Ambivalent attitudes promote support for extreme political actions
Joseph J. Siev,
Richard E. Petty
Abstract:Political extremism varies across people and contexts, but which beliefs will a person support through extreme actions? We propose that ambivalent attitudes, despite reducing normative political actions like voting, increase support for extreme political actions. We demonstrate this hypothesized reversal using dozens of measures across six studies (
N
= 13,055). The effect was robust to relevant covariates and numerous methodological variations and was magnified when people’s attitudina… Show more
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