Justice for the People? How Justice Sensitivity Can Foster and Impair Support for Populist Radical-Right Parties and Politicians in the United States and in Germany

Many people argue that support for populist radical-right political agents is motivated by people feeling “left behind” in globalized Western democracies. Empirical research supports this notion by showing that people who feel personally or collectively deprived are more likely to hold populist beliefs and anti-immigration attitudes. Our aim was to further investigate the psychological link between individuals' justice concerns and their preferences for populist radical-right political agents. We focused on stable individual differences in self-oriented and other-oriented justice concerns and argue that these should have opposing correlations with preferences for populist radical-right parties. We tested our hypotheses in two national samples, one from the United States (N = 1500) and one from Germany (N = 848). Sensitivity to injustice towards oneself enhanced the likelihood of preferring Trump (United States) and Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) (Germany) via increased anti-immigration attitudes and increased populist attitudes. Sensitivity to injustice towards others reduced the likelihood of preferring Trump and AfD via decreased anti-immigration attitudes. We discuss our findings in regard to how stable individual differences in the evaluation of fairness can motivate intra- and interpersonal political conflicts in modern w estern societies and how politics and mass media can fuel these conflicts.     

童年亲子关系与“好资源”对未婚男性性开放态度的影响

本研究采用实验启动的方式探讨“好资源”和童年环境对未婚男性性开放态度的影响, 结果发现童年亲子关系(而不是童年经济状况)在资源线索启动和性开放态度之间存在显著调节作用。研究1采用想象启动来控制个体的资源获取状况, 结果发现：童年亲子关系差的个体在“好资源”想象时其性开放态度较“差资源”想象时明显提升。研究2采用图片情境的资源想象方式, 在研究1的基础上进一步把亲子关系细分成亲子沟通、亲子焦虑和亲子回避三个维度, 结果表明：童年亲子回避在男性资源状况启动和性开放态度之间存在显著调节作用, 童年亲子高回避的个体在“好资源”照片情境想象下其性开放态度显著提升, 而童年亲子低回避的个体在“好资源”照片情境想象下其性开放态度明显下降; 此外, 童年亲子回避在性开放态度上的主效应显著, 亲子回避程度高的个体其性开放态度也更高。两个研究共同揭示了“男人有钱就变坏”的情境和群体特殊性。     

Moral approval of aggressive acts: A preliminary investigation

A questionnaire was used to investigate 1) the approval of various kinds of aggressive behaviour under different specified circumstances and 2) the arousal of feelings of aggression in imagined situations. In addition, an attitude test was presented which discriminated between the two highest of Kohlberg's levels of moral reasoning [1969]. The subjects were a very varied group of 83 adults (aged 17–68 years) from municipal evening courses in Finland. Aggression was most approved when it was given altruistic purpose. Self-defense was rated as the second highest justification for aggression. Aggression was found least legitimate when the reasons were emotional (drunk, rage). The justification of some types of aggressive behaviour were dependent on the conditions under which they occurred, whereas others appeared independent. Killing and torture were the most disapproved kinds of aggressive behaviour. Another's attack was the most powerful instigator of feelings of aggression, whereas frustration seemed relatively unimportant. Females approved of emotional expressions of aggression to a greater extent than did males. The moral test did not correlate with approval of aggression in general, but a couple of more specific predictions about the effects of level of moral reasoning on attitudes to socially sanctioned forms of aggression were tentatively confirmed.     

The Return of Ethnocentrism

The concept of ethnocentrism was introduced by Gumplowicz in the 1870s, popularized by Sumner in the 1900s, and first investigated psychometrically by Adorno and colleagues in the 1940s. It has become a fundamental concept in the social sciences, but over the last several decades, its popularity and usage in political and social psychology have decreased. Recent events, such as the growing popularity of ethno-nationalist and populist leaders and policies, show that ethnocentrism as a phenomenon has been resurging around the world. In addition, given its important explanatory power, an increasing number of political psychologists have started again to use the concept. This article presents an analysis of ethnocentrism reconceptualized as a hierarchical construct emanating from a strong sense of ethnic group self-centeredness and self-importance. It discusses the prevalence of ethnocentrism around the world, its conceptualization and measurement, and its theoretical underpinnings, supporting them with novel empirical research conducted with two abbreviated measures of ethnocentrism. The article argues that ethnocentrism ultimately stems from the need to strengthen one's own ethnic group at the expense of anyone who and anything that can weaken it.     

