Political Outcomes
Threat and Political Attitudes
Physical Threat Sensitivity and Aggressive Political Attitudes
Much has been made of the idea that physical threat processes permeate the political mind. Early work found that political conservatism is associated with a heightened sensitivity to threat, yet recent replication failures have cast doubt on this finding. In one line of work, we explore the idea that threat sensitivity can have similar implications for conservatives and liberals alike. We focus on“aggressive political attitudes” (AGAs) in the form of partisans’ support for violent and antidemocratic tactics to achieve ingroup political power. We expect that that AGAs are instantiations of defensive aggression linked to threat sensitivity. In an initial study (n = 1,867) we established that, across the political spectrum, physical threat sensitivity underlies support for AGAs. A second study (n = 457) clarifies that the associations between ideology and AGAs are mediated by perceptions of outparty members as physically threatening. A final study (n = 985) experimentally reduced perceptions of outparty physical threat yet does not extinguish the association between threat sensitivity and AGAs. Together, our findings imply that threat sensitivity has like implications for AGAs across the political spectrum
Human Threat Projection and Political Conservatism
Political Ideology (z-scored)
Threat Perception of PLW
S1: PLW
S3: Human Threat
S3: Nonhuman Threat
Political Ideology
Postural Avoidance
of Human Threats
Noted above, early research on threat and political ideology purported to show an association between heightened threat sensitivity and stronger political conservatism. Yet, again, recent replication failures have cast doubt on this finding. In this line of work, we take on the perspective that conservatism may be related to sensitivity to some but not all sources of physical threat. Whereas we find in the above described work that a generalized threat sensitivity is associated with aggressive political sentiments across the political spectrum, this line of work focuses on the the association between political ideology and a specified threat sensitivity.
We find that stronger conservatism is indeed associated with a heightened sensitivity to physical threat, but only when the source of danger originates from humans. In a first study, conservatives reported heightened threat perception of ambiguous human stimuli in the form of point light walkers (PLWs; see first plot to the left). In Study 2, conservatism was associated with perceived likelihood of experiencing physical harm in contexts involving human sources of threat (e.g., encountering a stranger, walking down a dark alley), but not in contexts involving nonhuman sources of threat (e.g., swimming in the ocean, walking in the woods). A final study found that conservatism was associated with stronger postural avoidance to unambiguously threatening human (images of people pointing guns at the viewer), but not nonhuman (images of snarling animal predators) stimuli (see second plot to the left)
Political Orientation and Anti-Black Bias
Study 2 and 3 replicated these findings using point-light walkers where race information was completely withheld (see figure on right for results) and racially stereotypical names, respectively.
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In Study 4, we found the relationship between conservatism and the Black-threat association mediated the link between conservatism and the Black-criminal association (see figure below).
Previous research indicates that anti-Black bias is primarily due to threat and conservatives tend to have higher threat sensitivity than liberals. Thus, it is possible that anti-Black bias among more conservative vs. liberal individuals may be driven by a Black-threat association. Across four studies, we found evidence for this claim. In Study 1, as conservatism increased, perceptions of unambiguous Black stimuli as dangerous increased.
