Ideological Rigidity and Political Conservatism in Relation to Death Anxiety and Reactions to Those With Different Beliefs.

This research tested the assumptions of Terror Management Theory (Pyszczynski et al., 2015) and conservatism as motivated social cognition (Jost et al., 2003) regarding how belief systems relate to existential anxiety. Conservatism as motivated social cognition posits that politically conservative ideologies are uniquely capable of minimizing fears about death. In contrast, TMT asserts that ideological rigidity is associated with less fear of death but it also promotes aggression and intolerance against those with different beliefs. The relation of ideological rigidity and political conservatism to death anxiety and intolerance of those who have differing worldviews was explored in a sample of American university students (n = 134) and of American respondents from the Prolific crowdsourcing platform (n = 199). The results from both samples supported the hypothesis that ideological rigidity was associated with more negative reactions to people with different beliefs. The results regarding death anxiety were more complicated. In the student sample, personal need for structure was the best predictor of death anxiety, with higher scores on personal need for structure being associated with more death anxiety. In the crowdsourcing sample, social conservatism was the best predictor of death anxiety, with more conservatism being associated with less death anxiety.

An action research partnership in an urban Texas county to explore barriers and opportunities for collaborative community health needs assessments.

Background: The Affordable Care Act mandated triennial community health needs assessments (CHNAs) for greater nonprofit hospital accountability in responding to community health needs. Over 10 years later, hospital spending on community benefits remains largely unchanged. While greater collaboration in CHNA implementation can increase hospital investment in community-based initiatives, nonprofit hospitals in conservative states are subject to policy, political, and economic factors that inhibit public health partnerships and magnify existing disparities in health care access. This participatory action research study explores the decision-making environment of collaborative CHNA implementation within a group of nonprofit hospitals in a north Texas urban county. Methods: In 2017 faculty from an urban anchor institution initiated an academic-community partnership with a coalition of nonprofit hospitals, public health departments, and academic institutions. An interdisciplinary research team engaged in multi-method document review and qualitative data collection to describe historical barriers for local CHNA processes and develop practical strategies for joint CHNA initiatives. Local CHNA documents were first reviewed through team-based content analysis and results applied to develop a qualitative study protocol. Key informants were recruited from county-based nonprofit hospitals, community-based nonprofit organizations, and public health systems. Seventeen senior- and mid-level professionals participated in semi-structured research interviews to describe their perspectives relating to CHNA-related planning and implementation decisions. Through iterative data collection and analysis, the research team explored CHNA-related knowledge, experiences, and processes. A constructivist lens was subsequently applied to examine historical barriers and future opportunities for local collaboration. Results: Findings reveal CHNA implementation is a multi-stage cyclical process in organizational environments with accountability to a wide range of public and private stakeholders. This promotes varied levels of inclusivity and conservatism in data collection and community benefit implementation. Decisions to collaborate are hindered by competing priorities, including compliance with existing guidelines, administrative simplicity, alignment with health care service delivery, and efficient resource use. Efforts to promote greater CHNA collaboration may be facilitated through intentional alignment with organizational priorities and clearly communicated benefits of participation for leaders in both public and private nonprofit health systems. Discussion: We consider implications for policymakers and health systems in restrictive political environments and advance a conceptual framework for greater CHNA collaboration.

Political ideology and pandemic lifestyles: the indirect effects of empathy, authoritarianism, and threat.

Background: In this paper, we integrate theory and research from sociology, psychology, and political science to develop and test a mediation model that helps to explain why political conservatism is often associated with pandemic behaviors and lifestyles that are inconsistent with public health recommendations for COVID-19. Methods: Using national data from the 2021 Crime, Health, and Politics Survey (n = 1743), we formally test the indirect effects of political conservatism (an index of Republican party identification, conservative political orientation, right-wing news media consumption, and 2020 Trump vote) on pandemic lifestyles (an index of social distancing, hand sanitizing, mask usage, and vaccination) through the mechanisms of empathy (concern about the welfare of others), authoritarian beliefs (authoritarian aggressiveness and acquiescence to authority), and pandemic threat perceptions (threats to self and to the broader society). Result: Our results confirm that political conservatism is associated with riskier pandemic lifestyles. We also find that this association is partially mediated by lower levels of empathy, higher levels of authoritarian beliefs, and lower levels of perceived pandemic threat. Conclusions: Understanding why political conservatism is associated with riskier pandemic lifestyles may eventually lead us to ways of identifying and overcoming widespread cultural barriers to critical pandemic responses.

