jost_j_t_kay_a_c_thorisdottir_n_social_and_psychological_bas

Figure 20.4 Regression estimates of relationship between ideological self-place- ment and self-reported warmth ratings from combined ANES data for lower status (top panel) and higher status (bottom panel) groups.

Examining the higher and lower status groups separately with explicit, self-report data provided some interesting insights into the differences in group attitudes by ideology. Explicitly, at least, the pattern is consistent, although with variable magnitude: conservatives report stronger favoritism for higher-status groups than do liberals. The pattern is less consistent for attitudes toward lower-status groups. When substantial differences are observed, the pattern was as expected—conservatives held less favorable attitudes toward lower-status groups than did liberals.

In sum, these data suggest that the liberal–conservative differences are driven primarily by conservatives’ greater liking than liberals for higherstatus groups, rather than consistently greater disliking than liberals for lower-status groups. This intriguing result deserves further investigation, as the existing theoretical perspectives are mute with regard to whether the effect is primarily a low-status disliking or a high-status liking effect.

The effects reported in this section have the advantage of being drawn from large and heterogeneous data sets, thus allowing highly reliable estimation and confidence in the robustness of the effects in a very diverse sample. As an unselected data set, the data are not, however, representative of the U.S. population. Next, we sought to replicate the explicit preference effects in a nationally representative data collection—the ANES (an implicit measurement of nationally representative samples was not yet available at the time of writing this chapter).

DATA FROM THE AMERICAN NATIONAL ELECTION STUDIES

Started in 1948, the ANES has conducted studies of the American electorate every 2 or 4 years, using a representative sample of 1,000 to 3,000 Americans on each occasion. The surveys were conducted in face-to-face or telephone interviews in a structured format. Besides surveying a representative sample of Americans, an important feature of the ANES is that similar or identical items were used on multiple occasions, allowing aggregation and crosssectional comparisons by year.

Two sets of items were of particular interest for the present purposes. For one, since 1972, ANES has included a 7-point “strongly liberal” to “strongly conservative” single-item measure. Also, ANES respondents provided warmth ratings on a thermometer scale toward a variety of different social groups. Attitudes toward some groups, such as Blacks and Whites, were measured on most occasions, and attitudes toward other groups were measured less frequently.

From the available set, we selected feeling thermometer ratings toward a range of social groups and analyzed the available data from 1972 through 2004.6 This resulted in a sample of 14 social groups—each with four to 15 measurement occasions. Table 20.1 lists the social groups, the years that they were included in the feeling thermometer rating section of the ANES, the total sample size, the mean warmth rating (range 0 to 97), and the empirical relationships between ideology and intergroup attitudes, described next.

6 The data set was the 1948–2004 ANES Cumulative Data File retrieved from http://elec

tionstudies.org/.

Table 20.1 Mean warmth rating (0 cold—97 warm) and ideology–attitude relation from ANES data for 14 social groups. Positive d’s indicate that conservatism was positively associated with liking for the group; negative d’s indicate that conservatism was negatively associated with liking for the group.

1.Negative scores indicate that liking for the group was higher with increasing liberalism; positive scores indicate that liking for the group was higher with increasing conservatism.

2.Boldface means that political orientation was not a signifi cant predictor of thermometer ratings for that group.

3.Thermometer ratings for some groups go back to 1964, but the political orientation selfrating does not. There are thermometer ratings for liberals and conservatives going back to 1964 that could be used to replicate these analyses.

Table 20.1 Mean warmth rating (0 cold—97 warm) and ideology–attitude relation from ANES data for 14 social groups. Positive d’s indicate that conservatism was positively associated with liking for the group; negative d’s indicate that conservatism was negatively associated with liking for the group. (Continued)

4.ANES thermometer ratings that were not included here concerned political groups (e.g., Democrats, Republicans), politicized groups (e.g., feminists, fundamentalists), or occupational groups (e.g., police).

5.Family income item (vcf0114) was not available in 2002, so that year was not included in multilevel regressions.

