (Wilson and Patterson, 1968), the full version of which can be found in section 1 (Supplementary Material). This test was also chosen for results to be directly comparable to recent research involving political values and disgust sensitivity (Jost et al., 2003;Smith et al., 2011;Ahn et al., 2014;Hatemi and Verhulst, 2015). ...
Individuals' moral views have been shown to affect their event-related potentials (ERP) response to spoken statements, and people's political ideology has been shown to guide their sentence completion behavior. Using pupillometry, we asked whether political ideology and disgust sensitivity affect online spoken language comprehension. 60 native speakers of English listened to spoken utterances while their pupil size was tracked. Some of those utterances contained grammatical errors, semantic anomalies, or socio-cultural violations, statements incongruent with existing gender stereotypes and perceived speaker identity, such as “I sometimes buy my bras at Hudson's Bay,” spoken by a male speaker. An individual's disgust sensitivity is associated with the Behavioral Immune System, and may be correlated with socio-political attitudes, for example regarding out-group stigmatization. We found that more disgust-sensitive individuals showed greater pupil dilation with semantic anomalies and socio-cultural violations. However, political views differently affected the processing of the two types of violations: whereas more conservative listeners showed a greater pupil response to socio-cultural violations, more progressive listeners engaged more with semantic anomalies, but this effect appeared much later in the pupil record.
... Although political orientation is often described as if it were inherently unidimensional, such apparent unidimensionality may actually reflect partisan coalitional dynamics. Accordingly, rather than assume that individuals' positions are necessarily uniform across multiple components of political orientation, we measured political orientation using a modification of Dodd et al.'s [49] version of Wilson and Patterson's [50] multifaceted issues index. Participants were asked to indicate whether they agree, disagree, or are uncertain about various prominent issues in contemporary American politics. ...
Social liberals tend to be less pathogen-avoidant than social conservatives, a pattern consistent with a model wherein ideological differences stem from differences in threat reactivity. Here we investigate if and how individual responses to a shared threat reflect those patterns of ideological difference. In seeming contradiction to the general association between social conservatism and pathogen avoidance, the more socially conservative political party in the United States has more consistently downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 during the ongoing pandemic. This puzzle offers an opportunity to examine the contributions of multiple factors to disease avoidance. We investigated the relationship between social conservatism and COVID-19 precautionary behavior in light of the partisan landscape of the United States. We explored whether consumption of, and attitudes toward, different sources of information, as well as differential evaluation of various threats caused by the pandemic—such as direct health costs versus indirect harms to the economy and individual liberties—shape partisan differences in responses to the pandemic in ways that overwhelm the contributions of social conservatism. In two pre-registered studies, socially conservative attitudes correlate with self-reported COVID-19 prophylactic behaviors, but only among Democrats. Reflecting larger societal divisions, among Republicans and Independents, the absence of a positive relationship between social conservatism and COVID-19 precautions appears driven by lower trust in scientists, lower trust in liberal and moderate sources, lesser consumption of liberal news media, and greater economic conservatism.
... Ostensibly empirical connections may merely be logical tautologies. For instance, in Jost et al.'s (2003) meta-analysis of the motivated social cognition model of ideology, the F (Fascism) Scale (Adorno et al., 1950), the Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale (Altemeyer, 1996), and the C (Conservatism) Scale (Wilson & Patterson, 1968) comprise 60% of political conservatism measures examined in relation to needs for certainty. The F Scale (10% of certainty effect sizes) is intended to assess "fascist receptivity at the personality level" (e.g., "Most of our social problems would be solved if we could somehow get rid of the immoral, crooked, and feebleminded people"). ...
Commentary on Gries, T., Mueller, V., & Jost, J. (2021). The market for belief systems: A formal model of ideological choice. Psychological Inquiry.
... Issue-based ideological preferences were assessed using five different instruments: (a) the Core Domains of Social and Economic Conservatism Scale, which contains seven items, four measuring economic conservatism and three measuring social conservatism (Feldman & Johnston, 2014); (b) the Core Issues in American Politics Scale, which is comprised of 12 items (e.g., "The government needs to do more to make health care affordable and accessible"; Zell & Bernstein, 2014); (c) the Social and Economic Conservatism Scale, which includes five economic and seven socially conservative items (Everett, 2013); (d) the Political Issue Statements Scale, which is comprised of 10 items measuring political orientation on the left/right ideological space (e.g., "A woman should have the right to choose what to do with her body, even if that means getting an abortion"; Inbar et al., 2009); and (e) an adapted 16-item version of Henningham's (1996Henningham's ( , 1997 Social and Economic Conservatism Scales, which are contemporary versions of the "classic" Wilson and Patterson (1968) scale for measuring liberalism-conservatism (see Azevedo et al., 2019, for the full list of items). ...
