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that societal crises (e.g., economic upheavals, terrorist attacks) often precipitate rightward political shifts, presumably because conservative, right-wing opinions typically resonate with heightened needs to manage uncertainty and threat (Doty, Peterson, & Winter, 1991; Sales, 1972, 1973; McCann, 1997; Ullrich & Cohrs, 2007). As Huntington (1957) put it, “When the foundations of society are threatened, the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and desirability of the existing ones.” In other words, system-level threats stimulate the motivation to justify the system.

A meta-analytic review of the psychological antecedents of political conservatism by Jost and colleagues (2003) supports this view. Specifically, they found that situational as well as dispositional variables associated with the management of threat and uncertainty predicted various manifestations of political conservatism (including economic system justification). The original studies were conducted in 12 countries between 1958 and 2002 and employed 88 different research samples involving a total of 22,818 individual cases. Results indicated that the tendency to endorse conservative (rather than liberal or moderate) opinions is positively associated with threat variables such as mortality salience (or death anxiety), system instability, and fear of threat and loss, and it is negatively associated (albeit weakly) with self-esteem. Conservatism is also positively associated with uncertainty avoidance, intolerance of ambiguity, and needs for order, structure, and closure, and it is negatively associated with openness to experience and integrative complexity.

Although the meta-analysis focused on explicit, self-reported attitudes and beliefs, recent research using implicit measures mirrors these ideological differences. For example, ideological differences in resistance to change were demonstrated by Jost, Nosek, and Gosling (2008), who found that implicit and explicit attitudes toward tradition, stability, and the status quo were predictors of political orientation. More specifically, conservatism was associated with greater implicit as well as explicit preferences for order compared to chaos, conformity compared to rebelliousness, stability compared to flexibility, tradition compared to progress, and traditional values compared to feminism. In simultaneous regressions, both implicit and explicit attitudes showed unique predictive validity of political orientation, suggesting that they are nonredundant indicators of ideological proclivities.

Ideological differences in implicit social cognition also relate to the tolerance of inequality and, specifically, favoritism for higherover lower-status groups. Jost, Banaji, and Nosek (2004) found that individual differences in political orientation moderated implicit attitudes for social groups. Measured with the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), conservatives, compared to liberals, showed stronger preferences for White Americans over African Americans and for heterosexuals

over homosexuals (see also Cunningham, Nezlek, & Banaji, 2004; see also Sidanius & Pratto, 1999 for similar results at the explicit level).

The meta-analysis and subsequent investigations of implicit social cognition provide an initial basis for the notion that conservatives are more likely to show favoritism for higherthan lower-status groups than liberals, on both implicit and explicit measures. We examined this possibility across a variety of target groups using nationally representative samples of voters collected through the American National Election Studies (ANES) and with large data sets collected over the Internet.

MEASURING IDEOLOGY AND IMPLICIT ATTITUDES

Validity of a Single-Item Political Ideology Assessment

Remarkably, even the simplest of questions—self-placement on a single-item liberal to conservative dimension—appears to be an effective means of parsing individual differences in ideological orientations. Jost (2006) analyzed ANES data from 1972 to 2004 and found that a self-placement on a 7-point single item of strongly liberal to strongly conservative explained 85% of the variance in voting behavior for Democratic and Republican candidates for president.

Similar evidence is available from large data sets showing that self-place- ment on a liberal–conservative dimension discriminates both explicit and implicit attitudes toward politicians. Nosek and colleagues (Nosek, Smyth, Hansen, et al., 2007) summarized approximately 6 years’ worth of data collected at Project Implicit web sites (see https://implicit.harvard.edu/). The aggregated data sets included more than 2.5 million IATs and self-reported attitude assessments across more than a dozen topics, including social attitudes, stereotypes, and political attitudes. Three of the studies examined attitudes toward George Bush compared to (a) Al Gore (collected before and after the 2000 U.S. presidential election), (b) John Kerry (collected before and after the 2004 election), and (c) previous U.S. presidents (individual and aggregate comparisons).

