The concept of ethnocentrism was introduced by Gumplowicz in the 1870s, popularized by Sumner in the 1900s, and first investigated psychometrically by Adorno and colleagues in the 1940s. It has become a fundamental concept in the social sciences, but over the last several decades, its popularity and usage in political and social psychology have decreased. Recent events, such as the growing popularity of ethno‐nationalist and populist leaders and policies, show that ethnocentrism as a phenomenon has been resurging around the world. In addition, given its important explanatory power, an increasing number of political psychologists have started again to use the concept. This article presents an analysis of ethnocentrism reconceptualized as a hierarchical construct emanating from a strong sense of ethnic group self‐centeredness and self‐importance. It discusses the prevalence of ethnocentrism around the world, its conceptualization and measurement, and its theoretical underpinnings, supporting them with novel empirical research conducted with two abbreviated measures of ethnocentrism. The article argues that ethnocentrism ultimately stems from the need to strengthen one's own ethnic group at the expense of anyone who and anything that can weaken it.

We argue that the way ambiguity has been operationalized throughout the literature on ambiguity effects has an important limitation, insofar as ambiguity in outcomes has been neglected. We report two studies where judges do encounter ambiguity in the sampled outcomes and find evidence that ambiguity aversion is not less than when judges are given a range of outcomes without reference to ambiguous outcomes themselves. This result holds regardless of whether people are presented with a sample all at once or sample outcomes sequentially. Our experiments also investigate the effects of conflicting information about outcomes, finding that conflict aversion also does not decrease. Moreover, ambiguity and conflict aversion do not seem to arise as a consequence of judges ignoring uncertain outcomes and thereby treating outcome sets as reduced samples of unambiguous (or unconflicting) information. Instead, ambiguity and conflict aversion are partly explained by more pessimistic outcome forecasts by judges. This pessimism, in turn, may be due to the judges’ uncertainty about how the chance of a desirable outcome from an ambiguous or conflictive alternative compares with an equivalent risky alternative. Both studies used hypothetical scenarios, and no incentives were provided for participants’ decisions.

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