Serious concerns about public distrust of scientific experts and the spread of misinformation are growing in the US and elsewhere. To gauge ideological and psychological variability in attitudes toward science, we conducted an extensive analysis of public opinion data based on a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults ( N = 1,500) and a large replication sample ( N = 2,119). We estimated the unique effects of partisanship, symbolic and operational forms of political ideology, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and general system justification (GSJ), after adjusting for demographic factors. Multiverse analyses revealed that (a) conservatism and SDO were significant predictors of distrust of climate science in > 99.9% of model specifications, with conservatism accounting for 80% of the total variance; (b) conservatism, RWA, religiosity, (male) sex, (low) education, (low) income, and distrust of climate science were significant predictors of skepticism about science in general (vs. faith) in > 99.9% of model specifications; (c) conservatism, RWA, (low) education, and distrust of climate science were significant predictors of trust in ordinary people (over scientific experts) > 99.9% of the time; and (d) GSJ was a significant predictor of trust in scientific experts (over ordinary people) 81% of the time, after adjusting for all other demographic and ideological factors. Implications for the role of science in democratic society are discussed.
... Conservative people are those that "show a tendency to cherish traditions and social institutions that have survived the test of time" and "introduce changes only occasionally, reluctantly, and gradually" (Sharma et al., 1995, p. 28). In its extreme form, conservatism can manifest itself as religious intolerance (Wilson & Patterson, 1968in Sharma et al., 1995. Studies such as Sharma et al. (1995) and Balabanis et al. (2002) found a positive relationship between conservatism and consumer ethnocentrism. ...
The aim of this study is to assess the impact of certain socio-cultural factors on consumer ethnocentrism, as well as to measure the impact of consumer ethnocentrism on the purchase of domestic products. In this context, the paper presents and tests a new model that contains five potential antecedents of consumer ethnocentrism (national identity, cultural openness, patriotism, religiosity, animosity towards the European Union). The results indicate that patriotism stands out as the strongest antecedent of consumer ethnocentrism. Interestingly, the study confirmed the statistically significant and relatively strong impact of animosity towards the European Union (EU) on the general level of consumer ethnocentrism. On the other hand, cultural openness does not belong to the group of statistically significant drivers of consumer ethnocentrism. The originality of the study lies in the specific construction of the research model, which is coloured with sociocultural variables - especially patriotism, religiosity and animosity towards the EU.
... We used the data from Australian twins, one sample of twins born before 1964 and surveyed in 1980, aged between 19 and 87 years (Martin et al. 1986), and a second sample of twin participants born 1965-1971surveyed between 1989and 1991(Posner et al. 1996. The questions on the "ingroup ethnic favoritism" used in our study are part of a survey on the general attitudes towards liberalism-conservatism and had been assessed in a Wilson and Patterson (1968) format in all surveys: The survey inventory was presented to participants as a short stimulus word or phrase and they were asked to respond positively, negatively, or neutrally to each. For all analyses, we only used the definite negative or positive answers but not the neutral answers. ...
It is long known that inbreeding increases the detrimental effects of recessive sequence variants in "Runs of Homozygosity" (ROHs). However, although the phenotypic association of ROH has been investigated for a variety of traits, the statistical power of the results often remains limited as a sufficiently high number of cases are available for only a restricted number of traits. In the present study, we aim to analyze the association of runs of homozygosity with the trait "in-group ethnic favoritism". This analysis assumes that if ethnic identity is important for an individual, that individual may tend to marry more frequently within their own group and therefore ROH are expected to increase. We hypothesize that an attitude preferring one's own ethnic group may be associated with a stronger tendency of inbreeding and, as a result, with more and longer ROHs. Accordingly, we investigated the association between the attitude to someone's own ethnicity and ROH, using the Wisconsin Longitudinal data (WLS, total N ~ 9000) as discovery data set and the Brisbane Twin data as replication data set (N ~ 8000). We find that both the number as well as the total length of homozygous segments are significantly positively associated with "in-group ethnic favoritism", independent of the method used for ROH calculation.
... Political orientation was assessed using abbreviated versions of the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) Scale (Altemeyer, 1998) and Conservatism Scale (C-Scale; Wilson & Patterson, 1968). The abbreviated RWA Scale contains six political statements, for example, "Gays and lesbians are just as healthy and moral as anybody else" (reverse-coded), which participants rated on a 9-point Likert scale ("Very strongly disagree" to "Very strongly agree") (α = .75). ...
