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Differences in attitudes on social issues such as abortion, immigration, and sex are hugely divisive, and understanding their origins is among the most important tasks facing human behavioural sciences. Despite the clear psychological importance of parenthood and the motivation to provide care for children, researchers have only recently begun investigating their influence on social and political attitudes. Because socially conservative values ostensibly prioritize safety, stability, and family values, we hypothesized that being more invested in parental care might make socially conservative policies more appealing. Studies 1 (pre-registered; n=376) and 2 (n=1,913) find novel evidence of conditional experimental effects of a parenthood prime, such that people who engaged strongly with a childcare manipulation showed an increase in social conservatism. Study 2 also finds evidence that this effect is mediated by increases in parental care motivation. Study 3 (n=2,610, novel data from 10 countries) and 4 (n=426,444, World Values Survey data) find evidence that both parenthood and parental care motivation are associated with increased social conservatism around the globe. Further, most of the positive association globally between age and social conservatism is accounted for by parenthood. These findings support the hypothesis that parenthood and parental care motivation increase social conservatism.

During pandemics, circulation of misinformation has optimal conditions as information spreads fast while uncertainty is high. While health authorities play a key role in providing advice for protective behaviors, little is known on how health authorities can mitigate the spread of misinformation on social media. In two experiments in Denmark, we assess the effect of an accuracy nudge and two video interventions from the Danish Health Authorities used in a real-world public health campaign circulated on social media in Denmark during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings show that providing citizens with elaborate, actionable and concrete advice decrease misinformation sharing by boosting citizens’ sense of self-efficacy. Furthermore, while accuracy nudges may less effective during times with high uncertainty, public health authorities can provide citizens with competences through scaleable video interventions on social media.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multinational data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar results were found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, and collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-neglible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic., PNAS Nexus, 1 (3), ISSN:2752-6542

Objectives: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic required rapid public compliance with advice from health authorities. Here, we ask who was most likely to do so during the first wave of the pandemic. Design: Quota-sampled cross-sectional and panel data from eight Western democracies (Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Methods: We fielded online public opinion surveys to 26,508 citizens between 19 March and 16 May. The surveys included questions about protective behaviour, perceptions of the pandemic (threat and self-efficacy), as well as broader attitudes towards society (institutional and interpersonal trust). We employ multilevel and fixed-effects regression models to analyse the relationship between these variables. Results: Consistent with prior research on epidemics, perceptions of threat turn out as culturally uniform determinants of both avoidant and preventive forms of protective behaviour. On this basis, authorities could foster compliance by appealing to fear of COVID-19, but there may be normative and practical limits to such a strategy. Instead, we find that another major source of compliance is a sense of self-efficacy. Using individual-level panel data, we find evidence that self-efficacy is amendable to change and exerts an effect on protective behaviour. Furthermore, the effects of fear are small among those who feel efficacious, creating a path to compliance without fear. In contrast, two other major candidates for facilitating compliance from the social sciences, interpersonal trust and institutional trust, have surprisingly little motivational power during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Conclusions: To address future waves of the pandemic, health authorities should thus focus on facilitating self-efficacy in the public.

Individuals who are more motivated to avoid pathogenic infection tend to be more opposed to immigrants. Explanations for this relation emphasize lack of familiarity, with people who are more unfamiliar with ethnic outgroups being more likely to perceive them as a possible infection risk and therefore oppose immigration. Exposure to immigrants can increase familiarity with outgroup members. This suggests that exposure to immigrants attenuates the relationship between pathogen avoidance motivation and opposition to immigration. We tested this prediction in four studies using country-level ethnic fractionalization and segregation (Study 1) and proportion of immigrants at the local neighborhood level (Studies 2–4) as indicators of exposure to immigrants. Results showed that intergroup exposure did not attenuate the relation between pathogen avoidance motivation and opposition to immigration. This suggests that long-term exposure to ethnic outgroups is insufficient to make them and their customs nonthreatening for those with strong worries about pathogenic threats. Individuals who are more motivated to avoid pathogenic infection tend to be more opposed to immigrants. Explanations for this relation emphasize lack of familiarity, with people who are more unfamiliar with ethnic outgroups being more likely to perceive them as a possible infection risk and therefore oppose immigration. Exposure to immigrants can increase familiarity with outgroup members. This suggests that exposure to immigrants attenuates the relationship between pathogen avoidance motivation and opposition to immigration. We tested this prediction in four studies using country-level ethnic fractionalization and segregation (Study 1) and proportion of immigrants at the local neighborhood level (Studies 2–4) as indicators of exposure to immigrants. Results showed that intergroup exposure did not attenuate the relation between pathogen avoidance motivation and opposition to immigration. This suggests that long-term exposure to ethnic outgroups is insufficient to make them and their customs nonthreatening for those with strong worries about pathogenic threats.

