ABSTRACT. Disgust is a core emotion that is deemed to have evolved primary to prevent our contact with pathogens. Recent theories and evidence suggest that social disgust plays a role in socially conservative attitudes (e.g., opposing to gay marriage) and that disgust sensitivity relates to social conservatism in general. Body odors are potent triggers of disgust and regulate social behaviors in many species. In fact, olfaction has a prominent role in preventing the contact with pathogens. However, the relationship between body odor disgust sensitivity and social conservatism has been scarcely investigated. In two studies, we investigated whether body odor disgust would predict social conservatism. We used a new instrument, the Body Odor Disgust Scale (BODS) to test if disgust sensitivity to body odors (e.g., sweat) is a better predictor of holding socially conservative attitudes, measured by the Right-wing Authoritarianism Scale (RWA). Results show that body odor disgust sensitivity explained more variance in authoritarianism than did the two most commonly used measures of general disgust sensitivity. Furthermore, the relationship between general disgust sensitivity and authoritarianism was fully mediated by body odor disgust. Body odor perception is a primitive sensory system that supports pathogen detection as well as social regulation in mammals, and research on body odor disgust might provide key insights into the emotional foundations of social behavior and attitudes.

ABSTRACT. Building off of recent theoretical accounts, we explore the possibility that authoritarianism in an individual develops in response to the perception that one is less capable of individual learning and should instead focus on following the examples set by others. We predicted that the belief that one is less capable of independently navigating the world would lead to higher levels of authoritarianism, independent of actual ability. We demonstrate this in four large (Ns > 300) samples. In the first, we found that self-reported self-efficacy (a component of Conscientiousness) is negatively associated with authoritarianism after controlling for the remainder of Conscientiousness. In the second, we found that self-reported personal capabilities predicted lower authoritarianism even after controlling for peer reports of the individual’s capabilities. In the third, we found that self-reported intelligence (negatively) predicted authoritarianism even after controlling for performance on an intelligence test. In the fourth, we used a quasi-experiment in which participants completed an authoritarianism measure in a neutral condition and then again two months later immediately following their completion of a major exam that provided immediate grading. Participants who reported that they had decreased doubts about their capabilities as a result of their exam performance exhibited a decline in authoritarianism between the two assessments.

ABSTRACT. Throughout the history of research on Right-Wing Authoritarianism, motivated cognition and experienced threat have been considered as basic sources of Right-Wing Authoritarianism. Yet, the interplay of these antecedents has hardly been investigated. In order to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the development of authoritarian attitudes, the present study examined the cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between dispositional Need for Closure (NFC), external threat, and their interaction on Right-Wing Authoritarianism in a representative sample in the Netherlands (N = 588). The results showed cross-sectional as well as a longitudinal interaction effects. In particular, whereas high levels of NFC predicted substantial increases in RWA when threat was relatively low, in the face of threat, even those low in NFC adopted authoritarian attitudes to the same level as their high NFC counterparts.

ABSTRACT. Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), one of the strongest predictors of prejudice, has been conceptualized as a one-dimensional construct, subsuming the three facets of authoritarian aggression, authoritarian submission, and conventionalism. However, recent developments in research, like Authoritarian Dynamic Theory or the Authoritarianism-Conservatism-Traditionalism Model, focus on the theoretical and empirical differentiation between the three sub-dimensions, showing differential correlations with various social attitudes. In order to establish this differentiation in research, it is important to develop a short measure for authoritarianism, which also differentiates the three sub-dimensions empirically. We present a newly-developed authoritarianism scale with nine items, which differentiates the three sub-dimensions with three items each. In two heterogeneous samples (total N = 451) factor analyses confirmed the expected hierarchical factor structure. The scale also showed different correlations of the three sub-dimensions with conservatism, religiosity, values, personality, and prejudices. In an experimental study (N = 207), we showed that, in line with authoritarian dynamic theory, authoritarian submission, but not authoritarian aggression, moderates the effect of social threat on prejudice. The theoretical and empirical benefits of the differentiation of the sub-dimensions and its applicability in various research settings, including survey research, will be discussed.

ABSTRACT. Forced migration occurs for many reasons such as ethnic conflict and political violence and people, who are forced to leave their places of residence, migrate either within the country or abroad. The place of resettlement is also the place where refugees carry their political struggles. It is observed that the sphere of political struggle is reproduced and reconstructed within the diasporas. The transfer and reconstruction of political thoughts, and therefore political activities, to the place of resettlement may have many effects at different levels and directions to the host country, migrants and migration groups.

The purpose of this study is to analyze how the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and acculturation processes of forced migrants are affected by their political engagement in the context of forced migration. The population represents Kurdish migrants who had forcibly migrated to France (Paris) after 1991. Qualitative researches methods were used for collecting data and for analyzing the collected data content analysis was used.

According to the results, political groups play important roles for Kurdish forced migrants at the beginning of their arrival. Political group is a protective factor for migrants’ social and economic welfare, also for their mental health especially for the new comers. in the long run, due to the group dynamics, it turns out to be a retarding factor for the treatment of PSTD symptoms and is becoming a negative factor for migrants’ acculturation process. also engagement into a political group has different impact on women and men.

