The Politics of Fear: Is There an Ideological Asymmetry in Existential Motivation?

Abstract

A meta-analysis by Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway (2003) suggested that existential needs to reduce threat were associated with political conservatism. Nevertheless, some maintain that fear plays as prevalent a role on the left as the right. In an attempt to resolve this issue, we reviewed evidence from 134 different samples (N = 369,525) and 16 countries-a database 16 times larger than those previously considered. Although the association between fear of death and conservatism was not reliable, there was a significant effect of mortality salience (r = .08-.13) and a significant association between subjective perceptions of threat and conservatism (r = .12-.31). Exposure to objectively threatening circumstances, such as terrorist attacks, was associated with a "conservative shift" at individual (r = .07-.14) and aggregate (r = .29-.66) levels of analysis. Psychological reactions to fear and threat thus convey a small-to-moderate political advantage for conservative leaders, parties, policies, and ideas.

Asymmetries abound: Ideological differences in emotion, partisanship, motivated reasoning, social network structure, and political trust

“…Conversely, exposure to highly threatening circumstances such as terrorist attacks, governmental warnings, and drastic shifts in racial demography often precipitate conservative shifts in political attitudes (e.g., Bonanno & Jost, 2006; Craig & Richeson, 2014; Schüller, 2015), presumably because feeling threatened elicits “motivated closed‐mindedness” (Thórisdóttir & Jost, 2011). In a recent meta‐analytic review we observed that in 22 of 34 studies exposure to objectively threatening stimuli significantly increased the attractiveness of conservative, right‐wing ideas and opinions (Jost, Stern, Rule, & Sterling, 2017; see Fig. 1).…”

“…Distribution of average effect sizes for studies investigating the hypothesis that exposure to objectively threatening circumstances would be associated with political conservatism. Source: This figure, which was prepared by Joanna Sterling and based on a meta‐analytic review by Jost et al (2017), is adapted from Jost (2017b, Fig. 14, p. 188).…”

Ideological Asymmetries and the Essence of Political Psychology

“…The basic findings and conclusions reached by Jost et al (), which have nothing to do with mental illness or cultural cancers, have been replicated, extended, qualified, and applied in a number of useful and insightful ways (for reviews, see Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, ; Jost & Amodio, ; Jost & Krochik, ; Jost, Sterling, & Stern, ; Jost, Stern, Rule, & Sterling, ; Onraet, Van Hiel, Dhnot, & Pattyn, ; Van Hiel, Onraet, & De Pauw, ). Researchers have worked out implications of our theory of political ideology as motivated social cognition for understanding, among other things: influences of genetic heritability and assortative mating on resistance to change and acceptance of inequality (Kandler, Bleidorn, & Riemann, ); continuity between childhood temperament and political orientation in adulthood (Block & Block, ; Fraley, Griffin, Belsky, & Roisman, ); interpersonal attachment styles and adoption of rightist (vs. leftist) ideology (Weber & Federico, ); ideological differences in approach/avoidance (Rock & Janoff‐Bulman, ) and exploratory behavior in novel, potentially risky situations (Shook & Fazio, ); perceptual vigilance and physiological reactivity in response to negative and threatening stimuli (Carraro, Castelli, & Macchiella, ; Hibbing et al, ; Oxley et al, ; Vigil, ); patterns of verbal communication (Brundidge, Reid, Choi, & Muddiman, ; Cichocka, Bilewicz, Jost, Marrouch, & Witkowska, ; Robinson, Cassidy, Boyd, & Fetterman, ; Sylwester & Purver, ); and liberal‐conservative differences in brain structures and functions, especially those associated with the amygdala and anterior cingulate cortex (Amodio, Jost, Master, & Yee et al, ; Kanai, Feilden, Firth, & Rees, ; Oxley et al, ).…”

“…For a variety of reasons—certainly not just the publication of our article—there have been far more studies on this topic in the last 14 years than in the preceding 50 years. My students, Joanna Sterling and Chadly Stern, and I have put together newer, more comprehensive meta‐analytic reviews (Jost, Sterling, et al, ; Jost, Stern, et al, ). We have identified, for instance, 181 studies on epistemic motivation involving over 130,000 individual participants and nearly 100 studies on existential motivation involving over 360,000 participants.…”

“…Jost, Stern, Rule, and Sterling () reviewed evidence from 134 distinct samples and 369,525 participants from 16 countries. This database is 16 times larger than those analyzed previously by Jost et al () and Onraet et al ().…”