6.Multilevel regressions used year (vcf0004) as a grouping variable and regressed thermometer ratings on political orientation (vcf0803), race (vcf0106a), family income (vcf0114), gender (vcf0104), religion (vcf0128), and age (vcf0101). Only political orientation data are summarized here. Full analyses are available as a supplement at http://briannosek.com/.

We conducted a multilevel regression for each social group with year of data collection as the grouping variable; thermometer ratings as the dependent variable, which was regressed onto political orientation; and five covariates, namely gender, ethnicity, age, religion, and family income. The effects of political orientation on attitudes toward each of the social groups after adjusting for the other individual difference variables is presented in the last column of Table 20.1 as an effect size (Cohen’s d). Negative values indicate that more negative attitudes toward the group were associated with greater conservatism (versus liberalism); positive values indicate that more positive attitudes toward the group were associated with greater conservatism (versus liberalism).

As can be observed in Table 20.1, for seven social groups—gays/lesbians, people on welfare, illegal aliens, blacks, young people, Hispanics, and poor people—conservatism was associated with relatively more negative attitudes toward the group (average d = –.13). For four social groups—Catholics, middle class people, Whites, and southerners—liberalism was associated with relatively more negative attitudes toward the group compared to conservatism (average d = .07). There were no reliable relationships between political orientation and attitudes for three groups—Jews, Asian Americans, and Protestants (average d = .01).

The social groups included in the ANES vary in terms of their size and social status. For domains in which the higherand lower-status groups were included, conservatives tended to show greater liking for the higher-status

group and greater disliking of the lower-status group, in comparison with liberals. For example, liking of Blacks and Hispanics was negatively associated with conservatism, whereas liking of Whites was positively associated with conservatism. Likewise, liking of poor people was negatively associated with conservatism, whereas liking of middle class people was positively associated (see also Jost et al., 2004).

Across groups, there was a strong association between the overall liking of the group (averaging across liberals and conservatives) and the ideology– attitude relationship. The correlation between mean warmth ratings and the ideology–attitude relationship was r = .76. In other words, those groups that were most disliked overall were those that differentiated liberals and conservatives the most, with conservatives being more negative. This association was driven by the three most disliked groups in the data set—gays/lesbians (M warmth rating = 38.8), people on welfare (M = 50.9), and illegal aliens (M = 35.9). In short, ideological differences were most apparent for attitudes toward the most disliked groups.

The results suggest that lower-status groups are viewed more unfavorably by conservatives than liberals. At the same time, liberals do not like everyone more than conservatives do. Conservatives reported more liking of some groups, especially Whites and the middle class, who possess higher social status than their racial and economic counterparts. In addition, conservatives reported greater favorability toward southerners than did liberals. Southerners are not easily recognized as high-status or dominant, but they are generally seen as more conservative than other regional groups.

These data from nationally representative ANES data collections replicate the findings from the very large data sets reviewed earlier, at least with regard to explicit evaluations. In the next section, we narrow our focus to racial attitudes to take advantage of the fact that the ANES offers opportunities for cross-sectional comparisons over time. Following the review by Jost and colleagues (2003), conservatives’ comparatively greater resistance to change and tolerance of inequality should make liberals more likely to be at the forefront of social change movements aimed to increase egalitarianism between groups. Changes in explicit racial attitudes in the United States from the mid-20th to early 21st centuries provide an ideal circumstance to test this prediction.

LIBERALS AS SOCIAL CHANGE AGENTS

Following the theoretical analysis comparing liberals’ and conservatives’ attitudes about social change and inequality (Jost et al., 2003, 2008), liberals should be more likely than conservatives to instigate social change aimed at reducing social inequalities. Successful social movements, however, are those

that ultimately convince liberals, moderates, and conservatives alike that the inequalities are both real and unjustified. Jost and colleagues (2003) did not suggest that conservatives are altogether unconcerned with inequality; rather, their review suggested that conservatives are less concerned with inequality than are liberals (see also Graham, Haidt, & Nosek, 2007; Napier & Jost, 2008). They also observed that conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe that society is inevitably hierarchical. Further, because conservatives are relatively more resistant to change in general, they are likely more wary of corrective measures to redress inequality when they require substantive changes to the existing social order.

