Social and Economic Political Ideology Consistently Operate as Mutual Suppressors: Implications for Personality, Social, and Political Psychology

Abstract

Right–left political views can be decomposed into distinct economic and social dimensions that bear differing relations with external criteria. In three community samples (total N = 1,487), we identified replicable suppressor situations in which statistically controlling for either social or economic political ideology increased the other ideology dimension’s relations with variables reflecting cognitive rigidity, authoritarianism, dangerous worldview, and lethal partisanship. Specifically, positive bivariate relations between social conservatism and these outcomes were enhanced after controlling for economic conservatism, whereas, after controlling for social conservatism, positive bivariate relations between economic conservatism and external criteria became negative and negative bivariate relations were enhanced. We identified similar, albeit less consistent, suppressor phenomena for general personality. Taken together, our results suggest that social and economic conservatism differ substantially in their psychological implications, and that following statistical control, these differences emerge in samples in which social and economic conservatism are highly positively correlated.

Not so conservative: Suppression effects between social and economic ideology on moral foundations and moral absolutism

“…Testing for suppression between social and economic conservatism offered valuable insights to clarify divergences in their psychological profiles that might otherwise remain confounded. According to Costello and Lilienfeld (2020), large portions of the public would be prone to tribalistically identify as conservative on both social and economic issues even when they may endorse right-wing social policies and left-wing economic policies-or vice versa, thus artificially inflating the correlation between both. Our results from the present Colombian sample support this standpoint, as social and economic conservatism, although being positively correlated (r = .48), also exhibited suppressor effects and differentiated psychological profiles regarding the tested variables.…”

“…For instance, research outcomes show that people's self-placement in a unidimensional left-right axis is inconsistent with their scores in more comprehensive measures of ideology, suggesting that participants often perceive themselves as more conservative than they are (Zell & Bernstein, 2014). Costello and Lilienfeld (2020) have recently argued that identification as conservative or liberal in a broad sense might be introducing statistical noise that obscures the distinctive features of each ideology. In fact, Costello and Lilienfeld's research found evidence of suppressor effects in which statistically controlling for either social or economic conservatism increased the other one's association with need for closure, preference for state control, dogmatism, authoritarianism, moral disinhibition, dangerous worldview, lethal partisanship and personality traits.…”

Experiments in political psychology

“…Another potential confound is that studies do not control for RWA (SDO) when exploring SDO's (RWA's) relationship with pro-sociality. This is important because RWA and SDO are reliably correlated in the West and supress each other's effects on external variables (Costello & Lilienfeld, 2020). Claessens et al, (2020b) accounted for this and recruited a much larger, representative sample (n = 926) in New Zealand to examine whether SDO and RWA, controlling for demographic variables, differentially predicted cooperative and punitive latent variables (behavioural phenotypes) across a battery of economic games.…”

Shoring up the shaky psychological foundations of a micro-economic model of ideology: Adversarial collaboration solutions

“…Despite the popularity of the left vs. right political spectrum among researchers-one recent estimate suggested that it is used in 80% of political psychology studies (Claessens et al, 2020)-it is not clear that "liberalism" and "conservatism" are psychologically coherent categories. A noted by Gries and colleagues, a plethora of studies have found that the political spectrum can be decomposed into at least two conceptually and empirically distinct social and economic content dimensions (e.g., Claessens et al, 2020;Costello & Lilienfeld, 2020;Duckitt & Sibley, 2009;Federico & Malka, 2018;Feldman & Johnston, 2014), which may serve as a reasonably accurate taxonomy of the psychological structure of political ideology. Social and economic ideologies are not typically positively correlated outside certain Western democracies (Feldman & Johnston, 2014).…”