ABSTRACT. The present study investigated the role of authoritarianism in the association between the actual proportion of ethnic minorities (objective diversity) within a neighborhood and majority members’ subjective perception thereof (perceived diversity). Additionally, we tested how authoritarianism affects the direct and indirect relationships between objective diversity and outgroup threat, anxiety, and mistrust. Analyses in a nationally stratified sample of Dutch citizens (N = 848) without migration background from 706 different neighborhoods showed that higher levels of authoritarianism have a dual effect on the relationship between objective diversity and negativity towards outgroups. In particular, authoritarianism a) boosts the indirect relationship between objective diversity and greater outgroup negativity through perceived diversity, and b) curbs the direct association of objective diversity with reduced outgroup negativity. These findings shed light on how majority members with different levels of authoritarianism differentially perceive diversity in their neighborhood, and how this relates to their affective responses to ethnic minorities.

ABSTRACT. The paper examines attitudes towards immigrants and policy-related proposals in the context of the debate that followed the publication of pictures showing a Syrian child who had drowned while fleeing across the Mediterranean. By relying on a web-based panel study with an embedded survey experiment, we track attitude change in the aftermath of the publication of the controversial pictures. In our between-group experimental design, participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions. They were either shown a picture of the drowned Syrian refugee, a picture of refugees at a train station or no picture. Since the picture of the drowned refugee emphasizes victimhood, we expect that people become more supportive of refugees compared to the other conditions. Moreover, based on research on motivated reasoning, we predict that prior attitudes towards refugees moderate the treatment effects, which ultimately produces a polarization effect. That is, for individuals preferring fewer refugees, pictures of refugees should reinforce this belief whereas individuals preferring more refugees should become more supportive in their attitudes. We also examine if our predicted main effect and interaction effect are mediated by emotions. The experiment was conducted with 2395 Swedish participants between September 4 and September 14, 2015, with pre-treatment attitudes measured in May 2015.

ABSTRACT. People born into wealthy nations benefit from superior life chances and greater international freedom of movement than those from poorer developing countries. Previous research has shown that people’s confrontation with their groups unearned privileged position can have a negative relationship with their attitudes towards a disadvantaged outgroup if they strongly identify with their advantaged group. We furthered this premise by examining if their perceived or desired homogeneity of their ingroup also impacts on this relationship. Hence, this study examined the relationship between people’s perception of their privileged position within the global structure and their attitude towards immigration and redressing global inequality. We carried out a survey with 369 participants in Ireland and found a significant three-way interaction between national identity, multiculturalism and perceived privilege in relation to attitudes towards immigration. But this interaction was nonsignificant for attitudes towards redressing global inequality where perceived privilege displayed a consistent direct positive relationship and appeared to not be influenced by participant’s scores of national identity and multiculturalism. Conversely, when the interaction in relation to attitudes towards immigration was probed, it was apparent that perceived privilege only displayed a positive relationship with attitudes towards immigration when participants also scored high on national identity and multiculturalism. However, this positive relation between perceived privilege and attitudes towards immigration diminished as strong national identifiers support for multiculturalism decreased until the relationship becomes negative.

ABSTRACT. The continiously decreasing numbers of voter turnout and party membership rates, accompanied with the recent, global upsurge of protests are often seen as a confirmation that protesting has become a more conventional substitute to electoral politics. Prominent theories like the post-democracy, modernization, and market for political activism thesis argue that these processes in the non-electoral and electoral field are directly related to each other. The main hypothesis derived from these theories is that people who are active in movement/protest politics are not active in electoral/party politics. Although convincing, the empirical evidence for such a direct negative relationship is far from conclusive. Variety exists both in the direction and size of the effect over time, across groups, countries, and continents. Moreover, whereas these theories include an important time-perspective, hitherto, most empirical studies seem to neglect that the relationship between engagement in movement and party politics may change over time. In this study, we examine and theorize about the relationship between engagement in party politics and movement politics. Using a variety of cross-national datasets (ESS, EVS, WVS, ISSP, AfroBarometer, Asian Barometer, CSES, and CID), we provide a comprehensive overview of the levels of participation in almost all countries in the world and test potential explanations at the individual and the contextual-level that could explain why involvement in movement and party politics are related differently across groups, across countries, and over time.

ABSTRACT. The world is currently witnessing an unprecedented wave of mass protests, such as in India against sexual violence or against police violence in the USA. However diverse the reasons behind these protests, they seem to reflect deep seated societal cleavages. In this talk we focus on the cultural origins of such cleavages, and how they explain support for societal protest versus support for its repression. Traditionally, protests are studied by focusing on disadvantaged groups’ motivators to engage collective action to address suppression, such as group identification, group-based emotions and efficacy. Relatively few studies have focused on what motivates the repression of protests by ‘dominant’ groups. We propose that the same determinants may play a role. But going beyond these proximal predictors, the main focus of the present research is on the distal predictors: Can we identify the cultural origins of societal cleavages that determine why some endorse repression while others support protest? What are the origins of people’s political identities and emotions they experience, in turn propelling them to take two very different forms of action? The present study, conducted in the context of the Gezi park protests in Turkey, seeks to answer these questions. It provides initial support for our idea that differences in values within cultures (Community Collectivism Scale; Akkus, Postmes, & Stroebe, 2015) can explain such cultural cleavages and predict motivators of suppression/repression. We discuss how our findings may be exemplary for conflicts elsewhere, such as the Tea Party movement, or demonstrations for women’s rights in India.