For each of these data collections, participants reported their explicit candidate preferences, completed an IAT contrasting Bush with another politician, and reported their political orientation on a 5-, 6-, or 7-point scale of liberalism–conservatism. Results for Project Implicit 2004 Election data using a 6-point liberal–conservative self-rating are presented in Figure 20.1 (N = 22,904), and all other data sets replicated this pattern (Nosek, Smyth, Hansen, et al., 2007). Conservative participants favored Bush over Kerry both implicitly and explicitly, and liberal participants favored Kerry over Bush. Also, the political preferences were strongest for more extreme conservatives

Participants sort exemplars representing those four categories in two key sorting conditions. In one condition, items representing gay people and bad things are categorized with one response (a key press), and items representing straight people and good things are categorized with an alternate response. In a second condition, the response configuration is switched, so that gay people and good things are categorized with one response and straight people and bad things are categorized with the alternate response. Categorizing the items faster in the first compared to the second condition is interpreted as indicating an implicit preference for straight people relative to gay people.

The accumulated evidence suggests that the constructs measured by the IAT and self-report measures are related but distinct (Nosek & Smyth, 2007), and the strength of their relation varies from weakly to strongly positive depending on the topic of assessment (Nosek, 2005). Notably, in contrast to the well-known result of dissociation between explicit and implicit attitudes, attitudes toward political candidates and some political issues (e.g., pro-choice versus pro-life) elicit some of the strongest implicit–explicit relations, with r’s sometimes above .70 (Nosek, 2007).

The IAT also shows predictive validity of judgment and behavior in a variety of domains, with explicit measures showing better predictive validity in some cases (e.g., consumer preferences), and the IAT showing better predictive validity in others (e.g., intergroup discrimination-related behaviors; Greenwald, et al., in press). Such congruence may stem from political attitudes being subserved by a general liberal–conservative ideology that binds preferences and provides psychological consistency.

Current research efforts are investigating the underlying processes that contribute to IAT effects (Conrey, Sherman, Gawronski, Hugenberg, & Groom, 2005; Rothermund & Wentura, 2004), and refining the understanding of the IAT’s relation to self-report, behavior, and to other implicit measures, such as the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP; Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005), the Go/No-go Association Task (GNAT; Nosek & Banaji, 2001), evaluative priming (Fazio et al., 1986), and the Sorting Paired Features (SPF) task (Bar-Anan, Nosek, & Vianello, in press).

INTERNET DATA: CORRELATIONS BETWEEN POLITICAL ORIENTATION AND IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT ATTITUDES

A key topic investigated in this chapter is whether political ideology— measured by self-placement on a liberal–conservative dimension—is related to implicit and explicit attitudes toward social groups. In particular, following theories of ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, system justification, motivated social cognition, and moral foundations, are conservatives more

likely than liberals to prefer higher-status groups than lower-status groups? And, is this pattern observed with both implicit and explicit measurement methods?

In a review of the large data sets collected at Project Implicit (Nosek, Smyth, Hansen, et al., 2007), eight of the investigated topics concerned preferences between social groups that differ in terms of social status. To examine the relationship between political orientation and social group preferences, Nosek and colleagues regressed the attitude measure (IAT or a single-item self-reported preference) on to self-reported political orientation and three demographic covariates (gender, age, and ethnicity).

Across topics and measurement methods, conservatives consistently favored higher-status groups to a greater degree than did liberals. Conservatives showed relatively stronger implicit preferences than liberals for White Americans compared to African Americans (ηP2 = .009), light-skinned people compared to dark-skinned people (ηP2 = .006), White children compared to Black children (ηP2 = .013), others compared to Arab-Muslims (ηP2 = .012), others compared to Jews (ηP2 = .008), abled people compared to disabled people (ηP2 = .005), straight people compared to gay people (ηP2 = .057), and thin people compared to overweight people (ηP2 = .004).

Likewise, conservatives self-reported relatively stronger explicit preferences than liberals for White Americans compared to African Americans (ηP2 =

.029), light-skinned people compared to dark-skinned people (ηP2 = .013), White children compared to Black children (ηP2 = .023), other people compared to Arab-Muslims (ηP2 = .039), other people compared to Jews (ηP2 =

.035), and straight people compared to gay people (ηP2 = .126). There was minimal variation across political orientation in explicit preferences for the abled compared to the disabled (ηP2 = .001) and thin people compared to fat people (ηP2 = .001), and there was a slight tendency for liberals to show a stronger pro-young/anti-old preference (ηP2 = –.002).

