Effects of system-sanctioned framing on climate awareness and environmental action in the United States and beyond.

Despite growing scientific alarm about anthropogenic climate change, the world is not on track to solve the crisis. Inaction may be partially explained by skepticism about climate change and resistance to proenvironmental policies from people who are motivated to maintain the status quo (i.e., conservative-rightists). Therefore, practical interventions are needed. In the present research program, we tested an experimental manipulation derived from system justification theory in which proenvironmental initiatives were framed as patriotic and necessary to maintain the American "way of life." In a large, nationally representative U.S. sample, we found that the system-sanctioned change intervention successfully increased liberal-leftists' as well as conservative-rightists' belief in climate change; support for proenvironmental policies; and willingness to share climate information on social media. Similar messages were effective in an aggregated analysis involving 63 countries, although the overall effect sizes were small. More granular exploratory analyses at the country level revealed that while the intervention was moderately successful in some countries (e.g., Brazil, France, Israel), it backfired in others (Germany, Belgium, Russia). Across the three outcome variables, the effects of the intervention were consistent and pronounced in the United States, in support of the hypothesis that system justification motivation can be harnessed on behalf of social change. Potential explanations for divergent country-level effects are discussed. The system-sanctioned change intervention holds considerable promise for policymakers and communicators seeking to increase climate awareness and action.

Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks.

Political debate concerning moralized issues is increasingly common in online social networks. However, moral psychology has yet to incorporate the study of social networks to investigate processes by which some moral ideas spread more rapidly or broadly than others. Here, we show that the expression of moral emotion is key for the spread of moral and political ideas in online social networks, a process we call "moral contagion." Using a large sample of social media communications about three polarizing moral/political issues (n = 563,312), we observed that the presence of moral-emotional words in messages increased their diffusion by a factor of 20% for each additional word. Furthermore, we found that moral contagion was bounded by group membership; moral-emotional language increased diffusion more strongly within liberal and conservative networks, and less between them. Our results highlight the importance of emotion in the social transmission of moral ideas and also demonstrate the utility of social network methods for studying morality. These findings offer insights into how people are exposed to moral and political ideas through social networks, thus expanding models of social influence and group polarization as people become increasingly immersed in social media networks.

Setting the record straight: System justification and rigidity-of-the-right in contemporary Hungarian politics.

Despite international concern about the resurgence of right-wing authoritarianism and xenophobic prejudice throughout Central and Eastern Europe, researchers have argued recently that rightists may be less cognitively rigid and system-justifying than liberals and leftists in the context of Hungary (Kelemen, Szabó, Mészáros, László, & Forgas, 2014; Lönnqvist, Szabó, & Kelemen, 2019). We identify shortcomings of the research on which these claims are based and provide evidence that "rigidity-of-the-right" does indeed characterise contemporary Hungarian politics. Specifically, we hired professional survey firms to administer measures of personal needs for order and structure, system justification and political orientation to two large, nationally representative samples in Hungary. Results revealed that self-identified rightists scored higher than leftists on needs for order and structure and system justification (Study 1, N = 1005) and that supporters of right-wing parties (Fidesz and Jobbik) scored higher on both general and economic system justification than supporters of liberal and leftist parties (Study 2, N = 886). In exploratory analyses, we also observed that rightists expressed more intolerance than leftists toward groups that are commonly mistreated in Eastern Europe, including the Roma, religious minorities and sexual minorities.

Tweeting From Left to Right: Is Online Political Communication More Than an Echo Chamber?

We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and nonpolitical issues, explored whether online communication resembles an "echo chamber" (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a "national conversation." We observed that information was exchanged primarily among individuals with similar ideological preferences in the case of political issues (e.g., 2012 presidential election, 2013 government shutdown) but not many other current events (e.g., 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, 2014 Super Bowl). Discussion of the Newtown shootings in 2012 reflected a dynamic process, beginning as a national conversation before transforming into a polarized exchange. With respect to both political and nonpolitical issues, liberals were more likely than conservatives to engage in cross-ideological dissemination; this is an important asymmetry with respect to the structure of communication that is consistent with psychological theory and research bearing on ideological differences in epistemic, existential, and relational motivation. Overall, we conclude that previous work may have overestimated the degree of ideological segregation in social-media usage.

