When the Political Right “Feels Right”, or How the Need for Cognitive Closure and Threat-Related Uncertainty Leads Liberals to the Conservative Shift

Abstract

Liberals and conservatives typically differ in their support for immigration even if there has been a recent trend of left-wing voters supporting right-wing immigration policies. We examined if and when liberals with a need for cognitive closure (NCC), or the desire for stable and certain knowledge, can be similar to the right-wing in their attitudes towards immigration. In three studies (Total N = 858) in which the NCC was either measured or experimentally induced, we found that liberals with high NCC endorsed moral norms pertaining to the maintenance of groups and were more likely to have negative attitudes towards immigrants, but this effect only held under primed threat-related uncertainty. No difference was found for conservatives between high or low NCC. This is consistent with the conservative shift hypothesis that argues that both liberals and conservatives can shift towards the right in response to threat. Implications for the conservative shift and the alternative entrenching hypothesis are discussed.