In the wake of the 2016 election, which surprised pundits and voters on both the left and the right, there has been renewed interest in understanding what predicts American voters’ choices. In this article, we investigate the roles of personality and issue importance in how people voted in the 2016 U.S. election. In this longitudinal study of 403 MTurk workers who voted in the election, we assessed the relations between personality (openness, social dominance orientation, and national identity importance) and issue importance (group rights and social justice, economic rights, and individual and national rights), and voting for Clinton or Trump. Our results indicate that both individual differences and issue importance as measured in July 2016 predicted votes in November. We also found that the links between personality and voting were mediated by issue importance. Implications for political psychology and the study of personality, campaign issues, and voting behavior are discussed.

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In two studies, we examine how different processes might underlie the political mobilization of individuals with marginalized versus privileged identities for leftwing activism (LWA) versus right-wing activism (RWA). In the first study, with a sample of 244 midlife women, we tested the hypotheses that endorsement of system justification beliefs and social identities were direct predictors of political activism, and that system justification beliefs moderated the mobilization of social identities for activism on both the left and the right. We found that system justification predicted RWA only among those who felt close to privileged groups; the parallel reverse effect did not hold for LWA, though rejection of system-justifying beliefs was an important direct predictor. In Study 2, we replicated many of these findings with a sample of 113 college students. In addition, we tested and confirmed the hypothesis that LWA is predicted by openness to experience and is unrelated to RWA, but not that openness plays a stronger role among those with marginalized identities. These two studies together support our overall hypothesis that different personality processes are involved with

In two studies, we investigated how intersecting social categories shape views of immigrants in the United States. In Study 1, we analyzed 310 attributes generated by 92 participants for the category of immigrant and 30 additional immigrant groups with intersecting social categories (e.g. “undocumented immigrant”) reflecting various levels of social status. Using the Meaning Extraction Method (MEM) and factor analysis to examine shared meanings, we identified five factors; further comparative analyses of immigrant groups focused on the first two factors (Vulnerable vs. Hardworking, Drain vs. Asset). The importance of legal status for judgments on these two factors was evident in comparisons of the generic immigrant with four specific legal intersections. An examination of all 31 groups of immigrants showed that higher status groups were perceived as Hardworking (less Vulnerable) and high national Assets (low Drain), while lower status groups varied in Vulnerability perceptions but were generally thought to be Drains on the nation rather than Assets. In Study 2, 270 participants evaluated intersectional immigrant social categories that differed in combinations of higher status (privileged) and lower status (marginalized) social group memberships, using scales based on the terms identified by the factors in Study 1. Participants rated immigrant groups with two privileged statuses as less vulnerable and more likely to be an asset to the nation than immigrant groups with two marginalized or mixed statuses. The utility of a bottom-up intersectional approach to assess stereotype content of immigrant groups is discussed.

The negotiation of multiple social identities (e.g., race, gender, and socioeconomic status) is relevant to emerging adults in their first year of college, with important implications for their social attitudes and subsequent intergroup interactions and behaviors (Arnett, 2000;Jones & Abes, 2013). Social identity scholarship acknowledges that individuals hold multiple social identities simultaneously, but relatively little research examines individuals' identification with multiple social identities or implications for their social attitudes. The current study used latent class cluster analysis to examine variation in patterns of identity centrality across gender, racial, and social class identities among a diverse college student sample (N ϭ 887) attending a predominantly White university. Five cluster groups were distinguished (all average, all low, all high, high-race/low-SES, and high-gender/low-SES importance). Cluster membership related to participants' self-identified gender, racial, and social class categories. Cluster groups also varied in social-identity-related attitudes, with the all-high-importance cluster (high centrality across social identities) showing higher sexism, racism, and classism consciousness scores and more positive intergroup and social justice action attitudes than all-low-importance or all-average-importance clusters, and showing similarities and differences in attitudes compared with those for whom a single identity was most central. Implications of findings for identity theory and supporting identity development in higher education are discussed.