Gender ideology and fertility: evidence for a curvilinear hypothesis

Research on the relationship between fertility and gender ideology revealed inconsistent results. In the present study, we argue that inconsistencies may be due to the fact that such a relationship may be nonlinear. We hypothesize a U-shaped relationship between two dimensions of gender ideology (i.e., primacy of breadwinner role and acceptance of male privilege) and fertility rates. We conducted a cross-national analysis of 60 countries using data from the World Values Survey as well as the World Population Prospects 2019. Controlling for gross domestic product, we found support for a U-shaped relationship between gender ideology and fertility. Higher levels of fertility rates were found at lower and especially higher levels of traditional gender ideology, while a medium level of gender ideology was associated with the lowest fertility rate. This curvilinear relationship is in agreement with the phase of the gender revolution in which the country is located.

Walking the Talk: How to Identify Anti-Pluralist Parties

The recent increase of democratic declines around the world - "the third wave of autocratization" - has sparked a new generation of studies on the topic. Scholars tend to agree that the main threat to contemporary democracy arises from democratically elected rulers who gradually erode democratic norms. Is it possible to identify future autocratizers before they win power in elections? Linz (1978) and Levitsky and Ziblatt (2018) suggest that a lacking commitment to democratic norms reveals would-be autocratizers before they reach office. This article argues that the concept of anti-pluralism rather than populism or extreme ideology captures this. We use a new expert-coded data set on virtually all relevant political parties worldwide from 1970 to 2019 (V-Party) to create a new Anti-Pluralism Index (API) to provide the first systematic empirical test of this argument. We find substantial evidence validating that the API and Linz's litmus-test indicators signal leaders and parties that will derail democracy if and when they come into power.

The path of ideological and political education in fulfilling the function of psychological nurturing

Introduction

The risk of college students facing psychological problems, such as stress, anxiety, and depression, has increased, which may have a negative impact ontheir academic performance and overall well-being, especially after the outbreakof the pandemic.

Methods

This paper summarizes the potential psychological issues thatuniversity students may face and the corresponding coping measures. Basedon this, a theoretical model of ideological and political education to enhancepsychological education was established.

Results

There was a total of 446 participantsin the study, with a mean age of 21.4 years and 44.6 per cent male. With 406 valid survey responses, the theoretical model was examined using the structuralequation modeling method. The results showed that education and teaching, practical activities, counseling services, prevention and intervention, and multilevelplatforms are effective measures to protect the psychological health ofuniversity students.

Discussion

Based on the insights gained from this study, policies canbe implemented to help university students improve their mental health andinspire higher education institutions to prioritize psychological education.

Raced and risky subjects: The interplay of racial and managerial ideologies as an expression of "colorblind" racism

Contemporary manifestations of race are dynamic and elusive in the forms and shapes they take. "Colourblind" racism is effective at drawing on seemingly objective and race-neutral discourses to obfuscate racialized forms of structural exclusion. Framed by Critical Race Theory and Critical Narrative Analysis this paper presents an example from the Australian context that examines the relationships between a grassroots initiative developed by creatives from the African diaspora and two not-for-profit human services organizations, to illustrate how ideologies of race are enacted and obscured by managerialist ideologies and discourses of risk. Specifically, it shows how harmful dominant cultural narratives of deficit and danger transforms racialized Africans in Australia into "risky subjects." In a managerialist organization, risk must be controlled, and thus risk becomes the rationality for the control of racialized and risky subjects. Resistance to control by those subjects produces forms of organizational defensiveness that are mobilized through managerialist discourses and practices that work to structurally exclude. These findings illustrate the ways ideologies of race work alongside and through other ideological discourses and practices which render racialized dynamics of oppression race-neutral.

Color War. Does Color Influence the Perception of Political Messages?

Several studies have shown that exposure to colors affects cognitive and affective processes. In this paper, we tried to find if colors affect the perception of political messages and activate partisan biases. We focus our study on the Spanish cultural environment. In a prestudy (n = 991), participants identified red as progressive, blue as conservative, and gray as neutral. In two subsequent experiments (n = 840; n = 938), we analyzed how these three colors influenced the interpretation of political messages and confronted them with issues ownership. The results show that the colors can activate partisan biases but do not have the same strength as issues ownership.

The Multiple-Matching Perspective on Value Versus Identity: Investigating How Political Ideology and Party Identity Contribute to Citizens' Support for Political Candidates

Past studies on how political value (i.e., ideology) and identity (i.e., party identity) predict support for candidates often fail to consider both the perspectives of citizens and candidates, introducing omitted variable problems. To address them, this paper introduces the multiple matching perspective, which considers how citizens' ideology and political identity are matched (i.e., moderated) by a candidate's ideology and party affiliation. Four studies using this approach reveal: 1. The effect of ideology match is large, robust, and consistent. 2. candidates' ideology plays more role than candidates' party identity except during the final stage of a presidential race. 3. Citizens' party identity can guide them to support a candidate based on the candidate's ideology (Republicans will support conservatives), but it is less so for the reverse of it (conservatives do not always support Republicans). Therefore, this approach helps theory-building in political psychology by uncovering novel effects of ideology and partisanship.

Rationally blind? Rationality polarizes policy support for colour blindness versus multiculturalism

Do White Americans prefer society to be 'colour-blind' by rising above racial identities, or 'multicultural' by openly discussing and considering them? We developed an ideology-rationality model to understand support for these diversity perspectives. Specifically, since people endorse a diversity perspective in line with their ideological values, we hypothesized that conservatism is related to a relative preference for colour blindness over multiculturalism. However, since colour blindness and multiculturalism are complex and multi-layered ideologies, we further hypothesized that the relationship between conservatism and a preference for colour blindness over multiculturalism is especially pronounced under higher levels of rationality. Results confirmed the hypotheses, either when rationality was operationalized within a dual process theory (Study 1, N = 496) or experimentally induced within a tripartite model of cognition (Study 2, N = 497). Higher levels of rationality guided White Americans high in conservatism towards a stronger preference for colour-blindness, but those low in conservatism towards a stronger preference for multiculturalism. These results suggest that among White Americans the endorsement of colour blindness versus multiculturalism stems from the interplay between ideological orientation and rationality and that rational considerations about racial policies may further divide rather than unify along ideological lines.