A longitudinal study of vaccine hesitancy attitudes and social influence as predictors of COVID-19 vaccine uptake in the US.

BACKGROUND: In many countries with high levels of COVID-19 vaccine access, uptake remains a major issue. We examined prospective predictors of COVID-19 vaccine uptake in a United States longitudinal study. METHODS: An online longitudinal study on COVID-19 and well-being assessed vaccine hesitancy attitudes, social norms, and uptake among 444 respondents who had completed both survey waves in March and June 2021. RESULTS: The mean sample age was 41, with 55% female, 71% white, 13% Black, and 6% Latinx. In March 2021, 14% had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose. By June 2021, 64% reported receiving at least one dose. In prospectively assessing predictors of vaccine uptake, we found strong correlations among five different vaccine hesitancy questions. In multivariable logistic regression models, family and friends discouraging vaccination (adjusted odds ratios [aOR] = .26, 95% CI = .07, .98), not knowing whom to believe about vaccine safety (aOR = .51, 95% CI = .27, .95), and concerns that shortcuts were taken with vaccine development (aOR = .43, 95% CI = .23, .81) were all independent predictors of lower vaccine uptake. Political conservatism, gender, education, and income were also independent predictors of reduced uptake. Vaccine hesitancy items were also modeled as a scale, and the scale was found to be strongly predictive of vaccine uptake. CONCLUSIONS: The findings highlight the importance of social norm interventions and suggest general and specific vaccine hesitancy attitudes, especially trust, should be considered in developing vaccine uptake programs.

Intersections Around Ambivalent Sexism: Internalized Homonegativity, Resistance to Heteronormativity and Other Correlates.

This article explores the connections between the construct of sexism and other sociodemographic and attitudinal variables, such as internalized homonegativity and heteronormative resistances, among psychology students. Both unrefined and inferential analyses were used with a representative sample of 841 psychology students from public universities in Madrid. Results showed higher levels of sexism, internalized homonegativity and low resistances to heteronormativity among groups of men, heterosexuals and conservatives. Interactions were found that showed a higher degree of hostile sexism in: heterosexual people with respect to LGB and heterosexual men with respect to heterosexual women. Also, interactions were found to show a greater degree of heteronormative resistance in: LGB people with respect to heterosexuals and left-wing women with respect to right-wing women. Correlations with sexism varied according to gender identity and sexual orientation. In addition, heteronormative resistances correlated negatively with sexism, while some components of internalized homonegativity correlated positively. Political affiliation was the most frequent predictor of sexism. The results highlight the need for an intersectional approach to understanding the phenomenon of sexism.

The surprising politics of anti-immigrant prejudice: How political conservatism moderates the effect of immigrant race and religion on infrahumanization judgements.

Attitudes towards immigrants in the United Kingdom are worsening. It has been posited that these attitudes may reflect covert racial and religious prejudices, particularly among conservatives. To investigate this, two studies examined the role that immigrant race (Black/White; Study 1) and immigrant religion (Muslim/non-Muslim; Study 2) played in immigrant infrahumanization judgements, using political conservatism as a moderating variable. There was a moderating effect of political conservatism; however, it was not in the predicted direction. The results of both studies indicated that immigrant race (Black) and immigrant religion (Muslim) predicted greater infrahumanization when political conservatism was low. Conservatives infrahumanized all immigrants equally (and more than liberals), but liberals were more sensitive to racial/religious biases in their evaluations of immigrants.

Sexual and reproductive rights under attack: the advance of political and moral conservatism in Brazil.

