Is Political Conservatism Adaptive? Reinterpreting Right‐Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation as Evolved,Sociofunctional Strategies

The Dual Process Model (DPM) explains prejudice and political conservatism as functions of Right‐Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and a Social Dominance Orientation (SDO; Duckitt, 2001). From an evolutionary perspective, such orientations may represent specific adaptations to coalitional competition in the ancestral environment (Sinn & Hayes, 2016). Supporting this view, recent research suggests the two orientations represent divergent strategies, with RWA pursuing an honest‐cooperator strategy and SDO a deceptive, cooperation‐mimicking strategy (Heylen & Pauwels, 2015). In two studies, we examine additional evidence for an adaptationist interpretation of DPM. Utilizing life history theory, Study 1 finds that RWA reflects the predicted “slow” strategy by endorsing planning and control, investment in family relationships, altruism, and religiosity. In contrast, SDO reflects a “fast” strategy by devaluing planning and control, secure relationships, and altruism. Utilizing rank management theory, Study 2 finds that RWA reflects a prosocial orientation, endorsing coalition building and social networking while rejecting deception and manipulation. In contrast, SDO reflects an exploitive orientation, rejecting coalition building and networking but endorsing ruthless self‐advancement and deceptive tactics. These findings support an adaptationist revision of RWA to recognize its prosocial, honest‐cooperator dimension and of SDO to recognize proself, “dark” tactics seeking power within groups.     

Wellness as Fairness

I argue that distinct conditions of justice lead to diverse wellness outcomes through a series of psychosocial processes. Optimal conditions of justice, suboptimal conditions of justice, vulnerable conditions of injustice, and persisting conditions of injustice lead to thriving, coping, confronting, and suffering, respectively. The processes that mediate between optimal conditions of justice and thriving include the promotion of responsive conditions, the prevention of threats, individual pursuit, and avoidance of comparisons. The mechanisms that mediate between suboptimal conditions of justice and coping include resilience, adaptation, compensation, and downward comparisons. Critical experiences, critical consciousness, critical action, and righteous comparisons mediate between vulnerable conditions of injustice and confrontation with the system. Oppression, internalization, helplessness, and upward comparisons mediate between persisting conditions of injustice and suffering. These psychosocial processes operate within and across personal, interpersonal, organizational and community contexts. Different types of justice are hypothesized to influence well-being within each context. Intrapersonal injustice operates at the personal level, whereas distributive, procedural, relational, and developmental justice impact interpersonal well-being. At the organizational level, distributive, procedural, relational and informational justice influence well-being. Finally, at the community level, distributive, procedural, retributive, and cultural justice support community wellness. Data from a variety of sources support the suggested connections between justice and well-being.     

Multidimensionality of Right‐Wing Authoritarian Attitudes: Authoritarianism‐Conservatism‐Traditionalism

Traditionally Right‐Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) has been seen as a unidimensional construct. Recently, however, researchers have begun to measure three distinct RWA dimensions (Feldman, 2003; Funke, 2005; Van Hiel, Cornelis, Roets, & De Clercq, 2006). One of these new multidimensional RWA approaches has conceptualized these three dimensions as Authoritarianism, Conservatism, and Traditionalism (ACT), which are viewed as expressions of basic social values or motivational goals that represent different, though related, strategies for attaining collective security at the expense of individual autonomy. Findings are reported from two studies to assess the validity and predictive utility of the multidimensional ACT approach. First, a direct cross‐national comparison showed that the three ACT dimensions were reliable and factorially distinct and demonstrated the measurement invariance of the three latent constructs across Serbian and NZ (New Zealand) samples. The three ACT dimensions predicted self‐reported behavior differentially in both samples, and a comparison of latent means showed the Serbian sample higher than the NZ sample on the ACT dimensions of Authoritarianism and Traditionalism but markedly lower on Conservatism. Second, a reanalysis of previously collected NZ data showed that the three ACT scales differentially predicted three dimensions of generalized prejudice in a theoretically meaningful manner. These findings underline the importance of studying ideological attitudes, such as RWA, multidimensionally.     

Third-party punishment and symbolic intragroup status

Retributive justice theory has suggested two processes by which punishment is psychologically satisfying to victims of injustice: leveling the power imbalance caused by the transgression and revalidating social consensus over the importance of the rules, norms, and values violated by the offense. The current investigation proposes a third symbolic function that has not yet been identified as a psychological consequence of punishment: confirmation of the victim's membership status in the group (i.e., intragroup standing or respect). Three studies identified perceptions of intragroup membership status as following from third-party punishment, partly explaining the effect of punishment on a victim's group identification. Study 1 showed that, following the experience of an injustice, punishment prevented perceived membership status threats from resulting in victim disidentification. Study 2 showed that third-party desires to punish increased subsequent identification by symbolically communicating the ingroup's regard for the victim, even when the offender did not actually suffer the effects of third-party sanctions. Finally, Study 3 showed that punishment only implied membership status when the act of punishment was instigated by an ingroup authority and was thus identity-relevant. Taken together, these studies offer the first examination of membership status as a relevant concern underlying retributive justice.     

What exactly are victim-sensitive persons sensitive to?