Auditing YouTube's recommendation system for ideologically congenial, extreme, and problematic recommendations

Algorithms of social media platforms are often criticized for recommending ideologically congenial and radical content to their users. Despite these concerns, evidence on such filter bubbles and rabbit holes of radicalization is inconclusive. We conduct an audit of the platform using 100,000 sock puppets that allow us to systematically and at scale isolate the influence of the algorithm in recommendations. We test 1) whether recommended videos are congenial with regard to users' ideology, especially deeper in the watch trail and whether 2) recommendations deeper in the trail become progressively more extreme and come from problematic channels. We find that YouTube's algorithm recommends congenial content to its partisan users, although some moderate and cross-cutting exposure is possible and that congenial recommendations increase deeper in the trail for right-leaning users. We do not find meaningful increases in ideological extremity of recommendations deeper in the trail, yet we show that a growing proportion of recommendations comes from channels categorized as problematic (e.g., "IDW," "Alt-right," "Conspiracy," and "QAnon"), with this increase being most pronounced among the very-right users. Although the proportion of these problematic recommendations is low (max of 2.5%), they are still encountered by over 36.1% of users and up to 40% in the case of very-right users.

What might be in so close that as psychoanalysts we miss it?

What if the author were to position herself as a liar? Not of conscious lying, but an ignorance of what is so close to our collective noses that as psychoanalysts we miss it. Drawing on Harari's (2011) description of liberal ideology, the author suggests that our contemporary psychoanalytic focus on feelings, countertransference, and intuition is more determined by our cultural era than generally recognized. It is suggested that prevailing ideology may at times serve a defensive function. The author discusses a 1970s clinical seminar in which Bion observes that the presenting analyst's attention to feelings is "excusing" the patient (and himself). A second example, from Bion's Cogitations (1991), underscores the complexity of being sensitive to a patient's feelings without gratifying narcissistic demands. A final example is taken from the author's work in which there was a pressure to allow the patient's infantile feelings to determine the analysis. It was subsequently recognized that neither the patient's feelings nor the analyst's understanding were the site of authority in the analysis. Rather, authority lies in the analytic process itself.

Barriers to Biculturalism: Historical Negation and Symbolic Exclusion Predict Longitudinal Increases in Bicultural Policy Opposition

The colonial ideologies of historical negation and symbolic exclusion (i.e., the "Dark Duo") promote inequality between settler colonizers and Indigenous peoples by denying the contemporary relevance of past injustices and excluding Indigenous culture from the nation's identity, respectively. Although their correlates are established, the temporal ordering of the relationship between the Dark Duo and bicultural policy opposition is unclear. We address this oversight by utilizing nine annual waves of panel data from a nationwide random sample of New Zealand adults (N = 31,104) to estimate two multigroup RI-CLPMs using the Dark Duo to predict symbolic and resource-based policy opposition (and vice versa). Results revealed that within-person increases in historical negation and symbolic exclusion predicted subsequent increases in symbolic and resource-based bicultural policy opposition for both majority and minority ethnic groups. These relationships were, however, bidirectional, demonstrating a self-perpetuating cycle, whereby the Dark Duo undermines biculturalism and antibiculturalism strengthens the Dark Duo.

'Dysgenic fertility' is an ideological, not a scientific, concept. A Comment on: 'Stability and change in male fertility patterns by cognitive ability across 32 birth cohorts' (2023), by Bratsberg & Rogeberg

Recently Bratsberg & Rogeberg (2023) presented an analysis in Biology Letters of how cognitive ability is associated with fertility in Norwegian men. Our concern relates to the theoretical framework of this paper. The analysis is framed around the concept of 'dysgenic fertility', which is treated throughout as a scientific theory, but 'dysgenic fertility' is not science, it is an ideological concept.

Intraindividual Changes in Political Identity Strength (But Not Direction) Are Associated With Political Animosity in the United States and the Netherlands

We test if within-person changes in political identities are associated with within-person changes in political animosity in two longitudinal studies (United States N = 552, Waves = 26; Netherlands N = 1,670, Waves = 12). Typical studies examine cross-sectional associations without assessing within-person change. Our work provides a stronger test of the relationship. We find that within-person changes in the strength of people's ideological and partisan identities are associated with increased political animosity. We found no such associations with within-person changes in identity direction. These patterns were robust to covariates and emerged in both studies. In addition to these average effects, we found substantial heterogeneity across participants in the associations among identity strength, identity direction, and political animosity. We did not find robust and replicable moderators for this heterogeneity. These findings suggest that identity strength (but not identity direction) is a key, if heterogenous, factor in changes in political animosity.

Ideological Mate-guarding: Sexual Jealousy and Mating Strategy Predict Support for Female Honor

Feminine honor dictates that women should cultivate a reputation for sexual purity via behaviors such as dressing modestly and maintaining virginity before marriage. The dominant explanation for people's support for feminine honor is that female infidelity threatens male partners' honor. Beyond this, the literature affords little understanding of the evolutionary and psychological origins of feminine honor. We propose that feminine honor functions as an ideological form of mate guarding that is shaped by sexual jealousy and mating strategy. Two correlational studies (N  =  892) revealed support for predictions derived from this ideological mate-guarding account. In Study 1, dispositional jealousy and mating strategy (more monogamous orientation) predicted male participants' support for a mate's (especially a long-term mate's) feminine honor. Moving beyond mate preferences, in Study 2 male and female participants' dispositional jealousy and mating strategy predicted support for feminine honor of women in general. Results applied beyond masculine honor norms, religiosity, political conservativism, and age. These findings enhance the understanding of the origins and maintenance of feminine honor and related norms and ideologies that enable control over women's socio-sexual behavior.

