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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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'.

Moral "foundations" as the product of motivated social cognition: Empathy and other psychological underpinnings of ideological divergence in "individualizing" and "binding" concerns.

According to moral foundations theory, there are five distinct sources of moral intuition on which political liberals and conservatives differ. The present research program seeks to contextualize this taxonomy within the broader research literature on political ideology as motivated social cognition, including the observation that conservative judgments often serve system-justifying functions. In two studies, a combination of regression and path modeling techniques were used to explore the motivational underpinnings of ideological differences in moral intuitions. Consistent with our integrative model, the "binding" foundations (in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity) were associated with epistemic and existential needs to reduce uncertainty and threat and system justification tendencies, whereas the so-called "individualizing" foundations (fairness and avoidance of harm) were generally unrelated to epistemic and existential motives and were instead linked to empathic motivation. Taken as a whole, these results are consistent with the position taken by Hatemi, Crabtree, and Smith that moral "foundations" are themselves the product of motivated social cognition.

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.

Economic system justification predicts muted emotional responses to inequality.

Although humans display inequality aversion, many people appear to be untroubled by widespread economic disparities. We suggest that such indifference is partly attributable to a belief in the fairness of the capitalist system. Here we report six studies showing that economic ideology predicts self-reported and physiological responses to inequality. In Studies 1 and 2, participants who regard the economic system as justified, compared with those who do not, report feeling less negative emotion after watching videos depicting homelessness. In Studies 3-5, economic system justifiers exhibit low levels of negative affect, as indexed by activation of the corrugator supercilii muscle, and autonomic arousal, as indexed by skin conductance, while viewing people experiencing homelessness. In Study 6, which employs experience-sampling methodology, everyday exposure to rich and poor people elicits less negative emotion among system justifiers. These results provide the strongest evidence to date that system-justifying beliefs diminish aversion to inequality in economic contexts.

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).

Ideological justification of the sectarian political system in Lebanon.

We start by summarizing recent research on system justification theory, highlighting studies conducted outside the U.S. to expand the cross-national scope of the theory. Next we describe major findings in social and political psychology pertaining to religiosity, political conservatism, and various forms of system justification before turning to a specific case of entrenched inequality, namely the sectarian political system in Lebanon. We discuss the results of a nationally representative survey of 500 Lebanese adults conducted in 2016. Consistent with system justification theory, we observed that religiosity and political conservatism were positively associated with general and economic forms of system justification as well as support for the sectarian political system in Lebanon. We situate these findings in a broader historical and cultural analysis of Lebanon and other sectarian societies and highlight ways in which applying psychological theories and methods to novel and distinctive socio-ecological contexts can lead to practical insights and perhaps even policy recommendations.

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.

False Equivalence: Are Liberals and Conservatives in the United States Equally Biased?

On the basis of a meta-analysis of 51 studies, Ditto et al. (this issue, p. 273) conclude that ideological bias is equivalent on the left and right of U.S. politics. In this commentary, we contend that this conclusion does not follow from the review and that Ditto and his colleagues are too quick to embrace a false equivalence between the liberal left and the conservative right. For one thing, the issues, procedures, and materials used in the studies reviewed by Ditto and his colleagues were selected for purposes other than the inspection of ideological asymmetries. Consequently, methodological choices made by researchers were systematically biased to avoid producing differences between liberals and conservatives. We also consider the broader implications of a normative analysis of judgment and decision making and demonstrate that the bias examined by Ditto and his colleagues is not, in fact, an irrational bias, and that it is incoherent to discuss bias in the absence of standards for assessing accuracy and consistency. Other conclusions about domain-general asymmetries in motivated social cognition have suggested that epistemic virtues are more prevalent among liberals than conservatives, and these conclusions are closer to the truth of the matter when it comes to current American politics. Finally, we question the notion that the research literature in psychology is necessarily characterized by liberal bias, as several authors have claimed.

An ideological asymmetry in the diffusion of moralized content on social media among political leaders.

Online social networks constitute a major platform for the exchange of moral and political ideas, and political elites increasingly rely on social media platforms to communicate directly with the public. However, little is known about the processes that render some political elites more influential than others when it comes to online communication. Here, we gauge influence of political elites on social media by examining how message factors (characteristics of the communication) interact with source factors (characteristics of elites) to impact the diffusion of elites' messages through Twitter. We analyzed messages (N = 286,255) sent from federal politicians (presidential candidates, members of the Senate and House of Representatives) in the year leading up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election-a period in which Democrats and Republicans sought to maximize their influence over potential voters. Across all types of elites, we found a "moral contagion" effect: elites' use of moral-emotional language was robustly associated with increases in message diffusion. We also discovered an ideological asymmetry: conservative elites gained greater diffusion when using moral-emotional language compared to liberal elites, even when accounting for extremity of ideology and other source cues. Specific moral emotion expressions related to moral outrage-namely, moral anger and disgust-were impactful for elites across the political spectrum, whereas moral emotion expression related to religion and patriotism were more impactful for conservative elites. These findings help inform the scientific understanding of political propaganda in the digital age, and the antecedents of political polarization in American politics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Who Leads? Who Follows? Measuring Issue Attention and Agenda Setting by Legislators and the Mass Public Using Social Media Data.

