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Bridging Political Divides: Perceived Threat and Uncertainty Avoidance Help Explain the Relationship Between Political Ideology and Immigrant Attitudes Within Diverse Intergroup Contexts.

ABSTRACT: The political divide between liberals and conservatives has become quite large and stable, and there appear to be many reasons for disagreements on a wide range of issues. The current research sought to explain these divides and to extend the Uncertainty-Threat Model to intergroup relations, which predicts that more dispositional, perceived-threat and uncertainty-avoidance will be related to more political conservatism. Given that conservatism is also often related to more negativity to low-status groups such as immigrants, the relationship between political ideology and negative attitudes toward immigrants may be mediated by more threat and uncertainty-avoidance. Study 1 tested this mediational hypothesis in a correlational design and showed that both uncertainty-avoidance and perceived realistic and symbolic threat significantly mediated the relationship between political ideology and attitudes toward immigrants, and that perceived threat was the more influential mediator. Study 2 extended threat management to perceived threats from unspecified outgroups, as opposed to the immigrant outgroup, and it replicated all significant mediations. Study 3 replicated the mediations observed in Studies 1 and 2 for political ideology to attitudes toward immigrants with uncertainty-avoidance and perceived threat from immigrants as mediators; it further replicated the mediations to the negative attitudes measure that had been used in Study 2 and it extended it to an objective and indirect bias measure [i.e., Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP)]. Overall, almost all of the results supported the idea that perceived threat and uncertainty-avoidance both mediate the relationship between political ideology and attitudes toward immigrants, and that threat management, as opposed to negativity bias, may be a central concern separating liberals and conservatives. Within all three studies, we also observed more evidence for the Uncertainty-Threat Model predictions than we did for the alternative Extremity Hypothesis, which predicted a quadratic relationship between political ideology and threat and uncertainty, and between political ideology and attitudes toward immigrants.

SUBMITTER: Stewart BD

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6587119 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Bridging Political Divides: Perceived Threat and Uncertainty Avoidance Help Explain the Relationship Between Political Ideology and Immigrant Attitudes Within Diverse Intergroup Contexts.

Stewart Brandon D BD Gulzaib Fyqa F Morris David S M DSM

Frontiers in psychology 20190614

The political divide between liberals and conservatives has become quite large and stable, and there appear to be many reasons for disagreements on a wide range of issues. The current research sought to explain these divides and to extend the Uncertainty-Threat Model to intergroup relations, which predicts that more dispositional, perceived-threat and uncertainty-avoidance will be related to more political conservatism. Given that conservatism is also often related to more negativity to low-stat ...[more]

PMID: 31258499

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Project description:ObjectiveThe impact of cognitive function and decline on political ideology is unknown. We studied the relationship between cognition and both political orientation and political policy choices in a population of older persons.DesignLongitudinal investigation.SettingA retirement community and its surroundings in Southern California.Participants151 members of a longitudinal investigation of aging and dementia in the oldest-old (the 90+ Study), mean age 95 years.MeasurementsParticipants self-reported their political ideology (7-point scale from extremely liberal to extremely conservative) and policy preferences for federal spending on public schooling, aid to the poor, and protecting the environment, as well as on preferences on immigration rates, death penalty, and university admission. The same political survey was mailed to participants twice: at time one and 6-months later. Cognitive function based on neurological examination and cognitive testing was classified as normal (55%), cognitive impairment/not dementia (CIND) (33%), or dementia (12%). We calculated rank correlations between ideology and policy choices, stratified by cognitive status, and agreement between Surveys 1 and 2.ResultsPolitical ideology/orientation was highly consistent over a six-month period (84% agreement) among the 122 who returned the second survey, with no significant relationship to cognitive status. Among cognitively impaired (CIND and dementia), however, there was significant loss of consistency between an individual's political orientation and their policy choices. Level of political engagement was high for participants, with more than 90% voting in the 2016 presidential election.ConclusionIn this population of older persons, political identification on the liberal-conservative spectrum was resilient despite cognitive decline, but its meaning and function were changed. For the cognitively impaired it remained a self-defining label, but no longer operated as a higher order framework for orienting specific policy preferences. There appeared to be loss of coherence between the political orientation and political policy choices of cognitively impaired individuals. Given the high level of political engagement of these individuals, these results have substantial public policy implications.

Dataset Information

Bridging Political Divides: Perceived Threat and Uncertainty Avoidance Help Explain the Relationship Between Political Ideology and Immigrant Attitudes Within Diverse Intergroup Contexts.

Publications

Bridging Political Divides: Perceived Threat and Uncertainty Avoidance Help Explain the Relationship Between Political Ideology and Immigrant Attitudes Within Diverse Intergroup Contexts.

Similar Datasets

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