Introduction
Research has consistently revealed positive correlations between political liberalism and Openness to Experience, and between conservatism and Conscientiousness. Most of this research has made use of domain‐level models of the Big Five personality traits. Recent work suggests, however, that each Big Five trait domain can be divided into distinct aspects or facets, which offer more nuanced characterizations of each trait.
Methods
Across four studies (Ns ranging from 1,123 to 116,406), the present research examined the degree to which distinct lower‐level traits would be associated with meaningful differences in political orientation. United States residents completed two different hierarchical Big Five personality measures (the Big Five Aspect Scales and the Big Five Inventory‐2), as well as a range of measures of political orientation.
Results
Across both personality measures, liberal political orientation showed distinct positive associations with the lower‐level traits Openness/Aesthetic Sensitivity, Intellect/Intellectual Curiosity, Compassion, and Withdrawal/Depression, as well as distinct negative associations with Orderliness/Organization, Politeness, and Assertiveness.
Discussion
By examining individual differences at a higher level of granularity, these data provide insight into specific motivations that predispose individuals toward different ends of the political spectrum.
... The dependent variables-political attitudes-are derived from a 40-item Wilson and Patterson (1968) scale, a commonly used format, wherein respondents agree, disagree, or indicate if they were unsure on a list of contemporary social, cultural, and political policies (Bouchard et al. 2003). Full question wording and format is presented in ESM §2. ...
Previous work proposes that dispositional fear exists predominantly among political conservatives, generating the appearance that fears align strictly along party lines. This view obscures evolutionary dynamics because fear evolved to protect against myriad threats, not merely those in the political realm. We suggest prior work in this area has been biased by selection on the dependent variable, resulting from an examination of exclusively politically oriented fears that privilege conservative values. Because the adaptation regulating fear should be based upon both universal and ancestral-specific selection pressures combined with developmental and individual differences, the elicitation of it should prove variable across the ideological continuum dependent upon specific combinations of fear and value domains. In a sample of ~ 1,600 Australians assessed with a subset of the Fear Survey Schedule II, we find fears not infused with political content are differentially influential across the political spectrum. Specifically, those who are more fearful of sharp objects, graveyards, and urinating in public are more socially conservative and less supportive of gay rights. Those who are more fearful of death are more supportive of gay rights. Those who are more fearful of suffocating and swimming alone are more concerned about emissions controls and immigration, while those who are more fearful of thunderstorms are also more anti-immigration. Contrary to existing research, both liberals and conservatives are more fearful of different circumstances, and the role of dispositional fears are attitude-specific.
... We measured social ideology using the six-issue Wilson-Patterson inventory ("protect gun rights," "support abstinence-only sex education," and "support prayer in public schools" with "protect abortion rights," "support transgender people using bathroom of their choice," and "ban the death penalty" reverse coded; see Wilson & Patterson, 1968). This scale had a direction-of-attitude question and a strength-of-attitude question for each issue, resulting in 12 items. ...
A bstract
Disgust is derived from evolutionary processes to avoid pathogen contamination. Theories of gender differences in pathogen disgust utilize both evolutionary psychological and sociocultural perspectives. Drawing on research that suggests that masculine and feminine gender identities are somewhat orthogonal, we examine how gender identity intersects with pathogen disgust. In addition, building on evolutionary psychological and sociocultural accounts of how caregiving and parental investment affect pathogen disgust, we present a new measure of caregiving disgust and compare its properties across gender, parental status, and political ideology with those of a conventional pathogen disgust measure. This registered report finds that how masculinity and femininity affect disgust varies by gender, disgust domain, and their intersection; that parental status effects vary by disgust domain but not gender; that reframing disgust in terms of caregiving eliminates the gender gap in disgust; and that the caregiving frame unexpectedly strengthens the relationship between disgust and political ideology.
... Supplementary Material Appendix S1. The Revised Wilson-Patterson Inventory Adapted from Fessler and colleagues (2017), which was itself updated from Dodd and colleagues (2012) and Wilson and Patterson (1968), used in this study to asses participants' agreement with and support given to 30 social and political issues. ...
People are motivated by shared social values that, when held with moral conviction, can serve as compelling mandates capable of facilitating support for ideological violence. The current study examined this dark side of morality by identifying specific cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with beliefs about the appropriateness of sociopolitical violence, and determining the extent to which the engagement of these mechanisms was predicted by moral convictions. Participants reported their moral convictions about a variety of sociopolitical issues prior to undergoing functional MRI scanning. During scanning, they were asked to evaluate the appropriateness of violent protests that were ostensibly congruent or incongruent with their views about sociopolitical issues. Complementary univariate and multivariate analytical strategies comparing neural responses to congruent and incon-gruent violence identified neural mechanisms implicated in processing salience and in the encoding of subjective value. As predicted, neuro-hemodynamic response was modulated parametrically by individuals' beliefs about the appropriateness of congruent relative to incongruent sociopolitical violence in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and by moral conviction in ventral striatum. Overall moral conviction was predicted by neural response to congruent relative to incongruent violence in amygdala. Together, these findings indicate that moral conviction about sociopolitical issues serves to increase their subjective value, overriding natural aversion to interpersonal harm.