Among non-human animals, a key strategy to resolve conflicts without fighting relies on assessing relative fighting ability on the basis of physical cues such as size and strength. Recent studies hypothesize that the human mind also contains mechanisms for spontaneously coordinating conflict behavior on the basis of difference in physical strength, even if strength is not rationally relevant to the conflict. We provide the first direct, experimental test of the existence of such mechanisms. We do so by applying a non-physical, anonymous, economic game - the war of attrition - in which male contestants compete by means of perseverance to win a monetary prize. While initial studies provided some support for the prediction, the final well-powered and pre-registered study failed to support the prediction. Overall, we interpret our findings as evidence against the hypothesis that the human mind attributes relevance to physical factors that are irrelevant for the actual resolution of a conflict. We discuss implications for existing findings in the field and provide directions for further research.

Political hostility and ideological polarization permeate political debates on social media, but what is driving long-term developments in ideological polarization and political hostility? Prominent theories of social media argue that social media networks are best conceptualized as echo chambers, i.e., systems insulated from external input. Contrary to this view, we demonstrate that over the course of the 2020 election year in the US, all major ebbs and flows in political hostility on the social media platform Twitter were driven by external offline events. Importantly, these events were magnified for Twitter users within the most politically hostile and least ideologically diverse networks. Accordingly, social media networks are often best conceptualized as semi-open resonance chambers that are not insulated from external events but magnify them. We demonstrate that resonance chambers facilitate event-driven hostility via feedback loops that makes Twitter both more hostile and more ideologically polarized.

What is the relationship between morality and politics? If morality is a collection of cooperative rules, and politics is conflict over which cooperative projects to pursue, then we should expect the two to be related. People who expect to benefit from a particular type of cooperation will be likely to endorse the corresponding moral values and political policies. Here we examine the relationship between moral values and political liberalism-conservatism, with data from the Morality-As-Cooperation Questionnaire and the Social and Economics Conservatism Scale in samples of participants from the USA (N = 518), Denmark (N = 552), the Netherlands (N = 353), and an international online population (N = 1,337). We found that political conservatism was consistently related with deference values. We also found some support for the hypotheses that political orientation has different associations with family values versus group values and has different associations with fairness values versus reciprocity values. However, for most of our hypotheses, the results showed no support or did not reach statistical significance, largely due to poor model fit or measurement error associated with the political scales. We conclude that improved measurement of political preferences is needed to illuminate the relationship between morality and politics.

Data availability statement: The data associated with this research are available via the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/bax8r/). Copyright © The Author(s) 2022. Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals (N = 11,200) from 31 countries showed a small relation between pathogen disgust sensitivity (an individual-difference measure of pathogen-avoidance motivations) and measures of antigay attitudes. Analyses also showed that pathogen disgust sensitivity relates not only to antipathy toward gay men and lesbians, but also to negativity toward other groups, in particular those associated with violations of traditional sexual norms (e.g., prostitutes). These results suggest that the association between pathogen-avoidance motivations and antigay attitudes is relatively stable across cultures and is a manifestation of a more general relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice towards groups associated with sexual norm violations. J.R.C. acknowledges funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) under Grant ANR-17-EURE-0010 (Investissements d’Avenir program). J.M.T. was supported by Horizon 2020 European Research Council Grant StG-2015 680002-HBIS.

Many assume that citizens who are more inclined to moralize the values of evidence-based and logical thinking are less likely to spread political hostility and conspiracy theories. On the basis of adaptationist approaches to morality and status-seeking, we in contrast argue that moralization of rationality can actually stimulate the spread of news hostile to political opponents. Across two large surveys (N = 3675) run on U.S. respondents (one exploratory and one pre-registered), we provide empirical evidence for this prediction and demonstrate that moralizing rationality can be used as a form of moral grandstanding by individuals inclined to status seeking and dominance to spread hostile information. In contrast to such grandstanding with respect to rationality, our studies find robust evidence that intellectual humility—i.e., the awareness that intuitions are fallible, and that trusting others is often desirable—may protect people from both sharing and believing hostile news. Those associations generalized to all hostile news, independently of whether they are “fake” or anchored in real events.

We introduce the Politics and the Life Sciences Special Issue on Disgust and Political Attitudes discussing the importance of understanding state and trait disgust, the innovative and transparent process by which registered reports and preregistered studies were chosen and funded, and the manuscripts that make up this special issue. This essay concludes by discussing future research directions in disgust and political attitudes, as well as the benefits of a transparent review process that avoids the “file drawer problem” of unpublished null findings.

