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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]

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Is it possible to predict COVID-19 vaccination status prior to the existence and availability of COVID-19 vaccines? Here, we present a logistic model by regressing decisions to vaccinate in late 2021 on lagged sociodemographic, health, social, and political indicators from 2019 in a sample of New Zealand adults aged between 18 and 94 (Mage = 52.92, SD = 14.10; 62.21% women; N = 5324). We explain 31% of the variance in decision making across New Zealand. Significant predictors of being unvaccinated were being younger, more deprived, reporting less satisfaction with general practitioners, lower levels of neuroticism, greater levels of subjective health and meaning in life, higher distrust in science and in the police, lower satisfaction in the government, as well as political conservatism. Additional cross-sectional models specified using the same, and additional COVID-19-specific factors are also presented. These findings reveal that vaccination decisions are neither artefacts of context nor chance, but rather can be predicted in advance of the availability of vaccines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The third-person effect (TPE) is the tendency for people to perceive the media as more influential on others than on themselves. This study introduced a new methodological paradigm for measuring the TPE and examined whether the effect stems from an overestimation of the persuasibility of others, an underestimation of the persuasibility of the self, both, or neither. In three studies, we compared ratings of: (a) current self attitudes (both baseline and post-persuasion), (b) current others' attitudes (both baseline and post-persuasion), (c) retrospective self attitudes, and (d) retrospective others' attitudes. We also measured traditional third-person perception ratings of perceived influence. Rather than overestimating others' attitude change, we found evidence that people underestimated the extent to which their own attitudes had, or would have, changed.