ABSTRACT. In the last decades of the twentieth century, Western democracies generally controlled street demonstrations by ‘negotiated management’, a policing style that protects the right to protest. Following the 1999 ‘Battle of Seattle’ and other transnational protests, Western police forces developed a more repressive protest policing style called ‘strategic incapacitation’, which seeks to securitize society. While scholars initially considered strategic incapacitation to be reserved for transnational protests, some now argue that it has diffused to national protests that pose a threat to the establishment and/or police forces. However, research on this diffusion premise is rare, and while it is consistently supported in the United States, it is not in Europe. This paper seeks to provide more insight into the police’s use of strategic incapacitation to manage national European protests. To do so, we assessed protest organizers’ and researchers’ direct observations of strategic incapacitation tactics at 78 national European protests (2009-13), which were categorized as non-threatening, somewhat threatening, or threatening to the establishment and/or police forces. Our results showed that the more a protest was considered threatening, the more the police used strategic incapacitation tactics to manage it. Nevertheless, threatening protests rarely witnessed the most aggressive tactics of this policing style (e.g. use of less-lethal weapons). So, we concluded that, in the countries and years under study, the diffusion of transnational protest policing to national protests was limited.

ABSTRACT. A large literature has demonstrated that attitudes towards social welfare are characterized by a clear outgroup bias so that immigrant outgroup members are perceived as less deserving than white ingroup members. However, recent research in political psychology also support that attitudes towards social welfare are regulated by a deservingness heuristic such that support for social welfare depends to a large extent on whether people perceive social welfare recipients as lazy individuals or as individuals who have been victims of bad circumstances beyond their control. In this paper, we bring together the literatures on outgroup bias and the deservingness heuristic to advance our understanding of the psychological structures that regulate support for social welfare. Specifically we argue that clear cues about target recipients’ effort diminish outgroup bias in attitudes towards social welfare. We investigate this prediction in a unique survey experiment fielded to an approximately nationally representative sample of Danish citizens. In the experiment subjects are exposed to a highly realistic television news story maximizing ecological validity in the research design. In the television news story we vary experimentally whether the social welfare recipient, who is being interviewed, is an immigrant or a white ingroup member. Likewise, we vary whether positive, negative or no effort cues are provided about the target welfare recipient. The findings provide an important contribution to our understanding of under which circumstances outgroup bias in social welfare attitudes can be switched off.

ABSTRACT. With the rise of the Internet, printed newspapers gradually make way for digital news. It has been suggested that people read online news differently than offline news. Scholars claim that news website are suitable for rapid and shallow reading, while printed newspapers are best suitable for effortful learning. So far, there are no studies available in political communication research that examined why people learn more from printed than from online news, by investigating the way in which they read news. This research fills this void by examines to what extent modality of news (i.e., whether news is presented in a printed newspaper, in a e-newspaper on a tablet or news website) affects visual attention to news, and subsequently, recall of news. Data for this study was collected using a laboratory experiment with eye tracking. Results show that reading news in a printed newspaper, leads to more news learning than reading news on a website. This might partly be explained by the fact that citizens, who read news on a website, read less articles. But if they do read those articles, they read these specific articles for a longer period of time. This has then a positive effect on recall of information. Taken together, this study is one of the first that deploys eye-tracking data in a research on the learning effects of news media. It is crucial to understand these implications of the digitalizing news environment for citizens, especially because less people read newspapers and online news is rapidly growing.

ABSTRACT. Over the last decade, political scientists and communication researchers have provided ample evidence that media framing and elite communications strongly influence how ordinary citizens think and talk about political issues. Yet there has been surprisingly little systematic research into the factors that make particular frames strong – i.e., influence why some frames are strongly transmitted in public debate while others perish over time? Based on theories from the cognitive sciences, we outline a model for understanding the transmission of political frames that focus on the fit between the psychological input conditions of evolved cognitive systems and frames available in political communication. We make the key prediction that political frames that fit cognitive systems are more easily copied and transmitted than frames lacking fit. Focusing on the case of transmission of episodic and thematic frames, we test this prediction in a unique research design implementing the kids game ‘Broken Telephone’ in three consecutive experimental online surveys fielded to nationally representative samples. This design allows us to investigate which frames that are reliably encoded and transmitted by observing actual chains of transmission.

ABSTRACT. Visuals in communicating texts can have a strong influence on how the information is processed and perceived. Focusing on religious visual cues, we argue that these cues will affect both religious in-group and out-group members, but that the effect depends on subjects’ characteristics. We rely on two original experimental studies: a systematic sample of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands and a representative sample of Dutch adults. Both samples were assigned to read a message delivered by a Muslim. The textual information as well as the photo of the message source were held constant across conditions, while we experimentally manipulated the background behind the source to include a subtle visual cue related to Islam or to the host society. The results show a consistent pattern, with within the Muslim sample, the highly religious Muslims evaluated the message with the religious similarity cue more positive than an identical message without the cue, while among the Dutch, those expressing low comfort with Muslims were more critical of the message with the religious cue. These findings extend the boundary conditions in which similarity cues enhance message by showing that subtle visual cues in a message where visually depicted source as well as textual information is identical can (a) exert important effects on how audiences evaluate the message, (b) in the context of potentially controversial sociopolitical issues, (c) and as related to religion rather than the oft-studied similarity based on race.