... Cultural conservatism. Based on prior evidence that many aspects of cultural conservatism tend to converge on a broad individual difference construct (e.g., Bouchard 2009;Norris and Inglehart 2019;Saucier 2000;Stankov 2017;Wilson and Patterson 1968), we computed a widely inclusive cultural conservatism measure with the WVS data. It includes indicators of socially traditional versus progressive policy preferences as well as a range of social attitudes, values, and beliefs shown in prior work to cohere with these policy preferences (e.g., Feldman 2003; Hetherington and Weiler 2009;Malka 2013;Miller and Davis 2018). ...
Recent events have raised concern about potential threats to democracy within Western countries. If Western citizens who are open to authoritarian governance share a common set of political preferences, then authoritarian elites can attract mass coalitions that are willing to subvert democracy to achieve shared ideological goals. With this in mind, we explored which ideological groups are most open to authoritarian governance within Western general publics using World Values Survey data from fourteen Western democracies and three recent Latin American Public Opinion Project samples from Canada and the United States. Two key findings emerged. First, cultural conservatism was consistently associated with openness to authoritarian governance. Second, within half of the democracies studied, including all of the English-speaking ones, Western citizens holding a protection-based attitude package⸺combining cultural conservatism with left economic attitudes⸺were the most open to authoritarian governance. Within other countries, protection-based and consistently right-wing attitude packages were associated with similarly high levels of openness to authoritarian governance. We discuss implications for radical right populism and the possibility of splitting potentially undemocratic mass coalitions along economic lines.
... Differences between right and left orientations help guide people's interpretations and responses within their political environments (Abramowitz & Saunders, 2006;Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008). Examples of core values within the conservative-liberal dimension are to maintain the status quo vs. supporting societal change (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003;McClosky, 1958;Wilson & Patterson, 1968); tolerance of vs. opposition to inequality (Bobbio, 1996;Jost et al., 2003); and a great vs. small emphasis on military strength (Shapiro & Bloch-Elkon, 2007). Several cultural stances have also been placed at either end of the spectrum since the 1970's, such as stances on abortion and homosexuality (Adams, 1997;Baldassari & Gelman, 2008;Fiorina & Abrams, 2009). ...
... In their analyses, they used two sets of data concerning twins and their relatives: Virginia 30,000 (VA 30k) and Australian 25,000 (OZ 25k). The attitudes were measured using the Wilson-Patterson (W-P) Attitude Inventory (Wilson and Patterson 1968), consisting of 28 items. The results confirmed the predictions of the researchers demonstrating that political attitudes are in all likelihood heritable (correlations for MZ twin pairs were higher than for DZ twin pairs). ...
The study of political attitudes and behaviours is important from a cognitive point of view and carries considerable practical implications. Therefore, researchers should consider the widest possible spectrum of factors determining the participation of individuals in politics. Their analyses, however, are usually limited to the effects of environmental factors, ignoring or marginalizing the impact of genetic factors. An approach called ‘genopolitics’ has been trying to fill the resulting knowledge gap for over a decade. The aim of this article is to provide a synthetic description of genopolitics based on institutional, methodological, epistemological and social criteria. The main points of consideration are the assessment of the explanatory utility of genopolitical research, as well as the analysis of the cognitive and non-cognitive conditions and barriers to the development of genopolitics.
... Many tests, and the theories from which they are derived, reflect the issues of the day and their particular time period. Hence, the interest in authoritarianism after the second war (Adorno et al., 1950), conservatism and racism in the 1960s (Wilson and Patterson, 1968;Eysenck and Wilson, 1978) and conspiracy theories today (Swami and Furnham, 2014). This study is about militant extremism which has attracted a number of recent studies (Loza, 2007;Trip et al., 2019;Gøtzsche-Astrup, 2020). ...
