Suchergebnisse

"Aufgrund der in der Literatur vorgenommenen Unterscheidung von primärem und sekundärem Antisemitismus wurde eine Skala entwickelt, um diese beiden Facetten zu messen. An einer studentischen Stichprobe (N=70) wurden zusätzlich zur Validierung rechtsgerichteter Autoritarismus (RWA), Soziale Dominanzorientierung (SDO), Nationale Identifikation und die Motivation zu vorurteilfreiem Verhalten als Kovariaten erhoben. Die Skala erwies sich als insgesamt konsistent und zeitlich stabil, die angenommene Zwei-Faktoren-Struktur konnte bestätigt werden. Die Korrelationen mit weiteren Konstrukten sprechen für die Validität. Eine zweite Studie (N=341) bestätigt diese Befunde anhand einer größeren Stichprobe und testet Strukturmodelle der Skala. Trotz der Bestätigung der zweifaktoriellen Struktur zeigt sich eine erstaunlich hohe Korrelation zwischen den beiden Subskalen, so dass die Vermutung nahe liegt, dass primärer und sekundärer Antisemitismus lediglich verschiedene Ausdrucksformen eines einheitlichen zugrundliegenden Konstrukts sind." (Autorenreferat)

Was ist eine Verschwörungstheorie? Wer glaubt daran und warum? Welche Folgen ergeben sich daraus für Gesellschaft, Politik, Gesundheit und Social Media? Der Band betrachtet das Phänomen des Verschwörungsglaubens aus verschiedenen psychologischen Blickwinkeln und stellt diese in einen interdisziplinären Diskurs. Leserinnen und Leser erhalten so einen Überblick über die aktuelle Forschung zu Verschwörungsnarrativen, inklusive der so wichtigen Widersprüche, Uneinigkeiten und Debatten.Der erste Teil des Bandes beleuchtet die kognitiven Grundlagen von Verschwörungstheorien und den Einfluss von kognitiven Verzerrungen. Es wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie ein verschwörungstheoretisches Weltbild im Lebensverlauf entstehen kann. Zudem wird die Rolle von Verschwörungsglauben im politischen Diskurs, den sozialen Medien und in Bezug auf das persönliche Gesundheitsverhalten diskutiert. Auch wird auf Möglichkeiten und Grenzen von Interventionen gegen Verschwörungsglauben eingegangen. Im zweiten Teil des Bandes werden diese psychologischen Perspektiven in eine produktive Reibung mit anderen Fächern gebracht. Beiträge aus Philosophie, Geschichtswissenschaft, Linguistik und Kommunikationswissenschaft beleuchten die psychologischen Überlegungen kritisch oder reflektieren die Begrenztheit der psychologischen Methoden. Den Abschluss bildet ein Beitrag zur weltanschaulichen Beratung von Verschwörungsgläubigen und ihren Angehörigen. Der Band vermeidet vorschnelle Vereinfachungen und verfolgt das Ziel, das Phänomen des Verschwörungsglaubens in all seinen Nuancen zu begreifen und weder in die Falle zu tappen, Verschwörungsglauben und seine Konsequenzen a priori zu verdammen, noch diesen zu verharmlosen

During the coronavirus disease pandemic rising in 2020, governments and nongovernmental organizations across the globe have taken great efforts to curb the infection rate by promoting or legally prescribing behavior that can reduce the spread of the virus. At the same time, this pandemic has given rise to speculations and conspiracy theories. Conspiracy worldviews have been connected to refusal to trust science, the biomedical model of disease, and legal means of political engagement in previous research. In three studies from the United States (N = 220; N = 288) and the UK (N = 298), we went beyond this focus on a general conspiracy worldview and tested the idea that different forms of conspiracy beliefs despite being positively correlated have distinct behavioral implications. Whereas conspiracy beliefs describing the pandemic as a hoax were more strongly associated with reduced containment-related behavior, conspiracy beliefs about sinister forces purposefully creating the virus related to an increase in self-centered prepping behavior.

Abstract. Only little is known about the underpinning psychological processes that determine medical choices. Across four studies, we establish that conspiracy mentality predicts a preference for alternative over biomedical therapies. Study 1a (N = 392) and 1b (N = 204) provide correlational support, Study 2 (N = 185) experimentally tested the role of power: People who endorsed a conspiracy mentality perceived a drug more positively if its approval was supported by a powerless (vs. powerful) agent. Study 3 (N = 239) again showed a moderating effect of power and conspiracy mentality on drug evaluation by comparing analytic versus holistic approaches. These findings point to the consequences of conspiracy mentality for health behavior and prevention programs.

Since 2001 there has been a steadily increasing awareness of discrimination against Muslims based on their religion. Despite the widespread use of the neologism Islamophobia to refer to this phenomenon, this term has been harshly criticized for confounding prejudiced views of Muslims with a legitimate critique of Muslim practices based on secular grounds. In the current research a scale was developed to differentiate Islamoprejudice (based on the influential Islamophobia definition of the British Runnymede Trust) and Secular Critique of Islam. Across two studies, Islamoprejudice was related to explicit and implicit prejudice, right‐wing authoritarianism, and social dominance orientation whereas Secular Critique was unrelated to any forms of prejudice but negatively related to religiosity and authoritarianism. The two scales were mostly independent or only moderately related. Importantly, the new Islamoprejudice scale outperformed all other scales in predicting actual opposition versus support for a heatedly debated, newly built mosque. These results demonstrate the necessity to differentiate between Islamoprejudice and Secular Critique in future research on attitudes towards Islam.