Are legislators responsive to the priorities of the public? Research demonstrates a strong correspondence between the issues about which the public cares and the issues addressed by politicians, but conclusive evidence about who leads whom in setting the political agenda has yet to be uncovered. We answer this question with fine-grained temporal analyses of Twitter messages by legislators and the public during the 113th US Congress. After employing an unsupervised method that classifies tweets sent by legislators and citizens into topics, we use vector autoregression models to explore whose priorities more strongly predict the relationship between citizens and politicians. We find that legislators are more likely to follow, than to lead, discussion of public issues, results that hold even after controlling for the agenda-setting effects of the media. We also find, however, that legislators are more likely to be responsive to their supporters than to the general public.

The future of system justification theory.

In this article, we respond to commentaries by Friesen et al. (2018, Br. J. Soc. Psychol.), Osborne et al. (2018, Br. J. Soc. Psychol.), and Owuamalam et al. (2018, Br. J. Soc. Psychol.) on the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of system justification theory. The first two commentaries are highly favourable in their evaluation of the state of theory and research on system justification, and they provide insightful suggestions for new directions. The third commentary is far more critical of system justification theory. We address each objection in some detail, seeking to correct a number of misconceptions about system justification theory and clarify the fact that the theory specifies three - ego, group, and system justification - motives rather than one. Finally, we end by proposing exciting new areas for future research, such as (1) distinguishing between subjective and objective consequences of system justification in a broader array of social and political contexts and (2) developing practical interventions to reduce system justification motivation and strengthen the motivation to improve upon the status quo.

Speculations on the Evolutionary Origins of System Justification.

For centuries, philosophers and social theorists have wondered why people submit voluntarily to tyrannical leaders and oppressive regimes. In this article, we speculate on the evolutionary origins of system justification, that is, the ways in which people are motivated (often nonconsciously) to defend and justify existing social, economic, and political systems. After briefly recounting the logic of system justification theory and some of the most pertinent empirical evidence, we consider parallels between the social behaviors of humans and other animals concerning the acceptance versus rejection of hierarchy and dominance. Next, we summarize research in human neuroscience suggesting that specific brain regions, such as the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex, may be linked to individual differences in ideological preferences concerning (in)equality and social stability as well as the successful navigation of complex, hierarchical social systems. Finally, we consider some of the implications of a system justification perspective for the study of evolutionary psychology, political behavior, and social change.

Ideological asymmetries in conformity, desire for shared reality, and the spread of misinformation.

Ideological belief systems arise from epistemic, existential, and relational motives to reduce uncertainty, threat, and social discord. According to system justification theory, however, some ideologies-such as those that are conservative, religious, and legitimizing of the status quo-are especially appealing to people whose epistemic, existential, and relational motives are chronically or temporarily heightened. In this article, we focus on relational motivation, describing evidence that conservatives are more likely than liberals to: prioritize values of conformity and tradition; possess a strong desire to share reality with like-minded others; perceive within-group consensus when making political and non-political judgments; be influenced by implicit relational cues and sources who are perceived as similar to them; and maintain homogenous social networks and favor an 'echo chamber' environment that is conducive to the spread of misinformation.

What inverted U can do for your country: A curvilinear relationship between confidence in the social system and political engagement.

We examined the link between political engagement and the tendency to justify the sociopolitical system. On one hand, confidence in the system should be negatively related to political engagement, insofar as it entails reduced desire for social change; on the other hand, system confidence should also be positively related to political engagement to the extent that it carries an assumption that the system is responsive to citizens' political efforts. Because of the combination of these 2 opposing forces, the motivation for political engagement should be highest at intermediate levels of system confidence. Five studies revealed a negative quadratic relationship between system confidence and normative political engagement. In 2 representative surveys, Polish participants with moderate levels of system confidence were more likely to vote in political elections (Study 1) and to participate in solidarity-based collective action (Study 2). Two field studies demonstrated a negative quadratic relationship between system confidence and actual participation in political demonstrations (gender equality and teachers' protests in Poland; Studies 3 and 4). This pattern of results was further corroborated by analyses of data from 50 countries drawn from the World Value Survey: we observed negative quadratic relationships between system confidence and collective action as well as voting. These relationships were stronger in democratic (vs. nondemocratic) regimes (Study 5). Our results suggest that some degree of system confidence might be useful to stimulate political engagement within the norms of the system. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).