This study aimed to examine bright- and dark-side personality, personal beliefs (religion and politics) and self-evaluation correlates of beliefs in the Militant Extremist Mindset (MEM). In all, 506 young adults completed various self-report measures in addition to the three-dimensional MEM questionnaire. The measures included short measures of the Big Five traits, Self-Monitoring, Self-Evaluation and Personality Disorders, as well as demographic questions of how religious and politically liberal participants were. The Proviolence, Vile World, and Divine power mindsets showed varying correlates, with no consistent trend. Stepwise regressions showed that the demographic, personality and belief factors accounted for between 14% (Vile World) and 54% (Divine Power) of the variance, There were many differences between the results of three mindset factors, but personality disorder scores remained positive predictors of all three. The Vile World mindset was predicted by religiousness, liberalism, personality disorder scores and negative self-monitoring, but not personality traits. Religiousness had a contribution to all subscales and predicted the vast majority of the Divine Power mindset with smaller relationships with personality and personality disorders. Proviolence was predicted by the majority personality measures and sex.
... Appendix S1. The Revised Wilson-Patterson Inventory Adapted from Fessler and colleagues (2017), which was itself updated from Dodd and colleagues (2012) and Wilson and Patterson (1968), used in this study to asses participants' agreement with and support given to 30 social and political issues. ...
People are motivated by shared social values that, when held with moral conviction, can serve as compelling mandates capable of facilitating support for ideological violence. The current study examined this dark side of morality by identifying specific cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with beliefs about the appropriateness of sociopolitical violence, and determining the extent to which the engagement of these mechanisms was predicted by moral convictions. Participants reported their moral convictions about a variety of sociopolitical issues prior to undergoing functional MRI scanning. During scanning, they were asked to evaluate the appropriateness of violent protests that were ostensibly congruent or incongruent with their views about sociopolitical issues. Complementary univariate and multivariate analytical strategies comparing neural responses to congruent and incongruent violence identified neural mechanisms implicated in processing salience and in the encoding of subjective value. As predicted, neuro-hemodynamic response was modulated parametrically by individuals’ beliefs about the appropriateness of congruent relative to incongruent sociopolitical violence in ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and by moral conviction in ventral striatum. Overall moral conviction was predicted by neural response to congruent relative to incongruent violence in amygdala. Together, these findings indicate that moral conviction about sociopolitical issues serves to increase their subjective value, overriding natural aversion to interpersonal harm.
... General Social Attitudes. General Social Attitude Scale (SAS_G) is a multidimensional instrument based on the catch-phrase approach proposed by Wilson and Patterson (1968) consisting of five subscales labeled Religiosity, Sexual Freedom, Cosmopolitism, Modern technology and Social justice that has been validated in a large sample of Croatian university students (Milas et al, 2013). The Scale demonstrated acceptable psychometric properties and some previous research on criterion validity (Milas & Burušić, 2004) showed that it is predictive of relevant attitudes and political behavior. ...
Much research has been conducted on the relationship between ideology, voter preferences and electoral choice. However, due to the complexity of the relationship, differences in the understanding of ideology and the diversity of political systems, the issue has not yet been fully explored. Current research approaches the problems by monitoring the dynamics of change in the association between ideological position and party preferences over time in Croatia. Data for the study were collected in three surveys conducted in 2003 (N=1248), 2014 (N=1000) and 2016 (N=750) on nationally representative samples of the Croatian adult population. The ideological position of an individual was measured in two ways, using General Social Attitude Scale (SAS_G) and left-right dimension self-placement. Political party preferences were measured by the reported electoral choice in the previous elections and the expressed voting choice in the forthcoming elections. The results of the current study indicate a steady increase in the correlation between ideological factors and political preferences over the years. In the paper we argue that the observed increase in the correspondence between one's own ideology and the preference for a political party could be an additional indicator of democratic consolidation in transitional and post-transitional countries like Croatia. However, unlike the democratic consolidation taking place on the outside and involving the construction of democratic institutions, this is a change in the minds of citizens who broaden and deepen their political culture, knowledge of ideology, political competence and are becoming more aware of implications of their own electoral decisions.
... Studies on authoritarianism or conservatism (Wilson & Patterson, 1978) -in some sense the opposite of Openness to Experience -may also provide evidence for a link between Openness to Experience and intelligence, since authoritarianism has been found to be negatively correlated with both Openness on one hand (r = -.57 in Trapnell, 1994), and intelligence on the other (up to r = -.50, Zeidner & Matthews, 2000). ...
This thesis concerns the relationship between personality traits and intellectual competence. It contains five chapters and ten independent but related empirical studies. Chapter one presents a review of the salient literature in the area. It is divided into three sub-sections: personality and psychometric intelligence, personality and academic performance (AP), and personality and subjectively-assessed intelligence (SAI). Chapter two (studies 1 to 4) examines the relationship between the Big Five personality traits with several psychometric intelligence tests, SAI, and gender. Results indicated that personality traits (notably Neuroticism and Agreeableness) are significantly related to SAI, but not to psychometric intelligence. Since SAI is also significantly related to psychometric intelligence, it is suggested that SAI may mediate the relationship between personality and psychometric intelligence. Chapter three (studies 5 to 8) examines the relationship between psychometric intelligence and personality (the Big Five and the Gigantic Three) with AP. Results indicate that personality traits (notably Conscientiousness and Psychoticism) are significant predictors of AP, accounting for unique variance in AP even when psychometric intelligence and academic behaviour are considered as predictors. Chapter four (studies 9 and 10) looks at the relationship between personality and psychometric intelligence with a measure of art judgement as well as several indicators of previous art experience. Results indicate that art judgement is related to both personality and intelligence, and may therefore be considered a mixed construct. Chapter five presents a brief summary of the results and conclusions.