Theoretical integration in motivational science: System justification as one of many "autonomous motivational structures".

Recognizing that there is a multiplicity of motives - and that the accessibility and strength of each one varies chronically and temporarily - is essential if motivational scientists are to achieve genuine theoretical and empirical integration. We agree that system justification is a case of nonconscious goal pursuit and discuss implications of the fact that it conflicts with many other psychological goals.

Why does the "mental shotgun" fire system-justifying bullets?

We suggest that people privilege explanations relying on inherent rather than contingent factors not only because of an innate cognitive tendency to monitor reality, but because doing so satisfies the desire to perceive the societal status quo as legitimate. In support, we describe experimental studies linking the activation of system justification motivation to the endorsement of inherence-based (essentialist) explanations.

The "chicken-and-egg" problem in political neuroscience.

A comprehensive review by Hibbing et al. establishes close links between physiological and psychological responses and ideological preferences. However, existing research cannot resolve the "chicken-and-egg problem" in political neuroscience: Which is cause and which is effect? We consider the possibility, which they reject, that general ideological postures, if consistently adopted, could shape psychological and physiological functioning.

Stripped of illusions? Exploring system justification processes in capitalist and post-Communist societies.

Sociologists and political scientists have often observed that citizens of Central and Eastern Europe express high levels of disillusionment with their social, economic and political systems, in comparison with citizens of Western capitalist societies. In this review, we analyze system legitimation and delegitimation in post-Communist societies from a social psychological perspective. We draw on system justification theory, which seeks to understand how, when and why people do (and do not) defend, bolster and justify existing social systems. We review some of the major tenets and findings of the theory and compare research on system-justifying beliefs and ideologies in traditionally Capitalist and post-Communist countries to determine: (1) whether there are robust differences in the degree of system justification in post-Communist and Capitalist societies, and (2) the extent to which hypotheses derived from system justification theory receive support in the post-Communist context. To this end, we summarize research findings from over 20 countries and cite previously unpublished data from a public opinion survey conducted in Poland. Our analysis confirms that there are lower levels of system justification in post-Communist countries. At the same time, we find that system justification possesses similar social and psychological antecedents, manifestations and consequences in the two types of societies. We offer potential explanations for these somewhat complicated patterns of results and conclude by addressing implications for theory and research on system justification and system change (or transition).

Liberal-conservative asymmetries in anti-democratic tendencies are partly explained by psychological differences in a nationally representative U.S. sample.

Based on theory and research in political psychology, we hypothesized that liberal-conservative differences in right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and political system justification would contribute to asymmetries in anti-democratic tendencies. These hypotheses were tested in a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults (N = 1557). Results revealed that conservatives were less supportive of political equality and legal rights and guarantees and more willing to defect from democratic "rules of the game" and vote for anti-democratic candidates, even after adjusting for political extremism. Mediational analyses suggested that conservatives' anti-democratic tendencies were partially attributable to higher levels of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. Conservatives also scored higher in political system justification, which was associated with support for free speech and mitigated anti-democratic tendencies. Democrats and Republicans who approved January 6, 2021, insurrectionists were more conservative and higher in right-wing authoritarianism than those who did not. Implications for social psychology and society are discussed.

Expectations about system justification predict the ideological gap in attitudes towards immigrants.

In the U.S. political conservatives hold less favorable attitudes than liberals about immigration and immigrant groups. We hypothesized that one reason for this ideological gap is that conservatives are more likely to believe that immigrants are not as justifying of the American system as they should be. This hypothesis was tested in an online study (N = 404) with respect to four immigrant groups: Europeans, East Asians, Middle Easterners, and Latin Americans. Results revealed that conservatism was positively associated with (a) prescriptive beliefs that immigrants should engage in high levels of system justification, and (b) descriptive beliefs that immigrants-except for Middle Eastern immigrants-generally do endorse high levels of system justification. Importantly, conservatives perceived a bigger difference than liberals between prescriptive and descriptive beliefs about immigrants' system justification levels, and this difference mediated the association between conservatism and attitudes and feelings about non-European (but not European) immigrants. These findings support a new "Perceived System Justification Deficit Model of Prejudice" in which expectations about others' degree of ideological support for the societal status quo may contribute to out-group bias and perhaps even discrimination.

Ideological asymmetries in online hostility, intimidation, obscenity, and prejudice.