What is the psychology underlying preferences for dominant political leaders? Against earlier theories about authoritarianism and submissiveness, recent research shows that followers strategically promote dominant individuals to leadership positions in order to enhance their ability to aggress against other groups. Thus, recent evidence supports the existence of dedicated mechanisms for generating summary impressions of the dominance of potential leaders from a wealth of cues. Furthermore, research demonstrates how preferences for dominant leaders are heightened in contexts of conflict and among individuals prone to view the social world as conflictual. At the same time, this research shows that followers intuitively fear exploitation from dominant leaders and the political psychology of followership also contains dedicated mechanisms for identifying and counteracting such exploitation.

Given the costs of political violence, scholars have long sought to identify its causes. We examined individual differences related to participation in political violence, emphasizing the central role of political orientations. We hypothesized that individuals with dominance-driven autocratic political orientations are prone to political violence. Multilevel analysis of survey data from 34 African countries ( N = 51,587) indicated that autocracy-oriented individuals, compared with democracy-oriented individuals, are considerably more likely to participate in political violence. As a predictor of violence (indexed with attitudinal, intentional, and behavioral measures), autocratic orientation outperformed other variables highlighted in existing research, including socioeconomic status and group-based injustice. Additional analyses of original data from South Africa ( N = 2,170), Denmark ( N = 1,012), and the United States ( N = 1,539) indicated that the link between autocratic orientations and political violence reflects individual differences in the use of dominance to achieve status and that the findings generalize to societies extensively socialized to democratic values.

Despite early hope that vaccines may end the COVID-19 pandemic, large unvaccinated minorities persist even in countries with high vaccine access. Consequently, public debates and protests have been intensifying over the issue of vaccination. Here, we ask whether people's status as either vaccinated or unvaccinated has come to reflect a socio-political cleavage that spills over even to interactions between people in everyday life. Using a standard measure of exclusionary reactions in family relationships, we quantify the antipathy between vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens in 21 countries (10,740 respondents), representative of 58\% of the world's population. Using conjoint experimental data, we demonstrate that vaccinated people have high antipathy towards the unvaccinated, 2.5 times more than towards a traditional target: immigrants from the Middle East. This antipathy reflects, in part, stereotypic inferences that unvaccinated individuals are untrustworthy and unintelligent, making the antipathy resemble prejudice towards other deviant groups. Antipathy towards the unvaccinated is larger in countries that suffered fewer COVID-19 deaths and that have higher social trust. In contrast, we find no evidence that unvaccinated respondents display antipathy towards vaccinated people, although they are equally prejudiced against immigrants. While previous research recommends framing vaccination as a moral obligation in order to increase uptake, our research documents the costs of this strategy. Whether understandable or not, the antipathy faced by the unvaccinated may exacerbate marginalization and mistrust, which are core causes of their initial vaccine hesitancy, and further entrench the conflict. The novel socio-political cleavage we document may thus be an indication that societies worldwide will leave the pandemic more divided than they entered it.

Toxicity and hostility permeate political debates on social media, but who is responsible? Canonical theories of political engagement equate political resources with being a “model democratic citizen.” In contrast, we develop the theoretical argument that in the current polarized political climate, those same resources come to motivate hostile engagement. Combining two years of survey and behavioral Twitter data, we provide empirical support for a link between political resources and online political hostility. This link is especially pronounced among citizens high in affective polarization -- a trait held by many resourceful citizens in current US society. Concerningly, resourceful but hateful social media users do not simply cater to fringe audiences. Rather, they dominate online debates by tweeting more frequently, having more friends and followers, and by occupying powerful positions in their online networks. The present findings thus shed important light on the causes and consequences of online political hostility.

It may seem strange to propose that biological evolution – and, hence, the deep pre-historic past of humans – has any relevance for political psychology. Afterall, is there anything more modern, technical, and complex than politics? Yet, the core argument of this chapter is that underneath this complexity is a number of fundamental problems of social life that we, as a species, have been recurrently facing for thousands and thousands of years. If evolution had not designed us to deal with these problems, we would not be here today and, accordingly, we should expect the human mind to contain a large number of psychological mechanisms specifically dedicated to political decision-making. While much research in political psychology laments the political sophistication of the average citizen, evolutionary approaches in contrast highlight the opposite. As will also be clear, however, our political nature was designed to solve problems in the particular environments of the ancestral past and, hence, will fail in predictable ways when applied to the problems that are unique to the politics of modern mass societies.

This chapter seeks to explain why “truth is the first casualty of war.” It questions the assumption that humans are solely motivated to pursue accurate beliefs, arguing that the current circulation of fake news, conspiracy theories, and hostile political rumors is the expected outcome of a deep-seated motivation to dispense with truth in situations of conflict. The authors theorize that the occurrence of intergroup conflict throughout human evolutionary history has built psychological motivations into the human mind to spread information that (a) mobilizes the ingroup against the outgroup, (b) facilitates the coordination of attention within the group and (c) signals commitment to the group to fellow ingroup members. The authors hypothesize that, in all of these instances, human psychology is designed to select information that accomplishes these goals most efficiently rather than to select information on the basis of its veracity. Thus, they conclude that when intergroup conflict is salient, humans are psychologically prepared to prioritize misinformation over truth.

