Self-esteem trajectories over three decades predict opposition to social equality in midlife.

Although life trajectories are frequently theorized to explain people's attitudes toward different social groups, few studies have been able to directly assess their importance with suitable data. Addressing this gap and focusing on the development of general and domain-specific self-esteem, we report results from a population-based sample of Norwegians (N = 2,215) followed over 28 years and five time points from adolescence to midlife. Growth curve models demonstrated that irrespective of self-esteem domain, low levels of self-esteem in adolescence as well as a depressed self-esteem development over the next three decades were related to more overall opposition to social equality as well as more opposition to gender equality and immigration in midlife. The results held when controlling for participants' baseline political orientations and other key covariates in adolescence. Our findings indicate that low self-esteem and a lack of positive self-esteem development can be detrimental to harmonious intergroup relations in ever-diversifying societies. We discuss how future psychological interventions aimed at enhancing self-esteem may promote support for a more inclusive society.

Cultural threat perceptions predict violent extremism via need for cognitive closure.

Understanding the psychological processes that drive violent extremism is a pressing global issue. Across six studies, we demonstrate that perceived cultural threats lead to violent extremism because they increase people's need for cognitive closure (NFC). In general population samples (from Denmark, Afghanistan, Pakistan, France, and an international sample) and a sample of former Mujahideen in Afghanistan, single-level and multilevel mediation analyses revealed that NFC mediated the association between perceived cultural threats and violent extremist outcomes. Further, in comparisons between the sample of former Afghan Mujahideen and the general population sample from Afghanistan following the known-group paradigm, the former Mujahideen scored significantly higher on cultural threat, NFC, and violent extremist outcomes. Moreover, the proposed model successfully differentiated former Afghan Mujahideen participants from the general Afghan participants. Next, two preregistered experiments provided causal support for the model. Experimentally manipulating the predictor (cultural threat) in Pakistan led to higher scores on the mediator (NFC) and dependent variables (violent extremist outcomes). Finally, an experiment conducted in France demonstrated the causal effect of the mediator (NFC) on violent extremist outcomes. Two internal meta-analyses using state-of-the-art methods (i.e., meta-analytic structural equation modeling and pooled indirect effects analyses) further demonstrated the robustness of our results across the different extremist outcomes, designs, populations, and settings. Cultural threat perceptions seem to drive violent extremism by eliciting a need for cognitive closure.

Attachment and Political Personality are Heritable and Distinct Systems, and Both Share Genetics with Interpersonal Trust and Altruism.

The attachment and caregiving domains maintain proximity and care-giving behavior between parents and offspring, in a way that has been argued to shape people's mental models of how relationships work, resulting in secure, anxious or avoidant interpersonal styles in adulthood. Several theorists have suggested that the attachment system is closely connected to orientations and behaviors in social and political domains, which should be grounded in the same set of familial experiences as are the different attachment styles. We use a sample of Norwegian twins (N = 1987) to assess the genetic and environmental relationship between attachment, trust, altruism, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), and social dominance orientation (SDO). Results indicate no shared environmental overlap between attachment and ideology, nor even between the attachment styles or between the ideological traits, challenging conventional wisdom in developmental, social, and political psychology. Rather, evidence supports two functionally distinct systems, one for navigating intimate relationships (attachment) and one for navigating social hierarchies (RWA/SDO), with genetic overlap between traits within each system, and two distinct genetic linkages to trust and altruism. This is counter-posed to theoretical perspectives that link attachment, ideology, and interpersonal orientations through early relational experiences.

Decoding the Dynamics of Cultural Change: A Cultural Evolution Approach to the Psychology of Acculturation.