The combination of differential concerns about inequality and resistance to change suggests that social movements for changing inequalities are more likely to be introduced and led by liberals and to be resisted, especially at first, by conservatives. Liberals, in prioritizing social equality over social order, may provide the culture with an early-warning signal for the presence of an excessive inequality among groups.

Conversely, conservatives, in prioritizing social order over social equality, may caution against unnecessary changes to a societal status quo and warn against the uncertainties of change. Conservatives’ degree of sensitivity to order and their tolerance for inequality frequently puts them in the role of skeptic concerning social movements that seek to ameliorate social inequalities. We hypothesize that those social movements that produce change are those in which liberals are ultimately able to convince conservatives that the inequalities are important to fix, and that social change can occur without cultural collapse. Eventually, the liberal-initiated changes become part of the status quo, and conservative resistance relents and embraces the new world order.

In the context of social group prejudices, this account of liberal and conservative reactions to social movements leads to the following predictions:

(a)early in a social movement, liberals’ and conservatives’ attitudes toward a given stigmatized group will be most differentiated, with liberals being relatively more favorable toward the target group than conservatives; and

(b)over time, for successful social movements, the attitude gap between liberals and conservatives will progressively narrow, as conservatives become more accepting of the social change and more supportive of equal rights and treatment for the stigmatized group.

A TEST OF THE SOCIAL CHANGE HYPOTHESES: ATTITUDES TOWARD BLACKS IN THE UNITED STATES

From 1972 to 2004, the ANES included feeling thermometer ratings toward Blacks in every data collection except for 1978. These cross-sectional data

toward Blacks for ANES data by year of data collection.

Note: Negative values indicate that conservatism (compared to liberalism) was associated with more negative attitudes toward Blacks, and positive values indicate the reverse, namely that liberalism (compared to conservatism) was associated with more negative attitudes toward Blacks.

provide an opportunity to test whether liberals and conservatives differ most in their attitudes toward Blacks early in the Civil Rights movement (as early as is available in this data set), and the extent to which the liberal– conservative gap closed in the intervening years. The ANES data provide clear support for both hypotheses (Fig. 20.5).

We conducted a multilevel regression with attitudes toward Blacks as the dependent variable; year of data collection as the grouping variable; race, gender, family income, age, and religion as covariates; and political orientation entered as a predictor and random effects factor. The latter variable tests the hypothesis that the relationship between political orientation and attitudes toward Blacks changes over time.7 A main effect of year reveals that attitudes toward Blacks became more favorable over time (z = 2.54, p = .006).

7 An additional model that excluded Black participants from the data set shows the same pat-

tern of results as reported here.

Figure 20.6 Regression estimates for warmth ratings for attitudes toward Blacks by political ideology for ANES data from 1972 and 2004. Estimates calculated after partialing out gender, race, family income, age, and religion. Indep, independent; cons, conservative.

Likewise, a main effect of political orientation indicates that liberals tended to be more favorable toward Blacks than did conservatives over the 32-year period (B = –1.08, SE B = .18, t = –6.19, p < .0001). Critically, the random effect of political orientation by year was significant, despite there being only 15 measurement occasions (z = 1.66, p = .048). The attitude gap between liberals and conservatives was strongest in the earliest years available, and the gap narrowed significantly in later years.

The pattern shows that liberals’ and conservatives’ attitudes toward Blacks were most differentiated in the 1970s, and that this differentiation narrowed over time and was completely absent (even nonsignificantly reversed) in the latest two data collections (2002 and 2004).8 Figure 20.6 provides further illustration by showing the regression estimates for attitudes toward Blacks for the first (1972) and last (2004) data collection by ideology. The most extreme liberals were nearly as positive toward Blacks in 1972 as they were 32 years later, suggesting very little change among liberals over the time span.

8 Note that the large web data sets reviewed earlier found that a small political difference in

racial attitudes persisted into the 21st century (data collected 2000–2006).

