Political diversity in social and personality psychologyInbar, Y.; Lammers, J. General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research -You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain -You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Research in social and personality psychology often bears directly on important political debates. Social-personality psychologists have studied the nature of prejudice and discrimination (Allport, 1954), the origins of ideology (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003), and the intuitive underpinnings of people's moral convictions (Haidt, 2001). Thus, the political beliefs of researchers can have large consequences for research. Critics have argued that social-personality psychologists are overwhelmingly politically liberal (left-wing) and that this lack of diversity leads to ideologically biased selection of research questions, selective interpretation of evidence, and even to discrimination against conservative (right-wing) students and faculty (Haidt, 2011;Redding, 2001;Tetlock, 1994).This issue seems to recur roughly every 10 years-most recently, in a provocative talk given by Jonathan Haidt (2011) at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP; APA Division 8). During his talk, Haidt asked the political conservatives present to raise their hands. In an audience of more than 1,000, only three hands went up. Haidt also described two other attempts he had made to locate conservatives in social psychology: searching the web using the term "conservative social psychologist" and asking 30 social psychologists to name a conservative colleague. Combined, these latter two methods uncovered one conservative social psychologist. Following earlier critics of psychology's liberal bias, Haidt argued that this "statistically impossible lack of diversity" has serious negative consequences, including the unwillingness to consider "taboo" hypotheses and discrimination against politically conservative students. Haidt suggested setting the explicit goal that 10% of SPSP members be political conservatives by 2020. The Political Ideology of Social and Personality PsychologistsWhether one agrees or disagrees with this goal, it is clearly a problem that we know so few of the relevant facts. First, we have little reliable data on the political ideology of socialpersonality psychologists. Haidt's (2011) demonstration shows that very few are ...

A wealth of research has found that power leads to behavioral approach and action. Four experiments demonstrate that this link between power and approach is broken when the power relationship is illegitimate. When power was primed to be legitimate or when power positions were assigned legitimately, the powerful demonstrated more approach than the powerless. However, when power was experienced as illegitimate, the powerless displayed as much approach as, or even more approach than, the powerful. This moderating effect of legitimacy occurred regardless of whether power and legitimacy were manipulated through experiential primes, semantic primes, or role manipulations. It held true for behavioral approach (Experiment 1) and two effects associated with it: the propensity to negotiate (Experiment 2) and risk preferences (Experiments 3 and 4). These findings demonstrate that how power is conceptualized, acquired, and wielded determines its psychological consequences and add insight into not only when but also why power leads to approach.

How does power affect behavior? We posit that this depends on the type of power. We distinguish between social power (power over other people) and personal power (freedom from other people) and argue that these two types of power have opposite associations with independence and interdependence. We propose that when the distinction between independence and interdependence is relevant, social power and personal power will have opposite effects; however, they will have parallel effects when the distinction is irrelevant. In two studies (an experimental study and a large field study), we demonstrate this by showing that social power and personal power have opposite effects on stereotyping, but parallel effects on behavioral approach.

Five experiments investigated the effect of power on social distance. Although increased social distance has been suggested to be an underlying mechanism for a number of the effects of power, there is little empirical evidence directly supporting this claim. Our first three experiments found that power increases social distance toward others. In addition, these studies demonstrated that this effect is (a) mediated by self-sufficiency and (b) moderated by the perceived legitimacy of power-only when power is seen as legitimate, does it increase social distance. The final two studies build off research showing that social distance is linked to decreased altruism and find an interaction between power and legitimacy on willingness to help others. The authors propose that the concept of social distance offers a synthesizing lens that integrates seemingly disparate findings in the power literature and explains how power can both corrupt and elevate.

Conservatives appear more skeptical about climate change and global warming and less willing to act against it than liberals. We propose that this unwillingness could result from fundamental differences in conservatives' and liberals' temporal focus. Conservatives tend to focus more on the past than do liberals. Across six studies, we rely on this notion to demonstrate that conservatives are positively affected by past-but not by future-focused environmental comparisons. Past comparisons largely eliminated the political divide that separated liberal and conservative respondents' attitudes toward and behavior regarding climate change, so that across these studies conservatives and liberals were nearly equally likely to fight climate change. This research demonstrates how psychological processes, such as temporal comparison, underlie the prevalent ideological gap in addressing climate change. It opens up a promising avenue to convince conservatives effectively of the need to address climate change and global warming.climate change | temporal comparison | political ideology | attitudes | framing A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.-Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790