Emphasizing Similarities Between Politically Opposed Groups and Their Influence in Perceptions of the Political Opposition: Evidence From Five Experiments

Across five experiments (four pre-registered, N = 4,431), we investigate whether emphasizing similarities between Republicans and Democrats can improve intergroup relations between the two groups. Members of both groups who were presented with evidence emphasizing similarities rather than differences in the psychological attitudes of both parties reported greater inclusion of the political opposition in the self, greater belief that common ground can be reached for major social issues, and warmer feelings toward the opposition. Inclusion of the political outgroup in the self mediated the effect of the similarities condition on additional outcomes, relating to more positive and less threatening perceptions of political opposition members. These findings held even when compared with a baseline condition with no information presented to participants. We conclude that by emphasizing the study of group similarities and by disseminating research in a way that highlights similarities, researchers could reduce intergroup hostilities in the political domain.

Is Open Science Neoliberal?

The scientific-reform movement, frequently referred to as open science, has the potential to substantially reshape the nature of the scientific activity. For this reason, its sociopolitical antecedents and consequences deserve serious scholarly attention. In a recently formed literature that professes to meet this need, it has been widely argued that the movement is neoliberal. However, for two reasons it is hard to justify this widescale attribution: First, the critics mistakenly represent the movement as a monolithic structure, and second, the critics' arguments associating the movement with neoliberalism because of the movement's (a) preferential focus on methodological issues, (b) underlying philosophy of science, and (c) allegedly promarket ideological proclivities reflected in the methodology and science-policy proposals do not hold under closer scrutiny. These shortcomings show a lack of sufficient engagement with the reform literature. What is needed is more nuanced accounts of the sociopolitical underpinnings of scientific reform. To address this need, we propose a model for the analysis of reform proposals, which represents scientific methodology, axiology, science policy, and ideology as interconnected but relatively distinct domains, and thus allows for recognizing the divergent tendencies in the movement and the uniqueness of particular proposals.

Ideology Strength Versus Party Identity Strength: Ideology Strength Is the Key Predictor of Attitude Stability

We investigate the relationship between attitude instability and both party identity strength and ideology strength. We test the explorative hypotheses that higher party identity strength (H1) and ideology strength (H2) predict more attitude stability using intensive longitudinal data collected in the United States every 2 weeks over 1 year (Study 1, N = 552) and in the Netherlands over 6 months (Study 2, N = 1,670). We found mixed support for H1: In the United States, there was no association between party identity strength and attitude stability. In the Netherlands, people with stronger party identity had more stable attitudes. We found stronger support for H2: Individuals with a stronger ideology than average had more stable attitudes in the United States and the Netherlands. The context-dependent nature of relations is discussed.

An Examination of Populist Attitudes With Social Values and the Motivational Differences Between Right-Wingers and Left-Wingers

Populism continues to become commonplace, not just among politicians and political parties, but also among individuals. The prevalence of populist attitudes may have soared because of economic and social issues like the outsourcing of jobs and the influx of immigrants, as well as the perceived injustice against ordinary people. Populism, as a psychological construct, is a relatively nascent research area. The present study contributes to this literature by examining the link between values and populist attitudes, noting the motivational differences between right-wingers and left-wingers with a U.S. student sample. An online survey was conducted, and regression results revealed that populist attitudes were associated with openness to change, self-enhancement and self-transcendence. Moreover, conservation amplified the link between populist attitudes and right-wing identification whereas openness to change increased the relationship between populist attitudes and left-wing identification. The discussion focuses on the value priorities of populism broadly as well as the moderating effects of values in the endorsement of populist attitudes for right-wingers and left-wingers, respectively.

How reputation does (and does not) drive people to punish without looking

Punishing wrongdoers can confer reputational benefits, and people sometimes punish without careful consideration. But are these observations related? Does reputation drive people to people to "punish without looking"? And if so, is this because unquestioning punishment looks particularly virtuous? To investigate, we assigned "Actors" to decide whether to sign punitive petitions about politicized issues ("punishment"), after first deciding whether to read articles opposing these petitions ("looking"). To manipulate reputation, we matched Actors with copartisan "Evaluators," varying whether Evaluators observed i) nothing about Actors' behavior, ii) whether Actors punished, or iii) whether Actors punished and whether they looked. Across four studies of Americans (total n = 10,343), Evaluators rated Actors more positively, and financially rewarded them, if they chose to (vs. not to) punish. Correspondingly, making punishment observable to Evaluators (i.e., moving from our first to second condition) drove Actors to punish more overall. Furthermore, because some of these individuals did not look, making punishment observable increased rates of punishment without looking. Yet punishers who eschewed opposing perspectives did not appear particularly virtuous. In fact, Evaluators preferred Actors who punished with (vs. without) looking. Correspondingly, making looking observable (i.e., moving from our second to third condition) drove Actors to look more overall-and to punish without looking at comparable or diminished rates. We thus find that reputation can encourage reflexive punishment-but simply as a byproduct of generally encouraging punishment, and not as a specific reputational strategy. Indeed, rather than fueling unquestioning decisions, spotlighting punishers' decision-making processes may encourage reflection.

Political Attitudes and Disease Threat: Regional Pathogen Stress Is Associated With Conservative Ideology Only for Older Individuals

What environmental factors are associated with individual differences in political ideology, and do such associations change over time? We examine whether reductions in pathogen prevalence in U.S. states over the past 60 years are associated with reduced associations between parasite stress and conservatism. We report a positive association between infection levels and conservative ideology in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. However, this correlation reduces from the 1980s onwards. These results suggest that the ecological influence of infectious diseases may be larger for older people who grew up (or whose parents grew up) during earlier time periods. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the political affiliation of 45,000 Facebook users, and find a positive association between self-reported political affiliation and regional pathogen stress for older (>40 years) but not younger individuals. It is concluded that the influence of environmental pathogen stress on ideology may have reduced over time.