ABSTRACT. Evaluations of current political authorities are based on general ideas about how the political system ought to function (what principles it should be based on) and on the actual functioning of the current institutions. These two types of evaluation can be used by citizens to assess legitimacy of political authorities. This study investigates the relation between specific evaluations, general ideas, and perceived legitimacy in five countries representing different political regimes (two old democracies—Netherlands and France, a new post-communist democracy—Poland, and two post-Soviet hybrid regimes—Ukraine and Russia). The data was collected from students in 2014 using pen-and-paper and online questionnaires (all Ns > 300). In all five countries the specific views explained perceived legitimacy better and were similar across cases. The main differences concerned the significant general predictors. Specifically, in hybrid regimes there was an effect of viewing democracy as the best system on perceived legitimacy whereas this predictor was not significant in democracies. Also, perceived legitimacy of institutions in Russia was predicted by more general ideas, indicating that there was less consensus about what principles the regimes should be based on. The results show that in established democracies the perceptions of how well the authorities perform vary and the perceptions of distributive and procedural fairness are the main predictors of perceived legitimacy. In hybrid regimes, different ideals about how the political system ought to function are of bigger importance for legitimacy than in democracies.

ABSTRACT. Does exposure to opposing views affect trust? In this article, we set up a minimal group experimental design where opinion diversity within the group and group members’ value congruence are manipulated. The results indicate that exposure to group members’ opinions can affect individuals’ trusting attitudes even in this limited-interaction framework, but that opinion certainty and in-group trust play an important mediating role. In particular, when exposed to opposing views, participants report being more certain about their own opinion (consistent with the so-called ‘backfire’ effect) and display a decrease in generalized trust. When confronted with similar views, participants report relatively lower levels of opinion certainty, and no change in generalized trust. Finally, when exposed to heterogeneous opinions, individuals display an increase in generalized trust only when they report high in-group trust. Thus attitudinal social network composition particularly influences individual-level attitudes when at least some group members’ viewpoints run counter to individuals’ opinion.

ABSTRACT. Media reports on norm violations of specific politicians have repeatedly been discussed to promote a general decline of citizens’ political trust. However, empirical evidence that supports this claim is still scarce. The present research aimed to investigate the impact of media reports on political norm violations on trust in the involved politicians, generalized trust in politicians, and the political system. In four experimental studies, participants read either a bogus newspaper report on a norm violation (norm violation condition) or neutral issue (control condition). Study 1 (N = 430) provided evidence that reading about a sex scandal (compared with the control condition) reduced participants’ perceived integrity, benevolence, and competence of the involved politician. Study 2 (Sample 1: N = 154, Sample 2: N = 114) showed that participants’ also perceived politicians in general and the political system as less trustworthy after they read about a politician’s tax fraud compared with the control condition. Study 3 (N = 140) and Study 4 (N = 122) suggest that the impact of a norm violation on generalized trust in politicians and the political system is mediated by the perceived trustworthy of the involved politician. Practical implications will be discussed.

ABSTRACT. Twenty years after the war, Bosnia and Herzegovina (B-H) has a burden of unstable economy and heavily politicized social identities - the ethnicity above all. Such conditions usually correlate with a sense of mistrust towards foreign factors. We explored the relation between social identifications and trust towards three relevant international institutions: the EU, NATO and the UN. We conducted a survey on a sample of 203 respondents in two largest cities in B-H (Sarajevo and Banja Luka). The sample was gender- and ethnicity-balanced (same number of Bosniaks and Serbs; age range: 18 – 33). To predict the level of the trust we used three sets of variables. The first consisted of measures of group identification with ethnicity, religion and nationality. The second set is made of measures of social inclusiveness, social complexity and social dominance orientation. The third set consisted of demographic variables (gender, age, education level and income). We found two interpretable canonical functions. The first function mostly explains the trust towards civil international institutions (rc = .45), while the second function additionally explains variance of the trust towards NATO, although nonsignificantly (rc = .27). The ethnicity of the respondents has a differential effect on the model structure and correlation magnitudes. Nevertheless, we found that, in both ethnic groups, the trust is best predicted by demographic variables, followed by the social identification variables.

ABSTRACT. Decades of research in political behavior find that most individuals seek political information, learn about politics, and participate in various political activities, not only because they stand to gain or lose much from political outcomes, but also simply because they find politics interesting. How and why do individuals get interested in specific political messages and events? This study investigates the appraisal structure of political interest. Theoretically, I draw on cognitive appraisal theories of interest developed in psychology that suggest that how people think they can cope with the information (“coping potential” or “comprehensibility”) is important for getting them interested in a stimuli (Silvia 2006). Extending this framework I propose that incorporating the role of heuristics in enhancing the coping potential in one’s understanding of politics is the key to understand political interest. While heuristics have been an important topic in studies of political information processing, the attention has not usually extended to discussions of political interest. Implementing a unique survey experiment design, I assess whether heuristics can substitute for individuals’ experience and knowledge in allowing them to cope better with political messages or events, and so find them more interesting.

