How different are cultural and economic ideology?

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

We investigated if the COVID-19 pandemic's onset caused changes in political attitudes. Influential theories predict that the pandemic's onset will cause 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 eight 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 (six conservative shifts, four extremity shifts, 12 liberal shifts, 62 no change). Prominent theories of threat and politics did not make accurate predictions for this major societal threat. Our results highlight the necessity of testing psychological theories' predictive powers in real-life circumstances.

Political orientation predicts the use of conventional and complementary/alternative medicine: A survey study of 19 European countries

BACKGROUND

People align their beliefs and behaviors, including those related to health, increasingly along politically ideological lines.

OBJECTIVE

We investigated whether individual political orientation (PO) predicts the use of conventional (CM) and complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) across Europe.

METHODS

We used cross-sectional samples representative of persons aged 15 and over from 19 European countries (ESS 2015; round 7; N = 35,572). We assessed PO based on participants' vote choice in the most recent national election, using expert ratings of party positioning along five political-ideological dimensions: left-right general; left-right economic; Green/alternative/libertarian vs. Traditional/authoritarian/nationalist; anti-elite; and anti-corruption. Use of CM was defined as having consulted a general practitioner or specialist, and use of CAM as having used acupuncture, acupressure, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, herbal treatment, hypnotherapy, or spiritual healing.

RESULTS

Participants with an anti-corruption PO were less likely to use CM and more likely to use CAM than other Europeans. Participants with a Green/alternative/libertarian PO were more likely to use CAM than others. Poorer health moderated the association between anti-corruption PO and CM, such that people in poor health tended to use CM regardless of their political leanings, but health status did not moderate the association between PO and CAM use.

CONCLUSIONS

The results show that political and socio-cultural views are associated with how the European lay public engages with healthcare and complementary/alternative services, but the relevant boundary lines do not lie along the left-right dimension. People who preferred parties favoring expanded freedoms were more likely to use complementary/alternative services, but likely for other reasons than to seek cures for diseases in a traditional biomedical sense. Concerns about corruption among the lay public may be more relevant for conventional healthcare than has been recognized.

Validating the dual evolutionary foundations of political values in a US sample

Psychological research repeatedly identifies two dimensions of political values. Recent work argues that these dimensions reflect the dual evolutionary foundations of human social and political life: a trade-off between cooperation and competition that generates differences in values about social inequality, and a trade-off in managing group coordination that generates differences in values about social control. Existing scales used to measure political values, however, were created prior to this framework. Here, we introduce the Dual Foundations Scale, designed to capture values about the two trade-offs. We validate the scale across two studies, showing it accurately and reliably measures both dimensions. Our results support key predictions of the dual foundations framework and pave the way for future work on the foundations of political ideology.

Cooperative and conformist behavioural preferences predict the dual dimensions of political ideology

Decades of research suggest that our political differences are best captured by two dimensions of political ideology. The dual evolutionary framework of political ideology predicts that these dimensions should be related to variation in social preferences for cooperation and group conformity. Here, we combine data from a New Zealand survey and a suite of incentivised behavioural tasks (n = 991) to test whether cooperative and conformist preferences covary with a pair of widely used measures of the two dimensions of political ideology-Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA)-and related policy views. As predicted, we find that cooperative behaviour is negatively related to SDO and economically conservative policy views, while conformist behaviour in the form of social information use is positively related to RWA and socially conservative policy views. However, we did not find the predicted relationships between punitive and rule following behaviours and RWA or socially conservative views, raising questions about the interpretation of punishment and rule following tasks and the nature of authoritarian conformist preferences. These findings reveal how cooperative and conformist preferences that evolved to help us navigate social challenges in our ancestral past continue to track our political differences even today.

Prosociality and health: Identification with all humanity is a replicable predictor of prosocial motivation for health behaviors

The acute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic may have passed, but the pandemic remains a major worldwide health concern that demands continued vigilance. Are there individual differences that predict the motivation to continue to wear masks and to create physical distance in public? Previous research conducted early in the pandemic had suggested that a particular social identity-identification with all humanity-is one underlying factor that contributes to people's cooperation with health behavior guidelines. This highlights that the pandemic is not only an issue to be tackled with the tools of immunology and epidemiology. It also requires the tools from psychology-to measure the representations people have about themselves and others and how these representations drive values and decisions related to health. Here we report work on U.S. respondents that examined whether individuals' level of identification with all humanity predicts their prosocial health behaviors aimed at mitigating the spread of COVID-19. In 3 convergent studies (total N = 1,580), we find that identification with all humanity predicted the prosocial motivation to wear masks and to engage in physical distancing when in public without a mask. The results were obtained while controlling for a host of covariates, including demographics, educational attainment, and Big Five personality dimensions. We find that some people have a marked drive to care for the health of strangers, which is significantly linked to their concern for all humanity rather than being restricted to their care for their community or country. Discussion focuses on this social identification with humanity and its enduring, replicable role in predicting the motivation to engage in prosocial health behaviors. We note key implications for theories in social and developmental psychology as well as for research that may lead to practical applications for lessening the human toll of the current and future pandemics.