The WEIRD Microcosm of Microaggression Research: Toward a Cultural-Psychological Approach

Microaggression research has made great strides over the past decade while steadily pushing itself into mainstream psychological science. Yet the field remains firmly situated within the Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) cultural context. Correspondingly, recurring criticisms against the validity of microaggressions are often rooted in individualist, decontextualized understandings of behavior, and critics' rebuttals are often grounded in a philosophical and reflective understanding of the cultural context. In this article, I put forward that (a) the enactments and appraisals of microaggressions are the behavioral results of the cognitive salience of cultural schemas; (b) cultural schemas are informed by cultural ideologies, underlining their methodological and empirical relevance for future research; and (c) cultures are dynamic by highlighting the effects of geopolitical events on the content of cultural schemas that may moderate the perception and enactment of microaggressions. For these reasons, I argue that a cultural psychology of microaggressions may help to depathologize the individual by situating behavior in its cultural context while at the same time necessitating the inclusion of communities residing in non-WEIRD societies.

Validating the dual evolutionary foundations of political values in a US sample

Psychological research repeatedly identifies two dimensions of political values. Recent work argues that these dimensions reflect the dual evolutionary foundations of human social and political life: a trade-off between cooperation and competition that generates differences in values about social inequality, and a trade-off in managing group coordination that generates differences in values about social control. Existing scales used to measure political values, however, were created prior to this framework. Here, we introduce the Dual Foundations Scale, designed to capture values about the two trade-offs. We validate the scale across two studies, showing it accurately and reliably measures both dimensions. Our results support key predictions of the dual foundations framework and pave the way for future work on the foundations of political ideology.

Cognitive ability and ideology join forces in the culture war: A model of opinion formation

We propose a model of moral policy opinion formation that integrates both ideology and cognitive ability. The link from people's ideology to their opinions is assumed to go via a semantic processing of moral arguments that relies on the individual's cognitive ability. An implication of this model is that the relative quality of arguments that justify supporting vs. opposing a moral policy-the policy's "argument advantage"-is key to how opinions will be distributed in the population and develop over time. To test this implication, we combine polling data with measures of the argument advantage for 35 moral policies. Consistent with the opinion formation model, the argument advantage of a moral policy accounts for how public opinion moves over time, and how support for the policy ideologies varies across different ideological groups and levels of cognitive ability, including a strong interaction between ideology and cognitive ability.

Women, the intellectually humble, and liberals write more persuasive political arguments

If sincere attempts at political persuasion are central to the functioning of democracy, then what attributes of individuals make them more persuasive toward fellow citizens? To examine this, we asked 594 Democrats and Republicans to write politically persuasive arguments on any topic of their choice and then gave those arguments to a US representative sample of 3,131 to rate the persuasiveness, totaling 54,686 judgments. We consistently found that arguments written by women, liberals, the intellectually humble, and those low on party identification were rated as more persuasive. These patterns were robust to controls for the demographics and partisanship of judges and persuaders, the topics written about, argument length, and the emotional sentiments of the arguments. Women's superior persuasiveness was partially, but not fully, explained by the fact that their arguments were longer, of a higher grade level, and expressed less dominance than men's. Intergroup dynamics also affected persuasiveness, as arguments written for in-party members were more persuasive than the ones written for out-party members. These findings suggest that an individual's personal and psychological characteristics durably provide them with a persuasive advantage when they engage in sincere attempts at changing the hearts and minds of fellow citizens.

Did Donald Trump's presidency reshape Americans' prejudices?

Did the presidency of Donald Trump affect Americans' intergroup attitudes? Converging evidence from recent experimental and longitudinal studies suggests that Trump's political rise led his supporters to increase their reported prejudice toward traditionally minoritized racial and religious groups in the USA.

Racial and ethnic variation in the negativity bias-ideology connection: A registered report

This is a registered report for a study of racial and ethnic variation in the relationship between negativity bias and political attitudes. Pioneering work on the psychological and biological roots of political orientation has suggested that political conservatism is driven in large part by enhanced negativity bias. This work has been criticized on several theoretical fronts, and recent replication attempts have failed. To dig deeper into the contours of when (and among whom) negativity bias predicts conservatism, we investigate a surprisingly overlooked factor in existing literature: race and ethnicity. We propose that political issues represent threat or disgust in different ways depending on one's race and ethnicity. We recruited 174 White, Latinx, and Asian American individuals (in equal numbers) to examine how the relationship between negativity bias and political orientation varies by race/ethnicity across four domains: policing/criminal justice, immigration, economic redistribution, and religious social conservatism.

Sensitive liberals and unfeeling conservatives? Interoceptive sensitivity predicts political liberalism

The stark divide between the political right and left is rooted in conflicting beliefs, values, and personality-and, recent research suggests, perhaps even lower-level physiological differences between individuals. In this registered report, we investigated a novel domain of ideological differences in physiological processes: interoceptive sensitivity-that is, a person's attunement to their own internal bodily states and signals (e.g., physiological arousal, pain, and respiration). We conducted two studies testing the hypothesis that greater interoceptive sensitivity would be associated with greater conservatism: one laboratory study in the Netherlands using a physiological heartbeat detection task and one large-scale online study in the United States employing an innovative webcam-based measure of interoceptive sensitivity. Contrary to our predictions, we found evidence that interoceptive sensitivity may instead predict greater political liberalism (versus conservatism), although this association was primarily limited to the American sample. We discuss implications for our understanding of the physiological underpinnings of political ideology.

Constructions of difference in lay talk about diversity: Ideological dilemmas, antiracism and implications for identity

Dilemmas around differences among people may encapsulate ideological assumptions deep-rooted in modernity, according to work on ideological dilemmas. In this article, we suggest that ideological struggles such as the one between racism and antiracism may further ingrain ideological dilemmas around difference and put certain identities at stake. In a qualitative study addressing constructions of difference in lay talk about diversity, lay people in Greece argued about the meaningfulness, value, and public character of difference, deploying two lines of argumentation: an 'objectivist' line affirming categorical differences and hierarchies; and a 'subjectivist' argumentative line which deprived categorical differences of any importance and simultaneously celebrated differences assuming that differences only lie in individuals' minds. For this latter line of argumentation, constructions of difference appeared to perform a non-racist identity, making systematic comparisons to racists' alleged constructions of differences. Such comparisons were far less important for the objectivist argumentative line. These findings suggest that constructions of difference may be nested in ideological struggles, selectively reflecting the categorizations of the social world - and associated identities - advanced by ideological projects such as antiracism. The discussion points to theoretical implications for historical accounts of social categorization and social implications for current inclusive perspectives centred on diversity.

