Between-person methods provide limited insight about within-person belief systems.

Belief systems are individual-level phenomena that describe the interrelationships of the political attitudes of a person. However, the modal study of the structure of political ideologies and beliefs uses cross-sectional survey data to estimate what is central to the belief system or the dimensionality of the belief system, aggregating across many people. Cross-sectional data, however, are ill-suited to the task of studying individual-level phenomena because they contain an unobservable mixture of within-person and between-person variation. In this project, we use longitudinal datasets from the Netherlands (representative) and the United States (convenience), spanning between 6 months and 10 years, to we ask whether between-subjects methods can help us understand the within-person structure of belief systems. First, we use Bayesian STARTS models (Lüdtke et al., 2018) to assess what type of variance cross-sectional studies are likely tapping into. We find that variability in measures of ideology and political beliefs is primarily due to stable between-person differences, with relatively smaller amounts of variation due to within-person differences. Second, we estimate between-person, within-person, and cross-sectional correlations between all items in our study and find that between-person correlations are larger and in some cases differ in their direction from within-person correlations. Furthermore, cross-sectional correlations are most similar to between-person correlations. Taken together, these findings indicate that the modal study may help describe differences between people, but is ill-suited to tell us about the structure of individuals' belief systems. New methods are necessary for a complete understanding of political belief systems that clarify both between- and within-person processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The Psychology of Moral Conviction.

This review covers theory and research on the psychological characteristics and consequences of attitudes that are experienced as moral convictions, that is, attitudes that people perceive as grounded in a fundamental distinction between right and wrong. Morally convicted attitudes represent something psychologically distinct from other constructs (e.g., strong but nonmoral attitudes or religious beliefs), are perceived as universally and objectively true, and are comparatively immune to authority or peer influence. Variance in moral conviction also predicts important social and political consequences. Stronger moral conviction about a given attitude object, for example, is associated with greater intolerance of attitude dissimilarity, resistance to procedural solutions for conflict about that issue, and increased political engagement and volunteerism in that attitude domain. Finally, we review recent research that explores the processes that lead to attitude moralization; we integrate these efforts and conclude with a new domain theory of attitude moralization.

The roles of disgust and harm perception in political attitude moralization.

What causes people to see their political attitudes in a moral light? One answer is that attitude moralization results from associating one's attitude stance with feelings of disgust. To test the possibility that disgust moralizes, the current study used a high-powered preregistered design looking at within-person change in moral conviction paired with an experimental manipulation of disgust or anger (versus control). Results from the preregistered analyses found that we successfully induced anger but not disgust; however, our manipulation had no effect on moral conviction. Additional exploratory analyses investigating whether emotion and harm predicted increases in moral conviction over time found that neither disgust, anger, nor sadness had an effect on moralization, whereas perceptions of harm did predict moralization. Our findings are discussed in terms of their implications for current theory and research into attitude moralization.

A checklist to facilitate objective hypothesis testing in social psychology research.

Social psychology is not a very politically diverse area of inquiry, something that could negatively affect the objectivity of social psychological theory and research, as Duarte et al. argue in the target article. This commentary offers a number of checks to help researchers uncover possible biases and identify when they are engaging in hypothesis confirmation and advocacy instead of hypothesis testing.

Political ideology is contextually variable and flexible rather than fixed.

Hibbing et al. argue that the liberal-conservative continuum is (a) universal and (b) grounded in psychological differences in sensitivity to negative stimuli. Our commentary argues that both claims overlook the importance of context. We review evidence that the liberal-conservative continuum is far from universal and that ideological differences are contextually flexible rather than fixed.

The expulsion from Disneyland: the social psychological impact of 9/11.

People expressed many different reactions to the events of September 11th, 2001. Some of these reactions were clearly negative, such as political intolerance, discrimination, and hate crimes directed toward targets that some, if not many, people associated with the attackers. Other reactions were more positive. For example, people responded by donating blood, increasing contributions of time and money to charity, and flying the American flag. The goal of this article is to review some of Americans' negative and positive reactions to 9/11. We also describe two frameworks, value protection and terror management theory, that provide insights into Americans' various reactions to the tragedy of 9/11.

When values and attributions collide: liberals' and conservatives' values motivate attributions for alleged misdeeds.

Conservatives tend to make dispositional whereas liberals make situational attributions for social problems and alleged misconduct (the "ideo-attribution effect"). Three studies demonstrated a reversal of the ideo-attribution effect. Conservatives made stronger situational attributions than liberals for the behavior of Marines accused of killing Iraqi civilians (Studies 1 and 2) and police officers accused of wrongly killing a cougar running loose in a Chicago neighborhood (Study 3). Reversals of the ideo-attribution effect occurred because conservative values were more consistent with excusing the Marines' and police officers' behavior, whereas liberal values were more consistent with blaming the Marines and police officers. These results suggest that the ideo-attribution effect-and attributions more generally-are shaped by whether people's attributional conclusions are consistent or inconsistent with their salient values.