This project sought to understand when ideology is relevant (or not) predicting contact avoidance of ‘others’ during the COVID-19 pandemic. Right-leaning ideologies (political conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation) were not expected predict greater per se, but rather exhibit selective outgroup (vs. ingroup) members. White British participated in one exploratory...

Why do people vary in their views of human nature and their visions of the good society? Why do many people categorize themselves as “liberal,” “conservative,” “libertarian,” “socialist,” and so on? Some researchers try to answer these questions by starting with people’s self-identifications and then moving “down,” examining traits (such as openness to experience) that underlie and predict endo...

Previous research has highlighted how ideological factors such as political self-identification, religiosity and conspiracy thinking influence our beliefs about scientific issues climate change vaccination. Across three studies (combined N = 9,022) we expand on this line of inquiry to show for the first time that attitudes relating authoritarianism group-based dominance predict disagreement wit...

An individual’s words often reveal their political ideology. Existing automated techniques to identify ideology from text focus on bags of words or wordlists, ignoring syntax. Taking inspiration from recent work in sentiment analysis that successfully models the compositional aspect of language, we apply a recursive neural network (RNN) framework to the task of identifying the political positio...

The role of ideology in the study of political behavior has a long and distinguished history. * Whether writing in the 1940s, the 2000s, or eras in between, political scientists have examined the assumption that the ideological commitments of the masses and elites alike help explain the political choices they make—from their willingness to support particular public policies to the votes they ca...

Abstract Political conservatives' opposition to COVID-19 restrictions is puzzling given the well-documented links between conservatism and conformity, threat sensitivity, pathogen aversion. We propose a resolution based on Dual Foundations Theory of ideology, which holds that ideology comprises two dimensions, one reflecting trade-offs threat-driven conformity individualism, another empathy-dri...

Our research investigated whether promotion concerns with advancement and prevention concerns with security related to moral beliefs and political ideology. Study 1 found that chronic prevention and promotion focus had opposite relations to binding foundation endorsement (as measured by the Moral Foundations Questionnaire), that is, positive for prevention and negative for promotion, and opposi...

Political ideologies summarize dimensions of life that define how a person organizes their public and private behavior, including their attitudes associated with sex, family, education, and personal autonomy. Despite the abstract nature of such sensibilities, fundamental features of political ideology have been found to be deeply connected to basic biological mechanisms that may serve to defend...

Almost 40 years ago, evidence from large studies of adult twins and their relatives suggested that between 30 and 60% of the variance in social and political attitudes could be explained by genetic influences. However, these findings have not been widely accepted or incorporated into the dominant paradigms that explain the etiology of political ideology. This has been attributed in part to meas...