Why do people disseminate fake news online? We investigate this question by focusing on the effect of perceived conflict on the endorsement of fake news in the context of a regional conflict between Russia and the West as experienced by Ukrainian citizens. In our survey experiment, a sample of Ukrainians (N= 1,615) was randomly assigned to read negative fake news stories about Russia, the European Union or Tanzania – a country with no stakes in the conflict. We find that perceived conflict between Ukraine and Russia makes Ukrainians less likely to endorse fake news targeting the European Union, but more likely to endorse fake news about Russia. This finding extends the support for motivated reasoning theory beyond Western contexts investigated so far, but also advances our understanding of why false information is disseminated and point to the importance of conflict de-escalation to prevent its diffusion.

This article presents a large-scale, empirical evaluation of the psychophysiological correlates of political ideology and, in particular, the claim that conservatives react with higher levels of electrodermal activity to threatening stimuli than liberals. We (1) conduct two large replications of this claim, using locally representative samples of Danes and Americans; (2) reanalyze all published studies and evaluate their reliability and validity; and (3) test several features to enhance the validity of psychophysiological measures and offer a number of recommendations. Overall, we find little empirical support for the claim. This is caused by significant reliability and validity problems related to measuring threat sensitivity using electrodermal activity. When assessed reliably, electrodermal activity in the replications and published studies captures individual differences in the physiological changes associated with attention shifts, which are unrelated to ideology. In contrast to psychophysiological reactions, self-reported emotional reactions to threatening stimuli are reliably associated with ideology.

One important objection to vaccination programmes involving coercive measures such as re-strictions on unvaccinated people’s access to public space, or even nudging, is that they are paternalistic. We believe this objection is weaker than is often assumed. We defend this belief by: 1) introducing a novel distinction between individual and collective paternalism; 2) showing that, across a range of circumstances, vaccination programmes involve collective, not individu-al, paternalism; and 3) arguing that collective paternalism is not wrong for the reasons that, arguably, individual paternalism is.

While the World has been busy mitigating the disastrous health and economic effects of the novel coronavirus, a less direct, but not less concerning peril has largely remained unexplored: the COVID-19 crisis may disrupt some of the most fundamental social and political relationships in democratic societies. We interviewed samples resembling the national population of Denmark, Hungary, Italy and the US three times: in April, June and December of 2020 (14K observations). We employed a broad set of survey questions tapping into perceptions about the two major relationships structuring society: Horizontal relationships between citizens, and vertical relationships between citizens and the state. We benchmarked these data against pre-COVID levels measured in the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey. We present strikingly similar findings across the four diverse countries. We show that support for the political system has markedly decreased already by April and fell further till December. Exploiting the panel setup, we demonstrate that within-respondent increases in indicators of pandemic fatigue (specifically, the perceived subjective burden of the pandemic and feelings of anomie) correspond to decreases in system support and increases in extreme anti-systemic attitudes. Meanwhile, we find much smaller changes in social solidarity and trust compared to pre-pandemic levels, and we find that these attitudes are largely unaffected by pandemic burden. Our results imply that the pandemic is not only a health-crisis, but poses a substantial challenge to the relationship between citizens and the state.

Background Public use of face masks has been widely adopted to halter the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but a key concern has been whether the effectiveness of face mask use is limited due to the elicitation of false feelings of security that decrease the observance of other protective behaviors, the so-called risk-compensation. Methods We exploit quasi-experimental variation, prompted by three major changes in policy, to assess whether public use of face masks elicit risk-compensation by increasing the number of close contacts or decreasing attention to distancing and hygiene measured in daily nationally representative surveys (N = 106 880). Results Number of close contacts: face mask use prompted by the policy changes decrease the number of contacts in two of the three interventions. In the remaining intervention, it has no effect. Attention to hygiene: across the changes, face masks use does not affect people’s attention to hygiene. Attention to distancing: in two of three interventions, face mask use increase attention to distancing. In the remaining intervention, we see a decrease in attention. Conclusions Overall, public use of face masks may occasionally elicit a narrow form of risk-compensation; specifically, reducing engagement in physical distancing. However, such narrow forms of risk-compensation are limited: the results do not reveal any effects on the actual number of physical contacts, only on the psychological attention to distancing advice. Moreover, the negative effect only appears for one of three interventions. The other two interventions suggest that face mask use increases attention to physical distancing.

