Exploring short-term longitudinal effects of right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation on environmentalism

The psychological causes and societal consequences of authoritarianism

Over the past two decades, citizens’ political rights and civil liberties have declined globally. Psychological science can play an instrumental role in both explaining and combating the authoritarian impulses that underlie these attacks on personal autonomy. In this Review, we describe the psychological processes and situational factors that foster authoritarianism, as well as the societal consequences of its apparent resurgence within the general population. First, we summarize the dual process motivational model of ideology and prejudice, which suggests that viewing the world as a dangerous, but not necessarily competitive, place plants the psychological seeds of authoritarianism. Next, we discuss the evolutionary, genetic, personality and developmental antecedents to authoritarianism and explain how contextual threats to safety and security activate authoritarian predispositions. After examining the harmful consequences of authoritarianism for intergroup relations and broader societal attitudes, we discuss the need to expand the ideological boundaries of authoritarianism and encourage future research to investigate both right-wing and left-wing variants of authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism weakens democratic institutions and fosters societal divisions. In this Review, Osborne et al. describe the psychological processes and situational factors that give rise to authoritarianism, as well as the societal consequences of its apparent resurgence within the general population.

Relationship between global identity and pro-environmental behavior and environmental concern: a systematic review

Global issues such as environmental problems and climate change, require collective efforts. Global identity has been linked to the promotion of pro-environmental behavior by international and environmental organizations. In environment-related research, this all-inclusive social identity has been consistently related to pro-environmental behavior and environmental concern, but the underlying mechanisms are not well understood. This current systematic review seeks to examine past studies across disciplines that have reported findings on the relationship between global identity and the constructs of pro-environmental behavior and environmental concern and to synthesize findings on the potential pathways behind this relationship. Thirty articles were identified through a systematic search. We found that most studies reported a positive correlation, and the effect of global identity on pro-environmental behavior and environmental concern was stable across studies. Only nine of the studies empirically examined the underlying mechanisms of this relationship. Three major themes of these underlying mechanisms emerged: obligation, responsibility, and relevance. These mediators highlight the role of global identity in pro-environmental behavior and environmental concern via how individuals relate to other humans and how they appraise environmental problems. We also observed a heterogeneity in measurements of global identity and environment-related outcomes. As a topic of interest in multiple disciplines, a variety of global identity labels have been adopted, such as global identity, global social identity, humanity identity, Identification With All Humanity, global/world citizen, connectedness to humanity, global belonging, and psychological sense of global community. Self-report measures of behavior were common, but observations of actual behavior were rare. Knowledge gaps are identified, and future directions are suggested.

The effects of a temporal framing manipulation on environmentalism: A replication and extension

Recent research promotes comparing the current state of the environment with the past (and not the future) to increase the pro-environmental attitudes of those on the political right. We aimed to replicate this temporal framing effect and extend on research in this area by testing the potential drivers of the effect. Across two large-scale replication studies, we found limited evidence that past comparisons (relative to future comparisons) increase pro-environmentalism among those with a more conservative political ideology, thus precluding a full investigation into the mediators of the effect. Where the effect was present, it was not consistent across studies. In Study One, conservatives reported greater certainty that climate change was real after viewing past comparisons, as the environmental changes were perceived as more certain. However, in Study Two, the temporal framing condition interacted with political orientation to instead undermine the certainty about climate change among political liberals in the past-focused condition. Together, these studies present the first evidence of backfire from temporal frames, and do not support the efficacy of past comparisons for increasing conservatives' environmentalism. We echo recent calls for open science principles, including preregistration and efforts to replicate existing work, and suggest the replication of other methods of inducing temporal comparisons.

Sustainable Development, Energy Transition, and Climate Challenges in the Context of Gender: The Framework of Gender Determinants of Environmental Orientation in Poland

How does gender affect attitudes towards ecology? This question is of particular interest in a society where conservative and populist power elites perceive the concepts of “gender” and “ecology” as manifestations of “foreign” cultural influences. In turn, the dependence of the Polish energy system on coal forces us to look for various social factors that may support energy transition and the principles of sustainable development. The article outlines the results of computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) research on a representative sample of Polish society composed of 1.001 people and analyses the gender differentiation of attitudes towards the policy of sustainable development in Poland. The results presented in this article clearly show that women in Poland constitute an important support for ecological activities and energy transition. This is also the case with the entire progressive vision of politics: Women have become its main driver and an opportunity for change.

The influence of social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism on environmentalism: A five-year cross-lagged analysis

Social dominance orientation (SDO) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) are ideological attitudes that predict lower concern for the environment and less willingness to act on climate change. Research generally shows that SDO and RWA exhibit moderate, negative relationships with environmentalism. We examine the longitudinal influence of SDO and RWA on people's willingness to change their behaviour to benefit the environment in a national probability sample over five years. We show that both ideological attitudes relate to lower environmentalism across time and that the SDO effect was stronger than the RWA effect, yet the association from environmentalism to later endorsement of SDO is stronger than the reverse. Interestingly, these findings suggest that the more likely temporal association flows from environmentalism to SDO.

Neural Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism in a Post-communist Country

A previous experiment showed that there was a strong correlation between conservatism/liberalism and brain activity, linked to an error response (r = 0.59, p < 0.001) in the USA political environment. We re-ran the experiment on a larger and age-homogeneous group (n = 100, 50 females and 50 males, aged 20-26 years) in the Czech Republic; a European country with a different sociocultural environment and history. We did not find a relationship between the brain activity connected to conflict monitoring and self-reported conservatism/liberalism orientation (ρ = -0.11, p = 0.297) or conservatism/liberalism validated for the USA agenda (ρ = -0.01, p = 0.910). Instead of replicating the previous study, we decided to test the hypothesis under a different socio-cultural context. Our results support a view of self-reported or validated, conservative or liberal attitudes as a complex behavioral pattern. Such a behavioral pattern cannot be determined with statistical significance, using a simple Go-NoGo detection task, without accounting for confounding factors such as age and socio-cultural conditions. Sufficiently powered studies are warranted to evaluate this neuro-political controversy.

Associations among dimensions of political ideology and Dark Tetrad personality features

Examinations of personality and political ideology have assessed political ideology as a unidimensional construct and primarily focused on the Big Five personality factors. The purpose of the present two-part study was to examine associations among political ideology (assessed using two dimensions [social and economic]) and Dark Tetrad traits in two samples of adults from the United States (N = 579 and 597). The combination of high economic conservatism and high social liberalism was associated with the highest levels of Machiavellianism and the combination of high social conservatism and high economic liberalism was associated with the highest levels of Narcissism. These effects were significant even after accounting for Big Five personality factors and when using a measure of political ideology that was comprised of multiple items for each dimension of political ideology. Implications include the potential application of our findings to altering political interpersonal dynamics. Additionally, study findings highlight the importance of examining political ideology via multiple dimensions to account for heterogeneity of political attitudes.

The intergroup foundations of climate change justice

Climate change is a global problem that is caused by humans and must be solved by humans, and while differences exist, many theories and research on prejudice and discrimination have direct connections to the psychological processes involved in climate change. Climate change is not only a geophysical issue, but an intergroup issue with justice implications. It impacts people who are most vulnerable to environmental degradation as well as social injustices. Arguably it not only violates human rights but also the rights of animals and nature. Thus, the study of group processes and intergroup relations is critical to understanding the myriad of barriers to addressing this large-scale problem. We explore influences on cognitive steps in perceiving climate change as a justice issue, using social psychology to understand minimization of harms and responsibilities for addressing climate change, and draw from the prejudice and discrimination literature to find ways of moving forward.