The intent and extent of collective threats: A data-driven conceptualization of collective threats and their relation to political preferences

Resumen

The purpose of the present article is to systematically investigate how people perceive collective threat and how such threat perceptions relate to political preferences. Existing threat taxonomies have been theoretically contrived and no attempt has been made thus far to examine how people spontaneously perceive threats. One area where this is of central importance is the relationship between political preferences and threat. Dominant theories in social psychology have studied security and stability threats and have concluded that conservatives are more sensitive to threats and more motivated to manage threat than liberals. Recent perspectives, however, have criticized this position and maintain that the relationship between threat and political preferences depends on how both constructs are defined. To resolve this issue, we carried out a systematic, data-driven investigation of how collective threats are perceived. In six preregistered, data-driven studies, carried out in large-scale, representative cross-cultural samples (aggregate N = 24,391), we show that people tend to categorize collective threats according to two dimensions – their intent (omission/commission) and extent (local/global). We show that whereas liberals are more concerned than conservatives by omission threats, conservatives are more concerned than liberals by commission threats. These results suggest that threat is a multidimensional construct and that political leftists and rightists do not differ in the extent to which they perceive threats, but rather in the way they prioritize different threats facing society.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Kahn, D. T., Björklund, F., & Hirschberger, G. (2020). The intent and extent of collective threats: A data-driven conceptualization of collective threats and their relation to political preferences. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/evxu6