An aggregated comparison of implicit and explicit preferences for all eight topics is presented in Figure 20.2. The x-axis presents self-rated political orientation from strongly liberal to strongly conservative. Positive values on the y-axis indicate a preference for higher-status groups. The displacement of effect sizes from zero indicates that, across the political spectrum, the sample as a whole (both liberals and conservatives) favored higher-status groups. The positive slope shows that greater conservatism was associated with stronger preferences for highercompared to lowerstatus groups.

At the extremes, even strong liberals showed a preference for higherstatus groups both implicitly (d = 0.48) and explicitly (d = 0.28), but strong conservatives showed a 65% stronger implicit preference than liberals

Implicit Explicit

Figure 20.2 Average implicit and explicit preferences for higher status versus lower status groups as a function of ideological self-placement.

Note: Positive values indicate a preference for the higher status group. Aggregate comprised of attitudes toward (higher status listed second): African Americans/White Americans, Dark- skin/Light-skin, old people/young people, Arab-Muslims/Other people, Jews/Other people, Disabled people/Abled people, gay people/straight people, and fat people/thin people (adapted from Nosek et al., 2007).

(d = 0.79), and a 186% stronger explicit preference (d = 0.80). That is, all groups favored higher-status groups on average, and conservatives did so to a greater degree than did liberals.

In summary, liberals and conservatives differ somewhat in their implicit intergroup preferences, and differ more substantially in their explicit intergroup preferences. Liberals showed a larger discrepancy between their implicit higher-status preferences and their comparatively weaker explicit higher-status preferences, whereas conservatives showed very little discrepancy between their strong implicit higher-status preferences and their strong explicit higher-status preferences (assuming the comparability of effect sizes). These findings suggest that liberals are more likely to have a complex or perhaps “conflicted” stance in their social evaluations insofar as they harbor some degree of automatic bias along with an explicit commitment to egalitarianism.

In this sense, in everyday judgment and action, liberals may make greater efforts to override their automatic reaction in favor of a more egalitarian explicit response (e.g., Skitka et al., 2002). Conservatives, on the other hand, show greater consistency on average in their implicit and explicit social evaluations, suggesting that conservatives may be more likely than liberals to justify and use their automatic reactions as a basis for explicit report and judgment (see also Jost et. al., 2003, 2004; Sniderman, Crosby, & Howell, 2000).1

Explicit Attitudes Toward African and White Americans by Respondent Ethnicity. The prior section examined relative preferences between higherand lower-status groups because of the procedural constraint of relative comparison in the IAT and the use of relative explicit preference measures. For this chapter, we conducted additional analyses of Nosek and colleagues’ (2007) data and analyzed self-reported thermometer ratings for each group separately. Also, we compared racial attitudes of White American, African American, and other respondents.

Social identity theory anticipates that group members will tend to like their own group more than others (Hewstone, Rubin, & Willis, 2002; Tajfel, 1978; Tajfel & Turner, 1986). But, the hypothesis that conservatives will be more favorable to higher-status groups and more unfavorable to lowerstatus groups than will liberals does not depend on the individual’s own group membership. That is, to the extent that conservatism is linked to a desire to preserve the status quo and acceptance of inequalities among groups (Jost et al., 2003), conservatives should possess more negative attitudes than liberals toward lower-status groups whatever their own group membership. For example, conservative Blacks would be expected to report more negative attitudes toward African Americans than would liberal Blacks (see also Jost et al., 2004).

Figure 20.3 presents regression estimates of thermometer attitude ratings (0 cold to 10 warm) toward White Americans on the left and African Americans on the right, separated by respondent ethnicity (White [n = 255,590], Black [n = 34,216], Other [n = 72,834]). The x-axis arrays respondents according to selfreported political orientation. Considering attitudes toward White Americans first, there is a main effect of ethnicity in which White respondents, across the political spectrum, reported liking White Americans more than respondents

1 Notably, the implicit–explicit consistency is greater at the mean level for conservatives than liberals, but this difference does not emerge at the level of individual differences. The correlation between implicit and explicit social attitudes seems to be equally strong for liberals and conservatives (Nosek, Smyth, Hansen, et al., 2007).

of other racial groups did.2 At the same time, there was a main effect of conservatism such that, for all three racial groups, conservatives expressed more positive attitudes toward White Americans than did liberals in the same racial group. The strength of the conservatism–attitude relationship was strongest for White respondents compared to the other two groups (Whites β = .11; Blacks β = .06; Others β = .06). For Whites, this corresponded to an estimated attitude difference of .8 of a scale point (on a 0 to 10 scale) between attitude ratings of the strong liberals and the strong conservatives.

