Costs and benefits of political ideology: The case of economic self-stereotyping and stereotype threat

The political (and physiological) divide: Political orientation, performance monitoring, and the anterior cingulate response

Our goal was to test a model of sociopolitical attitudes that posits a relationship between individual differences in liberal versus conservative political orientation and differential levels of anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) responsivity. We recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) while participants who varied along a unidimensional liberal-conservative continuum engaged in a standard Go/NoGo task. We also measured component attitudes of political orientation in the form of traditionalism (degree of openness to social change) and egalitarianism (a preference for social equality). Generally, participants who reported a more liberal political orientation made fewer errors and produced larger ACC-generated ERPs (the error-related negativity, or ERN and the NoGo N2). This ACC activation, especially as indicated by a larger NoGo N2, was most strongly associated with greater preference for social equality. Performance accuracy, however, was most strongly associated with greater openness to social change. These data are consistent with a social neuroscience view that sociopolitical attitudes are related to aspects of neurophysiological responsivity. They also indicate that a bidimensional model of political orientation can enhance our interpretation of the nature of these associations.

Divergent effects of system justification salience on the academic self-assessments of men and women

Based on system justification theory, we hypothesized that, when the salience of system justification concerns are high, both men and women would bias estimates of their own and their group’s academic competence so as to make them more congruent with complementary gender stereotypes concerning mathematical and verbal abilities. Results show that, compared to men, women reported lesser competence and recalled lower achievement scores in math following the activation of system justification concerns, while at the same time reporting greater competence in verbal domains, albeit less strongly. Concerning perceptions of their group’s competence, men endorsed complementary gender stereotypes more strongly in the high (vs. low) system justification salience condition. However, women were less prone to endorse abstract gender stereotypes when system justification was made salient, which may suggest reactance rather than acquiescence.