Background: Since the initial phases of vaccination campaigns, health authorities across the world have recommended vaccination of children between 15 and 18; and since the summer of 2021, vaccinations of children between 12 and 15 have been recommended. Recently, American and European Health Authorities have approved the use of a vaccine against COVID-19 for children between age 5 and 11. In this article, we ask what predicts parents’ intention to vaccinate their children against COVID-19. Methods: We use empirical data from a large-scale survey in Denmark about vaccine intentions. The survey included a subsample of 794 parents to children aged 6-15. For this group of parents, we assess key predictors (including demographics, predispositions, vaccine perceptions, and vaccine barriers) of parents’ acceptance of a vaccine for their child against COVID-19. Results: We propose that the vaccine decision follows a stepwise process: demographic variables shape parents’ predispositions, which again shape their specific perceptions of the safety and effectiveness - both in general and for their children - of the particular vaccine. Moreover, we argue that vaccine barriers will moderate this process. Our results demonstrate that parents’ intention to get their children vaccinated against COVID-19 is not driven by considerations regarding the disease of COVID-19 but by considerations of the safety of vaccines and added benefits of vaccination such as normalizing societal and everyday life. The balance of these considerations shift depending on the child's age, with lower acceptance for younger children. Furthermore, the content of considerations are shaped by trust in the health authorities and factual vaccine knowledge. Conclusion: To increase parents' acceptance of a COVID-19 vaccine for their children, health authorities should focus on establishing and communicating evidence for the safety of vaccines and the impact of vaccination for their everyday lives.

On November 8, 2021, the Danish government held a press conference re-introducing COVID-19 passports both to mitigate the recent surge in COVID-19 infections and to put more pressure on still unvaccinated people to take up the vaccine. The press conference was also notable for the Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, condemning the unvaccinated in unprecedentedly harsh words. While new vaccinations increased in the weeks following the press conference, we show that the press conference had unintended, negative consequences. We analyze daily, nationally representative survey data (total N = 25K) employing a difference-in-differences design. We demonstrate that the press conference broadened by 25-33% the already large gaps between vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens on four out of five key psychological antecedents of health compliance. Most notably, we find that trust in the strategy of managing the COVID-19 epidemic decreased by 11 percentage points among the unvaccinated but stayed high among the vaccinated. When considering “pressure” as a pandemic management strategy it is important to be aware of these unintended costs and how they may shape the unvaccinated citizens’ compliance with other health advice and their overarching support for the political system.

Health authorities have highlighted “pandemic fatigue” as a psychological consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic and warned that “fatigue” could demotivate compliance with healthrelated policies and mandates. Yet, “fatigue” from following the policies of authorities may have consequences far beyond the health domain. Theories from the social sciences have raised that real and perceived costs of policies can also drive sentiments of discontent with the entire political establishment. Integrating theories from the health and social sciences, we ask how “pandemic fatigue” (i.e., perceived inability to ”keep up” with restrictions) developed over the pandemic and whether it fueled political discontent. Utilizing longitudinal and panel surveys collected from September 2020 to July 2021 in eight Western countries (N=49,116), we analyze: (1) “fatigue” over time at the country level, (2) associations between “pandemic fatigue” and discontent, and (3) the effect of “pandemic fatigue” on political discontent using panel data. “Pandemic fatigue” significantly increased with time and the severity of interventions but also decreased with COVID-19 deaths. When triggered, fatigue elicited a broad range of discontent, including protest support and conspiratorial thinking. The results demonstrate the significant societal impact of the pandemic beyond the domain of health and raises concerns about the stability of democratic societies, which were already strained by strife prior to the pandemic.

In order to halt the spread of COVID-19 governments have engaged in policies that are both economically costly and involve infringements of individual rights. In democratic countries, these policy responses have elicited significant debate but little is known about the extent to which the responses are supported or opposed by the broader public. This article investigates how citizens across eight Western democracies evaluate the specific policies imposed by their governments to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. The study relies on large-scale, longitudinal surveys that are reflective of the national populations (total N = 124,062). On this basis, it is investigated how pandemic-specific and broader political attitudes correlate with support for government responses during a significant part of 2020, a period marked by pandemic restrictions in all the countries. Medium to high levels of support for the government's responses are found in all eight countries. Beyond the regular voters of the government, support is driven by individuals high in interpersonal trust and self-assessed knowledge about COVID-19. This may suggest that halting the spread of COVID-19 is viewed as a collective action problem and mobilises support from those who know how to act and who trust others to act similarly. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1925821 .

The fields of political psychology and election studies often live separate lives. One reason has been the difficulty of including long psychological question batteries in the high-quality, representative samples that are the hallmark of election studies. In this study, we examine a novel one-item measure of psychological differences in sensitivity to one particular emotion: disgust. We demonstrate that disgust sensitivity serves as a foundational political difference that colors a very large range of social and political attitudes and behaviors: including ideology, political engagement, reactions towards outgroups, support for government intervention, behavior during a pandemic, and vote choice.