... Issue-based ideological preferences were assessed using five different instruments: (1) the Core Domains of Social and Economic Conservatism Scale, which contains seven items measuring economic conservatism and three items measuring social conservatism (Feldman & Johnston, 2014); (2) the Pew Research Center's "Core Issues in American Politics" scale, which is comprised of 12-items (e.g., "The government needs to do more to make health care affordable and accessible"; Zell & Bernstein, 2014); (3) the Social and Economic Conservatism Scale, which includes five economic and seven socially conservative values (e.g., "Traditional values"; Everett, 2013); (4) the Political Issue Statements which is comprised of 10-items measuring political orientation on the left-right ideological space (e.g., "A woman should have the right to choose what to do with her body, even if that means getting an abortion"; Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, 2009); and (5) an adapted 16-item version of Henningham's (1996Henningham's ( , 1997 Social and Economic Conservatism scales, which are contemporary versions of the "classic" Wilson and Patterson (1968) scale for measuring liberalism-conservatism (see the online supporting information for the full list of items). ...
It is often claimed that conspiracy theories are endorsed with the same level of intensity across the left‐right ideological spectrum. But do liberals and conservatives in the United States embrace conspiratorial thinking to an equivalent degree? There are important historical, philosophical, and scientific reasons dating back to Richard Hofstadter's book The Paranoid Style in American Politics to doubt this claim. In four large studies of U.S. adults (total N = 5049)—including national samples—we investigated the relationship between political ideology, measured in both symbolic and operational terms, and conspiratorial thinking in general. Results reveal that conservatives in the United States were not only more likely than liberals to endorse specific conspiracy theories, but they were also more likely to espouse conspiratorial worldviews in general (r = .27, 95% CI: .24, .30). Importantly, extreme conservatives were significantly more likely to engage in conspiratorial thinking than extreme liberals (Hedges' g = .77, SE = .07, p < .001). The relationship between ideology and conspiratorial thinking was mediated by a strong distrust of officialdom and paranoid ideation, both of which were higher among conservatives, consistent with Hofstadter's account of the paranoid style in American politics.
The present chapter deals with the theoretical underpinnings of defining conservativism. In the past, conservativism was defined in a rather ideological manner with the following topoi: importance of strong rules and punishments; militarism, ethnocentrism, and intolerance against any minorities; religious dogmatism; preference for conventional art, clothes, and institutions; resistance against scientific knowledge; and anti-hedonism. These thematic fields were then translated into a questionnaire and linked to specific political outcomes. Yet, those theoretical pillars are in stark contradiction to other thematic approaches to the notion of conservativism that feature the preservation of meaningful activities in the domain of one’s family, work, and friends. That in mind, the conservative-minded attitude relies on traditions and norms in those domains that help oneself to anticipate the next present—unknown—moment. This approach was left unnoticed by the research community but remains an important contribution to the wholistic study of the conservative phenomenon that is then translated into the operational definition of a conservative culture.
Introduction
Contact interventions have shown short‐term effectiveness in reducing stigmatising attitudes and behaviours of the public towards marginalised population groups, including people who inject drugs. We theorised that the effectiveness of an intervention differs according to peoples' underlying social values and undertook a study to test this.
Methods
We recruited participants from the Australian public by social media and measured their attitudes, desire to maintain personal distance, and support for structural stigma towards people who inject drugs before and after a brief online video intervention ( n = 314). We divided participants into tertile groups according to their responses to a conservatism scale and compared group differences in post‐intervention stigma scores ( n = 242–244), controlling for pre‐intervention scores and demographic variables.
Results
Adjusting for baseline levels, the post‐intervention scores in all measures showed significant improvement but scores of the moderate group were consistently most improved. Stigmatising attitudes in the moderate group were significantly reduced when compared with the conservative and progressive groups. However, reductions in desire for personal distance and support for structural stigma did not significantly differ by conservatism group.
Discussion and Conclusions
A brief online contact intervention showed immediate effectiveness in reducing stigma towards people who inject drugs. As people with moderate values were found to be more amenable to changing their perspectives, audience social values may need consideration when designing and evaluating stigma interventions. More research is needed to understand how to influence people with more conservative values, and how to increase public support for policies and practices that reduce stigma.
