Negativity bias, personality and political ideology

Johnston, Christopher A.; Madson, Gabriel

doi:10.1038/s41562-022-01327-5

Cited by 25 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 69 publications

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“…It is less clear what changes could be made to salvage the conservative shift hypothesis. It was not supported in our study, and recent studies prioritizing internal validity have also found very little evidence consistent with the theory (e.g., Bakker et al, 2020;Johnston & Madson, 2022). It may be that the field needs to move to a new theoretical perspective.…”

Section: Theoretical Implicationscontrasting

confidence: 97%

The Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic Made People Feel Threatened, but had a Limited Impact on Political Attitudes in the United States

Brandt¹,

Vallabha²,

Turner-Zwinkels³

2023

Preprint

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The COVID-19 pandemic threatens people’s physical, mental, and economic well-being. We investigated if the pandemic’s onset caused changes in political attitudes. Theories of threat and politics predict that the pandemic’s onset will change people’s attitudes by causing people to adopt more conservative attitudes, more culturally conservative attitudes, or more extreme attitudes. We comprehensively tested the external validity of these predictions by estimating the causal effect of the pandemic’s onset on 84 political attitudes and 8 perceived threats using fine-grained repeated cross-sectional data (Study 1, N = 232,684) and panel data (Study 2, N = 552) collected in the United States. Although the pandemic’s onset caused feelings of threat, the onset only caused limited attitude change. Only 6 attitudes shifted in a conservative direction and none of these shifts were for culturally conservative attitudes. Only 4 attitudes became more extreme. The most consistent finding was that most attitudes did not change. The reliable changes that did emerge were typically in a liberal direction. These were on social welfare and healthcare related attitudes, suggesting that people adopted attitudes that would help directly address the healthcare and economic threats of the pandemic. The data suggest that the prominent theories of threat and politics did not make accurate predictions for a major societal threat. This calls into question the generalizability of these theories to a threatening event which scholars and policy makers want to make predictions about. Our results highlight the necessity of testing psychological theories’ predictive powers in real life circumstances.

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Section: Theoretical Implicationscontrasting

confidence: 97%

The Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic Made People Feel Threatened, but had a Limited Impact on Political Attitudes in the United States

Brandt¹,

Vallabha²,

Turner-Zwinkels³

2023

Preprint

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“…We only examine a subset of psychological variables that are commonly framed as causes or correlates of political ideology in the present investigation. Perhaps most importantly, we did not include measures relevant to threat sensitivity and existential needs, from physiological indicators (Bakker et al, 2020) to negativity bias (Johnston & Madson, 2022) to trait neuroticism (Federico, 2022), which features prominently in several explanatory accounts of political ideology (Hibbing et al, 2014; Jost, 2017). That said, the literature on these accounts is murky and either does not appear to replicate (Bakker et al, 2020; Johnston & Madson, 2022) or differs in both direction and magnitude across threat-sensitivity indicators, conservatism indicators, and contexts (Bergh & Brandt, 2022; Brandt & Bakker, 2022; Kahn et al, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis: A meta-analytic review.

Costello¹,

Bowes²,

Baldwin³

et al. 2023

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

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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 multilevel 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 nonrepresentative sampling, criterion contamination, and disproportionate use of American samples have yielded overestimates 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.

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“…Valence remains widely used by many without any acknowledgment of the challenges valence scholars have long failed to address. Those using valence simply disregard contrary evidence (Hibbing et al, 2014;Brandt et al, 2015;Fournier et al, 2020;Bellovary et al, 2021;Johnston and Madson, 2022;Schumacher et al, 2022).…”

Section: Popper Criteriamentioning

confidence: 99%

Evaluating the status of theories of emotion in political science and psychology

Marcus

2023

Front. Polit. Sci.

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Emotion is an increasingly influential area of research in psychology, political psychology, political science, and other social sciences. Research is best when driven by theory because the absence of theory generates research that can lack coherence and precision of language and meaning from one study to another, from one program of research to another. In brief, a theory provides essential binding foundations that enable scientific explanations to be rigorously tested. Furthermore, reliance on incomplete or unsound theories tends to generate flawed results. I evaluate four current emotion research programs to assess whether each constitutes a comprehensive theory of emotion. The programs under consideration, in alphabetical order, are appraisal theories in psychology and in political science, emotion regulation, and valence-based accounts. A review of the elements that constitute a theory of emotion of each of these programs persuades me that each has weaknesses that should be addressed. In sum, I find that the ambition to have a comprehensive theory of emotion awaits fulfillment.

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Negativity bias, personality and political ideology

Cited by 25 publications

References 69 publications

The Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic Made People Feel Threatened, but had a Limited Impact on Political Attitudes in the United States

The Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic Made People Feel Threatened, but had a Limited Impact on Political Attitudes in the United States

Revisiting the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis: A meta-analytic review.

Evaluating the status of theories of emotion in political science and psychology

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