Privilege and Marginality: How Group Identification and Personality Predict Right-and Left-Wing Political Activism (original) (raw)
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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2013
In this article we explore how beliefs about system ideals and the achievement of those ideals differentially predict system justification among low-and high-status groups. Our goal was to reconcile how people can promote system ideals such as equal opportunities for all and at the same time recognize that group-based disparities are, in part, due to these unfulfilled ideals. Three studies examined whether people perceived a discrepancy between a system's ideal goals and its achievement of those goals. Everyone endorsed these goal ideals more than they believed that the goals were being achieved; however, this discrepancy was larger for low-status people. The larger the perceived discrepancy, the more dissatisfied people were with the system and the more likely they were to support hierarchyattenuating policies. Studies 2 and 3 also examined people's motivation for endorsing goal ideals. People of all statuses endorsed system ideals to promote an ideal system more than to legitimize the actual system (Study 2); however, high-status people were slightly more likely to endorse system ideals to legitimize the actual system than low-status people (Study 3). In summary, low-status people were more likely than high-status people to recognize discrepancies between system goals and system outcomes, show dissatisfaction with the American system, and prefer policies that would attenuate extant hierarchies.
Members of groups in conflict may take collective action: actions to improve conditions for their group as a whole. The psychological antecedents of collective action for groups that are party to conflict and inequality are well-established. Comparatively little is known about how uninvolved outsiders respond to an external intergroup conflict. We investigate how personal ideological orientations of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) shape outsiders' willingness to take collective action in support of groups engaged in external conflict. In Study 1, U.S. residents read about conflicts between disadvantaged citizens and an advantaged government in Greece and Russia. In Study 2, U.S. residents read about a similar conflict in a fictional country, Silaria. Path analyses revealed that SDO and RWA shaped psychological appraisals of the conflict contexts, which predicted intentions to take collective action on behalf of either group. SDO and RWA were positively associated with advantaged group identification and anger at a disadvantaged group, and negatively associated with disadvantaged group identification and anger at an advantaged group. Group identification and anger predicted subsequent collective action intentions on behalf of either group. The sensitivity of outsiders' appraisals to ideological orientations suggests strategies for both advantaged and disadvantaged groups to recruit outsiders as allies in group conflict.
Ideology: Its Resurgence in Social, Personality, and Political Psychology
Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2008
We trace the rise, fall, and resurgence of political ideology as a topic of research in social, personality, and political psychology. For over 200 years, political belief systems have been classified usefully according to a single left-right (or liberal-conservative) dimension that, we believe, possesses two core aspects: (a) advocating versus resisting social change and (b) rejecting versus accepting inequality. There have been many skeptics of the notion that most people are ideologically inclined, but recent psychological evidence suggests that left-right differences are pronounced in many life domains. Implicit as well as explicit preferences for tradition, conformity, order, stability, traditional values, and hierarchy-versus those for progress, rebelliousness, chaos, flexibility, feminism, and equality-are associated with conservatism and liberalism, respectively. Conservatives score consistently higher than liberals on measures of system justification. Furthermore, there are personality and lifestyle differences between liberals and conservatives as well as situational variables that induce either liberal or conservative shifts in political opinions. Our thesis is that ideological belief systems may be structured according to a left-right dimension for largely psychological reasons linked to variability in the needs to reduce uncertainty and threat. CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others. (Bierce, 1911, pp. 54-55)
Personal Political Salience: The Role of Personality in Collective Identity and Action
Political Psychology, 2007
Personal political salience (PPS) is proposed as a personality characteristic that assesses individuals' linkage of political events with their personal identities. Its role in facilitating the development of politicized collective identity and action is examined. In four samples of midlife and activist women, we show that PPS was consistently related both to politicized gender identity and political participation. Further analyses show similar results for PPS, politicized racial identity, and political participation. Politicized gender identity mediated the relationship between PPS and women's rights activism, and politicized racial identity mediated the relationship between PPS and civil rights activism. PPS is demonstrated to independently predict political action and also to provide a personality link between group memberships, politicized collective identity, and political participation.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019
Recent years have witnessed an increased public outcry in certain quarters about a perceived lack of attention given to successful members of disadvantaged groups relative to equally meritorious members of advantaged groups, exemplified by social media campaigns centered around hashtags, such as #OscarsSoWhite and #WomenAlsoKnowStuff. Focusing on political ideology, we investigate here whether individuals differentially amplify successful targets depending on whether these targets belong to disadvantaged or advantaged groups, behavior that could help alleviate or entrench group-based disparities. Study 1 examines over 500,000 tweets from over 160,000 Twitter users about 46 unambiguously successful targets varying in race (white, black) and gender (male, female): American gold medalists from the 2016 Olympics. Leveraging advances in computational social science, we identify tweeters’ political ideology, race, and gender. Tweets from political liberals were much more likely than those from conservatives to be about successful black (vs. white) and female (vs. male) gold medalists (and especially black females), controlling for tweeters’ own race and gender, and even when tweeters themselves were white or male (i.e., advantaged group members). Studies 2 and 3 provided experimental evidence that liberals are more likely than conservatives to differentially amplify successful members of disadvantaged (vs. advantaged) groups and suggested that this is driven by liberals’ heightened concern with social equality. Addressing theorizing about ideological asymmetries, we observed that political liberals are more responsible than conservatives for differential amplification. Our results highlight ideology’s polarizing power to shape even whose accomplishments we promote, and extend theorizing about behavioral manifestations of egalitarian motives.