Is the myth of left-wing authoritarianism itself a myth?

Is left-wing authoritarianism (LWA) closer to a myth or a reality? Twelve studies test the empirical existence and theoretical relevance of LWA. Study 1 reveals that both conservative and liberal Americans identify a large number of left-wing authoritarians in their lives. In Study 2, participants explicitly rate items from a recently-developed LWA measure as valid measurements of authoritarianism. Studies 3-11 show that persons who score high on this same LWA scale possess the traits associated with models of authoritarianism: LWA is positively related to threat sensitivity across multiple areas, including general ecological threats (Study 3), COVID disease threat (Study 4), Belief in a Dangerous World (Study 5), and Trump threat (Study 6). Further, high-LWA persons show more support for restrictive political correctness norms (Study 7), rate African-Americans and Jews more negatively (Studies 8-9), and show more cognitive rigidity (Studies 10 and 11). These effects hold when controlling for political ideology and when looking only within liberals, and further are similar in magnitude to comparable effects for right-wing authoritarianism. Study 12 uses the World Values Survey to provide cross-cultural evidence of Left-Wing Authoritarianism around the globe. Taken in total, this large array of triangulating evidence from 12 studies comprised of over 8,000 participants from the U.S. and over 66,000 participants world-wide strongly suggests that left-wing authoritarianism is much closer to a reality than a myth.

Commentary: The Boy Who Cried Wolf or Cassandra? A Consideration of the Correct Characterization of Critics of Neoliberal Reforms to the English NHS

Peter Roderick and Allyson Pollock's article, "Dismantling the National Health Service in England," provides a history of the market incrementalism that has dominated UK government policy pertaining to the English National Health System (NHS), in recent decades. It also contains an analysis of the latest statute to reform the English NHS, namely the Health and Care Act 2022. It is often argued that the concerns-for example, about privatization-of those who critique neoliberal reforms to the English NHS are misplaced. I highlight that such neoliberal reforms have increased the proportion of the budget of the English NHS that is being diverted to private providers. Consequently, I aver that the term privatization accurately describes what has been occurring within the English NHS. I contend that the arguments of those who deny or downplay the privatization of the English NHS are indicative of some of the ideological strategies that the sociologist John B. Thompson identified. My commentary suggests that the concerns of critics of neoliberal reforms to the English NHS, such as Roderick and Pollock, are not misplaced and that more heed should be given to their analyses and warnings.

Negotiating intersubjectivity by interpersonal and appraisal shifts in Chinese-English government press conference interpreting

This study investigates how interpreting shifts of interpersonal and appraisal resources facilitated the successful negotiation of intersubjectivity at China's premier press conferences (PPCs) from 2016 to 2021. This study conducts a corpus-based critical discourse analysis of interpersonal shifts at the PPCs as defined by systematic functional linguistics. Quantitative results show that the interpreter is strongly inclined to utilize appraisal shifts which enhance (or soften) the positive (or negative) evaluations of the Chinese government in interpreting the journalists' questions and uses shifts to first-person plurals and inclinational modal verbs in interpreting the Chinese Premier's answers. Qualitative results show these shifts facilitate the direct or indirect reproduction of the government's official ideology (especially the notions of solidarity, change, resolution, and people's wellbeing) and the existing power relations between the government, media, and Chinese people (both authority and solidarity). It is concluded that the interpreter displays a strong tendency to use interpersonal shifts to ensure successful negotiation of intersubjectivity at the PPCs by ultimately reproducing the social status quo.

The Ideological Structure of Municipal Non-Ideology

This paper explores the structure of elite disagreement about the ideological or nonideological character of municipal politics. I propose two possible relationships between a representative's own ideology and their beliefs about the character of municipal politics: an "ends-against-the-middle" pattern, in which ideologues on the left and right embrace an ideological vision of municipal politics, whereas moderates insist that municipal politics is not ideological; and an "asymmetric visions" pattern, in which individuals on the left endorse an ideological view of municipal politics and those on the right oppose it. I use new survey data from more than 800 mayors and councillors in Canada to assess these possible relationships. While both are supported by the data, the asymmetric visions pattern is the stronger of the two: the nonideological view of municipal politics is most firmly embraced by municipal politicians of the moderate right, while the ideological vision is most common among representatives on the left. This pattern, I argue, is in keeping with a century of municipal political history and should be incorporated into our theories of municipal elections, representation, and policy disagreement.

Ideological polarization during a pandemic: Tracking the alignment of attitudes toward COVID containment policies and left-right self-identification

Research on opinion polarization has focused on growing divides in positions toward political issues between the more politically and ideologically engaged parts of the population. However, it is fundamentally difficult to track the alignment process between ideological group identity and issue positions because classically controversial political issues are already strongly associated with ideological or partisan identity. This study uses the COVID pandemic as an unique opportunity to investigate polarizing trends in the population. Pandemic management policies were not a politicized issue before COVID, but became strongly contested after governments all across the world initiated policies to contain the pandemic. We use data from the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP) to track trajectories in attitudes toward current COVID measures over the course of more than a year of the pandemic. We differentiate individuals by their ideological self-identity as measured by left-right self-placement. Results suggest that all ideological groups viewed the containment measures as similarly appropriate in the very beginning. However, already in the first weeks, individuals who identify as right-wing increasingly viewed the policies as too extreme, whereas centrists and left-wing identifiers viewed them as appropriate. Opinion differences between left-wing and right-wing identifiers solidified over the course of the pandemic, while centrists fluctuated between left and right self-identifiers. However, at the end of our observation period, there are signs of convergence between all groups. We discuss these findings from the perspective of theoretical models of opinion polarization and suggest that polarization dynamics are likely to stop when the political context (salience of certain issues and concrete material threats) changes.