The most extreme conservatives, on the other hand, showed a substantial change (cross-sectionally) in attitudes over the same period. The regression estimates for extreme conservatives have them giving a 56 warmth rating for Blacks in 1972 and a 70 rating in 2004. In effect, these data suggest that conservatives’ explicit attitudes toward Blacks eventually “caught up” to liberals’ over this 32-year period in American history.9

Cross-sectional analyses of attitudes toward Blacks in ANES data were consistent with our hypothesis that liberals are more likely to be the instigators of social change aimed at redressing social group inequalities, and conservatives to initially resist. Whereas strong liberals were already quite positive toward Blacks in 1972, conservatism was then associated with markedly less favorable attitudes toward Blacks. Over time, attitudes toward Blacks became more favorable in general, with the rest of the political spectrum ultimately joining liberals in the expression of more positive attitudes.

INTERGROUP ATTITUDES AND THE

CHANGING OF POLITICAL MINDS

Across two large data sets, and using both implicit and explicit methods of measurement, we consistently observed that conservatives more than liberals tilt in their preferences toward higher-status groups over lower-status groups (Jost et al., 2004). Looking at explicit attitudes toward higherand lower-status groups separately, we see that this effect in conservatives occurs at both ends: they prefer higher-status groups more than liberals and dislike lower-status groups more than liberals, with the former being the more consistent effect. Variation occurs in the extent to which liberals and conservatives differ. Some intergroup comparisons elicit strong polarization (e.g., gay men), whereas others elicit minimal variation by ideology (e.g., young people). An obvious next step for this area of research is to identify those factors that exaggerate or minimize ideological polarization with respect to specific target groups.

An observation of interest from data from the Project Implicit website is that the ideological polarization for group preferences was substantially stronger for explicit reports than for implicit measurement. Nosek and colleagues (2007) reported that, after adjusting for variations in age, gender, and ethnicity, the average effect size across topics for political ideology predicting implicit preferences was ηP2 = .013, and the average effect size for explicit

9 The main caution for this interpretation is the fact that the data is cross-sectional, not longi-

tudinal. Different people participated in each year’s data collection.

preferences was ηP2 = .030, more than twice the magnitude. Conservatives show robust preferences for high-status groups, with implicit and explicit preferences having approximately the same effect sizes, on average, for moderate and strong conservatives (Fig. 20.2). For liberals, however, a “conflicted stance” more accurately describes the data, with explicitly reported preferences being discrepant from implicit ones and consistently more egalitarian on average.

Why might this be? Our prevailing hypotheses focus on change—both in the immediate situation and over time. At any given moment, liberals and conservatives may have fairly similar automatic reactions to social groups but deal with their reactions differently. Liberals may be more suspicious of their own automatic responses and seek to suppress, change, or modify their influence on explicit report and judgment (Skitka et al., 2002). Conservatives, on the other hand, might be more likely to accept their automatic responses as valid and use them to guide explicit judgment.

This hypothesis does not address the fact that there are indeed some implicit attitude differences across the ideological spectrum, suggesting that automatic reactions are not all the same for liberals and conservatives. This provides the basis for our hypothesis about change over time. Evidence for the automatization of cognitive processes points to practice and elaboration as key influences (Logan, 1988; Nosek, 2005).

If liberals actively reject or modify their automatic responses and practice replacing those reactions with judgments that conform to their explicit values, then, over time, those alternative evaluations may become automatized themselves. This is consistent with evidence that people who are chronic egalitarians or high in the motivation to respond without prejudice show less implicit bias against African Americans than others do (e.g., Devine, Plant, Amodio, Harmon-Jones, & Vance, 2002; Moskowitz, Gollwitzer, Wasel, & Schaal, 1999). Liberals typically have stronger motivations to avoid prejudice than conservatives. As a consequence, they may practice egalitarian responses more frequently, thus accounting for their lower degree of implicit preference for higher-status groups.

From this perspective, a liberal’s effort to practice egalitarianism is first an explicit shift that, over time, fosters an implicit shift as well. It also highlights the possibility that, based on the present data, the change of mind is incomplete. If practicing egalitarian responses is the key to reducing implicit biases, then most liberals have more practicing to do before attaining a high degree of implicit–explicit consistency.

Another possibility is that the type of change that leads to explicit egalitarianism is not sufficient for changing implicit evaluations. Deciding that one has changed one’s mind will likely alter what is said and endorsed, but