Conservative Orientation as a Determinant of Hopelessness

Abstract

Conservative orientation is identified with reference to authoritarianism, work ethic belief, just world belief, and endorsement of individualistic causes of social problems. This over-arching orientation is hypothesized to affect hopelessness and to be affected by self-esteem with reference to ego development theory and learned helplessness theory. Causal modeling of data obtained from 1st-year college students (N = 556) in Hong Kong supports the hypotheses, showing that a student's hopelessness relates to his or her conservative orientation, even when self-esteem is controlled. This relationship can be interpreted by ego development and learned helplessness theories and cannot be explained as a spurious effect. Through the theories, hopelessness is interpreted as a result of maladaptive development and fatalistic, alienated, and helpless outlooks. This maladaptive development and the outlooks in turn result from students' conservative and individualistic orientation.

Sociopsychological profiles of students that leave the ingroup or engage in social competition

“…Although the demobilizing influence of these beliefs is clear, their effect on the individual strategy of leaving the group are less clear and certain. Adherence to just‐world beliefs can provoke a sentiment of fatalism and helplessness in the face of negative outcomes (Chuen & Knowk, 1996). We would expect that people who adhere to just‐world beliefs would accept situations that are negative to ingroup interests without engaging in any individual or collective coping strategy.…”

Two Spheres of Belief in Justice: Extensive Support for the Bidimensional Model of Belief in a Just World

“…It has been demonstrated that political ideology, which is generally linked to penal punitivity Hamilton, 1976), is frequently related to BJW (Cheung & Kwok, 1996;Dalbert, 1992;Dittmar & Dickinson, 1993;Furnham & Gunter, 1984;Smith & Green, 1984;Wagstaff, 1983;Wagstaff & Quirk, 1983). This variable was therefore included in the questionnaire design in order to test that correlations between BJW-O and penal punitivity are not influenced by political ideology.…”

Predictors of satisfaction among cognitively intact nursing home residents in Hong Kong

“…Total scores range from 10 to 40 with higher scores indicating stronger selfesteem. Construct validity of the RSES was demonstrated by significant correlations with hopelessness and psychological well-being in different populations (Cheung & Kwok, 1996;Shek, 1997). The reliability between the English and Chinese language versions of RSES as estimated by intraclass correlation coefficient is .90.…”