The Conditional Effects of Authoritarianism on COVID-19 Pandemic Health Behaviors and Policy Preferences

A large literature contends that conservatives differ from liberals in their dispositional sensitivity to threat and needs for social order and security. Thus, a puzzle emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic when American conservatives, despite their purported threat sensitivity, responded to the pandemic in ways that evinced little concern toward the risks posed by COVID-19. Threat tolerant liberals present an equally interesting case, having fervently masked, isolated, and advocated for stringent public health restrictions when facing down COVID-19. Why did so many Americans adopt health behaviors and policy preferences at odds with their dispositional orientations toward threat and needs for security during the COVID-19 pandemic? In this paper, I analyze three national surveys to evaluate how psychological dispositions affected Americans' responses to COVID-19. I find that authoritarianism, a common measure of dispositional threat sensitivity and needs for security, conditionally affected Americans' responses to the pandemic. Directly, authoritarianism was associated with greater concern over COVID-19 and, in turn, increased willingness to engage in protective health behaviors, support restrictive public health measures, and support economic interventions amidst the pandemic-induced downturn. Indirectly, however, authoritarianism promoted identification with and cue-taking from right-wing elites who frequently downplayed the severity of COVID-19; attention to such rhetoric reduced politically engaged authoritarians' concern over COVID-19 and, in turn, their willingness to adopt protective health behaviors and support public health restrictions or economic interventionism. Attention to political discourse thus appears to have countervailed Americans' dispositional orientations toward threat and security during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-022-09828-9.

Evaluating Belief System Networks as a Theory of Political Belief System Dynamics

A theory of political belief system dynamics should incorporate causal connections between elements of the belief system and the possibility that belief systems are influenced by exogenous factors. These necessary components can be satisfied by conceptualizing an individual's belief system as a network of causally connected attitudes and identities which, via the interactions between the elements and the push of exogenous influences, produces the disparate phenomena in the belief systems literature. We implement this belief systems as networks theory in a dynamic Ising model and demonstrate that the theory can integrate at least six otherwise unrelated phenomenon in the political belief systems literature, including work on attitude consistency, cross-pressures, spillover effects, partisan cues, and ideological differences in attitude consensus. Our findings suggest that belief systems are not just one thing, but emerge from the interactions between the attitudes and identities in the belief system. All code is available: https://osf.io/aswy8/?view_only=99aff77909094bddabb5d382f6db2622.

Social and Economic Political Ideology Consistently Operate as Mutual Suppressors: Implications for Personality, Social, and Political Psychology

Right–left political views can be decomposed into distinct economic and social dimensions that bear differing relations with external criteria. In three community samples (total N = 1,487), we identified replicable suppressor situations in which statistically controlling for either social or economic political ideology increased the other ideology dimension’s relations with variables reflecting cognitive rigidity, authoritarianism, dangerous worldview, and lethal partisanship. Specifically, positive bivariate relations between social conservatism and these outcomes were enhanced after controlling for economic conservatism, whereas, after controlling for social conservatism, positive bivariate relations between economic conservatism and external criteria became negative and negative bivariate relations were enhanced. We identified similar, albeit less consistent, suppressor phenomena for general personality. Taken together, our results suggest that social and economic conservatism differ substantially in their psychological implications, and that following statistical control, these differences emerge in samples in which social and economic conservatism are highly positively correlated.

The Association Between Threat and Politics Depends on the Type of Threat, the Political Domain, and the Country

Theories link threat with right-wing political beliefs. We use the World Values Survey (60,378 participants) to explore how six types of threat (e.g., economic, violence, and surveillance) are associated with multiple political beliefs (e.g., cultural, economic, and ideological identification) in 56 countries/territories. Multilevel models with individuals nested in countries revealed that the threat-political belief association depends on the type of threat, the type of political belief, and the country. Economic-related threats tended to be associated with more left-wing economic political beliefs and violence-related threats tended to be associated with more cultural right-wing beliefs, but there were exceptions to this pattern. Additional analyses revealed that the associations between threat and political beliefs were different across countries. However, our analyses identified few country characteristics that could account for these cross-country differences. Our findings revealed that political beliefs and perceptions of threat are linked, but that the relationship is not simple.

Estimating and Examining the Replicability of Belief System Networks

Belief system structure can be investigated by estimating belief systems as networks of interacting political attitudes, but we do not know if these estimates are replicable. In a sample of 31 countries from the World Values Survey (N = 52,826), I find that countries’ belief system networks are relatively replicable in terms of connectivity, proportion of positive edges, some centrality measures (e.g., expected influence), and the estimates of individual edges. Betweenness, closeness, and strength centrality estimates are more unstable. Belief system networks estimated with smaller samples or in countries with more unstable political systems tend to be less replicable than networks estimated with larger samples in stable political systems. Although these analyses are restricted to the items available in the World Values Survey, they show that belief system networks can be replicable, but that this replicability is related to features of the study design and the political system.