Moral values, social ideologies and threat-based cognition: Implications for intergroup relations

Moral foundations theory (MFT) has provided an account of the moral values that underscore different cultural and political ideologies, and these moral values of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity can help to explain differences in political and cultural ideologies; however, the extent to which moral foundations relate to strong social ideologies, intergroup processes and threat perceptions is still underdeveloped. To explore this relationship, we conducted two studies. In Study 1 (N = 157), we considered how the moral foundations predicted strong social ideologies such as authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) as well as attitudes toward immigrants. Here, we demonstrated that more endorsement of individualizing moral foundations (average of harm and fairness) was related to less negative intergroup attitudes, which was mediated by SDO, and that more endorsement of binding moral foundations (the average of loyalty, authority, and purity) was related to more negative attitudes, which was mediated by RWA. Crucially, further analyses also suggested the importance of threat perceptions as an underlying explanatory variable. Study 2 (N = 388) replicated these findings and extended them by measuring attitudes toward a different group reflecting an ethnic minority in the United States, and by testing the ordering of variables while also replicating and confirming the threat effects. These studies have important implications for using MFT to understand strong ideologies, intergroup relations, and threat perceptions.

Mothering in the context of intimate partner violence: A feminist intersectional critique of the nursing literature

AIMS

To describe how mothers and mothering in the context of IPV are conceptualized in the nursing research and practice literature with attention to underlying ideologies, biases and potential harms.

DESIGN

Feminist intersectionality was used as a theoretical and analytic lens.

DATA SOURCES

Articles published between 2000 and 2021 in the nursing literature, identified by searching Google Scholar, CINAHL, PubMed and Scopus databases, and conducting bibliographic reviews of published articles.

REVIEW METHODS

Search terms included: intimate partner violence, domestic violence, parenting, mother and nursing. Initial screening resulted in inclusion of 98 papers for analysis.

RESULTS

Four dominant ways of conceptualizing mothering in the context of IPV were identified: (1) IPV is conceptualized as a discrete acute event and/or crisis, (2) mothering is treated as a practice, (3) mothers are valued as vehicles for child health and well-being and (4) mothers are seen as vulnerable and 'at risk'. These narrow constructions are rooted in ideologies such as normative motherhood, deficit and grit/resilience and neoliberalism. Emerging shifts in the literature are providing an important counter-balance.

CONCLUSION

Biases in nursing knowledge about mothering in the context of IPV may limit nursing's capacity to support the health of these women and their children. The integration of emerging perspectives that emphasize strengths and equity is critical in strengthening nursing knowledge and practice and in beginning to redress existing limitations and potential harms.

IMPACT

This critique focused on higher-income countries of the Global North but raises fundamental questions that should be considered in other contexts. Applying broader conceptualizations of mothers, mothering and IPV to research and practice can help improve the quality of care available.

Gender norms and ideologies about adolescent sexuality: A mixed-method study of adolescents in communities, south-eastern, Nigeria

BACKGROUND

Sexual and reproductive health choices and behaviors of adolescents are shaped by gender norms and ideologies which are grounded in cultural beliefs. This study examined the perspectives of adolescents about the influence of gender norms and ideologies on sexuality.

METHODS

A cross-sectional study was undertaken in three urban and three rural communities in south-eastern Nigeria using quantitative and qualitative research methods. A modified cluster sampling procedure was used to select respondents. Data were collected from 1,057 adolescents and twelve focus group discussions with unmarried adolescents aged 13 to 18 years. For the quantitative data, univariate, bivariate and probit regression analyses were performed using Stata while the thematic framework approach was used to analyze qualitative data.

RESULTS

The dominant beliefs among adolescents are that: it is wrong for unmarried adolescents to have sex (86.4%); unmarried adolescents should abstain from sex (89.3%); consent should be obtained before sexual intercourse (89.1%); it is a girl's responsibility to ensure she does not get pregnant (66.5%), and sex should be initiated by boys (69.6%). Gender (boy or girl) was a predictor of belief in premarital abstinence (t-value = -3.88), belief that premarital sexual intercourse is acceptable provided contraceptive is used (t-value = 3.49, CI 1.14-0.49), belief that premarital sexual intercourse is wrong (t-value = -2.24) and, belief that sex should be initiated by boys only (t-value = -4.37). Adolescent boys were less likely to believe in pre-marital abstinence and less likely to believe that pre-marital sex among adolescents is wrong compared to girls. They were also more likely to believe adolescents can have sex provided contraceptive is used compared to girls. Qualitative findings revealed adolescents' beliefs that girls feel shy initiating sex and that boys experience more urge for sex hence, boys were perceived to be responsible for initiating sex. Both boys and girls experience pressure to have sex however, boys were described to experience more pressure from peers to have sex. Peer-to-peer communication, quest for material possessions and low socioeconomic conditions contribute to peer pressure to engage in sex.

CONCLUSION

Adolescents' beliefs about sexuality underline the need to contextualize interventions to address these norms and ideologies.

On Moving Across Oneself, Collective Identity, Homo-Nationalis, and the Trans-Subject

This paper contemplates two notions that I have been exploring in relation to the frontier between subjects and collectives. The first is what I call homo-nationalis, the subject formed by and along the organizing principles of nationalism. This subject, I argue, reflects the ideology and reality of the nation-state. It is animated by its imaginaries and unsettled by its fragilities in the deepest psychological sense. The second is what I call the trans-subject. I use this notion inspired by, and wishing to extend the sense of, transing as it pertains to trans-gendering to other categories of subjecthood, aiming to capture the subject's potential to re-form the precepts of subjectivity as it is prescribed for them. I engage these two notions as I reflect on my (countertransference) experience while working with an individual moving across various collective-social frontiers in the process of a religious conversion.

