Beyond high and low: Obstacles and opportunities associated with conceptualizing middle power and other middle‐range effects

Abstract

Researchers disproportionately develop and test research questions aimed at understanding the effects of extreme—compared to intermediate or fluctuating—positions and states. Commonly applied theoretical frameworks and methodological tools reflect and serve to perpetuate this binary focus on extreme effects. Here, I attempt to lay the foundation for researchers to more rigorously and consistently study middle‐range effects in the psychological sciences in general and in the social power literature in particular. In proposing three different conceptualizations of “middle power,”—power fluctuation, power tension, and medium power—I identify theoretical and methodological obstacles and opportunities related to studying middle power. Overall, I argue that the landscape between a construct's poles is neither vacuous nor hypothetical space. Rather, it is potentially fertile, yet largely unharvested, scholarly terrain. Simply put, the middle matters, and deserves greater attention.

Enough Terror to Belong: The Nonlinear Association of Death Anxiety with Group Identification

“…Our findings offer a novel perspective for understanding the challenges in replicating the traditional mortality salience effect on cultural worldview defense as evidenced by previous studies [32,[75][76][77][78][79]. Prior studies have primarily focused on only two points (i.e., low and relatively high levels) on the death anxiety continuum [28][29][30]80]. For example, mortality salience paradigms typically include two conditions: mortality salience (most frequently using two open-ended questions on thinking of one's own death) and control (parallel questions about neutral or aversive topics).…”