This article discusses political setbacks related to sexual and reproductive health and rights that have occurred in Brazil in the last 5 years (2014-2018) resulting from the significant role played by Christian (Evangelical and Catholic) parliamentarians in the legislative branch. Political initiatives aimed at prohibiting the affirmation of sexual and reproductive rights, while also curtailing debate about sexuality and gender in schools and universities, have raised "moral panic" within some elements of Brazilian society. The discursive strategies used around so-called "gender ideology" stimulated the formation of civil organisations which promote morality based on right-wing political positions. For this study, we looked at official documents and bibliographic material to examine how issues related to abortion rights, health care in cases of sexual violence, the prevention of sexually transmitted infections and homosexual citizenship are currently being suppressed, compromising the defence and advancement of the sexual and reproductive rights of women and the LGBTI+ population. The results point to the steady weakening of public policies that had become law in the 1980s, a time of Brazilian re-democratisation after two decades of military dictatorship. A wide range of civil, political and social rights, which saw significant growth and consolidation over the last 20 years, were rolled back after the resurgence of the extreme right wing in the federal legislature, culminating in the election of the current president in October 2018. However, social movements have increased in strength in the last few decades, especially the black feminist and LGBTI+ rights movements. These movements continue to provide political resistance, striving to affirm and protect all sexual and reproductive rights achieved to date.

Social (not fiscal) conservatism predicts deontological ethics.

Prior research has reported that political conservatives rely on a deontological approach to resolving moral dilemmas by favoring moral rules and moral edicts rather than expressing a willingness to sacrifice one life in order to save multiple others. In the current research, we sought to firstly demonstrate the underlying process and secondly to clarify the exact nature of the link between political ideology and deontological ethics. In Study 1, political conservatism predicted deontological judgments because of greater intuition. That is, conservatives think rather intuitively, and intuitive thinking is one antecedent to deontological judgments when resolving moral dilemmas. Following, in Study 2, we demonstrate that only social-not fiscal-conservatism predicts intuition and thus deontological ethics. Accordingly, we tease apart the typical left-right measure of political ideology into its two key aspects and argue that only the social but not fiscal dimensions predicts intuition and deontological ethics. We are not the first authors to suggest the existence of a link between political conservatism and moral processing, but we are the first to suggest an explanation and the first to clarify which aspect of conservatism is associated with deontological ethics.

Evidence of decreased system justification among extreme conservatives in non-American samples.

Do extreme rightists criticize the system, or do rightwing extremists exhibit the higher system justification? These competing alternatives were tested across three studies. In Study 1 (N = 38,168), I examined the linear and quadratic relationship between political orientation and satisfaction with the existing national system across 23 nations. In Study 2 (N = 1,206), I investigated the linear and quadratic relationship between political orientation and confidence in the national institution in a representative sample of Italian people. In Study 3 (N = 190), I considered general system justification and investigated its linear and quadratic relations with political conservatism as measured with different indexes. In all the studies, I found some evidence of a positive linear relationship between political conservatism and system justification. Moreover, a quadratic and negative relationship emerged so that system justification appeared to decrease at the extremes of the political continuum.

On the precipice of a "majority-minority" America: perceived status threat from the racial demographic shift affects White Americans' political ideology.

The U.S. Census Bureau projects that racial minority groups will make up a majority of the U.S. national population in 2042, effectively creating a so-called majority-minority nation. In four experiments, we explored how salience of such racial demographic shifts affects White Americans' political-party leanings and expressed political ideology. Study 1 revealed that making California's majority-minority shift salient led politically unaffiliated White Americans to lean more toward the Republican Party and express greater political conservatism. Studies 2, 3a, and 3b revealed that making the changing national racial demographics salient led White Americans (regardless of political affiliation) to endorse conservative policy positions more strongly. Moreover, the results implicate group-status threat as the mechanism underlying these effects. Taken together, this work suggests that the increasing diversity of the nation may engender a widening partisan divide.