A comparison of political violence by left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist extremists in the United States and the world

Although political violence has been perpetrated on behalf of a wide range of political ideologies, it is unclear whether there are systematic differences between ideologies in the use of violence to pursue a political cause. Prior research on this topic is scarce and mostly restricted to self-reported measures or less extreme forms of political aggression. Moreover, it has generally focused on respondents in Western countries and has been limited to either comparisons of the supporters of left-wing and right-wing causes or examinations of only Islamist extremism. In this research we address these gaps by comparing the use of political violence by left-wing, right-wing, and Islamist extremists in the United States and worldwide using two unique datasets that cover real-world examples of politically motivated, violent behaviors. Across both datasets, we find that radical acts perpetrated by individuals associated with left-wing causes are less likely to be violent. In the United States, we find no difference between the level of violence perpetrated by right-wing and Islamist extremists. However, differences in violence emerge on the global level, with Islamist extremists being more likely than right-wing extremists to engage in more violent acts.

A decade-long longitudinal survey shows that the Supreme Court is now much more conservative than the public

Leveraging three unique surveys collected over a decade that ask members of the public about the policy issues before the US Supreme Court, we show how the court stands relative to the public. As we demonstrate, the court has, since 2020, become much more conservative than the public and is now more similar to Republicans in its ideological position on key issues. We also find that members of the public update their beliefs about the court’s ideology when its composition and rulings change. Even so, many members of the public currently underestimate the court’s conservative leaning, which in turn makes them less likely to support making changes to the institution than they would otherwise.

Has the US Supreme Court become more conservative than the public? We introduce results of three surveys conducted over the course of a decade that ask respondents about their opinions on the policy issues before the court. Using these data, we show that the gap between the court and the public has grown since 2020, with the court moving from being quite close to the average American to a position that is more conservative than the majority of Americans. Second, in contrast to findings showing consistency in the public’s approval of or deference to the court, we find that the public’s expectations of the court vary significantly over time and in tandem with changes in the court’s composition and recent rulings. Even so, many members of the public currently underestimate the court’s conservative leaning. Third, we find that respondents’ perceptions of the court’s ideology relative to their own are associated with support for institutional changes but with important differences between Democrats and Republicans. The fact that so many people currently underestimate how conservative the court is implies that support for proposed changes to the court may be weaker than it would be if people knew with greater accuracy the court’s conservative nature.

The Two Faces of Support for Redistribution in Colombia: Taxing the Wealthy or Assisting People in Need

Support for redistribution is crucial for reducing economic inequality. Despite people's desire for reducing extreme inequalities, they still have mixed opinions regarding how to do so. The aim of the article is to examine the underlying latent dimensions of support for redistribution and test its correlates to perceptions of and attitudes toward inequality. In two studies, we found that support for redistribution can be modeled as a latent construct depicting two different dimensions: one focused on taxing the wealthy and changing the income distribution schema, and other focused on assisting people in need and providing opportunities. We also found that the dimension related to taxing the wealthy (vs. assisting people in need) displayed higher internal reliability and correlated consistently with perceptions and attitudes toward inequality: the higher the support for taxing the wealthy, the higher the perceptions and concerns of inequality, and the lower the inequality-justifying ideologies. This research unveils distinct underlying dimensions of support for redistribution that shed light on different motivations that drive people's redistributive preferences.

How difficult should it be? Evidence of burden tolerance from a nationally representative sample

There is growing attention to how policymakers and bureaucrats think about administrative burdens, but we know less about public tolerance for burdens. We examine public burden tolerance in two major programmes (Medicaid and SNAP) using a representative sample of US residents. We show broad support for work requirements and weaker support for generally making it difficult to access benefits. People with conservative beliefs, greater opposition to social policies, and higher income are more tolerant of burdens in social policies. Those who have personal experience of welfare policies are less tolerant of burdens.

Psychopathology of Young Terrorist Offenders, and the Interaction With Ideology and Grievances

Psychopathology might be a risk factor for terrorist offending as it is for violent offending. Therefore, we examined the prevalence of psychopathology in young and adult Jihadist terrorist offenders on the basis of primary source judicial information and forensic mental health reports with the European Database of convicted Terrorist offenders (EDT). We hypothesised that psychopathology might be associated with ideological risk factors, and that these associations might be different for young and adult terrorist offenders. Therefore, we examined whether and to what extent psychopathology is related to a violent ideology, to grievances and anger about perceived injustice. We investigated whether this differs among 120 adult and 46 juvenile terrorist offenders. We found that most adult and young Jihadist terrorist offenders with a forensic mental health report had psychopathological problems. Most frequently found were symptoms and traits of intellectual disability disorders, depressive disorders, psychotic/schizophrenic disorders, substance use disorders, and personality disorders. Most frequently found clinically relevant personality traits were problems with relationships, poor regulation of aggression, feelings of anger, and paranoid feelings. We found some first indications for a positive association between psychopathology and grievances and anger about perceived injustice. In the young terrorist offenders with depressive symptoms, grievances about perceived injustice were more often present than in young terrorist offenders without these symptoms. In adult terrorist offenders it was found that grievances about perceived injustice and the anger were related to cluster B personality traits. In addition, in both young and adult terrorist offenders expressed grievances about perceived injustice were related to problems with relationships. Further research into psychopathology in terrorist offenders seems necessary with larger groups of adolescents and adults in relation to ideological, personal and contextual risk factors and how these factors relate to different terrorist acts. This may lead to more knowledge about engagement into terrorism and possible disengagement from terrorism. It may also lead to the inclusion of psychopathology into violent extremism risk assessment tools.

