The Politics of Intergroup Attitudes

Abstract

Ideologies that underlie concepts of ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, system justification, social dominance, and morality shape minds in sufficiently deep ways to bring about (a) congruence between implicit and explicit preferences, and (b) a consistently greater preference for socially advantaged groups among political conservatives than liberals on both explicit and implicit measures. Data from large web samples and representative samples from the American National Election Studies (ANES) provide support for these and two additional results: (a) liberals show greater mean dissociation between explicit and implicit attitudes than conservatives, reporting more favorable attitudes toward the underprivileged groups than they demonstrate on implicit measures; and (b) over time, conservatives’ racial preferences converge on those of liberals, suggesting that where liberals are today, conservatives will be tomorrow. Intergroup Attitudes 2 The Politics of Intergroup Attitudes Intergroup attitudes are made up of complex strands of social preferences. They are held together by political ideologies that serve as orienting systems guiding personality as well as responses to the environment such as decisions about the information one chooses to consume, the activities one pursues, and the policies one supports (Jost, 2006). They are sufficiently central to social cognition that they are visible in the the neural markers that distinguish a politically similar other from one who is dissimilar (Mitchell, Macrae & Banaji, 2006). In this chapter we rely on two large datasets that provide substantial evidence regarding attitudes toward multiple social groups (e.g., groups based on religion, sexuality, ethnicity/race, age, and gender). From these data we examine the role of political ideology as an organizing concept for the structure and function of social attitudes; simultaneously, we examine intergroup attitudes to understand more about the liberal-conservative (or left-right) political divide. In the last two decades, the idea that attitudes, like other mental processes, may reside in both conscious/explicit as well as less conscious/implicit form has come to be well-accepted (e.g., Bargh, 1997; Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). This distinction in attitudes may apply to philosophical and ideological belief systems as well (Jost, 2006; Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). That is, political ideology – an interconnected set of beliefs and attitudes that shape judgment – may not exist solely as a reasoned or explicit collection of beliefs and attitudes. Ideology has unconscious as well as conscious determinants, and the latter is well explicated elsewhere (Cunningham, Nezlek & Banaji, 2004; see Ferguson, Carter, & Hassin, this volume). In this chapter, we examine the variation in ideological orientation in relation to implicit and explicit attitudes, with a specific focus on attitudes toward social groups. We start by revisiting Jost et al.’s (2003) theoretical argument (and supporting meta-analysis) that liberals and conservatives differ on two key dimensions: resistance to change and tolerance for inequality. We then focus on the key prediction that conservatives are more likely than liberals to have and express more positive attitudes toward high-status or advantaged groups and more negative attitudes toward low-status or disadvantaged groups. We will describe that this is true on both conscious and less conscious measures of intergroup attitudes. In this sense, the intergroup attitudes of conservatives tend to be more system-justifying than those of liberals insofar as they support and perpetuate the existing social hierarchy (see also Jost et al., 2004; Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, in press). We also find--using data from the American National Election Studies (ANES)--that liberals are at the forefront of the social movement toward racial egalitarianism, whereas conservatives’ attitudes were slower to change. Ideological Differences between Liberals and Conservatives The “classic” conception of the authoritarian personality (Adorno, FrenkelBrunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950), its modern instantiation (Altemeyer, Intergroup Attitudes 3 1996), recent perspectives on ideology stressing motivated social cognition (Jost et al., 2003), system justification (Jost & Banaji, 1994; Jost et al., 2004, in press), social dominance (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), and moral foundations (Haidt & Graham, 2007) provide accounts of differences between the political left and right, or, more commonly in the U.S., liberalism and conservatism. These perspectives converge on the expectation that, compared to liberals, conservatives are less concerned with equality, more comfortable maintaining the status quo, and more likely to show favoritism for high-status or advantaged groups over low-status or disadvantaged groups. To the extent that conservative, system-justifying attitudes are characterized by resistance to change and tolerance for inequality (Jost et al., 2003), their appeal should be maximized when stability and order are prioritized values. In the study of authoritarianism, psychologists have long observed that societal crises (e.g., economic upheavals, terrorist attacks) often precipitate rightward political shifts, presumably because conservative, right-wing opinions typically resonate with heightened needs to manage uncertainty and threat (Doty, Peterson, & Winter, 1991; Sales, 1972, 1973; McCann, 1997; Ullrich & Cohrs, 2007). As Huntington (1957) put it, “When the foundations of society are threatened, the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and desirability of the existing ones.” In other words, system-level threats stimulate the motivation to justify the system. A meta-analytic review of the psychological antecedents of political conservatism by Jost et al. (2003) supports this view. Specifically, they found that situational as well as dispositional variables associated with the management of threat and uncertainty predicted various manifestations of political conservatism (including economic system justification). The original studies were conducted in 12 countries between 1958 and 2002 and employed 88 different research samples involving a total of 22,818 individual cases. Results indicated that the tendency to endorse conservative (rather than liberal or moderate) opinions is positively associated with threat variables such as mortality salience (or death anxiety), system instability, and fear of threat and loss, and it is negatively associated (albeit weakly) with self-esteem. Conservatism is also positively associated with uncertainty avoidance, intolerance of ambiguity, and needs for order, structure, and closure, and it is negatively associated with openness to experience and integrative complexity. Although the meta-analysis focused on explicit, self-reported attitudes and beliefs, recent research using implicit measures mirrors these ideological differences. For example, ideological differences in resistance to change were demonstrated by Jost, Nosek, and Gosling (in press), who found that implicit and explicit attitudes toward tradition, stability, and the status quo were predictors of political orientation. More specifically, conservatism was associated with greater implicit as well as explicit preferences for order compared to chaos, conformity compared to rebelliousness, stability compared to flexibility, tradition compared to progress, and traditional values compared to feminism. In simultaneous regressions, both implicit and explicit attitudes showed unique predictive validity of political orientation, suggesting that they are non-redundant indicators of Intergroup Attitudes 4 ideological proclivities. Ideological differences in implicit social cognition also relate to the tolerance of inequality and, specifically, favoritism for higher over lower status groups. Jost, Banaji, and Nosek (2004) found that individual differences in political orientation moderated implicit attitudes for social groups. Measured with the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), conservatives, compared to liberals, showed stronger preferences for White Americans over African Americans and for heterosexuals over homosexuals (see also Cunningham, Nezlek, & Banaji, 2004; see also Sidanius & Pratto, 1999 for similar results at the explicit level). The meta-analysis and subsequent investigations of implicit social cognition provide an initial basis for the notion that conservatives are more likely to show favoritism for higher than lower status groups than liberals, on both implicit and explicit measures. We examined this possibility across a variety of target groups with nationally representative samples of voters collected through the American National Election Studies (ANES) and with large datasets collected over the Internet. Measuring Ideology and Implicit Attitudes Validity of a single-item political ideology assessment Remarkably, even the simplest of questions – self-placement on a singleitem liberal to conservative dimension – appears to be an effective means of parsing individual differences in ideological orientations. Jost (2006) analyzed American National Election Studies data from 1972 to 2004 and found that a selfplacement on a 7-point single item of strongly liberal to strongly conservative explained 85% of the variance in voting behavior for Democratic and Republican candidates for president. Similar evidence is available from large datasets showing that selfplacement on a liberal-conservative dimension discriminates both explicit and implicit attitudes toward politicians. Nosek and colleagues (Nosek et al., 2007) summarized approximately six years’ worth of data collected at Project Implicit web sites (see https://implicit.harvard.edu/). The aggregated datasets included more than 2.5 million IATs and self-reported attitude assessments acr