Despite well-known problems associated with political prejudice, research that examines effects of political dissimilarity in organizational contexts is scarce. We present findings from a pre-registered experiment (N = 973, currently employed) which suggest that both Democrats and Republicans negatively stereotype and discriminate against job applicants with a political orientation that is dissimilar to their own. The effects were small for competence perceptions, moderate for hiring judgments, and large for warmth ratings and willingness to cooperate and socialize with the applicant. The effects of political orientation on hiring judgments and willingness to cooperate and socialize were mediated by stereotype content, particularly warmth. Furthermore, for all outcomes except competence judgments, Democrats discriminated and stereotyped applicants to a larger extent than Republicans did. These findings shed light on the consequences of applicants revealing their political orientation and have implications for the promotion of diversity in organizations.

A representative sample (n = 2282) of Swedish adults completed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which measures moral intuitions concerning care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. A subset (n = 607) completed a measure of intuitions about liberty. Measurement invariance was estimated across sex, age, education, income, left-right placement, religiosity, and party preference groups, based on multigroup confirmatory factor analyses of two-, three-, five-, six-, and eight-factor models, as well as bifactor models (with methods factors or a general factor). Acceptable configural, metric, and scalar invariance was obtained for most group comparisons, particularly based on the more complex models. The clearest exceptions were (1) configural non-invariance in comparisons involving participants with very low education or income, and (2) scalar non-invariance in comparisons of ideological groups based on three- and six-factor models but not the eight-factor model, which distinguished lifestyle liberty from government liberty.

This research investigated whether belief in truth relativism yields higher receptivity to misinformation. Two studies with representative samples from Sweden (Study 1, N = 1005) and the UK (Study 2, N = 417) disentangled two forms of truth relativism: subjectivism (truth is relative to subjective intuitions) and cultural relativism (truth is relative to cultural context). In Study 1, subjectivism was more strongly associated with receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit and conspiracy theories than cultural relativism was. In Study 2 (preregistered), subjectivism predicted higher receptivity to both forms of misinformation over and above effects of analytical and actively open-minded thinking, profoundness receptivity, ideology, and demographics; the unique effects of cultural relativism were in the opposite direction (Study 1) or non-significant (Study 2).

This study investigated ideological belief bias, and whether this effect is moderated by analytical thinking. A Swedish nationally representative sample (N = 1005) evaluated non-political and political syllogisms and were asked whether the conclusions followed logically from the premises. The correct response in the political syllogisms was aligned with either leftist or rightist political ideology. Political orientation predicted response accuracy for political but not non-political syllogisms. Overall, the participants correctly evaluated more syllogisms when the correct response was congruent with their ideology, particularly on hot-button issues (asylum to refugees, climate change, gender-neutral education, and school marketization). Analytical thinking predicted higher accuracy for syllogisms of any kind among leftists, but it predicted accuracy only for leftist and non-political syllogisms among rightists. This research contributes by refining a promising paradigm for studying politically motivated reasoning, demonstrating ideological belief bias outside of the United States across diverse political issues, and providing the first evidence that analytical thinking may reduce such bias.

Research has suggested that the sense of threat aroused by reminders of death can lead to worldview defense and elevated conservatism. The current studies disentangled the effects of mortality salience and death anxiety on two core components of conservatism—resistance to change and acceptance of inequality—and on the broader worldviews of normativism and humanism among Swedish adults. Study 1 (N = 186), which used a mortality salience manipulation, and Study 2 (N = 354), which measured self-reported death anxiety, suggested that existential threat was most consistently associated with resistance to change and normativism, consistent with theoretical expectations.This was true predominantly among left-wingers. However, existential threat was not significantly more strongly associated with resistance to change and normativism than with acceptance of inequality and (low) humanism respectively, contrary to the hypotheses. Furthermore, Study 3, which was a pre-registered online replication of Study 1 with respondents from the United Kingdom, yielded no evidence for any effects of mortality salience on ideology (N = 319) or worldview (N = 199). An internal pre-registered meta-analysis of mortality salience effects indicated that mortality salience had a marginally significant effect only on normativism. Taken together, the results provided little clear evidence of mortality salience effects on ideological preferences and worldviews, but dispositional death anxiety was associated with resistance to change, normativism, and acceptance of inequality particularly among leftists.

Did the outbreak of COVID-19 influence spontaneous donation behavior? To investigate this, we conducted a natural experiment on real donation data. We analyzed the absolute amount, and the proportion of total payments, donated by individuals to charitable organizations via Swish-a widely used mobile online payment application through which most Swedes prefer to make their donations to charity-each day of 2019 and 2020. Spontaneous charitable donations were operationalized as Swish-payments to numbers starting with 90, as this number is a nationally acknowledged quality control label that is provided to all fundraising operations that are monitored by the Swedish Fundraising Control. The results show that the Swish-donations fluctuated substantially depending on season (less donations in January-February and during the summer months, and more donations in April-May and during the last months of the year) and specific events (peaks in Swish-donations often coincided with televised charity fundraising galas). Interrupted time-series analyses revealed that spontaneous donations were overall unaffected by the pandemic outbreak.