Significance During a pandemic, governments face incentives to not disclose negative information about vaccines to not jeopardize public vaccine acceptance. Against these incentives, the current study provides an experimental, cross-national demonstration of the importance of transparency in communication about a vaccine against COVID-19. While disclosing negative information may increase hesitancy, transparency sustains trust in health authorities and hinders the spread of conspiracy beliefs. Accordingly, the current results provide a clear warning against succumbing to the short-term incentive of withholding information. Sustaining trust during the pandemic is critical for health authorities, both if repeated vaccinations are necessary and in preparation for future health emergencies. Among those who have already lost trust, health communication has little persuasive effect., During the rapid development and rolling out of vaccines against COVID-19, researchers have called for an approach of “radical transparency,” in which vaccine information is transparently disclosed to the public, even if negative information can decrease vaccine uptake. Consistent with theories about the psychology of conspiracy beliefs, these calls predict that a lack of transparency may reduce trust in health authorities and may facilitate the spread of conspiracy theories, which may limit the long-term capabilities of health authorities during and after the pandemic. On the basis of preregistered experiments conducted on large, representative samples of Americans and Danes (N > 13,000), the current study contrasts the effects of vague vaccine communication with transparent communication, which discloses either positive or negative vaccine features. The evidence demonstrates that transparent negative communication may indeed harm vaccine acceptance here and now but that it increases trust in health authorities. Furthermore, the alternative of vague, reassuring communication does not increase vaccine acceptance either and leads to both lower trust and higher endorsement of conspiracy theories.

Background While effective vaccines against the SARS-COV-2 virus have been developed and countries around the world have invested heavily to secure vaccine rollout, a fundamental challenge remains. How do policy-makers around the world ensure high vaccine uptake? What is lacking is a comprehensive assessment that captures a total spectrum of features related to the development of a vaccine, the vaccine's characteristics as well as the implementation of the vaccination program. Methods To provide such an assessment, we designed a conjoint experiment embedded in large-scale surveys based on a random sample from the central database of Danish social security numbers (N = 3,099), providing a sample that is representative for the adult Danish population. In the conjoint experiment, we vary features relating to three dimensions: 1) the stage of vaccine development, 2) the specific characteristics of the vaccine, and 3) the implementation of the vaccination strategy. Results We show that the features relating to characteristics of the specific vaccine have the strongest impact on vaccine acceptance. The features relating to vaccine development were the second most powerful, while the features relating to the implementation of the vaccination strategy were the least. Conclusions The public has a strong preference for vaccines with high efficacy. This may point to a mounting challenge for ensuring high vaccine uptake. Yet, the results also provide evidence that there might be a pathway to naturally alleviate this challenge. Thus, over time the “testing period” of the vaccines are naturally extended, which simultaneously implies an increase in vaccine safety (provided that the roll-out only reveals marginal side-effects). Our results suggest that such an increase in vaccine safety in itself will increase acceptance (in particular, if the roll-out only reveals marginal side-effects). Furthermore, the results indicate that vaccine acceptance can be increased if politicians leave it to the health authorities to communicate about recommendations.

We live in a world of text but the sheer magnitude of social media data coupled with a need to measure complex psychological constructs have made this important source of data difficult to use for many social scientists. Either researchers engage in costly hand-coding of thousands of texts using supervised techniques or in unsupervised techniques where the measurement of predefined constructs are difficult. We propose a novel approach which we call super-unsupervised learning using the psychologically complex construct online political hate. This approach draws on the best features from both supervised and unsupervised learning techniques: Measurements of complex psychological constructs without a single labelled data source. We first outline the approach and then provide tests of (i) face validity, (ii) convergent and discriminant validity, (iii) criterion validity, (iv) external validity and (v) ecological validity.

On March 11, 2021, the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID-19 was suspended in three Nordic countries and, on subsequent days, in other European countries. Using data on vaccine acceptance in eight Western countries obtained on a daily basis, we show that these decisions - and associated news - decreased public vaccine acceptance in several countries and part of this decrease happened in response to suspensions in other countries. The findings demonstrate the importance of international coordination between health authorities during a pandemic such that local authorities are able to put the decisions of foreign authorities into perspective.

