This article refers to the concept of collective mentality, which consists of the mental patterns most typical of a given community. The authors show some psychosocial reasons why Poland’s political system may shift from liberal to illiberal forms of democracy in recent years. This process is accompanied by an increasing sociopolitical polarization of the society, gradually becoming an expanded and destructive conflict. Previous research has shown that the Polish sociopolitical polarization’s primary psychosocial reason could be the collision of two competing value systems—purely individualistic and purely collectivist. In this article, the authors argue that both mental patterns determine two different political community visions—liberal and communitarian. In-depth empirical analyses show anti-egalitarian characteristics of the liberal orientation and traditional-conservative characteristics of the communitarian one. Furthermore, the authors show that both orientations’ followers quite differently define the proportions between individual autonomy and social identity and cohesion. These differences are particularly evident in their attitudes toward democracy and patterns of involvement in public life. Finally, the article provides empirical evidence that the division into supporters of the liberal and communitarian political community directly appears in the Polish electorate’s political preferences.

BackgroundRecent studies and theorizing (SD-HARM model) suggested that social dominance orientation (SDO) constitutes the ideological foundation of negative attitude towards animals and acceptance of their exploitation. At the same time, right-wing authoritarian-ism (RWA) is expected to predict speciesist beliefs only when they are perceived as part of societal tradition. The present studies investigated these predictions with moral condemnation of harm done to animals by humans as an indicator of speciesism.Participants and procedure400 and 324 people, aged 18-87, took part in two cross-sectional studies. They reported their levels of SDO and RWA and made moral judgments of harm done to animals.ResultsIn both studies, SDO, but not RWA, negatively predicted moral condemnation of harming animals.ConclusionsThe results offer additional support for the SD-HARM model. The more people accept SDO beliefs, the less they morally con-demn harm done to animals by humans.

People vary in the extent to which they embrace their society’s traditions, impacting a range of social and political phenomena. People also vary in the degree to which they perceive disparate dangers as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions likely regularly offered direct and indirect avenues for addressing hazards; consequently, via multiple possible pathways, orientations toward tradition and toward danger may have become associated. Emerging research documents connections between individual differences in traditionalism and variation in threat responsivity in general, and pathogen-avoidance motivations in particular. Importantly, because threat-mitigating behaviors can conflict with competing priorities, the precise associations between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance likely depend on contextually contingent costs and benefits. The COVID-19 pandemic requires individuals to make decisions about consequential and costly pathogen-avoidance behaviors that can clash with other priorities. The pandemic therefore provides a real-world setting in which to test the posited relationship between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance across socio-political contexts. Across 27 societies (N = 7,844), we find that costly COVID-19-avoidance behaviors positively correlate with greater endorsement of traditional norms and values in a majority of countries. Accounting for the conflict that arises in some societies between public health precautions and competing priorities, such as the exercise of personal liberties, reveals a consistent relationship between traditionalism and COVID-19 precautions across an even wider range of social and cultural contexts. These findings support the thesis that traditionalism is associated with an enhanced tendency to attend to hazards.

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The present research explores the role of repetitive thought (RT) in developing control deprivation deficits. The two main RT theories lead to diverging predictions. The response style theory suggests that RT in reaction to distress leads to negative effects in terms of emotional and cognitive functioning. However, the theory of Marin and Tesser and its elaboration by Watkins, suggest that the effects of RT depend on its form and that individuals who are not depression-prone usually adopt the constructive form of RT that leads to positive effects. To test which of these predictions is true for control deprivation situation, two experimental studies were conducted. Participants after control deprivation were induced RT or distraction, followed by the measurement of their emotional and cognitive functioning. The results suggest that repetitive thought reduces both emotional and cognitive helplessness deficits and has no effect in no control deprivation condition. This supports the theory of Martin and Tesser and its elaboration by Watkins.