The present research examined the hypothesis that positive implicit attitudes toward a former romantic partner might be detrimental to well‐being as these attitudes lead to more suffering. In a cross‐sectional study (N = 144), implicit ex‐partner attitudes measured with an Affect Misattribution Procedure were negatively related to well‐being only for those participants who had not found a new partner after breakup. In contrast, positive explicit ex‐partner attitudes were related to greater well‐being, again only for those who were still alone. Contrary to the view that time will heal all wounds, the current research suggests that engaging with a new partner will make both implicit and explicit ex‐partner attitudes irrelevant.

Religious and conspiracy beliefs share the feature of assuming powerful forces that determine the fate of the world. Correspondingly, they have been theorized to address similar psychological needs and to be based on similar cognitions, but there exist little authoritative answers about their relationship. We delineate two theory‐driven possibilities. If conspiracy theories and religions serve as surrogates for each other by fulfilling similar needs, the two beliefs should be negatively correlated. If conspiracy and religious beliefs stem from the same values and cognitions, this would speak for a positive correlation that might be diminished—for example—by controlling for shared political ideologies. We approached the question with a meta‐analysis (N = 10,242), partial correlations from large Christian‐dominated datasets from Germany, Poland, and the United States (N = 12,612), and a preregistered U.S. study (N = 500). The results indicate that the correlations between religiosity and conspiracy theory endorsement were positive, and political orientation shared large parts of this covariance. Correlations of religiosity with the more need‐related conspiracy mentality differed between countries. We conclude that similarities in the explanatory style and ideologies seem to be central for the relation between intrinsic religiosity and endorsing conspiracy theories, but psychological needs only play a minor role.

A frequent rhetoric in the political arena calls members of larger groups like nations to lay aside all dividing differences and unite in face of a common threat. In the present research we sought to test whether such a unifying effect of external threat already manifests in such basic cognitive processes as automatic categorization even for such strong schisms as the ones between black and white Americans or Israeli Jews and Arabs. In Studies 1 & 2 (N = 183/144, USA), we established the decategorization effect in the context of black and white US Americans. In Study 3, we showed the effect again in a German lab for the gender category (N = 101). In Study 4 (N = 168, Israel), we transferred the effect to the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and teased apart the separate effects of intergroup threat, common goal and common threat, and category membership of participants. In summary, a common enemy leads to the decategorization of social groups already at an early automatic stage.

From a dual-systems perspective, it has been proposed that predictive validity of whether individuals act out or stifle their reactive aggression will be maximized if (a) automatic and (b) controlled precursors of aggression are assessed and (c) situational boundaries in favor of acting out or restraining oneself are specified. In the present research we experimentally manipulated participants' self-regulatory efforts in an ego depletion paradigm and subsequently measured reactive aggression in the Taylor Aggression Paradigm. Assessing automatic and controlled precursors of reactive aggression via an Implicit Association Test of Aggressiveness (Agg-IAT) and self-report reactive aggressiveness questionnaire, respectively, we demonstrated a theoretically expected double dissociation: Reactive aggression of ego depleted individuals was predicted by the implicit measure whereas non-depleted participants' reactive aggression was predicted by their explicit self-reports. The results corroborate the usefulness of both explicit and implicit measures of aggressiveness and point to boundary conditions of these measures' predictive validity.

Conspiracy theories are ubiquitous when it comes to explaining political events and societal phenomena. Individuals differ not only in the degree to which they believe in specific conspiracy theories, but also in their general susceptibility to explanations based on such theories, that is, their conspiracy mentality. We present the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (CMQ), an instrument designed to efficiently assess differences in the generic tendency to engage in conspiracist ideation within and across cultures. The CMQ is available in English, German, and Turkish. In four studies, we examined the CMQ's factorial structure, reliability, measurement equivalence across cultures, and its convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. Analyses based on a cross-cultural sample (Study 1a; N = 7,766) supported the conceptualization of conspiracy mentality as a one-dimensional construct across the three language versions of the CMQ that is stable across time (Study 1b; N = 141). Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated cross-cultural measurement equivalence of the CMQ items. The instrument could therefore be used to examine differences in conspiracy mentality between European, North American, and Middle Eastern cultures. In Studies 2–4 (total N = 476), we report (re-)analyses of three datasets demonstrating the validity of the CMQ in student and working population samples in the UK and Germany. First, attesting to its convergent validity, the CMQ was highly correlated with another measure of generic conspiracy belief. Second, the CMQ showed patterns of meaningful associations with personality measures (e.g., Big Five dimensions, schizotypy), other generalized political attitudes (e.g., social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism), and further individual differences (e.g., paranormal belief, lack of socio-political control). Finally, the CMQ predicted beliefs in specific conspiracy theories over and above other individual difference measures.