ABSTRACT. Previous research has found that voters are more likely to hold incumbents accountable for collective economic grievances than for personal economic grievances. Drawing on a large literature in social psychology, I propose that a reason for this is that voters have a self-serving bias in attribution. A bias which subdues the effect of personal economic grievances. This, as the self-serving bias will make voters less inclined to attribute an economic outcomes with positive consequences to their personal economic situation. An asymmetry which should not be present for collective economic grievances, which voters do not have a meaningful role in shaping. This proposition is explored in two ways. First, using data from a set of voter surveys, I show that voters who feel their personal economic situation have gotten worse are more likely to think that the government can influence their personal economic situation than voters who feel their personal economic situation has gotten better. Second, I leverage a set of survey experiments conducted with a nationally representative sample, in which I ask respondents to rate the degree to which the government would be responsible for a set of hypothetical events. I find that respondents were less likely to think the government was responsible for the event if the statement implied a gain and that this gain was for the respondents themselves.

ABSTRACT. When it comes to socially sensitive issues, self-report survey measures face notorious problems of validity. In some cases, respondents are hesitant to report what it is they truly think; in others, respondents may simply be unaware of their latent attitudes. Implicit measures—those outside the conscious control of respondents—allow a fuller picture of respondents’ attitudes toward difficult issues. Support for populist parties—in particular those on the extreme ends of the political spectrum—is a prime candidate for such measurement, precisely because of the potentially controversial nature of expressing public support for such parties. We explore this issue, comparing explicit and implicit measures of right-wing populist party support, and in particular the question of when voters’ implicit and explicit attitudes toward these parties align. We use a representative sample of Dutch voters, assessing their self-reported and implicit attitudes toward the Dutch right-wing populist party, the PVV. In particular, we explore the role of political ideology, political involvement, and anti-immigrant attitudes (as key drivers of right-wing populist support) in determining when and for whom there is more implicit-explicit attitudinal consistency. The results confirm that implicit measurement offers important additional explanatory power in models of right-wing populist support, particularly for right-leaning, more ideologically extreme, and more politically involved voters.

ABSTRACT. The founding principle of democracy is that it can promote prosperity and social harmony by giving the people what they want. Notably, what people want comprises not just what they say they want, but also implicit motivational wants that people are themselves unaware of. These implicit motives are non-conscious tendencies to experience particular incentives as rewarding and operate as important predictors of what people will ultimately enjoy. The implicit affiliation motive, for example, relates to a preference for social harmony, whereas the implicit achievement motive is more related to a preference for prosperity. Here, we examine whether the democratic process takes these implicit motives into account. Four studies indicated that the answer to this question is yes, as people are more likely to positively evaluate, agree with and vote for politicians intent on fulfilling motivational wants that match people’s implicit motives. Explicitly measured motives, conversely, did not predict these outcomes. These results indicate that what people want on an implicit level affects the democratic process through the evaluation and selection of politicians and policies intent on giving the people what they ultimately want, even when they don’t know they want it.

ABSTRACT. Many people have strong attitudes about whether certain objects (e.g., drugs) or services (e.g., sex) should be traded on a legal market. A taboo on trade in a good (e.g., kidneys) can result in the absence of a legal and regulated market. However, illegal (black) markets are associated with violence, exploitation, and scarcity. Economists have argued that societies might strive for legal markets where possible. This paper presents three studies involving samples of USA residents that aimed to show that current theories of moral psychology provide insufficient explanation of taboos on trade in organs (kidneys, blood), sex (prostitution), and recreational drugs (marijuana, cocaine). Study 1 showed that in the sampled population there are trade taboos for these goods and that these taboos are only partially explained by considerations of harm. Beliefs about suffering caused by the trade accounted for variation in condemning trade, but attributed suffering might reflect a post hoc justification. Study 2 showed that variables highlighted by current theories of taboo and folk economic beliefs insufficiently explained the trade taboos. Moral values, political ideology, education, economics education, financial situation, and sexual attitudes only accounted for moderate variation in trade taboos. Study 3 showed that perceived attitudes of friends explained substantial variation in trade taboos. Individuals who believed their friends would condemn trade tended to condemn such trade. The findings suggest that further research should involve rigorous studies to unravel how processes of conformity are involved in maintaining trade taboos.

ABSTRACT. We investigated why liberals and conservatives tend to differ in their endorsement of belief in free will. After showing that conservative ideology was associated that increased free will belief (Studies 1-2), we tested the hypothesis that conservatives report stronger belief in free will than do liberals because conservatives have a broader view of what is morally wrong (and thus a broader need to assign blame). Consistent with predictions, we found that conservatives attribute greater free will to agents for bringing about negative (and hence potentially blameworthy) events than do liberals (Studies 3). For events on which conservatives and liberals do not differ in moral judgments, they also fail to differ in their free will attributions (Study 4), and when political liberals (rather than conservatives) judge an action as more wrong, they also show a (weaker) tendency to attribute more free will (Study 5). Finally, we found that ratings of wrongness for actions mediated the effect of political conservatism on free will beliefs (Study 6). Rather than reflecting a generalized, abstract belief in free will that is greater than that of liberals, conservatives’ greater free will beliefs can be better explained through their tendency to moralize more events, resulting in a greater motivation to believe in free will and (thus) blameworthiness and personal accountability.

