David Abadi, Jan Willem van Prooijen, André Krouwel, Agneta H Fischer
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Previous research has found that populist attitudes and conspiracy mentality - here summarised as anti-establishment attitudes - increase when people feel threatened. Two types of intergroup threat have been distinguished, namely realistic threats (pertaining to socio-economic resources, climate, or health), and symbolic threats (pertaining to cultural values). However, there is no agreement on which types of threat and corresponding appraisals would be most important in predicting anti-establishment attitudes. We hypothesise that it is the threat itself, irrespective of its cause, that predicts anti-establishment attitudes. In the current paper, we conducted new (multilevel) regression analyses on previously collected data from four high-powered studies with multiple time points (Study 1) or collected in multiple nations (Studies 2-4). All studies included a populist attitudes scale, a conspiracy mentality scale, and different types of threat and emotion measures, reflecting both realistic and symbolic threats. Across studies, both realistic and symbolic threats positively predicted anti-establishment attitudes. The results support an emotional appraisal approach to anti-establishment attitudes, which highlights the importance of anxiety and feeling threatened regardless of what type of event elicits the threat.
期刊介绍:
Cognition & Emotion is devoted to the study of emotion, especially to those aspects of emotion related to cognitive processes. The journal aims to bring together work on emotion undertaken by researchers in cognitive, social, clinical, and developmental psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive science. Examples of topics appropriate for the journal include the role of cognitive processes in emotion elicitation, regulation, and expression; the impact of emotion on attention, memory, learning, motivation, judgements, and decisions.