Constructing the Citizen

Discussions of citizenship and citizenship education have been conducted largely within the worldview of stable, Western societies and have been based on psychological models that emphasize individual cognition. The concepts of citizenship that evolved in this context have become taken for granted. But during the past decade, different concepts of citizenship have arisen from emergent democracies, from societies in transition, from the dissolution of the left-right spectrum in Western society, and from a changing perspective in psychological theory that attends to language and to social and cultural context. These developments have implications for defining the goals of citizenship education and for formulating educational programs, particularly in relation to identity, positioning, narratives, and efficacy.     

社会困境下政治信任对公众态度和合作行为的影响

现代社会面临的重要问题是如何有效地促进人们之间的相互合作,达到社会公共利益的最大化。因此,有关社会困境(social dilemma)的研究成为社会心理学领域的热点。随着群体理论的发展,研究者的研究视角逐渐从个体(individual)转向群体(collective),关注层级结构的群体(hierarchical groups)中,管理者或管理机构(权威)的特征和行为对个体合作行为的影响。其中,权威信任(trust in authority)和公正感(fairness)是影响个体态度和合作行为的重要变量。政治信任(political trust)也可以看作权威信任的一种,即在社会背景下,公众对社会管理权威(政府机构)的信任。未来研究应尝试在实验室里对政治信任的作用和机制进行探究,并进一步探究公正感在政治信任对态度及合作行为关系中的中介作用。     

Political accountability,public constitution of recent past and the collective memory of socio‐political events: A discursive analysis

This paper presents a discursive analysis of a political news interview as a site for the interactional organization of the public constitution of recent past. In a context of commemoration and finding out the truth about the past, the focus is on how the collective memory of socio‐political events and political accountability is managed and what discursive practices representatives of nation‐states draw upon to understand and construct ideological representations of socio‐political events, namely the Romanian ‘revolution’ of 1989. The analysis shows how the possibility versus the actuality of knowing the truth about the events, (political) accountability and stake for actions are discussed, framed and given significance by constituting the ‘events’ of 1989 as ‘revolution’. The analysis further reveals how this ascribed categorial meaning is used by the interviewee as background for delegitimizing critical voices and sidestepping responsibility for past actions and knowing the truth. Social and community psychologists can learn more about how individuals and communities construct ideological versions of socio‐political events by considering the interplay between questions of political accountability and arguments over the meaning of political categories, and engaging with the accounting practices in which the meaning of socio‐political events is being negotiated by members of society Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

It’s security,stupid! Voters’ perceptions of immigrants as a security risk predicted support for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election

We analyzed two datasets to determine the predictive validity of four explanations of support for Donald Trump during the 2016 US presidential election: (a) security concerns regarding immigrants, (b) economic concerns regarding immigrants, (c) cultural concerns regarding immigrants, and (d) social dominance orientation. Results of a two‐phase study (N = 354) suggested that perceiving immigrants as a security concern was predictive of increased support for and greater odds of voting for Donald Trump three weeks later. Perceiving immigrants as an economic threat predicted odds of voting for Donald Trump, but only among liberals and there was no evidence of cultural concern or social dominance orientation (SDO) predicting support for Donald Trump or odds of voting for Trump. A follow‐up analysis of the cross‐sectional ANES survey corroborated that security concerns were an important correlate of voting for Trump, but also that SDO was correlated with having previously voted for Donald Trump. While our two‐phase study has the benefit of prediction, the cross‐sectional ANES data does not—“predictors” in these data were collected up to two months post‐election.     

Religious Right,Religious Left,Both, or Neither? Understanding Religio‐Political Identification

In this article we analyze the effects of religious, political, socioeconomic, and demographic variables on religious Americans’ propensity to identify with religio‐political movements. Using data from the 2013 Economic Values Survey collected by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), we sort nonsecular Americans into four categories: religious right, religious left, both religious right and religious left, or neither religious right nor the religious left. We estimate a multinomial logit model in which we depict religio‐political identification as a function of religious affiliation, worship attendance, religious embeddedness, religious convictions, political attitudes, and socioeconomic and demographic controls. We find that a wide range of religious, political, and socioeconomic/demographic variables affect individuals’ identification with the religious right and/or religious left. Our empirical results also permit us to analyze the seeming paradox of identifying with both the religious right and the religious left. We find that individuals who identify with both movements come from the ranks of the highly religious, those who believe that being moral requires one to believe in God, Tea Party supporters, strong partisans, those with lower education and income, older individuals, and blacks and Hispanics.     

