The motivation to defend shared beliefs: A functionalist account
Item
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Title
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The motivation to defend shared beliefs: A functionalist account
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:8c0212abf1a8:11875
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identifier
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12504
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Creator
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Johnson, Adam Michael,
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Contributor
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Curtis D. Hardin
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Social psychology | Experimental psychology | Evolutionary Psychology | Ideology | Intergroup | Political Orientation | Shared Reality
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Abstract
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Past research shows that political and ideological disagreements with affiliatively-relevant others tend to be experienced as aversive and potentially damaging to the relationships in which the disagreement arises. While social psychology offers many proximate explanations for this tendency, the more ultimate evolutionary explanations of this automatic, pervasive, and "hot cognition" phenomenon have been under-explored. The current research argues that because high levels of belief consensus within groups increase trust, cooperation, and prosociality among group members, and because these group-level features were adaptively advantageous especially in the context of intergroup competition, then people should be motivated to defend shared beliefs with other ingroup members -- and thus find disagreements aversive -- when faced with fitness-relevant threats to the group that require high levels of ingroup cohesion. Two experiments tested this prediction by manipulating participants exposure to evolutionarily relevant and non-relevant intergroup threats and then measuring participants' aversion to ideologically-inconsistent beliefs (Exp. 1 & 2), their desire to share beliefs with other ingroup members (Exp. 1), and their attitudes toward ingroup members who challenged shared beliefs (Exp. 2). Results from Experiment 1 showed that in a national intergroup context (American ingroup vs. Chinese outgroup), participants demonstrated greater aversion to ideologically opposing beliefs and greater desire to share beliefs with other ingroup Americans when faced with the evolutionarily-relevant threat of highly-cohesive male outgroup. Results from Experiment 2 showed that in a political intergroup context (Republicans vs. Democrats), somewhat contrary to predictions, participants showed greater aversion to ideologically-inconsistent beliefs and less favorable attitudes toward ingroup members who challenge shared beliefs when primed with highly-creative (vs. high power) male outgroups. Implications for potential ways to reduce political polarization are discussed.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Psychology