ABSTRACT. Trolley-type moral dilemmas pitch utilitarian (outcome-based) moral concerns versus deontological (principle-based) moral concerns. Recent research has indicated that participants’ responses to these dilemmas are impacted by group norms and are subject to conformity under social pressure (Kundu & Cummins, 2013). However, are subjects more likely to conform to deontological or utilitarian group pressure? Trolley dilemmas require subjects to judge whether a certain beneficial outcome is worth committing to a specific a deontological moral violation. As such, utilitarian judgment requires one to overcome a prepotent negative emotional response towards the moral violation (Greene, 2007). We hypothesized that deontological social pressure would strengthen this negative emotional response and thus lead to a decreased amount of utilitarian judgments. Furthermore, we expected this effect to be asymmetric, i.e. that utilitarian social pressure would not subdue the negative emotional response and therefor would not lead to an increase in utilitarian judgment. These hypotheses were verified in a first study. A second study was aimed at replicating these results while also testing whether individual differences in moral judgment can be explained through differential appreciation of the Schwartz ‘Conformism’-value. These results are discussed in light of the moral psychology literature.

ABSTRACT. International crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes are by definition manifestations of collective violence committed in a very particular political, ideological and institutional context in which a large number of people are involved as perpetrators. Amongst them many law-abiding citizens who have been transformed into perpetrators of international crimes. Not all perpetrators are the same though: they differ in the role they play, the amount of power they have and their motives. Some perpetrators are powerful political leaders who initiate the crimes; others organize the violence and execute the repressive and violent policies developed by the political leaders while still others physically execute the orders and maim, kill or rape other people with their own hands. Perpetrators differ in their motives too. Some are driven by an ideology, others by self-interest or fear. In order to get a better understanding of the micro-dynamics of mass atrocities I have developed a typology of perpetrators based on the abovementioned parameters and have distinguished ten different types of perpetrators: (1) the criminal mastermind; (2) the careerist; (3) the profiteer; (4) the fanatic; (5) the devoted warrior; (6) the professional; (7) the criminal; (8) The sadist and mentally disturbed; (9) the follower; and (10) the compromised perpetrator. In this paper I will show how ordinary people can transform into perpetrators of international crimes and describe the various types of perpetrators involved.

ABSTRACT. The ever-expanding literature on the effect of contextual ethnic diversity on generalized social trust has overwhelmingly focused on the neighborhood. In doing so, the literature has largely overlooked other social contexts in which individuals may be exposed to people of other ethnic background on a regular basis. In this paper we focus on one of these neglected contexts, namely the workplace. In the workplace individuals are consistently and, compared to many other social settings, less voluntarily exposed to people of different ethnic background, which makes it a highly fruitful setting for examining various theories of the role of contextual exposure to ethnic diversity on social trust. We analyze the effect of workplace diversity on trust by merging the five first rounds of the European Social Survey to elaborate register-data on workplaces (specific branches) in Denmark. Consistent with theories positing negative effects of interethnic exposure, we find a negative effect of ethnic diversity in the workplace on trust. Furthermore, this effect holds up in a number of robustness checks.

ABSTRACT. Drawing upon a novel theoretical framework, Social Identity Complexity (SIC; Roccas & Brewer, 2002), we examine how national, ethnic and religious ingroup memberships are subjectively represented among majority Albanians (N=105) and minority Serbs (N=86) in Kosovo. Prior research in SIC has mostly focused on existing identities. This study focuses on complexity while a new national (Kosovar) identity is being developed and assesses its correlates in intergroup outcomes. Our findings show that social identity in Kosovo is relatively low in complexity and made up of sub-identities (e.g., ethnic Albanian, Muslim; ethnic Serb, Orthodox) that have a high degree of overlap. Results on intergroup outcomes show that there is minimal inter-group contact, and that both groups are similarly negative towards the outgroup and similarly distant from one-another. Moreover, for both groups, lower complexity relates to more ingroup bias and less openness towards the outgroup. Findings are discussed in terms of current socio-political challenges and opportunities for these intergroup relations.

ABSTRACT. In societies across the globe, conflict arises and is maintained often due to competing identities. These identities can be based upon a variety of social categories such as nationality, race, gender, social class and occupation. Much of the psychological research on identity is based on the premise of social identity theory, which posits that we tend to divide our world into social categories and define ourselves in terms of the group we feel we belong to. In order to promote psychological distinctiveness, groups compare themselves to others through social comparison processes; often resulting in-group love, out-group derogation. At the same time, intergroup contact and shifts in identity patterns can help to promote peace. As a result, identity is a vital consideration in any attempt to understand and improve intergroup relations.

This paper will situate the importance of a social identity approach to understanding conflict and peace. In doing so, it will consider contemporary issues such as the meaning of space and place, the use of symbols, health and climate change. It will draw on a variety of contexts from across the globe and offer rationale for why social identity theory is one of the most important theories for political psychology.

