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Despite being a defining issue in the culture war, the political psychology of abortion attitudes remains poorly understood. We address this oversight by reviewing existing literature and integrating new analyses of several large‐scale, cross‐sectional, and longitudinal datasets to identify the demographic and ideological correlates of abortion attitudes. Our review and new analyses indicate that abortion support is increasing modestly over time in both the United States and New Zealand. We also find that a plurality of respondents (43.8%) in the United States are consistently "pro‐choice," whereas 14.8% are consistently "pro‐life," across various elective and traumatic abortion scenarios. We then show that age, religiosity, and conservatism correlate negatively, whereas Openness to Experience correlates positively, with abortion support. New analyses of heterosexual couples further reveal that women's and men's religiosity decrease their romantic partner's abortion support. Noting inconsistent gender differences in attitudes toward abortion, we then discuss the impact of traditional gender‐role attitudes and sexism on abortion attitudes and conclude that, rather than misogyny, benevolent sexism—the belief that women should be cherished and protected—best explains opposition to abortion. Our review thus provides a comprehensive overview of the demographic and ideological variables that underly abortion attitudes and, hence, the broader culture war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social dominance orientation ( SDO) is conceived as an individual's level of support for group-based hierarchy in general that causes support for more specific group hierarchies. According to social dominance theory, group differences in SDO underpin ideological and behavioural group differences related to specific group hierarchies. Using representative 5-year longitudinal panel data from New Zealand ( N = 3,384), we test whether SDO mediates effects of sex and ethnicity on legitimizing myths ( LMs) relating to gender and ethnic hierarchy over time. The SDO mediation hypothesis is supported in the case of hostile sexism. However, it is unsupported in the case of benevolent sexism and LMs relating to ethnic hierarchy, where there was no cross-lagged effect of SDO. Moreover, being in the dominant ethnic group is associated with more legitimization of ethnic hierarchy but less legitimization of gender hierarchy, which is inconsistent with the notion of a general orientation underpinning group differences in legitimation. There was mixed evidence for a reverse path whereby specific LMs mediate group differences in SDO across time. We argue for the need to find alternative ways to theorize ideological consensus and difference between groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benevolent sexism promises women a revered place within intimate relationships, which should lead to greater dissatisfaction when they face relationship difficulties. We collected self-reports of relationship problems and relationship satisfaction (Study 1; N = 91 heterosexual couples), relationship problems and relationship evaluations daily over 3 weeks (Study 1), and hurtful partner behaviour and relationship evaluations over 10 days (Study 2; N = 86 women). Women's endorsement of benevolent sexism predicted sharper declines in relationship satisfaction when they faced greater relationship problems (Study 1) and hurtful partner behaviour (Study 2). These effects were magnified in longer relationships (Studies 1 and 2), indicating that the sensitivity to relationship problems associated with women's endorsement of benevolent sexism is particularly pronounced when women have more invested in their relationship role being revered and cherished. The results suggest that women who endorse benevolent sexism are vulnerable within their relationships because their satisfaction is contingent upon the fulfilment of the promises of benevolent sexism. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the proportion of people who held ambivalent versus univalent sexist attitudes, that is, those who simultaneously endorsed benevolent sexism (BS) and hostile sexism (HS). We examined this by capitalizing on recent innovations in latent class analysis to model latent types of sexists, or response profiles to BS and HS, in a nationally representative New Zealand sample (n = 6450). Our results show, for the first time, that by far, the most common pattern was for people to hold similar levels of BS and HS. Strongly ambivalent sexists, however, constituted only 8%-9% of the population. Most were classified as mild or moderate ambivalent sexists (28% and 44%, respectively). Univalent sexism was exceedingly rare, with between 2% and 5% of people solely endorsing HS but not BS, or BS but not HS. We validated the model by showing theoretically predicted differences across sexist types in demographics (gender, age), ideology (social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism), and relationship satisfaction. Strongly ambivalent sexists also held the highest levels of gender-specific system justification, invariant of gender. This provides novel evidence for the premise that strong sexist ambivalence promotes support for and faith in the patriarchical system. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The additive and interactive effects of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) were examined using 16 independent samples of New Zealand European participants (N = 2,164). Consistent with Duckitt's (2001) Dual Process Model, SDO and RWA displayed strong additive effects across various domains of intergroup-related attitude, including measures of racism, sexism, homosexual prejudice, and ethnic and religious in group identification. In each of these five domains, meta-analysis indicated that the statistical interaction of SDO and RWA accounted for an average of less than .001% variance in addition to their linear combination. It is concluded that the association between SDO and various discriminatory attitudes and beliefs is only extremely weakly dependent on RWA, and vice-versa, suggesting that these two ideological attitudes are primarily additive, rather than interactive, in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]