Suchergebnisse

The question of the role of Islam in the public space has become a new pivotal point in political disputes about civil liberties in Western Europe. This debate challenges the scholarly literature on tolerance by highlighting that our understanding of the situational factors shaping tolerance judgments remains limited. This study therefore investigates how the salience of the signaling of religious group membership influences religious tolerance. Based on a unique question-wording experiment embedded in an approximately nationally representative survey, I demonstrate that conspicuous manifestations of religious outgroup membership spark stronger intolerance than subtle manifestations and that anxiety mediates the effect of conspicuous manifestations of religious outgroup membership. Finally, I demonstrate that the effect of the salience of religious outgroup membership is strongest among those who are highly opposed to secularism. I conclude by discussing how these findings constitute an important extension of the extant work on tolerance and feed back into the discussion regarding the role of religion in the public space. Adapted from the source document.

While much research has investigated the persuasive effects of partisan cues on citizens' evaluations of political messages, our knowledge regarding failed persuasion is limited. It remains particularly unclear whether failed elite attempts at persuasion simply leave citizens' attitudes unchanged or whether such attempts at persuading one segment of the electorate can actually lead to a loss of support in others. This study therefore investigates partisan cues and the occurrence of contrast effects, i.e. when the presence of an elite cue induces citizens to shift their attitudes away from the viewpoint advocated in a persuasive message. Based on data from three experiments involving two different party leader cues, I demonstrate that partisan cues can trigger contrast effects among those perceiving the party leader in question as non-likeable and those who vote for a party which is politically opposed to the source. The implications of the findings are discussed.

An impressive body of research shows that the framing of an issue affects citizens' attitudes, but also that some frames are more influential than others. Yet, we have surprisingly limited knowledge of the factors that affect the strength of a frame, that is, the frame's capacity to influence citizens' opinions. Therefore, this study investigates the relative strength of episodic and thematic frames to argue that our understanding of the dynamics of frame strength can be advanced through a better incorporation of citizens' emotional reactions. Based on experimental data, I demonstrate that the relative strength of episodic and thematic frames depends on the intensity of citizens' emotional reactions. When there are no or weak emotional reactions, thematic frames are stronger than episodic frames, whereas the relative strength is increasingly reversed when intense emotional reactions are inflamed in the audience. I conclude by discussing the implications of the findings. Adapted from the source document.

A robust finding in the welfare state literature is that public support for the welfare state differs widely across countries. Yet recent research on the psychology of welfare support suggests that people everywhere form welfare opinions using psychological predispositions designed to regulate interpersonal help giving using cues regarding recipient effort. We argue that this implies that cross-national differences in welfare support emerge from mutable differences in stereotypes about recipient efforts rather than deep differences in psychological predispositions. Using free-association tasks and experiments embedded in large-scale, nationally representative surveys collected in the United States and Denmark, we test this argument by investigating the stability of opinion differences when faced with the presence and absence of cues about the deservingness of specific welfare recipients. Despite decades of exposure to different cultures and welfare institutions, two sentences of information can make welfare support across the U.S. and Scandinavian samples substantially and statistically indistinguishable. Adapted from the source document.

How do modern individuals form a sense of the vast societies in which they live? Social cognition has evolved to make sense of small, intimate social groups, but in complex mass societies, comparable vivid social cues are scarcer. Extant research on political attitudes and behavior has emphasized media and interpersonal networks as key sources of cues. Extending a classical argument, we provide evidence for the importance of an alternative and internal source: imagination. With a focus on social welfare, we collected survey data from two very different democracies, the United States and Denmark, and conducted several studies using explicit, implicit, and behavioral measures. By analyzing the effects of individual differences in imagination, we demonstrate that political cognition relies on vivid, mental simulations that engage evolved social and emotional decision-making mechanisms. It is in the mind's eye that vividness and engagement are added to people's sense of mass politics.

Party identification is central to the study of American political behavior, yet there remains disagreement over whether it is largely instrumental or expressive in nature. We draw on social identity theory to develop the expressive model and conduct four studies to compare it to an instrumental explanation of campaign involvement. We find strong support for the expressive model: a multi-item partisan identity scale better accounts for campaign activity than a strong stance on subjectively important policy issues, the strength of ideological self-placement, or a measure of ideological identity. A series of experiments underscore the power of partisan identity to generate action-oriented emotions that drive campaign activity. Strongly identified partisans feel angrier than weaker partisans when threatened with electoral loss and more positive when reassured of victory. In contrast, those who hold a strong and ideologically consistent position on issues are no more aroused emotionally than others by party threats or reassurances. In addition, threat and reassurance to the party's status arouse greater anger and enthusiasm among partisans than does a threatened loss or victory on central policy issues. Our findings underscore the power of an expressive partisan identity to drive campaign involvement and generate strong emotional reactions to ongoing campaign events.

Do politically irrelevant events influence important policy opinions? Previous research on social welfare attitudes has emphasized the role of political factors such as economic self-interest and ideology. Here, we demonstrate that attitudes to social welfare are also influenced by short-term fluctuations in hunger. Using theories in evolutionary psychology, we predict that hungry individuals will be greedier and take more resources from others while also attempting to induce others to share by signaling cooperative intentions and expressing support for sharing, including evolutionarily novel forms of sharing such as social welfare. We test these predictions using self-reported hunger data as well as comparisons of subjects who participated in relevant online studies before and after eating lunch. Across four studies collected in two different welfare regimes-the United Kingdom and Denmark-we consistently find that hungry individuals act in a greedier manner but describe themselves as more cooperative and express greater support for social welfare. Adapted from the source document.

People who are more avoidant of pathogens are more politically conservative, as are nations with greater parasite stress. In the current research, we test two prominent hypotheses that have been proposed as explanations for these relationships. The first, which is an intragroup account, holds that these relationships between pathogens and politics are based on motivations to adhere to local norms, which are sometimes shaped by cultural evolution to have pathogenneutralizing properties. The second, which is an intergroup account, holds that these same relationships are based on motivations to avoid contact with outgroups, who might pose greater infectious disease threats than ingroup members. Results from a study surveying 11,501 participants across 30 nations are more consistent with the intragroup account than with the intergroup account. National parasite stress relates to traditionalism (an aspect of conservatism especially related to adherence to group norms) but not to social dominance orientation (SDO; an aspect of conservatism especially related to endorsements of intergroup barriers and negativity toward ethnic and racial outgroups). Further, individual differences in pathogen-avoidance motives (i.e., disgust sensitivity) relate more strongly to traditionalism than to SDO within the 30 nations.