Intolerancia a la ambigüedad, conservadurismo político y justificación de la inequidad económica, legal, educativa y étnica en la ciudad de Lima – Perú / Intolerância à ambiguidade, conservadorismo político e justificativa da inequidade econômica, legal, educativa e étnica na cidade de Lima, Peru / Intolerance to ambiguity, political conservatism, and justification of economic, legal, educational, and ethnic inequality in the city of Lima – Peru

Se analiza la relación entre el conservadurismo político y la justificación de cuatro formas de inequidad: económica, legal, educativa y étnica, en una muestra de estudiantes y graduados universitarios de la ciudad de Lima. Se evaluaron la intolerancia a la ambigüedad, el autoritarismo de ala derecha (RWA), la orientación hacia la dominancia social (SDO) y la orientación política de derecha. Un diagrama de sendero muestra que la intolerancia a la ambigüedad influye directamente sobre el RWA y la SDO, y estos a su vez lo hacen sobre los cuatro tipos de justificación de la inequidad. La SDO ejerce una influencia de mayor intensidad en comparación con el RWA.

The article analyzes the relationship between political conservatism and the justification of economic, legal, educational, and ethnic inequality in a sample of students and university graduates from the city of Lima. The following aspects were evaluated: intolerance toward ambiguity, right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and rightist political orientation. A Path-analysis shows that intolerance toward ambiguity directly influences RWA and SDO, and that these variables, in turn, influence the four types of justification of inequality. SDO exerts a greater influence than RWA.

Analisa-se a relação entre o conservadorismo político e a justificativa de quatro formas de inequidade: econômica, legal, educativa e étnica, em uma amostra de estudantes e universitários formados da cidade de Lima. Avaliaram-se a intolerância à ambiguidade, o autoritarismo de direita (RWA), a orientação à dominância social (SDO) e a orientação política de direita. Um diagrama de trilha mostra que a intolerância à ambiguidade influencia diretamente sobre o RWA e a SDO, e estes, por sua vez, fazem isso sobre os quatro tipos de justificativa da inequidade. A SDO exerce uma influência de maior intensidade em comparação com o RWA.

Relaciones entre el sexismo ambivalente, el conservadurismo político y la rigidez cognitiva en una muestra de habitantes de la ciudad de Lima / Relationships between ambivalent sexism, political conservatism and cognitive rigidity in a sample of inhabitants from the city of Lima

Este estudio analiza la relación entre el conservadurismo político, la rigidez cognitiva y el sexismo ambivalente en una muestra de adultos jóvenes de la ciudad de Lima (N = 279). Para evaluar el conservadu- rismo político se utilizaron medidas de autoritarismo de ala derecha (RWA ), orientación hacia la dominancia social (SDO) y justificación de la inequidad. La rigidez cognitiva fue evaluada a través de la intolerancia a la ambigüedad, la intolerancia a la incertidumbre, la necesidad de cierre cognitivo y la apertura a la experiencia. Se utilizó una versión traducida al castellano del inventario de sexismo ambivalente. Se encontró una relación directa entre el conservadurismo político, la rigidez cognitiva, el sexismo hostil y el sexismo benevolente. Un análisis de regresión lineal mostró que el RWA , la SDO y la intolerancia a la ambigüedad ejercen influencia directa sobre el sexismo hostil, mientras que el sexismo benevolente recibe la influencia directa del RWA y la justificación de la inequidad. Los hombres puntuaron más alto en el sexismo hostil, mientras que las mujeres lo hicieron en una de las tres dimensiones del sexismo benevolente.

This study analyzes the relationship between political conservatism, cognitive rigidity and ambivalent sexism in a sample of young adults of the city of Lima (N = 279) . Political conservatism was assessed by measures of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO) and justification of inequality. Cognitive rigidity was evaluated through intolerance to ambiguity, intolerance to uncertainty, need for cognitive closure and openness to experience. A Spanish translation of ambivalent sexism inventory was also used. A direct relationship between political conservatism, cognitive rigidity, and hostile and benevolent sexism was found. A multiple linear regression analysis showed that RWA , SDO and intolerance of ambiguity exert influence on hostile sexism. On the other hand, benevolent sexism was inuflenced by RWA and justification of inequality. Men scored higher on hostile sexism while women showed higher scores on one of the three dimensions of benevolent sexism.