To investigate ideological symmetries and asymmetries in the expression of online prejudice, we used machine-learning methods to estimate the prevalence of extreme hostility in a large dataset of Twitter messages harvested in 2016. We analyzed language contained in 730,000 tweets on the following dimensions of bias: (1) threat and intimidation, (2) obscenity and vulgarity, (3) name-calling and humiliation, (4) hatred and/or racial, ethnic, or religious slurs, (5) stereotypical generalizations, and (6) negative prejudice. Results revealed that conservative social media users were significantly more likely than liberals to use language that involved threat, intimidation, name-calling, humiliation, stereotyping, and negative prejudice. Conservatives were also slightly more likely than liberals to use hateful language, but liberals were slightly more likely than conservatives to use obscenities. These findings are broadly consistent with the view that liberal values of equality and democratic tolerance contribute to ideological asymmetries in the expression of online prejudice, and they are inconsistent with the view that liberals and conservatives are equally prejudiced.

What's so insidious about "Peace, Love, and Understanding"? A system justification perspective.

We agree that promoting intergroup harmony "carries insidious, often unacknowledged, 'system-justifying' consequences" (sect. 4.1.3, para. 2) and identify several ways in which "benevolent" and "complementary" stereotypes, superordinate identification, intergroup contact, and prejudice reduction techniques can undermine social change motivation by reinforcing system-justifying beliefs. This may "keep the peace," but it also prevents individuals and groups from tackling serious social problems, including inequality and oppression.

Cognitive-motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts.

Healthy democratic polities feature competing visions of a good society but also require some level of cooperation and institutional trust. Democracy is at risk when citizens become so polarized that an 'us versus them' mentality dominates. Despite a vast multidisciplinary literature, no coherent conceptual framework of the microlevel dynamics that increase or decrease polarization has been presented. In this Review, we provide a conceptual framework to integrate scientific knowledge about cognitive-motivational mechanisms that influence political polarization and the social-communicative contexts in which they are enacted. Ego-justifying and group-justifying motives lead individuals to defend their own pre-existing beliefs and those of their in-group, respectively. However, a distinct class of system-justifying motives contributes to asymmetric forms of polarization. Whereas conservative-rightist ideology is associated with valuing tradition, social order and maintenance of the status quo, liberal-leftist ideology is associated with a push for egalitarian social change. These cognitive-motivational mechanisms interact with social influence processes linked to communication source, message and channel factors, all of which might contribute to increased or decreased polarization. We conclude with a discussion of unanswered questions and ways in which our framework can be extended to the study of culture and institutions.

Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism.

Political scientists and psychologists have noted that, on average, conservatives show more structured and persistent cognitive styles, whereas liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty. We tested the hypothesis that these profiles relate to differences in general neurocognitive functioning using event-related potentials, and found that greater liberalism was associated with stronger conflict-related anterior cingulate activity, suggesting greater neurocognitive sensitivity to cues for altering a habitual response pattern.

Expressive suppression as an obstacle to social change: Linking system justification, emotion regulation, and collective action.

Research on system justification theory suggests that justifying the societal status quo decreases negative emotions, leading to less collective action. In this investigation, we propose that the degree to which negative emotions mediate the link between system justification and collective action may depend upon whether individuals tend to suppress the expression of their negative emotions. We tested this hypothesis in the diverse socio-political contexts of Turkey, Israel, and the U.S. In one correlational study (Study 1) and three experimental studies (Studies 2-4), we observed that the link between system justification and willingness to participate in collective action through anger (Studies 1-2 and 4) and guilt (Study 3) was moderated by expressive suppression. We found that negative emotions mediated the association between system justification and collective action among those who suppress the expression of their emotions less frequently, but not those who use expressive suppression more frequently. These findings suggest that emotion regulation may undermine, rather than facilitate, efforts to engage in collective action even among people who are low in system justification. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11031-021-09883-5.

The neural basis of ideological differences in race categorization.

