Ideology: The Psychological and Social Foundations of Belief Systems

Abstract

Defining ideology as a system of functionally inter-connected political attitudes and beliefs, we review evidence concerning (1) the nature and origins of ideology in mass publics and (2) the social and interpersonal nature of the motives underlying ideological coherence. One key conclusion that we draw is that the links between psychological attributes and subsets of ideological attitudes sometimes appear to be organic and functional but other times appear to be conditional on how the relevant attitudes are packaged with other attitudes into socially constructed ideologies. A second key conclusion is that the social motives that induce citizens to pull diverse attitudes into ideological alignment may also, in polarized contexts, induce people to adopt non-political identities and self-perceptions that are congruent with ideological stereotypes. We recommend a focus on the implications of these processes for polarization and democratic stability.

Revisiting the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis: A meta-analytic review.

“…Azevedo et al, 2019). Our results are consistent with this conclusion insofar as (a) social conservatism was related to rigidity with relatively large effect sizes that are robust across nations and sampling contexts; (b) economic conservatism was not correlated with rigidity on average but was correlated with rigidity in the United States, where social and economic conservatism are structured together (Federico & Malka, 2022); and (c) rigidity did not predict economic conservatism in representative national samples (which include many politically disengaged individuals), even within the United States.…”

“…This dovetails with a prominent strain of thinking within political science that suggests most people do not naturally use left-right ideology in a coherent way (Kalmoe, 2020;Kinder & Kalmoe, 2017). Further, the positive correlation between social and economic conservatism in American samples has increased over the last two decades (Kozlowski & Murphy, 2021), which is consistent with the possibility that this strong link is a product of particular people, places, and/or times (Federico & Malka, 2022). For instance, politically engaged individuals are consistently more inclined to structure their social and economic attitudes on the right versus left dimension than politically disengaged individuals (Baldassarri & Goldberg, 2014; Kozlowski & Murphy, 2021), attesting to the role of top-down information environment influences (e.g., cues from elites) on political attitude structure.…”

Absolute Certainty and Political Ideology: A Systematic Test of Curvilinearity

“…In contrast, in the social domain, the shape of the line of fit trends toward a fishhook shape, such that the right extreme is clearly more dogmatic than the left. These findings carry intriguing implications for the literature suggesting that different components (e.g., social vs. economic) of a single belief system (e.g., conservatism) can satisfy competing or even opposing psychological needs, leading a highly psychologically heterogeneous group of individuals to proclaim their adherence to what is, nominally, the same ideology (Federico & Malka, 2021; Feldman, 2013). Social conservatism and economic leftism may share structural and psychological features that are congenial to ideological extremism, perhaps because both social conservatives and economic leftists seek to impose top-down constraints on personal freedoms to safeguard collective societal wellbeing (Malka et al, 2014).…”

Revisiting the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis: A meta-analytic review

“…Where do these findings leave us? Insofar as economic and social ideology are sometimes strongly correlated (e.g., in certain educated subsets of the U.S. population ;Federico & Malka, 2021), the field should no longer presume that psychological factors drive this coherence-not least because social and economic ideology are nearly orthogonal within many countries around the world (Malka et al, 2019). One straightforward implication of this conclusion is that there is considerable downside to political psychologists focusing on a unidimensional conservative vs. liberal ideology construct (e.g., Feldman & Johnston, 2014).…”

“…As we argue above, adopting approaches that treat the environment as a unit of analysis with independent influence over psychological outcomes and behaviors may help to shed light on the degree to which ideology emerges from the dynamic interaction between people and the worlds they inhabit (see Fiedler, 2007;Fiedler & Wänke, 2009). Moreover, it is increasingly plausible that far-right, far-left, and religiously fundamentalist ideologies are in part caused by the same or similar psychological mechanisms (e.g., Zmigrod, 2021) while differing dramatically from one another in other ways (e.g., Federico, 2021).…”