People form political attitudes to serve psychological needs. Recent research shows that some individuals have a strong desire to incite chaos when they perceive themselves to be marginalized by society. These individuals tend to see chaos as a way to invert the power structure and gain social status in the process. Analysing data drawn from large-scale representative surveys conducted in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, we identify the prevalence of Need for Chaos across Anglo-Saxon societies. Using Latent Profile Analysis, we explore whether different subtypes underlie the uni-dimensional construct and find evidence that some people may be motivated to seek out chaos because they want to rebuild society, while others enjoy destruction for its own sake. We demonstrate that chaos-seekers are not a unified political group but a divergent set of malcontents. Multiple pathways can lead individuals to ‘want to watch the world burn’. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms’.

People form political attitudes to serve psychological needs. Recent research shows that some individuals have a strong desire to incite chaos when they perceive themselves to be marginalized by society. These individuals tend to see chaos as a way to invert the power structure and gain social status in the process. Analysing data drawn from large-scale representative surveys conducted in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, we identify the prevalence of Need for Chaos across Anglo-Saxon societies. Using Latent Profile Analysis, we explore whether different subtypes underlie the uni-dimensional construct and find evidence that some people may be motivated to seek out chaos because they want to rebuild society, while others enjoy destruction for its own sake. We demonstrate that chaos-seekers are not a unified political group but a divergent set of malcontents. Multiple pathways can lead individuals to ‘want to watch the world burn’. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms’.

By conforming to ingroup norms, individuals coordinate with other group members, preserve cohesion, and avoid costs of exclusion. Experimental studies have shown that increased concerns about infectious disease increases conformity. However, coordination with other group members has myriad benefits, most of which exist independent of pathogenic infection. Accordingly, a strong causal effect of pathogen avoidance motivations on conformity appears unlikely. In line with this theoretical concern, results from five studies (N = 1943) showed no support for the hypothesis that experimentally increasing pathogen avoidance motivations influences conformity. The findings are inconsistent with the notion that associations between the prevalence of infectious disease and conformity observed at the cross-cultural level result from a fast-acting psychological mechanism that regulates conformity as a function of pathogen avoidance motivations.

Democracies are experiencing destabilizing events, including the emergence of demagogues, street riots, circulation of misinformation, and extremely hostile interactions on social media. Some of these forms of discontent are commonly argued to be related to populism. In contrast, we argue that the evolved psychology of status-seeking lies at the core of this syndrome of extreme political discontent. Social status constitutes a key adaptive resource for any human, as it induces deference from others in conflicts of interest. Prior research has identified two routes to status: Privilege acquired through service and dominance acquired through coercion. We argue that extreme political discontent involves behaviors aimed at dominance through engagement in either individual aggression or in mobilization processes that facilitate coalitional aggression. Consistent with this, we empirically demonstrate that measures of status-seeking via dominance correlate with indices of a large number of extreme forms of political discontent and do so more strongly than a measure of populism. Finally, we argue that the reason why dominance strategies become activated in the context of modern democratic politics is that increased inequality activates heightened needs for status and, under such conditions, dominance for some groups constitutes a more attainable route to status than prestige.

How should health authorities communicate to motivate the public to comply with health advice during a prolonged health crisis such as a pandemic? During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, for example, people have had to comply with successive restrictions as the world faced multiple races between controlling new waves of the virus and the development and implementation of vaccines. Here, we examine how health authorities and governments most effectively motivate the public by focusing on a specific race: between the Alpha variant and the implementation of the first generation of COVID-19 vaccinations in the winter of 2021. Following prior research on crisis communication, we focus on appeals to fear and hope using communicative aids in the form of visualizations based on epidemiological modelling. Using a population-based experiment conducted in United States ($$N = 3,022$$ N = 3 , 022 ), we demonstrate that a hope-oriented visual communication aid, depicting the competing effects on the epidemic curve of (1) a more infectious variant and (2) vaccinations, motivates public action more effectively than a fear-oriented visual communication, focusing exclusively on the threat of the new variant. The importance of the implementation of such hope-oriented messages is further highlighted by cross-national representative surveys from eight countries ($$N = 3,995$$ N = 3 , 995 ), which demonstrate that feelings of fear towards the Alpha variant alone were insufficient to activate strong compliance. Overall, these findings provide general insights into the importance of hope as a health communication strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.

Widespread distrust in politicians is often attributed to the way elites portray politics to citizens: the media, competing candidates, and foreign governments are largely considered responsible for portraying politicians as self-interested actors pursuing personal electoral and economic interests. This article turns to the mass level and considers the active role of citizens in disseminating such information. We build on psychological research on human cooperation, holding that people exhibit an interpersonal transmission bias in favor of information on the self-interested, antisocial behavior of others to maintain group cooperation. We posit that this transmission bias extends to politics, causing citizens to disproportionally disseminate information on self-interested politicians through interpersonal communication and, in turn, contributes to distrust in politicians and policy disapproval. We support these predictions using novel experimental studies, allowing us to observe transmission rates and opinion effects in actual communication chains. The findings have implications for understanding and accommodating political distrust.