Multiracial individuals are often categorized as members of their 'socially subordinate' racial group-a form of social discrimination termed hypodescent-with political conservatives more likely than liberals to show this bias. Although hypodescent has been linked to racial hierarchy preservation motives, it remains unclear how political ideology influences categorization: Do conservatives and liberals see, feel or think about mixed-race faces differently? Do they differ in sensitivity to Black prototypicality (i.e. skin tone darkness and Afrocentric features) or racial ambiguity (i.e. categorization difficulty) of Black/White mixed-race faces? To help answer these questions, we collected a politically diverse sample of White participants and had them categorize mixed-race faces as Black or White during functional neuroimaging. We found that conservatism was related to greater anterior insula activity to racially ambiguous faces, and this pattern of brain activation mediated conservatives' use of hypodescent. This demonstrates that conservatives' greater sensitivity to racial ambiguity (rather than Black prototypicality) gives rise to greater categorization of mixed-race individuals into the socially subordinate group and tentatively suggests that conservatives may differ from liberals in their affective reactions to mixed-race faces. Implications for the study of race categorization and political psychology are discussed. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

Toward a neuropsychology of political orientation: exploring ideology in patients with frontal and midbrain lesions.

How do people form their political beliefs? In an effort to address this question, we adopt a neuropsychological approach. In a natural experiment, we explored links between neuroanatomy and ideological preferences in two samples of brain lesion patients in New York City. Specifically, we compared the political orientations of patients with frontal lobe lesions, patients with amygdala lesions and healthy control subjects. Lesion type classification analyses revealed that people with frontal lesions held more conservative (or less liberal) beliefs than those with anterior temporal lobe lesions or no lesions. Additional analyses predicting ideology by extent of damage provided convergent evidence that greater damage in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex-but not the amygdala-was associated with greater conservatism. These findings were robust to model specifications that adjusted for demographic, mood, and affect-related variables. Although measures of executive function failed to mediate the relationship between frontal lesions and ideology, our findings suggest that the prefrontal cortex may play a role in promoting the development of liberal ideology. Our approach suggests useful directions for future work to address the issue of whether biological developments precede political attitudes or vice versa-or both. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

Rediscovering Tomkins' polarity theory: Humanism, normativism, and the psychological basis of left-right ideological conflict in the U.S. and Sweden.

According to Silvan Tomkins' polarity theory, ideological thought is universally structured by a clash between two opposing worldviews. On the left, a humanistic worldview seeks to uphold the intrinsic value of the person; on the right, a normative worldview holds that human worth is contingent upon conformity to rules. In this article, we situate humanism and normativism within the context of contemporary models of political ideology as a function of motivated social cognition, beliefs about the social world, and personality traits. In four studies conducted in the U.S. and Sweden, normativism was robustly associated with rightist (or conservative) self-placement; conservative issue preferences; resistance to change and acceptance of inequality; right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation; system justification and its underlying epistemic and existential motives to reduce uncertainty and threat; and a lack of openness, emotionality, and honesty-humility. Humanism exhibited the opposite relations to most of these constructs, but it was largely unrelated to epistemic and existential needs. Humanism was strongly associated with preferences for equality, openness to change, and low levels of authoritarianism, social dominance, and general and economic system justification. We conclude that polarity theory possesses considerable potential to explain how conflicts between worldviews shape contemporary politics.

Political psycholinguistics: A comprehensive analysis of the language habits of liberal and conservative social media users.

For nearly a century social scientists have sought to understand left-right ideological differences in values, motives, and thinking styles. Much progress has been made, but-as in other areas of research-this work has been criticized for relying on small and statistically unrepresentative samples and the use of reactive, self-report measures that lack ecological validity. In an effort to overcome these limitations, we employed automated text analytic methods to investigate the spontaneous, naturally occurring use of language in nearly 25,000 Twitter users. We derived 27 hypotheses from the literature on political psychology and tested them using 32 individual dictionaries. In 23 cases, we observed significant differences in the linguistic styles of liberals and conservatives. For instance, liberals used more language that conveyed benevolence, whereas conservatives used more language pertaining to threat, power, tradition, resistance to change, certainty, security, anger, anxiety, and negative emotion in general. In 17 cases, there were also significant effects of ideological extremity. For instance, moderates used more benevolent language, whereas extremists used more language pertaining to inhibition, tentativeness, affiliation, resistance to change, certainty, security, anger, anxiety, negative affect, swear words, and death-related language. These research methods, which are easily adaptable, open up new and unprecedented opportunities for conducting unobtrusive research in psycholinguistics and political psychology with large and diverse samples. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).