ABSTRACT. Political framing can be defined as the process in which modes of message presentation shape public opinion. Although modes of presentation can be verbal and nonverbal, the focus of political framing research has been predominantly on verbal (message) framing. As a result, literature is comprehensive on how differences in wording can affect the persuasiveness of a political speech. However, less is known about the effects of nonverbal framing; a speaker’s strategic adjustment of nonverbal behavior such as tone of voice, posture and facial expression. Based on psychological theories and political examples, we formulated the hypothesis that nonverbal framing interacts with verbal framing as such that a political speech with a “masculine” message (i.e., advocating gun ownership) is more convincing when delivered in a feminine way (i.e., sensitive tone, moderate voice, relaxed posture, and friendly facial expression) than when delivered in a masculine way (i.e., authoritative tone, loud voice, tense posture, and stern facial expression). We tested this predicted incongruence effect with a remote experiment. Participants of the experiment were 669 males and 267 females enrolled in a free Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) from Delft University (100+ nationalities). Participants were presented with one of four 40-second videos, showing a male or female actor delivering a pro-gun ownership speech either in a masculine or feminine nonverbal frame. The hypothesized incongruence effect was only confirmed for the male speaker. The female speaker delivered a more convincing speech when displaying masculine nonverbal behavior than when displaying feminine nonverbal behavior.

ABSTRACT. Framing refers to a communicator's presentation of a political issue and is widely seen as an effective way for elites to influence citizens' opinions and behavior. The attractiveness of framing as a political strategy stems from the perception that it is relatively easy to focus people's attention on an aspect of the issue, beneficial to the communicator. We present three studies that question the power of framing to shape public opinion. Existing studies confound framing with the provision of new information and argumentation. Our novel experimental design allows us—for the first time—to disentangle the separate effects of framing and information. Despite adjusting the design of each of our experiments in favor of the framing hypothesis, we find strong and consistent effects of information on opinions, but we find no effects of framing. These results have serious normative and practical implications for understanding elite influence on public opinion.

ABSTRACT. A powerful news image or a memorable quote can help to define, or frame, an issue in the mind of a viewer. Research has begun to clarify the combined impact of such visual and textual media on political opinions and behaviours, however the mechanisms and boundary conditions of these effects remain unclear. To address this issue we used an experiment to present news reports comprising visual and textual exemplars of counter-frames from war and conflict news in congruent and incongruent pairs. Whilst doing so we introduced cognitive load or induced cognitive involvement to encourage participants to adopt a heuristic or systematic processing style, respectively. Results showed that the behavioural intentions of participants in the heuristic processing (load) condition were influenced strongly by the image frame, regardless of the paired text. In contrast, participants in the systematic (involvement) condition expressed opinions in line with the framed text, irrespective of the accompanying image. These were both significantly different from a control condition with no processing-style manipulation. These findings shed light on the mechanisms of multimodal framing theory by showing that the effects of images and text occur via qualitatively different processing routes. They also show that citizens who are comparatively more distracted or motivated when reading news will be influenced by different parts of a multimodal report.

ABSTRACT. In the current research we add to the literature on media and prejudice by examining the causal link between exposure to threats in news content and prejudice toward ethnic minorities. The approach is two-fold. We examine a) by means of a content analysis, the prevalence of threat frames in the Belgian television news over an eleven-year period toward multiple ethnic minorities, and b) take an experimental approach to examine the impact of (combinations of) these threat frames in the news on prejudice toward the most negatively depicted minority group, namely North Africans. Results from the content analysis show that intergroup threat frames present very common ingredients in television news content on ethnic groups. Realistic threats are most prevalent, driven by its criminal component, but symbolic threats are common too. Moreover, realistic and symbolic threats often occur simultaneously in news content. Furthermore, evidence suggests that North Africans are more strongly associated with both multiple intergroup threats and the affective components of prejudice than any other minority group. Very preliminary results of the experiment show that exposure to threat in the news appears to induce threat perceptions.

ABSTRACT. Political misperceptions, which are characterized as inaccurate beliefs about politics, are increasingly prevalent in society and plague electoral campaigns as well as a wide range of political issues. More troubling, evidence suggests misperceptions are not innocuous beliefs but rather have important consequences for political behavior. Scholars have recently begun to explore why citizens are misinformed and most extant research uses partisan-based information processing explanations, such as partisan motivated reasoning, to examine this phenomenon. In the current study, I argue that using party affiliations as the primary explanatory factor is limited in helping to understand why or how citizens are misinformed and instead make the case for discrete emotions as an alternative mechanism driving false beliefs about politics. Using nationally representative panel survey data (N = 1,004) collected over three waves during the 2012 U.S. presidential election, I show that citizens who express anger toward Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are more likely to develop misperceptions about those candidates, regardless of their party affiliation. Further, misperceptions that develop over the course of the campaign are attributable to anger but not partisanship. Anxiety, however, had little influence on belief accuracy, providing further evidence that these two negative emotions have unique effects on political beliefs. The data challenge the notion that misperceptions are driven solely by party affiliation and instead suggest that anger may be more influential in shaping inaccurate political beliefs.