Bølstad and Dinas (2017) propose a model of spatial voting, based on social identity theory, that suggests supporting a candidate/policy on the other side of the ideological spectrum has a disutility that is not accounted for by common spatial models. Unfortunately, the data they use cannot speak directly to whether the disutility arises because individuals perceive their ideology as a social identity. We present the results of an experimental study that measures the norm against crossing the ideological spectrum; tests the cost of doing so, controlling for spatial effects; and demonstrates that this cost increases with the salience and strength of identity norms. By demonstrating the norm mechanism for the disutility of crossing the ideological spectrum, we provide strong support for B&D's model.
In this chapter, I review key conceptual and methodological sources of bias in psychological measurement, emphasizing those with particular relevance to political phenomena and providing relevant examples of measurement bias in political psychological research. I then review the case of authoritarianism, which until recently was predominantly assessed among political conservatives. This emphasis on right-wing authoritarianism, and paucity of research concerning left-wing authoritarianism, has led to widespread conceptual obstacles to understanding the psychological underpinnings of authoritarianism, illustrating the degree to which measurement bias has key implications for theory development and testing. In closing, I provide several recommendations for reducing political bias in psychological measurement.
The Gender Stereotype Effect in language comprehension refers to the increased processing load that occurs when comprehenders encounter linguistic information that is incongruent with their understanding of gender stereotypes; for example, upon encountering the pronoun he in the sentence The maid answered the phone because he heard it ring . We investigate the Stereotype Effect using appropriateness and correctness ratings and ask whether it is modulated by individual differences in participants' personality and political ideology. Results from this study indicate that the Stereotype Effect can be replicated in an offline paradigm and that the Effect is specific to a discourse character's gender: sentences describing male agents fulfilling stereotypical female roles were rated lower in both appropriateness and correctness than sentences describing female agents fulfilling stereotypical male roles. Further, more open, conscientious, liberal, and empathetic individuals were more sensitive to the character gender-specific effect, rating stereotype incongruent sentences, particularly female role-male pronoun pairings, lower than congruent ones. Overall, these results point to certain individual differences being associated with differences in the strength of stereotype perception, indicating the possibility that these individuals use more top-down language processing, where comprehenders higher on these scales might be able to make more use of extra-linguistic, sociocultural factors in their language comprehension. Additionally, the results indicate a character gender-based difference in sociocultural stereotypes.
Vocational choice can be defined as the process by which an individual comes to follow a certain occupation, to enter a specific field of work. The theme of vocational choice has largely been explored by occupational psychologists and career guidance officers. Various theories have been developed, regarding how the actual choice is made, what process(es) one goes through, and what factors act on the process and influence the final decisions.
Although theories about vocational choice have been put forward from various disciplines, the ones that will be presented here come primarily from the psychology field. These theories deal primarily with aspects within the individual which play a role as motivating forces and/or as part of the process, and include psychodynamic theories and need theories, self theory of occupational choice, and the developmental and the differentialist theories.
The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology provides a comprehensive review of the psychology of political behaviour from an international perspective. Its coverage spans from foundational approaches to political psychology, including the evolutionary, personality and developmental roots of political attitudes, to contemporary challenges to governance, including populism, hate speech, conspiracy beliefs, inequality, climate change and cyberterrorism. Each chapter features cutting-edge research from internationally renowned scholars who offer their unique insights into how people think, feel and act in different political contexts. By taking a distinctively international approach, this handbook highlights the nuances of political behaviour across cultures and geographical regions, as well as the truisms of political psychology that transcend context. Academics, graduate students and practitioners alike, as well as those generally interested in politics and human behaviour, will benefit from this definitive overview of how people shape – and are shaped by – their political environment in a rapidly changing twenty-first century.
This chapter discusses some of the relevant findings in the study of genetics and politics, with an examination of how these forces interact and intersect. Particular attention is given to the importance of assortative mating in determining political ideology, a topic that has been typically neglected by political science. Full incorporation of evolutionary, biological, and genetic contributions to political attitudes, preferences, and behaviour should start to change the way we think about both politics and science. Environments are not infinitely malleable and susceptible to easy intervention, any more than biology or genetics are immutable, fixed, or unchanging. Our genes operate in a social context and constantly interact with that environment in a recursive and iterative manner. These mechanisms also influence how we get our genes through processes like mate selection, and affect how those genes operate in a complex social and political world. This interaction has real-world political and social consequences, producing significant outcomes, including in-group protection, out-group discrimination, allocation of resources, and the regulation of human sexuality in all forms.