PUBLIC ABSTRACT: Acculturation describes the cultural and psychological changes resulting from intercultural contact. Here, we use concepts from "cultural evolution" to better understand the processes of acculturation. Cultural evolution researchers view cultural change as an evolutionary process, allowing them to borrow tools and methods from biology. Cultural evolutionary mechanisms such as conformity (copying the numerical majority), anti-conformity (copying the numerical minority), prestige bias (copying famous individuals), payoff bias (copying successful people), and vertical cultural transmission (copying your parents) can cause people to adopt elements from other cultures and/or conserve their cultural heritage. We explore how these transmission mechanisms might create distinct acculturation strategies, shaping cultural change and diversity over the long-term. This theoretical integration can pave the way for a more sophisticated understanding of the pervasive cultural shifts occurring in many ethnically diverse societies, notably by identifying conditions that empower minority-group members, often marginalized, to significantly influence the majority group and society.

The genetic underpinnings of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation explain political attitudes beyond Big Five personality.

OBJECTIVE: Political attitudes are predicted by the key ideological variables of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO), as well as some of the Big Five personality traits. Past research indicates that personality and ideological traits are correlated for genetic reasons. A question that has yet to be tested concerns whether the genetic variation underlying the ideological traits of RWA and SDO has distinct contributions to political attitudes, or if genetic variation in political attitudes is subsumed under the genetic variation underlying standard Big Five personality traits. METHOD: We use data from a sample of 1987 Norwegian twins to assess the genetic and environmental relationships between the Big Five personality traits, RWA, SDO, and their separate contributions to political policy attitudes. RESULTS: RWA and SDO exhibit very high genetic correlation (r = 0.78) with each other and some genetic overlap with the personality traits of openness and agreeableness. Importantly, they share a larger genetic substrate with political attitudes (e.g., deporting an ethnic minority) than do Big Five personality traits, a relationship that persists even when controlling for the genetic foundations underlying personality traits. CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that the genetic foundations of ideological traits and political attitudes are largely non-overlapping with the genetic foundations of Big Five personality traits.

Correlations between social dominance orientation and political attitudes reflect common genetic underpinnings.

A foundational question in the social sciences concerns the interplay of underlying causes in the formation of people's political beliefs and prejudices. What role, if any, do genes, environmental influences, or personality dispositions play? Social dominance orientation (SDO), an influential index of people's general attitudes toward intergroup hierarchy, correlates robustly with political beliefs. SDO consists of the subdimensions SDO-dominance (SDO-D), which is the desire people have for some groups to be actively oppressed by others, and SDO-egalitarianism (SDO-E), a preference for intergroup inequality. Using a twin design (n = 1,987), we investigate whether the desire for intergroup dominance and inequality makes up a genetically grounded behavioral syndrome. Specifically, we investigate the heritability of SDO, in addition to whether it genetically correlates with support for political policies concerning the distribution of power and resources to different social groups. In addition to moderate heritability estimates for SDO-D and SDO-E (37% and 24%, respectively), we find that the genetic correlation between these subdimensions and political attitudes was overall high (mean genetic correlation 0.51), while the environmental correlation was very low (mean environmental correlation 0.08). This suggests that the relationship between political attitudes and SDO-D and SDO-E is grounded in common genetics, such that the desire for (versus opposition to) intergroup inequality and support for political attitudes that serve to enhance (versus attenuate) societal disparities form convergent strategies for navigating group-based dominance hierarchies.

Revisiting the Integration Hypothesis: Correlational and Longitudinal Meta-Analyses Demonstrate the Limited Role of Acculturation for Cross-Cultural Adaptation.

When moving to a new country or living in that country as ethnic-minority-group members, individuals have to relate to different cultural spheres. Scholars and practitioners commonly agree that how people acculturate influences their psychological and sociocultural adaptation. Integration (or biculturalism), which involves engagement in both one's heritage culture and the dominant mainstream culture, is considered the most beneficial acculturation strategy. But how robust is the evidence for the role of acculturation in adaptation? Here, we present a reanalysis of a previous meta-analysis of mostly correlational studies (k = 83, N = 23,197) and a new meta-analysis of exclusively longitudinal studies (k = 19, N = 6,791). Results show that the correlational link between acculturation and adaptation is much weaker than previously assumed and that longitudinal evidence is minuscule at best. Our findings suggest that empirical support is still lacking for the most basic premises of acculturation theory.