Right- and left-wing prejudice toward dissimilar groups in cultural and economic domains

According to recent studies, people on both the political right and left show prejudice toward groups whose beliefs are in conflict with their own. This prediction applies to both cultural and economic dimensions of political beliefs. In three studies (N = 499) we demonstrate that people on both the cultural and economic right and left show negative attitudes toward groups on the other side of the given spectrum and that underlying this effect is the perception of value violation. In two out of three studies, we manipulated the extremity of target worldviews to further explore the causal chain between political beliefs, the perception of value violation, and prejudice. Our results showed a high degree of symmetry between the political left and right in their attitudes toward groups with dissimilar beliefs. However, although people on both sides of the political spectrum show prejudice toward each other, people on the cultural and economic right seem to be more sensitive to value violations than people on the left.     

Liberalism and Conservatism,for a Change! Rethinking the Association Between Political Orientation and Relation to Societal Change

According to common wisdom, which is supported by extant psychological theorizing, a core feature of political conservatism (vs. liberalism) is the resistance to (vs. acceptance of) societal change. We propose that an empirical examination of the actual difference in political liberals’ and conservatives’ attitudes toward change across different sociopolitical issues may call into question this assumed association between political orientation and relation to change. We examined this proposition in four studies conducted in Germany. In Study 1, we assessed lay people's intuitions about liberals’ and conservatives’ attitudes toward change. Results of this study concur with theoretical assumptions that liberals accept and conservatives resist change. In Study 2a, Study 2b, and Study 3, self‐identified liberals and conservatives were asked whether they would resist or accept change on various sociopolitical issues. Results of these studies suggest that both conservatives and liberals resist and accept societal changes, depending on the extent to which they approve or disapprove of the status quo on a given sociopolitical issue. Overall, our findings provide no evidence for a one‐directional association between political orientation and the tendency to accept or resist change. These findings therefore challenge theoretical and lay assumptions regarding general, context‐independent psychological differences underlying political ideologies.     

Deep Alignment with Country Shrinks the Moral Gap Between Conservatives and Liberals

Moral foundations theory suggests that relative to liberals, conservatives care more about values that are believed to bind group members together: loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and purity/degradation. In contrast, we propose that individuals who are deeply aligned (“fused”) with their group should display elevated commitment to group‐oriented moral values, regardless of their political orientation. The results of three studies supported this hypothesis. The tendency for conservatives to endorse the binding foundations more than liberals only emerged among weakly and moderately fused Americans. In fact, liberals strongly fused with the United States endorsed “binding” foundations more than average conservatives and to the same extent as strongly fused conservatives. These results indicate that to fully understand moral prerogatives, one must consider the nature of the connections people form to the group, as well as their political orientation.     

Emotion,Sophistication and Political Behavior: Evidence From a Laboratory Experiment

The way emotions affect political behavior has been a central theme in politics since ancient times, but it is only in the past few decades that it has been the focus of rigorous empirical inquiry. Recent empirical research suggests that emotions may affect different groups of people in distinct ways, but experimental evidence remains scant. Through a double‐blind experiment, this article investigates the degree to which emotions (shame and anger) motivate people with different levels of political sophistication to be more politically active. The findings are two‐fold: (1) Once treated with shame, more sophisticated individuals are more likely to change their political behavior than less sophisticated ones; and (2) once treated with anger, it is people with low levels of prior political involvement who are more likely to report a change in their behavior. The findings highlight the potential of going beyond the existing investigations by adding shame in empirical analyses of how emotions affect behavioral change. The evidence here also shows that different emotions might display different patterns of interaction with sophistication. Practically, the findings point to an emotional venue for the mobilization of citizens who are generally difficult to engage in political life.     

孙中山的心理建设思想及其现实意义

心理建设思想是孙中山革命和建设理论的重要内容。目前, 学术界对孙中山的思想在哲学、政治、文化等领域, 做了较多研究, 而从心理学视角的探索还较少。孙中山非常重视人的心理对社会政治的巨大作用, 强调心理建设对于人类发展和进步的重要意义。心理建设在他的革命与建国方略中具有极为重要的地位, 他创造性地提出了“知难行易”的命题, 强调了科学认知的艰难和重要性, 体现了孙中山独特的知行观。突出了心理建设在革命与建设中的核心价值和引领作用, 主张心理建设与社会发展和国家建设相联系。在当今时代中, 孙中山的心理建设思想依旧熠熠生辉, 他的奋斗精神、思路与方法已经成为我们实现民族复兴和现代化建设的宝贵精神财富, 具有重要的启迪作用和现实意义。