Personality researchers have posited multiple ways in which the relations between personality traits and life outcomes may be moderated by other traits, but there are well-known difficulties in reliable detection of such trait-by-trait interaction effects. Estimating the prevalence and magnitude base rates of trait-by-trait interactions would help to assess whether a given study is suited to detect interaction effects. We used the Life Outcomes of Personality Replication Project dataset to estimate the prevalence, nature, and magnitude of trait-by-trait interactions across 81 self-reported life outcomes ( n ≥ 1350 per outcome). Outcome samples were divided into two halves to examine the replicability of observed interaction effects using both traditional and machine learning indices. The study was adequately powered (1 − β ≥ .80) to detect the smallest interaction effects of interest (interactions accounting for a Δ R ² of approximately .01) for 78 of the 81 (96%) outcomes in each of the partitioned samples. Results showed that only 40 interactions (5.33% of the original 750 tests) showed evidence of strong replicability through robustness checks (i.e., demographic covariates, Tobit regression, and ordinal regression). Interactions were also uniformly small in magnitude. Future directions for research on trait-by-trait interactions are discussed.
Intro
Prior literature indicates that nontraditional attitudes are linked to higher intelligence. However, such attitudes in adolescence often accompany counter-normative, delinquent-type behaviors, which are themselves negatively linked with intelligence. This points to the possibility of suppression in the relationship between intelligence and nontraditional attitudes.
Methods
We analyzed a large community sample of 17-year-olds (N = 3330) with data on intelligence, nontraditional attitudes, and a diverse collection of self- and teacher-reported counter-normative behaviors. Developmental questions for these relationships were examined through cross-sectional comparisons between the adolescents and their parents as well as longitudinal analysis of the adolescent sample across emerging adulthood.
Results
Youth who endorsed nontraditional attitudes had lower school grades, earlier age at first sex, heavier substance use, and were perceived as more oppositional by their teachers. Each of these problem behaviors was inversely related to intelligence. Accordingly, the positive correlation between nontraditional attitudes and intelligence was much weaker in adolescents as compared to their middle-aged parents. Longitudinal analyses revealed that the association between nontraditional attitudes and intelligence strengthens in early adulthood.
Conclusion
Associations between intelligence and sociopolitical attitudes can be obscured even by seemingly distal psychological characteristics.
This research aimed to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relations between social norms, right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA), outgroup‐directed prejudice, and hostile behavioral intentions toward outgroups. Three correlational studies, conducted in two countries and three different intergroup contexts (n1 = 997; n2 = 1011; n3 = 1992), investigated the moderating role of social norms (both positive and negative) on the relation between RWA and expression of prejudice as well as behavioral intentions toward outgroups. We found that in the presence of positive (i.e., tolerant) social norms, the previously well‐established positive relation between RWA and prejudice is reduced or even reversed, whereas in the presence of negative (i.e., intolerant) social norms, this relation is strengthened. Additionally, the lower (vs. higher) prejudice of high‐RWA individuals in the presence of positive (vs. negative) social norms mediated the link between RWA and behavioral intentions toward outgroups. The present research constitutes the first comprehensive demonstration of authoritarians' potential to be less prejudiced in response to prevailing tolerant social norms.
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When deciding whether to support a political candidate, policy or cause, individuals are observed to prioritize the expression of their political identities. They even knowingly incur personal costs (a lower wage, strained family relations) to do so. We argue that viewing political identities as social identities that impart norms on who or what one ought to support can help explain such costly political expression. Through population-based survey experiments, we show that individuals are aware of the norms attached to their political identities; will knowingly choose norm-compliance at personal cost; and that this costly political identity expression varies with norm salience and strength. Our results imply that as political identities strengthen, group norm compliance will increase, even at a cost, rendering compromise between political groups less likely.
TAC Authoritarkan Personality
- Am Rno
- T W Frenkel-Brunswik
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Handbook for the The Social Desirability Factor in Personality Assessment and Research Sense and Nonsense in Psychology Attitude and pupil size Conservatism and personality. Am
- R B Cattell
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- G Sixteen Personality Edwards
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Measurement of Meaning Authoritarian scales and response bias The observable unconscious and the inferable conscious in current Soviet psychophysiology : interoceptive conditioning, semantic conditioning and the orienting reflex
- C E Osgood
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- P H Tannrnbaum
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Agreement set and anti-content attitudes in the F-scale : a reinterpn-tation
- F Saniublson
SANIUBLSON, F. (1964). Agreement set and anti-content attitudes in the F-scale : a reinterpn-tation. J. abncmn. SOC. Psychol. 68,338342. Illinois : University of Illinois Press. Mamrscript received 4 September 1967