A Psychology of Ideology: Unpacking the Psychological Structure of Ideological Thinking

The psychological study of ideology has traditionally emphasized the content of ideological beliefs, guided by questions about what people believe, such as why people believe in omniscient gods or fascist worldviews. This theoretical focus has led to siloed subdisciplines separately dealing with political, religious, moral, and prejudiced attitudes. The fractionation has fostered a neglect of the cognitive structure of ideological worldviews and associated questions about why ideologies—in all their forms—are so compelling to the human mind. Here I argue that it is essential to consider the nature of ideological cognition across a multitude of ideologies. I offer a multidimensional, empirically tractable framework of ideological thinking, suggesting it can be conceptualized as a style of thinking that is rigid in its adherence to a doctrine and resistance to evidence-based belief-updating and favorably oriented toward an in-group and antagonistic to out-groups. The article identifies the subcomponents of ideological thinking and highlights that ideological thinking constitutes a meaningful psychological phenomenon that merits direct scholarly investigation and analysis. By emphasizing conceptual precision, methodological directions, and interdisciplinary integration across the political and cognitive sciences, the article illustrates the potential of this framework as a catalyst for developing a rigorous domain-general psychology of ideology.

The Security Versus Freedom Dilemma. An Empirical Study of the Spanish Case

One of the classic debates in public opinion, now more prevalent due to the COVID-19 pandemic, has been the dilemma between freedom and security. Following a theoretical review, this article sets out to establish the sociodemographic profiles and those variables that can correlate and/or explain the inclination towards one or the other, that is, the dependent variable "freedom-security," such as victimization or the assessment of surveillance. The analysis is based on the results of a survey prepared by the Center for Sociological Research (CIS, in Spanish) and administered to a sample of 5,920 Spaniards. The conclusions indicate that the majority inclination is for security, especially among older men, with elementary education attainment level and right-wing ideology. Furthermore, although victimization correlated with the dependent variable, the perception of being a possible victim led to a preference for safety rather than the actual experience of having been a victim. Finally, the positive assessment of surveillance through technologies such as video cameras explains or is strongly associated with security, making it a promising line of research for future work and a means to improve the understanding of the analyzed dilemma.

Exposure and Aversion to Human Transmissible Diseases Predict Conservative Ideological and Partisan Preferences

The objective prevalence of and subjective vulnerability to infectious diseases are associated with greater ingroup preference, conformity, and traditionalism. However, evidence directly testing the link between infectious diseases and political ideology and partisanship is lacking. Across four studies, including a large sample representative of the U.S. population (N > 12,000), we demonstrate that higher environmental levels of human transmissible diseases and avoidance of germs from human carriers predict conservative ideological and partisan preferences. During the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 848), we replicated this germ aversion finding and determined that these conservative preferences were primarily driven by avoidance of germs from outgroups (foreigners) rather than ingroups (locals). Moreover, socially conservative individuals expressed lower concerns of being susceptible to contracting infectious diseases during the pandemic and worried less about COVID-19. These effects were robust to individual-level and state-level controls. We discuss these findings in light of theory on parasite stress and the behavioral immune system and with regard to the political implications of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ideological variation in preferred content and source credibility on Reddit during the COVID-19 pandemic

In this exploratory study, we examine political polarization regarding the online discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use data from Reddit to explore the differences in the topics emphasized by different subreddits according to political ideology. We also examine whether there are systematic differences in the credibility of sources shared by the subscribers of subreddits that vary by ideology, and in the tendency to share information from sources implicated in spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Our results show polarization in topics of discussion: the Trump, White House, and economic relief topics are statistically more prominent in liberal subreddits, and China and deaths topics are more prominent in conservative subreddits. There are also significant differences between liberal and conservative subreddits in their preferences for news sources. Liberal subreddits share and discuss articles from more credible news sources than conservative subreddits, and conservative subreddits are more likely than liberal subreddits to share articles from sites flagged for publishing COVID-19 misinformation.

A Clinical and Psychopathological Approach to Radicalization Among Adolescents

Recent studies have shown higher rates of radicalization of adolescents than in the 2000s. Since 2015, radicalization prevention units have been implemented in child and adolescent psychiatry departments in France. We aimed to report on the psychopathology of adolescents who were followed up in a university department due to their "radical conduct." Based on the available clinical data (from child psychiatry consultations, long-term family and/or individual therapy, and psychological testing) for 20 adolescents with "radical conduct," we examined the nature of their radical conduct, their psychopathology, their family characteristics, and the existence or absence of traumatic experiences. Among the 20 adolescents, 4 had radical conduct associated with a delusional syndrome (schizophrenia or a psychotic episode after substance abuse). For the other 16, we found no psychotic conditions. The analysis of other data showed that the adolescents shared some characteristics, such as an important prevalence of intrafamilial violence, sexual abuse, imprisonment of family members, traumatic family histories, and significant psychological control or dependence phenomena occurring in divided families. This diversity of psychopathologies appears consistent with previous studies highlighting the relevance of diverse profiles depending on the presence of a delusional syndrome, the individual's gender and the individual's attraction to violence. Finally, we discuss some psychopathological hypotheses and make therapeutic recommendations. We believe that child and adolescent psychotherapy/psychiatry has a role to play in countering violent extremism by offering adolescents a way out of radical commitment.

Preventing extreme polarization of political attitudes

Extreme polarization can undermine democracy by making compromise impossible and transforming politics into a zero-sum game. "Ideological polarization"-the extent to which political views are widely dispersed-is already strong among elites, but less so among the general public [N. McCarty, Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know, 2019, pp. 50-68]. Strong mutual distrust and hostility between Democrats and Republicans in the United States, combined with the elites' already strong ideological polarization, could lead to increasing ideological polarization among the public. The paper addresses two questions: 1) Is there a level of ideological polarization above which polarization feeds upon itself to become a runaway process? 2) If so, what policy interventions could prevent such dangerous positive feedback loops? To explore these questions, we present an agent-based model of ideological polarization that differentiates between the tendency for two actors to interact ("exposure") and how they respond when interactions occur, positing that interaction between similar actors reduces their difference, while interaction between dissimilar actors increases their difference. Our analysis explores the effects on polarization of different levels of tolerance to other views, responsiveness to other views, exposure to dissimilar actors, multiple ideological dimensions, economic self-interest, and external shocks. The results suggest strategies for preventing, or at least slowing, the development of extreme polarization.