Assessing the Accuracy of a Deep Learning Method to Risk Stratify Indeterminate Pulmonary Nodules.

Rationale: The management of indeterminate pulmonary nodules (IPNs) remains challenging, resulting in invasive procedures and delays in diagnosis and treatment. Strategies to decrease the rate of unnecessary invasive procedures and optimize surveillance regimens are needed.Objectives: To develop and validate a deep learning method to improve the management of IPNs.Methods: A Lung Cancer Prediction Convolutional Neural Network model was trained using computed tomography images of IPNs from the National Lung Screening Trial, internally validated, and externally tested on cohorts from two academic institutions.Measurements and Main Results: The areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve in the external validation cohorts were 83.5% (95% confidence interval [CI], 75.4-90.7%) and 91.9% (95% CI, 88.7-94.7%), compared with 78.1% (95% CI, 68.7-86.4%) and 81.9 (95% CI, 76.1-87.1%), respectively, for a commonly used clinical risk model for incidental nodules. Using 5% and 65% malignancy thresholds defining low- and high-risk categories, the overall net reclassifications in the validation cohorts for cancers and benign nodules compared with the Mayo model were 0.34 (Vanderbilt) and 0.30 (Oxford) as a rule-in test, and 0.33 (Vanderbilt) and 0.58 (Oxford) as a rule-out test. Compared with traditional risk prediction models, the Lung Cancer Prediction Convolutional Neural Network was associated with improved accuracy in predicting the likelihood of disease at each threshold of management and in our external validation cohorts.Conclusions: This study demonstrates that this deep learning algorithm can correctly reclassify IPNs into low- or high-risk categories in more than a third of cancers and benign nodules when compared with conventional risk models, potentially reducing the number of unnecessary invasive procedures and delays in diagnosis.

Dissociating meat from its animal origins: A systematic literature review.

Meat eaters often have an ambivalent relationship with the common practice of killing animals for food. They enjoy the taste of meat but dislike the harming of animals that it entails. This moral conflict, often referred to as the 'meat paradox,' tends to result in cognitive dissonance that meat eaters need to resolve. One of the arguably most basic strategies to deal with this dissonance is to cognitively dissociate meat from its animal origins. Whereas philosophers for long time have theorized about the role of such dissociation for consumer behavior, researchers have only recently started to empirically investigate the phenomenon. Here, we present the first systematic literature review of research on consumers' tendency to dissociate meat from its animal origins. Twenty-one publications comprising eight qualitative, one mixed-methods, four correlational, and twenty experimental/interventional studies were identified, which all provided support for the central psychological role of dissociation for meat consumption. However, the review also revealed the need for further research on moderating variables such as gender, age and generation, dietary styles, and people's place of living, including cross-cultural differences. Strikingly, no study so far seems to have included behavioral outcomes, urging the need for future research on how dissociation might affect behavior.

Preferences for group dominance track and mediate the effects of macro-level social inequality and violence across societies.

Whether and how societal structures shape individual psychology is a foundational question of the social sciences. Combining insights from evolutionary biology, economy, and the political and psychological sciences, we identify a central psychological process that functions to sustain group-based hierarchies in human societies. In study 1, we demonstrate that macrolevel structural inequality, impaired population outcomes, socio-political instability, and the risk of violence are reflected in the endorsement of group hegemony at the aggregate population level across 27 countries (n = 41,824): The greater the national inequality, the greater is the endorsement of between-group hierarchy within the population. Using multilevel analyses in study 2, we demonstrate that these psychological group-dominance motives mediate the effects of macrolevel functioning on individual-level attitudes and behaviors. Specifically, across 30 US states (n = 4,613), macrolevel inequality and violence were associated with greater individual-level support of group hegemony. Crucially, this individual-level support, rather than cultural-societal norms, was in turn uniquely associated with greater racism, sexism, welfare opposition, and even willingness to enforce group hegemony violently by participating in ethnic persecution of subordinate out-groups. These findings suggest that societal inequality is reflected in people's minds as dominance motives that underpin ideologies and actions that ultimately sustain group-based hierarchy.