Previous research suggests that threat can bolster anti-immigration attitudes, but less is known about the effects of threat on ideological tolerance. We tested the hypothesis that realistic threats — tangible threats to e.g., the safety or financial well-being of one’s group — bolster support for right-wing extremists. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 200) learned that crime and unemployment rates were either increasing (high threat condition) or remaining the same (low threat condition). Consistent with our hypothesis, higher threat lead to a significant increase in tolerance for right-wing, but not left-wing, extremists. In a second, pre-registered extended replication experiment (N = 385), we added a baseline (no threat) condition. Additionally, attitudes to immigrants were examined as a mediator. This experiment produced non-significant threat effects on tolerance of right-wing extremists. Overall, the current research provides weak support for the hypothesis that realistic threats have asymmetric effects on tolerance of political extremists. However, consistent with previous research, people were more tolerant of extremists within their own ideological camp.

To be able to implement nudges in an effective and ethically defensible manner, it is important to understand why some persons find nudges objectionable. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we investigated the moral roots of attitudes to pro-self nudges (which benefit the agent) and pro-social nudges (which benefit society). This registered report is based on a preregistered replication and extension (N = 607) of a first non-preregistered study (N = 629) with diverse samples of Swedish adults. We found that (a) individualizing moral intuitions concerning harm prevention and fairness were associated with the perceived acceptability of the nudges, (b) binding moral intuitions concerning in group loyalties, traditions, and sanctity were associated with the perception that nudges infringe on the agent’s freedom, and (c) individualist concern with freedom from the government’s interference in human lives, and with liberty in general, was associated with the perception that nudges restrict the agent’s freedom and are not acceptable. Opponents of nudging identified through cluster analysis exhibited high concern with liberty and low concern with individualizing and egalitarian values. These results were similar across studies and nudges, and they were consistent with our hypotheses, although individualist concern with freedom from the government specifically was the most robust unique predictor of opposition to nudges. Taken together, our findings suggest that opposition to nudges is rooted in attitudes concerning the conflict between public promotion of social goals, such as well-being, justice, or equality, and respect for the individual’s freedom from interference from the government. 

This research investigated the congruence between the ideologies of political parties and the ideological preferences (N = 1515), moral intuitions (N = 1048), and political values and worldviews (N = 1345) of diverse samples of Swedish adults who voted or intended to vote for the parties. Logistic regression analyses yielded support for a series of hypotheses about variations in ideology beyond the left-right division. With respect to social ideology, resistance to change and binding moral intuitions predicted stronger preference for a social democratic (vs. progressive) party on the left and weaker preference for a social liberal (vs. social conservative or liberal-conservative) party on the right. With respect to political values and broader worldviews, normativism and low acceptance of immigrants predicted the strongest preference for a nationalist party, while environmentalism predicted the strongest preference for a green party. The effects were generally strong and robust when we controlled for left-right self-placements, economic ideology, and demographic characteristics. These results show that personality variation in the ideological domain is not reducible to the simplistic contrast between liberals and conservatives, which ignores differences between progressive and non-progressive leftists, economic and green progressives, social liberal and conservative rightists, and nationalist and non-nationalist conservatives. (c) 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology

Moral foundations theory proposes that intuitions about what is morally right or wrong rest upon a set of universal foundations. Although this theory has generated a recent surge of research, few studies have investigated the real-world moral consequences of the postulated moral intuitions. We show that they are predictably associated with an important type of moral behaviour. Stronger individualizing intuitions (fairness and harm prevention) and weaker binding intuitions (loyalty, authority, and sanctity) were associated with the willingness to comply with a request to volunteer for charity and with the amount of self-reported donations to charity organizations. Among participants who complied with the request, individualizing intuitions predicted the allocation of donations to causes that benefit out-groups, whereas binding intuitions predicted the allocation of donations to causes that benefit the in-group. The associations between moral foundations and self-report measures of allocations in a hypothetical dilemma and concern with helping in-group and out-group victims were similar. Moral foundations predicted charitable giving over and above effects of political ideology, religiosity, and demographics, although variables within these categories also exhibited unique effects on charitable giving and accounted for a portion of the relationship between moral foundations and charitable giving. (c) 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology

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.

The authors of The Authoritarian Personality famously posited a psychological affinity between the authoritarian personality syndrome and politically conservative ideology. Seven decades later, we evaluate the empirical evidence bearing on this hypothesis. We conclude that: (a) there is a large body of evidence, including data from six continents and many different measures, documenting a positive association between authoritarianism and right-wing conservatism; (b) the association is observed in studies with ideologically neutral measures of authoritarianism, indicating that it is not a methodological artifact; (c) there is still no convincing counter-evidence that authoritarianism is equally prevalent on the left and right in Western societies, despite many attempts to procure such evidence; and (d) the authoritarian-conservatism nexus possesses both context-dependent and contex-tindependent features. In summary, the evidence of an affinity between authoritarianism and conservatism is strong, although more research focusing on specific aspects of authoritarianism, ideological subtypes, and contextual moderators is recommended.