Research has repeatedly shown that people who are habitually sensitive towards unjust victimizations tend to behave uncooperatively and hostile under certain circumstances. But what exactly is the underlying motivation for such uncooperativeness? One explanation is that victim-sensitive individuals behave uncooperatively in order to retribute fateful disadvantages in the past; an alternative explanation is that victim-sensitive individuals behave uncooperatively in order to avoid being exploited in the future. Two experimental studies are presented in which participants were confronted with an unfavorable outcome that was either due to bad luck or to another person’s mean intentions. Findings from both studies suggest that victim-sensitive individuals are specifically sensitive towards mean intentions, but not to fateful disadvantages in general.     

Neural correlates of metonymy resolution

Metonymies are exemplary models for complex semantic association processes at the sentence level. We investigated processing of metonymies using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).During an 1.5 Tesla fMRI scan, 14 healthy subjects (12 female) read 124 short German sentences with either literal (like “Africa is arid”), metonymic (“Africa is hungry”), or nonsense (“Africa is woollen”) content. Sentences were constructed so that they obey certain grammatical, semantic, and plausibility conditions and were matched for word frequency, semantic association, length and syntactic structure. We concentrated on metonymies that were not yet fossilised; we also examined a wide variety of metonymic readings.Reading metonymies relative to literal sentences revealed signal changes in a predominantly left-lateralised fronto-temporal network with maxima in the left and right inferior frontal as well as left middle temporal gyri. Left inferior frontal activation may reflect both inference processes and access to world knowledge during metonymy resolution.     

Individual differences in the neural basis of causal inferencing

This study used fMRI to examine individual differences in the neural basis of causal inferencing. Participants with varying language skill levels, as indexed by scores on the vocabulary portion of the Nelson-Denny Reading Test, read four types of two-sentence passages in which causal relatedness (moderate and distant) and presence or absence of explicit clause connectives were orthogonally varied to manipulate coherence and cohesion during inference generation. Skilled readers showed better neural efficiency (less activation) during all context sentences and during all inference conditions. Increased activation in less-skilled readers was most extensively distributed in the right hemisphere (RH) homologues of left hemisphere (LH) language areas, especially in the most difficult passage types. Skilled readers also showed greater sensitivity to coherence (greater activation and synchronization in moderately related than distantly related passages) whereas less-skilled readers showed sensitivity to cohesion (greater activation and synchronization when clause connectives were present than when they were not). These finding support the hypothesis that skilled reading comprehension requires recruitment of the RH on an “as needed” basis. We describe the dynamic spillover hypothesis, a new theoretical framework that outlines the conditions under which RH language contributions are most likely evoked.     

Traditional prejudice and justice judgments: Does bias suppression moderate the relationship?

This research investigated how the relationship between prejudice and intergroup inequalities with justice judgments is modulated by individual differences in self-regulation of bias through suppression. The first study conducted among 170 White British adolescents revealed that the link between racism and intergroup inequality in justice judgments was moderated by bias suppression. Prejudice, bias suppression, and blatant as well as subtle justice judgments were assessed in a second study carried out with 103 Canadian White adolescents. Bias suppression moderated the link between racist beliefs toward Aboriginals and intergroup inequality in punitive rulings. Racism translated into intergroup inequality in the potential for rehabilitation, irrespective of the level of bias suppression. The role of bias suppression is discussed.     

Employee personality, justice perceptions, and the prediction of workplace deviance

We examined the relative and incremental prediction of workplace deviance (i.e., intentional acts that harm the organization or its employees) offered by personality and organizational justice perceptions in a sample of 464 employees working in a large retail organization. We found that personality - including a sixth factor called Honesty-Humility, and its facet of trait Fairness - accounted for incremental variance in deviance criteria beyond justice perceptions. We found little support for the reverse. From a practical standpoint, these findings suggest that organizations may benefit from personality-related interventions (e.g., screening job applicants for relevant traits) more so than from justice-related interventions (e.g., organizational changes involving policies and procedures) in order to reduce workplace deviance. From a research perspective, our findings highlight the advantages of considering traits beyond the Big Five (e.g., Honesty-Humility) for maximizing the prediction and understanding of deviant behaviors at work.     

The right hemisphere advantage in visual change detection depends on temporal factors

What accounts for the Right Hemisphere (RH) functional superiority in visual change detection? An original task which combines one-shot and divided visual field paradigms allowed us to direct change information initially to the RH or the Left Hemisphere (LH) by deleting, respectively, an object included in the left or right half of a scene presented centrally. We manipulated the perceptual salience and semantic relevance of the change as well as the duration of the Inter-Stimulus Interval (ISI) between the scenes in order to clarify the role of the RH in memory and attention processes, and to explore whether lengthening the ISI would enhance the contribution of the LH. When analyzing data collapsed over the two levels (high vs. low) of salience and of relevance, changes were better detected in the left visual field (lvf) than in the right visual field (rvf) in the case of a short ISI, while no difference emerged in the case of a long ISI. Moreover, lengthening the ISI resulted in a performance decrement in the lvf, both for accuracy and response speed. The fact that the RH superiority was limited to short intervals indicates that stimulus-driven orienting contributes more than perceptual processing to this hemispheric asymmetry. When considering perceptual and semantic properties of the change, the effect of the ISI duration seemed to specifically emerge in the case of low relevance, with an enhancement of accuracy in the rvf when comparing the long with the short ISI. This suggests that the ISI influence on hemispheric performance operates on different levels.