A prevailing theme in White nationalist rhetoric is nostalgia for a time when Whites dominated American culture and had unchallenged status. The present research examines a form of collective nostalgia called racial nostalgia and its association with negative intergroup attitudes and extreme ideologies (White nationalism). In Studies 1 and 2, racial nostalgia was associated with higher racial identity, anti-immigrant attitudes, and White nationalism. Study 2 revealed that racial nostalgia was related to extreme ideologies, in part, through perceptions that immigrants and racial minorities posed realistic/symbolic threats. Study 3 manipulated nostalgia using a writing prompt (“America’s racial past” vs. “games of America’s past”) and an identity prime (prime vs. no prime). Racial nostalgia was higher in the racial prompt versus the games prompt condition, regardless of identity prime. Furthermore, there were significant indirect effects of the nostalgia manipulation on support for anti-immigrant policies and endorsement of White nationalism through increased racial nostalgia and its association with perceived threats. These findings show that racial nostalgia can be a maladaptive form of collective nostalgia linked to a sense of loss and threat, and can make people sympathetic to extreme racial ideologies.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and the COVID-19 pandemic are introducing cultural change in the United States. Past research demonstrates that cultural change can be perceived as threatening when compared to cultural stability. Thus, the change brought upon by the BLM protests and the COVID-19 pandemic may be reducing support for the BLM movement and reducing support for creating a new normal after the pandemic (i.e., creating new social norms). Based on the Cultural Inertia Model, we predicted that highlighting the BLM protests and the COVID-19 pandemic as agents of change would hinder support for each agent of change. We also hypothesized that psychological anchors (i.e., national nostalgia) and psychological propellers (i.e., national prostalgia) would serve as individual difference measures that hinder or facilitate support toward the BLM movement and creating a new normal following the pandemic. Our findings demonstrated that highlighting the BLM protests and the pandemic as agents of change did not cause differences in support for the BLM movement or creating a new normal following the pandemic. However, national nostalgia and prostalgia served as individual difference measures that respectively reduced and facilitated support for the BLM movement and the creation of new social norms following the pandemic.
Political candidates use Spanish-language appeals in efforts to increase their support among Hispanic voters. We argue that candidates, Hispanic or not, can use Spanish to signal closeness to Hispanics and posit that the effectiveness of these appeals is conditional on proficiency. To test this, we run two experiments where participants listen to an audio clip of a hypothetical candidate’s stump speech. We vary the ethnicity of the candidate (Anglo or Hispanic) and the language of the speech (English, non-native Spanish, and native-like Spanish). We find that Hispanic support for the Anglo and Hispanic candidates is higher in the native-like Spanish condition compared with the English-only condition. Relative to the English condition, non-native Spanish does not increase support for the Anglo candidate, but it decreases support for the Hispanic candidate. We find mixed effects for Anglo participants. Our results suggest that candidates can effectively appeal to Hispanic voters using Spanish-language messages.
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