Overview of Research on Political Attitudes
Threat and Political Attitudes
The role of "threat" in shaping political attitudes is widely studied and sometimes controversial, especially in light of recent non-replications and mixed findings. Towards clarifying our understand of threat and politics, I take a granular approach, focusing on a narrow definition of "threat" -- threat of physical harm to the self. Accordingly, I draw from theories on adaptive responding to physical threat and broadly ask, "What specific political attitudes may operate as adaptive responses to perceived physical threat?" In much of my work, I find that physical threat perception motivates functionally similar political attitudes among people on both the ideological left and right.
Physical Threat Bias and Political Aggression
Much has been made of the idea that physical threat permeates the political mind. Early work found that political conservatism is associated with a heightened sensitivity to threat, yet recent findings have cast doubt on this association. In one line of work, we explore the idea that physical threat promotes similar attitudes across the ideological spectrum. We focus on “aggressive political attitudes” (AGAs) in the form of partisans’ support for violent and antidemocratic tactics to achieve ingroup political power, and theorize that AGAs are instantiations of defensive aggression motivated by physical threat. In an initial study (n = 1,867) we established that, across the political spectrum, physical threat sensitivity underlies support for AGAs. A second study (n = 457) clarifies that the associations between threat sensitivity and AGAs are mediated by perceptions of outparty members as sources of physical threat. In a final study (n = 985), we experimentally reduced perceptions of outparty physical threat, which in turn ameliorated AGAs. Together, our findings imply that physical threat motivates aggressive political sentiments among liberals and conservatives alike.
Support for Partisan Violence
Threat Sensitivity
Anti-Democratic Attitudes
Threat Sensitivity
Physical Threat Bias and Authoritarian Attitudes
Democratic health is suffering a sustained global decline. Relevant is the question of who defers to or prefers authoritarianism and why. A majority of research on authoritarian attitudes has focused on antecedents to right-wing authoritarian attitudes, yet recent work suggests evidence of authoritarian preferences across the political spectrum. This package of studies advances the idea that a tendency to perceive physical threat is one core psychological foundation of authoritarian attitudes across ideological manifestations.
We argue that if authority is fundamentally viewed as a source of defense against physical threat, then people who are prone to perceiving physical threat should exhibit stronger authoritarian preferences regardless of their ideological leaning. Study 1 (N = 2,375) establishes that perceptual physical threat bias is associated with both left- and right-wing ideological authoritarianism whereas other measures of idiosyncratic threat perceptions only predict right-wing authoritarianism.
Studies 2 (N = 739) and 3 (N = 1,944) assess attitudes towards political candidates, indicating that people across the political spectrum support authoritarian but not diplomatic candidates commensurate with their physical threat bias, regardless of whether that candidate is in- or out-party:
And, finally, Study 4 (N = 1,364) elucidates a mechanism, indicating that belief in authority as a source of protection against physical threat increases support for authoritarians, and such beliefs are higher among more threat biased individuals regardless of their political ideology. Across studies, findings support the conclusion that perceptual physical threat bias is a core psychological foundation of authoritarian attitudes.
Human Threat Projection and Political Conservatism
Noted above, early research on threat and political ideology purported to show an association between heightened threat sensitivity and stronger political conservatism. Yet, again, recent replication failures have cast doubt on this finding. In this line of work, we take on the perspective that conservatism may be related to sensitivity to some but not all sources of physical threat. Whereas we find in the above described work that a generalized threat sensitivity is associated with aggressive political sentiments across the political spectrum, this line of work focuses on the the association between political ideology and a specified threat sensitivity.
We find that stronger conservatism is indeed associated with a heightened sensitivity to physical threat, but only when the source of danger originates from humans. In a first study, conservatives reported heightened threat perception of ambiguous human stimuli in the form of point light walkers (PLWs; see first plot to the left). In Study 2, conservatism was associated with perceived likelihood of experiencing physical harm in contexts involving human sources of threat (e.g., encountering a stranger, walking down a dark alley), but not in contexts involving nonhuman sources of threat (e.g., swimming in the ocean, walking in the woods). A final study found that conservatism was associated with stronger postural avoidance to unambiguously threatening human (images of people pointing guns at the viewer), but not nonhuman (images of snarling animal predators) stimuli (see second plot to the left)
Political Ideology (z-scored)
Threat Perception of PLWs
Political Ideology
Postural Avoidance of Human Threats
S1: PLW
S3: Human Threat