Although the genetic influence on voter turnout is substantial (typically 40–50%), the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Across the social sciences, research suggests that ‘resources for politics’ (as indexed notably by educational attainment and intelligence test performance) constitute a central cluster of factors that predict electoral participation. Educational attainment and intelligence test performance are heritable. This suggests that the genotypes that enhance these phenotypes could positively predict turnout. To test this, we conduct a genome-wide complex trait analysis of individual-level turnout. We use two samples from the Danish iPSYCH case–cohort study, including a nationally representative sample as well as a sample of individuals who are particularly vulnerable to political alienation due to psychiatric conditions (n = 13,884 and n = 33,062, respectively). Using validated individual-level turnout data from the administrative records at the polling station, genetic correlations and Mendelian randomization, we show that there is a substantial genetic overlap between voter turnout and both educational attainment and intelligence test performance. The genetic variance that predicts educational attainment or intelligence test performance predicts individual-level voter turnout in a nationally representative sample and among people with psychiatric conditions, such as depression.

One of the unprecedented measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic was to close borders across the world. In Europe, the closing of national borders was perceived as particularly controversial because of the emphasis on the free movement of labor and citizens across borders within the European Union. Here, we examine the level of support for border closings among citizens from eight Western democracies, how support developed over time, and how particular COVID-19-related concerns and considerations predict individual differences in support. Specifically, we collected data on support for tightened border security from 9 April 2020 until 19 December 2020 in quota-sampled online surveys in Denmark, Sweden, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Hungary. Eight Western democracies that differ in their response to and the impact of COVID-19 (N = 67,679). Overall, the data show moderate to high levels of support for tightened border security across all observed countries, with substantial within-country variation. Furthermore, the analyses show that support for border security relates to both usual predictors of anti-immigration views and corona-specific considerations, in particular, personal concerns about the adverse effects of COVID-19 and attributions of blame to international actors such as China and WHO.

The emergence of the novel coronavirus has put societies under tremendous pressure to instigate massive and rapid behavior change. Throughout history, an effective strategy to facilitate novel behaviors has been to morally condemn those who do not behave in an appropriate way. Accordingly, here, we investigate if complying with the advice of health authorities—for example, to physically distance or vaccinate—has emerged as a moralized issue during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Study 1, we rely on data (N = 94K) from quota-sampled rolling cross-sectional online surveys from eight countries (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, the United Kingdom, and the United States). We find that large majorities find it justified to condemn those who do not keep a distance to others in public and around half of respondents blame ordinary citizens for the severity of the pandemic. Furthermore, we identify the most important predictors of condemnation to be behavior change and personal concern, while institutional trust and social distrust also play large but less consistent roles. Study 2 offers a registered replication of our findings on a representative sample of Britons (N = 1.5K). It shows that both moralization and condemnation of both vaccination and general compliance are best predicted by self-interested considerations.

Theoretical work in evolutionary psychology have proposed that conspiracy theories may serve a coalitional function. Specifically, fringe and offensive statements such as conspiracy theories are expected to send a highly credible signal of coalition membership by clearly distinguishing the speaker’s group from other groups. A key implication of this theory is that cognitive systems designed for alliance detection should intuitively interpret the endorsement of conspiracy theories as coalitional cues. To our knowledge, no previous studies have empirically investigated this claim. Taking the domain of environmental policy as our case, we examine the hypothesis that beliefs framed in a conspiratorial manner act as more efficient coalitional markers of environmental position than similar but non-conspiratorial beliefs. To test this prediction, quota sampled American participants (total N = 2462) completed two pre-registered Who-Said-What experiments where we measured if participants spontaneously categorize targets based on their environmental position, and if this categorization process is enhanced by the use of a conspiratorial frame. We find firm evidence that participants categorize by environmental position, but no evidence that the use of conspiratorial statements increases categorization strength and thus serves a coalitional function.

During the rapid development and rolling-out of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2, researchers have called for an approach of "radical transparency", where vaccine information is transparently disclosed to the public, even if negative information can decrease vaccine uptake. Consistent with theories about the psychology of conspiracy beliefs, these calls predict that a lack of transparency may reduce trust in health authorities and facilitate the spread of conspiracy theories, which may limit the long-term capabilities of health authorities during and after the pandemic. On the basis of pre-registered experiments conducted on large, representative samples of Americans and Danes (N > 13,000), the present study contrasts the effects of vague vaccine communication with transparent communication, which discloses either positive or negative vaccine features. The evidence demonstrates that transparent negative communication may indeed harm vaccine acceptance here and now but that it increases trust in health authorities. Furthermore, the alternative of vague, reassuring communication does not increase vaccine acceptance either and leads to both lower trust and higher endorsements of conspiracy theories.

We introduce the