The social tensions felt within: Explaining felt ambivalence about polarized societal debates through perceived opinion discrepancies in the social environment

How ingroup norms of multiculturalism (and tolerance) affect intergroup solidarity: The role of ideology

Multiculturalism and tolerance, as two sets of normative beliefs about how to deal with intergroup diversity, have been recognized as effective at reducing outgroup negativity among majority group members. However, whether majority group members' normative beliefs regarding them might motivate their solidarity-based collective actions and how their political ideology might qualify this influence remained unclear. To answer these questions, we conducted two pre-registered experimental studies (N = 626), both zooming in on the multiculturalism issues in the context of the relationships between native Dutch citizens and citizens with a Moroccan background within Dutch university campuses (Study 1) and broader Dutch society (Study 2). In both studies, we found an ingroup norm of tolerance (vs. control) undermined majority group members' engagement in collective actions in support of ethnic minorities. Additionally, ideological leftists were more sensitive to norms than rightists: Study 1 showed a facilitative effect of the multiculturalism norm (vs. control) on solidarity-based collective action intentions particularly among leftists, whilst Study 2 revealed a dampening effect of the tolerance norm (vs. control) on these intentions particularly among leftists.

Attitude networks as intergroup realities: Using network-modelling to research attitude-identity relationships in polarized political contexts

We apply a newly developed attitude network-modelling technique (Response-Item Network, or ResIN) to study attitude-identity relationships in the context of hot-button issues that polarize the current US-American electorate. The properties of the network-method allow us to simultaneously depict differences in the structural organization of attitudes between groups and to explore the relevance of organized attitude-systems for group identity management. Individuals based on a sample of US-American crowd workers (N = 396) and the representative 2020 ANES data set (N = 8280), we model an attitude network with two conflictive partisan belief-systems. In the first step, we demonstrate that the structural properties of the attitude-network provide substantial information about latent partisan identities, thereby revealing which attitudes 'belong' to specific groups. In a second step, we evaluate the potential of attitudes to communicate identity-relevant information. Results from a vignette study suggest that people rely on their mental representations of attitude-identity links to structure and evaluate their social environment. By highlighting functional interdependences between (macro level) attitude structures and identity management, the presented findings help advancing the understanding of attitude-identity dynamics and socio-political cleavages.