Young Israelis' Reactions to National Trauma: The Rabin Assassination andTerror Attacks

This study examined the cognitive and emotional reactions of 477 Israeli high school students to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (immediately after the event as well as 5 months later) and to a series of terror attacks. The respondents' reactions to the two events were compared as a function of gender and political orientation. About 50% of the respondents who changed their political views immediately after the assassination reverted to pre-event attitudes 5 months later. Emotional reactions to the assassination showed substantial fading after 5 months, with extent of fading unaffected by gender or political orientation. The intensity of emotional reactions was affected by political orientation: Although Rabin's supporters and his opponents reacted with equal intensity to the terror attacks, supporters reacted with the same intensity to Rabin's assassination, whereas opponents' reactions to the assassination were less intense.     

Moral Reasoning Effects on Political Participation

In this study, respondents who agreed to participate in a computer-administered interview were presented with information and questions about public interest groups, followed by the Defining Issues Test of moral reasoning (DIT). Respondents with high DIT scores stressed morally central over morally peripheral considerations in deciding whether to participate in public interest groups. Less sophisticated reasoners showed the opposite pattern. Morally central considerations also had a much greater impact on the probability that sophisticated respondents would attempt to participate in public interest groups after completing the interview. The analysis included controls for potential confounding variables such as cognitive ability, education, prior political participation, and gender. The findings imply motivational differences between advantaged and disadvantaged population groups. Such differences may help to account for the differing strategies and successes of political organizations mobilizing these groups.     

Representativeness in the Market for Bets on National Football League Games

In laboratory experiments the representativeness heuristic has been shown to affect participants' judgments. Finding representativeness in a real-world economic market would indicate that even decision makers who are highly experienced and motivated use the heuristic, and would, in addition, violate the efficient market hypotheses, i.e. the theory that market prices fully reflect all available information. Testing for representativeness in the market for bets on National Football Leagues games avoids complications that make tests of representativeness in a stock market difficult to interpret. Evidence for representativeness in the NFL betting market is found in a data set from an earlier study which failed to test for representativeness, and in the 1976– 9 market. Representativeness does not appear to exist in the contemporary market, however, perhaps because with the advent of the personal computer the market depends less on purely human judgment.     

Creativity from Start to Finish: A “Straight-A” Model of Creative Process and Its Relation to Intelligence

This article describes a “straight-A” model of the creative process. It characterizes the creative process in five overlapping phases, with the variables most affecting those phases characterized as: (1) activators, (2) abilities, (3) amplifiers, (4) appeal to audience, and (5) assessment by audience. The creative process does not complete itself often, in part because all five phases rarely work in the right direction. For example, at Phase 1, there are deactivators as well as activators and at Phase 3, there are attenuators of creativity as well as amplifiers. I further discuss in the article the implications of the model for the relation between creativity and intelligence. In particular, whereas aspects of intelligence (according to the triarchic theory of successful intelligence) involve some degree overlap among creative, analytical, and practical skills, true creativity involves a true conjunction of these skills and is therefore much rarer.     

Changing Worship Practices in American Congregations

Worship is the core activity of American congregations and the primary way people experience religion collectively in the United States. We use data from the National Congregations Study (NCS), notably including data from the fourth wave, collected in 2018–19, to examine two key trends in worship practices among American religious congregations. First, the trend toward more informal and enthusiastic worship identified in earlier NCS surveys continues into 2019. Showing no signs of having reached a plateau, a more informal worship style has increased in prevalence across every major American religious tradition. Second, recently developed communication technologies have permeated congregations’ worship services in ways that change the collective experience. Collected on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic, NCS-IV data on worship and technology provide a baseline for future examinations of worship changes caused by the pandemic, and a window into congregations’ technological preparedness for a world in which it is not safe to gather.