nach oben

Social Justice Research

Erschienen in:

01.09.2009

Political Orientation and Ideological Inconsistencies: (Dis)comfort with Value Tradeoffs

verfasst von: Clayton R. Critcher, Michaela Huber, Arnold K. Ho, Spassena P. Koleva

Erschienen in: Social Justice Research | Ausgabe 2-3/2009

Einloggen

Aktivieren Sie unsere intelligente Suche, um passende Fachinhalte oder Patente zu finden.

search-config

KI-gestützte Suche

Aus

Abstract

People are often inconsistent in the way they apply their values to their political beliefs (e.g., citing the value of life in opposing capital punishment while simultaneously supporting abortion rights). How do people confront such inconsistencies? Liberals were more likely to say that issues that could draw on several competing values were complex issues that required value tradeoffs, whereas conservatives were more likely to deny the comparability of the issues. We argue that this difference is rooted in the distinct ways that liberals and conservatives represent political issues. Additional evidence suggested that conservatives’ higher need for closure leads them to represent issues in terms of salient, accessible values. Although this may lead conservatives’ attitudes to be more situationally malleable under some circumstances, such shifts do serve to protect an absolutist approach to one’s moral values and help conservatives to deny the comparability of potentially inconsistent positions.

Nächster Artikel On the “Exporting” of Morality: Its Relation to Political Conservatism and Epistemic Motivation

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

Jetzt informieren

Nur mit Berechtigung zugänglich

Skitka, Mullen, Griffin, Hutchinson, and Chamberlin (2002) found that under cognitive load (which increases need for closure), liberals and conservatives became more similar instead of more polarized. Participants considered whether the government should subsidize AIDS medication for those who contracted the disease through risky sexual behavior. When not under cognitive load, liberals overrode their automatic negative reaction to such individuals and endorsed the subsidies, for the denial would be antithetical to their humanitarian values. It is not clear, though, that liberals in Jost et al.’s (1999) study had an automatic negative reaction to anti-American sentiment or that it was effortful for participants to recognize the relevance of the liberal ideal of “tolerance for dissent.” In short, need for cognitive closure should enhance reliance on chronically accessible values to the extent these values can be effortlessly applied to the judgment at hand.

We dichotomized this variable, because our hypotheses were based on differentiating those participants experiencing continued conflict versus those who had largely resolved the conflict. We did not predict, for example, that someone who had nearly resolved the conflict would have done so differently than someone who had entirely resolved the conflict.

Note that we do not claim that these strategies are mutually exclusive or that they even tap into the same underlying construct. Our hypotheses make predictions about what determines the relative reliance on one strategy versus the other.

We did not include the death penalty reaction time in the covariate, given its relationship to the abortion attitude that was expressed earlier and its relation to the life prime.

The ANCOVA allowed us to test the omnibus interaction of political orientation and priming, but it required that we dichotomize the political orientation measure. To create a meaningful political orientation measure, participants whose average self-identification was on the liberal side of the scale were classified as liberals (55%), while the remaining participants were labeled conservatives (45%).

In Studies 2 and 3, we also tested for the orthogonal issue-relevant versus control prime effect using the weights: choice (−1), honesty (+2), and life (−1). While this contrast produced no significant effects in Study 2, there was a marginal interaction of political orientation and this irrelevant/relevant prime coding in predicting attitudes toward abortion in Study 3, t(52) = 1.90, p = .06, reflecting a tendency for the choice prime to influence attitudes more than the life prime. But crucially, this prime weighting did not interact with need for closure in predicting attitudes, t(52) = 1.20, p > .23, suggesting the interaction with political orientation was independent of the effect mediated through the need for closure.

Aiken, L. S., & West, S. G. (1991). Multiple regression: Testing and interpreting interactions. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Brehm, S. S., & Brehm, J. W. (1981). Psychological reactance: A theory of freedom and control. New York: Academic Press.

Cavazza, N., & Butera, F. (2008). Bending without breaking: Examining the role of attitudinal ambivalence in resisting persuasive communication. European Journal of Social Psychology, 38, 1–15.CrossRef

Cohen, G. L. (2003). Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 808–822.PubMedCrossRef

Converse, P. E. (1964). The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In D. E. Apter (Ed.), Ideology and discontent (pp. 206–261). London: Free Press of Glencoe.

Ferguson, M. (2008). On the subliminal evaluative conditioning of goals. Unpublished manuscript, Cornell University.

Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Golec, A. (2002). Cognitive skills as predictor of attitudes toward political conflict: A study of Polish politicians. Political Psychology, 23, 731–757.CrossRef

Golec de Zavala, A., & Van Bergh, A. (2007). Need for cognitive closure and conservative political beliefs: Differential mediation by personal worldviews. Political Psychology, 28, 587–608.CrossRef

Greenberg, J., & Jonas, E. (2003). Psychological motives and political orientation—The left, the right, and the rigid: Comment on Jost et al. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 376–382.PubMedCrossRef

Gross, S. R., & Ellsworth, P. C. (2003). Second thoughts: Americans’ views on the death penalty at the turn of the century. In S. P. Garvey (Ed.), Beyond repair? America’s death penalty (pp. 7–57). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2007). When morality opposes justice: Conservatives have moral intuitions that liberals may not recognize. Social Justice Research, 20, 98–116.CrossRef

Hovland, C., Janis, I., & Kelley, H. (1953). Communication and persuasion. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Jost, J. T. (2006). The end of the end of ideology. American Psychologist, 61, 651–670.PubMedCrossRef

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003a). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129, 339–375.PubMedCrossRef

Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003b). Exceptions that prove the rule—Using a theory of motivated social cognition to account for ideological incongruities and political anomalies: Reply to Greenberg and Jonas (2003). Psychological Bulletin, 129, 383–393.CrossRef

Jost, J. T., Kruglanski, A. W., & Simon, L. (1999). Effects of epistemic motivation on conservatism, intolerance, and other system justifying attitudes. In L. Thompson, D. M. Messick, & J. M. Levine (Eds.), Shared cognition in organizations: The management of knowledge (pp. 91–116). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Kemmelmeier, M. (1997). Need for closure and political orientation among German university students. Journal of Social Psychology, 137, 787–789.CrossRef

Kossowska, M., & van Hiel, A. (2003). The relationship between need for closure and conservative beliefs in Western and Eastern Europe. Political Psychology, 24, 501–518.CrossRef

Kruglanski, A. W. (1990). Lay epistemic theory in social-cognitive psychology. Psychological Inquiry, 1, 181–197.CrossRef

Kruglanski, A. W., Pierro, A., Mannetti, L., & De Grada, E. (2006). Groups as epistemic providers: Need for closure and the unfolding of group-centrism. Psychological Review, 113, 84–100.PubMedCrossRef

Kruglanski, A. W., & Webster, D. M. (1996). Motivated closing of the mind: “Seizing” and “freezing”. Psychological Review, 103, 263–283.PubMedCrossRef

Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t think of an elephant: Know your values and frame the debate—The essential guide for progressives. White River Jct., VT: Chelsea Green.

Lakoff, G. (2006). Thinking points: Communicating our American values and vision. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

McGuire, W. J. (1964). Inducing resistance to persuasion: Some contemporary approaches. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 191–229). New York: Academic Press.CrossRef

Sears, D. (1993). Symbolic politics: A socio-psychological theory. In S. Iyengar & W. J. McGuire (Eds.), Explorations in political psychology (pp. 113–149). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Skitka, L. J., & Mullen, E. (2002). Understanding judgments of fairness in a real-world political context: A test of the Value Protection Model of justice reasoning. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 1419–1429.CrossRef

Skitka, L. J., Mullen, E., Griffin, T., Hutchinson, S., & Chamberlin, B. (2002). Dispositions, scripts, or motivated correction? Understanding ideological differences in explanations for social problems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 470–487.PubMedCrossRef

Tetlock, P. E. (1986). A value pluralism model of ideological reasoning. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 819–827.CrossRef

Tetlock, P. E., Peterson, R. S., & Lerner, J. S. (1996). Revising the value pluralism model: Incorporating social context and context postulates. In C. Selingman, J. M. Olson, & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), The psychology of values: The Ontario symposium (Vol. 9, pp. 25–49). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, W. (1994). Individual differences in Need for Cognitive Closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 1049–1062.PubMedCrossRef

Zaller, J. R. (1992). The nature and origins of mass opinion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Titel: Political Orientation and Ideological Inconsistencies: (Dis)comfort with Value Tradeoffs
verfasst von: Clayton R. Critcher
Michaela Huber
Arnold K. Ho
Spassena P. Koleva
Publikationsdatum: 01.09.2009
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Social Justice Research / Ausgabe 2-3/2009
Print ISSN: 0885-7466
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-009-0096-1

Springer Professional

Abstract

Bitte loggen Sie sich ein, um Zugang zu Ihrer Lizenz zu erhalten.

Sie haben noch keine Lizenz? Dann Informieren Sie sich jetzt über unsere Produkte:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Weitere Artikel der Ausgabe 2-3/2009

On the “Exporting” of Morality: Its Relation to Political Conservatism and Epistemic Motivation

Conservative Shift among Liberals and Conservatives Following 9/11/01

Political Expertise, Social Worldviews, and Ideology: Translating “Competitive Jungles” and “Dangerous Worlds” into Ideological Reality

System Justification and the Meaning of Life: Are the Existential Benefits of Ideology Distributed Unequally Across Racial Groups?

Attachment Style and Political Ideology: A Review of Contradictory Findings

Whose Fault Is it Anyway? Political Orientation, Attributions of Responsibility, and Support for the War in Iraq

Premium Partner