Understanding Responses to Political Conflict: Interactive Effects of the Need for Closure and Salient Conflict Schemas.

Abstract

An open access repository of Middlesex University research http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk Golec de Zavala, Agnieszka and Federico, Christopher (2004) Understanding responses to political conflict: interactive effects of the need for closure and salient conflict schemas. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87 (6 Copyright and moral rights to this thesis/research project are retained by the author and/or other copyright owners. The work is supplied on the understanding that any use for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. A copy may be downloaded for personal, non-commercial, research or study without prior permission and without charge. Any use of the thesis/research project for private study or research must be properly acknowledged with reference to the work's full bibliographic details.This thesis/research project may not be reproduced in any format or medium, or extensive quotations taken from it, or its content changed in any way, without first obtaining permission in writing from the copyright holder(s).If you believe that any material held in the repository infringes copyright law, please contact the Repository Team at Middlesex University via the following email address:eprints@mdx.ac.ukThe item will be removed from the repository while any claim is being investigated. conflict is and how it should be dealt with. We provide evidence for this hypothesis using archival survey data on American foreign policy officials' attitudes toward international conflict at the height of the Cold War (Study 1) and our own data on the relationship between the need for closure and conflict-strategy preferences among samples of activists from two political parties in Poland -a centrist party with a reputation for cooperativeness and an extremist party with a reputation for confrontation (Study 2). The broader implications of these findings are discussed.Need for closure and conflict schemas -3

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“…In turn, the twodimensional approach, and especially the interpretation of these dimensions as respectively representing the freezing and seizing tendencies, was questioned in regard to its lack of a theoretical (Kruglanski et al, 1997) and empirical (Roets, Van Hiel, & Cornelis, 2006) foundation. In subsequent research, disagreement about the underlying dimensionality and the lack of a shared understanding of the scale led researchers to apply and interpret the NFC scale at their own discretion, including one-dimensional (e.g., Golec & Federico, 2004) and multidimensional (e.g., Van Hiel, Pandelaere, & Duriez, 2004) reports, as well as applications in which the decisiveness subscale was omitted (e.g., Chirumbolo, Livi, Mannetti, Pierro, & Kruglanski, 2004). Some researchers even explicitly stated that the disagreement on how to measure NFC made them decide to omit the concept from their research, and focus on related concepts instead (Chaiken, Duckworth, & Darke, 1999).…”