Across five studies (two representative, one pre-registered, total N=4,962), we examined the role of collective narcissism and secure identity in support for reactionary (Alt-Right and nationalist) and progressive (Black Lives Matter and Women’s Strike) social movements among advantaged (White Americans and Polish national majority) versus disadvantaged (Black Americans) groups. Among advantaged groups, collective narcissism, more so than secure identity, was related to more support for reactionary movements (Studies 1-4) and less support for progressive movements (Studies 1-3). Studies 3a, 3b, and 4 directly compared members of advantaged and disadvantaged ethnic groups in the US and suggested that both collective narcissism and secure identity were positively associated with support for progressive movements among disadvantaged groups. This research contributes to understanding the identity processes involved in reactionary and progressive movements. It highlights the importance o...
European Journal of Social Psychology, 2003
According to system justification theory, people are motivated to preserve the belief that existing social arrangements are fair, legitimate, justifiable, and necessary. The strongest form of this hypothesis, which draws on the logic of cognitive dissonance theory, holds that people who are most disadvantaged by the status quo would have the greatest psychological need to reduce ideological dissonance and would therefore be most likely to support, defend, and justify existing social systems, authorities, and outcomes. Variations on this hypothesis were tested in five US national survey studies. We found that (a) low-income respondents and African Americans were more likely than others to support limitations on the rights of citizens and media representatives to criticize the government; (b) low-income Latinos were more likely to trust in US government officials and to believe that 'the government is run for the benefit of all' than were high-income Latinos; (c) low-income respondents were more likely than high-income respondents to believe that large differences in pay are necessary to foster motivation and effort; (d) Southerners in the USA were more likely to endorse meritocratic belief systems than were Northerners and poor and Southern African Americans were more likely to subscribe to meritocratic ideologies than were African Americans who were more affluent and from the North; (e) low-income respondents and African Americans were more likely than others to believe that economic inequality is legitimate and necessary; and (f) stronger endorsement of meritocratic ideology was associated with greater satisfaction with one's own economic situation. Taken together, these findings are consistent with the dissonance-based argument that people who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it. Implications for theories of system justification, cognitive dissonance, and social change are also discussed.
The distinction between a person’s ideological identity and their more objective issue positions has come more clearly into focus in recent research. As one example, Ellis and Stimson (2012) have pointed out a significant difference between symbolic and operational ideology in the American electorate. Other work by Huddy, Mason, and Aaroe (2015) has found that an ideological identity, as distinct from a set of held issue positions, can motivate powerful levels of political activism. Furthermore, McGarty et al (2009) suggest that it is possible for individuals to form group identities around their most potent political opinions. However, the behavioral and affective effects of these multiple dimensions of ideology have not been sufficiently explored. The current work draws on a national sample collected by Polimetrix, and finds that ideology, whether understood as a nominal social identity, a set of issue positions, or an issue-based social identity, is capable of driving heightened levels of political action and social polarization against outgroup partisans, with identity-based elements driving the strongest effects.
Personality, Ideology, Prejudice, and Politics: A Dual-Process Motivational Model
2010
Early theorists assumed that sociopolitical or ideological attitudes were organized along a single left-right dimension and directly expressed a basic personality dimension. Empirical findings, however, did not support this and suggested that there seem to be 2 distinct ideological attitude dimensions, best captured by the constructs of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, which express 2 distinct sets of motivational goals or values. We outline a dual-process motivational (DPM) model of how these 2 dimensions originate from particular personality dispositions and socialized worldview beliefs and how and why their different underlying motivational goals or values generate their wide-ranging effects on social outcomes, such as prejudice and politics. We then review new research bearing on the model and conclude by noting promising directions for future research.
Measuring Partisanship as a Social Identity, Predicting Political Activism
… Meeting of the International Society for …, 2010
We argue that the current polarized nature of American politics requires a new, more fine-grained measure of partisanship than the existing 7-point scale. Building on work by Steven Greene (1999, 2002), we turn to social identity theory to develop a measure of partisan identity which is assessed with 4 items. Data from two surveys of blog readers (combined N=3,849) and a student sample (N=315) reveal the power of the new partisan identity scale to predict political activism. We test various predictions and competing explanations for the effectiveness of the new identity scale and find that it outperforms the standard measure of partisan strength, ideological self-placement, and a multi-item issue ideology scale in accounting for political activism. Moreover, a social identity approach leads to the creation of a measure of independent political identity which also predicts political involvement among independents to some degree. The greater effectiveness of the partisan identity than ideology scales in predicting political activism suggests that the scale does more than provide a fine-grained measure of ideological leaning and thus lends real and novel insight into the dynamics of political activism. Finally, the partisan identity scale far outperformed partisan strength and ideology as a predictorof strong emotional reactions to a threatened electoral loss. This reveals the micro process of emotional intensification by which identity drives political behavior. We discuss the broader implications of our findings for the conception and measurement of political partisanship.