A distinctly different pattern was observed for attitudes toward African Americans. As before, a main effect of respondent ethnicity was observed. This time, Black respondents across the political spectrum reported more positive attitudes toward African Americans than did White and other respondents. This ingroup effect for both racial groups is consistent with social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986).

Conservatism was not only positively associated with liking for White Americans, it was also negatively associated with liking for African Americans. For all three racial groups, liberals reported more positive attitudes toward African Americans than did conservatives. Again, the strength of the conservatism–attitude relationship was strongest for White respondents (Whites β = –.12; Blacks β = –.05; Others β = –.08). For Whites, this corresponded to a difference of .9 of a scale point between attitudes of strong liberals and strong conservatives.

Strong liberals who are White are estimated to have slightly more positive attitudes toward White Americans (est. M = 6.81) than African Americans (est. M = 6.61), whereas strong conservatives who are White show a difference of almost 2 full scale points favoring White Americans (est. M = 7.61) over African Americans (est. M = 5.71).3 Black respondents showed a similar ingroup preference in their White and Black warmth ratings, except that Black conservatives showed less ingroup preference than Black liberals, whereas the opposite was observed with respect to White conservatives and liberals (see also Jost et al., 2004). This latter finding shows that ideology

2 Because the samples were very large, all reported effects were estimated reliably with p < .0001. Figures and text report data analyses using a 6-point liberal to conservative response item. Data collected with a 7-point response item showed similar results for all reported effects.

3 Actual means were very similar to the regression estimates. Strong liberals (n = 32,880, Whites only) reported slightly more positive attitudes toward White Americans (M = 6.91) than African Americans (M = 6.66), and strong conservatives (n = 13,836, Whites only) reported substantially more positive attitudes toward White Americans (M = 7.78) than African Americans (M = 5.61).

predicts variation in group attitudes beyond that accounted for by social identity—one’s group membership.

Other Highand Low-status Groups. We reanalyzed the data for the other attitude domains from the Nosek and colleagues (2007) report that contained a 6-point single-item liberal–conservative self-rating and separate thermometer ratings of the higherand lower-status groups. These included the following, with the higher-status group listed second: dark skin/light skin (n = 67,561), old people/young people (n = 174,289), Arab-Muslims/other people (n = 34,520), Jews/other people (n = 39,021), disabled people/abled people (n = 20,729), gay people/straight people (n = 38,511), and fat people/thin people (n = 99,142).4 Regression estimates predicting warmth ratings by self-rated liberalism–conservatism appear in Figure 20.4, with the higher-status groups in the bottom panel and lower-status groups in the top panel.

For higher-status groups, all of the regression lines show a positive slope, suggesting that conservatives hold more favorable explicit attitudes toward these groups than do liberals. This effect was observed consistently and with varying magnitude for attitudes toward light-skinned people (β = .11), nonArabs (β = .08), non-Jews (β = .27), abled people (β = .10), young people (β =

.04), straight men (β = .34), and thin people (β = .11). Across all groups examined, attitudes toward higher-status groups were again more positive among conservatives than among liberals (see also Jost et al., 2004).

For lower-status groups, greater conservatism was expected to be associated with more negativity toward one’s own group. As can be observed in Figure 20.4, variability occurred across intergroup comparisons. Three comparisons revealed that conservatives had more unfavorable explicit attitudes than liberals did toward dark-skinned people (β = –.09), Arab-Muslims (β = –.34), and gay men (β = –.62).5 Four others had near zero or weakly positive attitude–ideology relations: Jews (β = .01), thin people (β = .02), disabled people (β = .03), and old people (β = .05). This suggests that some comparisons do not elicit as highly ideologically differentiated attitudes toward the lower-status group as do other comparisons.

4 Similar effects were observed with the portions of the data using a 7-point liberal–conserva- tive item. Also, one task—attitudes toward Black and White children—only contained data using a 7-point ideology item. Data for that task were similar to the other race tasks described.

5 Thermometer ratings were given separately for gay men, lesbians, straight men, and straight women. Because they show the same pattern, only the male data are presented in Figure 20.4. Attitudes toward lesbians (β = –.52) showed a similar relation with ideology as attitudes toward gay men, and attitudes toward straight women (β = .29) were similar to attitudes toward straight men.