ABSTRACT. Recent theory and empirical observations suggest that emotions influence both opinions on individual political issues (e.g., immigration policy, gay marriage) and broader ideological orientation (i.e., conservatism). Disgust, specifically, has been implicated as a key emotion relevant to understanding ideology. Here, I review the evidence that different dimensions of ideology relate to disgust sensitivity. Further, I explain how disgust is not a unitary emotion, but rather operates across pathogen, sexual, and moral domains, and that the relationship between ideology and disgust could covary with none, some, or all of these disgust domains. Finally, I present data from three large samples indicating that ideology only relates uniquely to sexual disgust sensitivity, rather than pathogen or moral disgust sensitivity. These results suggest that the relationship between disgust and ideology reflects sexual attitudes rather than concerns regarding infectious disease or cooperation.

ABSTRACT. In various Western European countries, politicians have claimed that, as a consequence of the growing cultural and religious diversification of these societies, native majority members no longer feel at home in their country and increasingly long for the good old days of when it was “just us”. This research examines the consequences of this group-based nostalgia for the nation (i.e., national nostalgia) for current group dynamics. Specifically, I propose that national nostalgia is likely to have positive consequences for the national in-group but negative consequences for the evaluation of immigrant out-groups. The theoretical reason is that national nostalgia is likely to foster processes of social categorization between the old “us” that share a past and a new “them” who are not part of this past. This means that while national nostalgia is likely to provide a sense of attachment to national in-group members, it may mark group boundaries and hamper positive intergroup relations. Social psychological research on nostalgia has mainly considered this emotion at the individual rather than the group level, leaving open the question how group-based nostalgia affects group dynamics. My research aims to provide more insights into how and why national nostalgia affects both intragroup and intergroup processes. I will present several experimental and survey studies on this topic, which were conducted among various samples of the native Dutch population

ABSTRACT. When citizens choose for whom to vote, they may base their decision either on rational considerations or on emotional responses. This paper explores whether in electoral research this dichotomy is useful or misleading by comparing two simple decision rules that voters may use. The cognitive heuristic posits that voters choose on the basis of perceived ideological proximity. The second heuristic entails that voters choose by comparing their affective responses towards the candidates or parties (likeability). Survey-based analyses of eight American presidential elections and five Dutch parliamentary elections indicate that rationality and emotionality are usually not antagonists: most votes were in line with both decision rules. If rational considerations and emotional responses diverged, however, voters more often chose in line with likeability than with ideology. The chance of rational/emotional incongruity depended on the direction and strength of party identification, whereas the chance of a rational vote depended primarily on the perceptions and feelings concerning both candidates. Effects of demographic characteristics and political sophistication were negligible.

ABSTRACT. Negative campaigning is a widespread practice worldwide. According to conventional wisdom voters dislike negative campaigning and are turned off by it, i.e. it would make voters cynical about politics and even stimulate voter withdrawal from the political process. The empirical findings on the effects of negative campaigning on voters’ attitudes towards politics are inconclusive. In addition, most work focuses on a two-party context making many of the insights and expectations about negative campaigning potentially biased and non-generalizable.

This study examines to what extent and in what ways negative campaigning affects voters’ attitudes towards politicians, political system and politics in general in the 2015 General Election Campaign in Britain. It uses data from the ‘rolling thunder’ wave of the 2015 British Election Study Internet Panel, collected during the last month of the election campaign.

This study contributes to the field of negative campaigning in three ways. First, this study is one of a handful studies studying the effect of negative campaigning on voters’ feelings of internal, external efficacy and satisfaction with democracy in a non-U.S. context. Second, this study is the first within-state comparative study in Europe, contrasting the three countries of Great Britain --England, Scotland and Wales-- each with its own distinctive multi-party system. Finally, the panel character of the data and the large sample size (N in excess of 20,000) allow for more extensive and more refined controls to ameliorate endogeneity concerns. A novel operationalisation of negative campaigning, further strengthens the foundation of causal inferences.

ABSTRACT. This paper analyses how framing political messages affected voting preferences in the UK general election in May 2015. Based on an online experiment and a follow-up survey, the study tested whether a particular type of negative campaigning against the Scottish National Party (SNP) was either beneficial or detrimental for the main Westminster parties. Results show that the strategy to attack the SNP actually reduced the support for the Labour party, while it did not substantially change the support for the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. This effect is significant especially among voters with a strong Scottish identity after controlling for party identification, thus indicating an interaction between identity and framing effects. The results of the study contribute to our understanding of how voters react to different framing of political messages in real electoral contexts.

ABSTRACT. Political psychology all too often aims to identify factors (related to personality, mental states, or situations) that predict political ideology, party affiliation, and voting behavior. This approach is meaningful to the extent that it is possible to identify general laws involving relationships between these factors and political phenomena. However, ideological content, affiliation, and behavior, can also be assumed to be context-specific and to fluctuate over historical time periods. The presentation will consider this assumption of “politics is a process” rather than a state, and will then consider the empirical implications of this position using a database containing annual frequencies of the 40.000 most frequently occurring words in the American literature from 1800-2000. In accordance with the “politics as process” assumption, it is shown that the meanings of key political concepts such as “democrats” and “republicans” vary over time-periods. Furthermore, using the LIWC developed by Pennebaker and colleagues, it is shown that in different time periods, political concepts are related to different psychological processes. The presentation will close by reflecting on the merits of social process analysis (Dechesne, 2015), using quantitative techniques to analyze societal and psychological processes, for the investigation of political psychological phenomena.