What’s currently happening…
Overall, I am interested in the role of social identities and emotions for understanding political behavior. My research focuses on these factors to explain radical right support, affective polarization, and prosocial behavior. Moreover, I am also interested in the fundamental goodness of human beings: what makes them feel well, when do people behave prosocially, how can we all be a bit nicer to each other? On this page, I document a few of my ongoing projects.
Work under review
E Pluribus Whom? Status Threat and American Identity in a Multiracial Democracy (with Stylianos Syropoulos)
Western societies are diversifying, liberalizing, and striding for social equality. Consequently, Recent papers suggest that shared American identity primes may reduce partisan conflict, but this intervention’s potential for another prominent political conflict remains untested: racial animosity. In this paper, we argue that white Americans often show backlash against multiracial democracy––the ideal of equal rights and liberties for all––because they tend to feel status threatened by racial outgroups. In turn, we posit that reminding them of their sharedAmerican identity may attenuate the status threat mechanism and subsequent backlash. Four experiments (three pre-registered, total N = 4,062) support the first claim but not the second. Despite various American identity primes and accounting for confounding variables, we find little indication that a shared American identity could reduce racial (and, in exploratory analyses, partisan) conflict in America. We discuss the implications for future research and the practical use of a shared identity when little remains that is shared.
Preprint: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/9w8q5
All Hands On Deck: In Societal Crises, Compassion Makes Citizens Assign Responsibility to Many Actors (with Jacob Sohlberg)
Recent research suggests that compassion motivates individuals to take prosocial action during societal crises. However, crises like climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic may be hardly overcome by personal action alone. This paper tests whether compassion elicits actions beyond personal prosocial behavior, such that it makes individuals assign responsibility to other actors, like politicians and organizations. Representative panel data from Sweden collected during the pandemic demonstrates that compassion predicts personal actions and makes citizens assign responsibility to other societal actors. An online experiment from the US replicates and extends these results, showing that compassion predicts personal action and responsibility assignment. Moreover, compassion leads individuals to monitor the crisis handling of various actors. These results imply that compassion –– the awareness of others’ suffering and the desire to mitigate it –– incites various mitigation strategies simultaneously. As complex and large crises require many actors’ actions, compassion may be even more beneficial than assumed.
An Immediate Reward: Participating in Minority Protest Makes Majority Members Feel Better (with Elena Leuschner)
Why do majority members participate in minority protests? Protesting is costly, the path to progress tenacious, and protest success not necessarily personally beneficial to majority members. This paper proposes a currently neglected factor — positive emotional experiences — that may offer an immediate personal benefit to majority members, increasing their participation benefits relative to the costs. We examine this argument in the case of racial minority protests in the US. A pre-registered online experiment (N = 672) shows that liberal whites become more willing to protest if they envision themselves protesting (vs. pure control), due to a net increase in positive emotions. These results integrate previous work suggesting that protesting and emotions mutually affect each other by showing that protesting begets mobilization through positive emotional experiences. Moreover, they imply that movements can gain support by emphasizing the immediate emotional benefits to individuals who may otherwise not necessarily benefit from protesting.
More Than Just Part of the Group? Uniqueness’ Role in Inclusion Experiences (with Byron G. Adams)
Optimal distinctiveness research suggests that people feel included when finding a balance between two needs: they need to belong to the superordinate group and simultaneously remain unique with their distinct subgroup background. Inclusion, in turn, can promote well-being, possibly through group identity. However, the theory that uniqueness improves inclusion experiences and subsequent well-being beyond mere belonging remains largely untested. We address this gap in two studies, using convenience samples from the U.S. and the Netherlands. Study 1 shows that the relationship between belonging and well-being is strengthened when the uniqueness need is met. In Study 2, belonging and uniqueness separately predict an inclusion experience, even though the subsequent relationship between inclusion and well-being is not mediated through group identity. Finally, we discuss avenues for future research to operationalize the two inclusion needs and raise a practical implication: practitioners can improve inclusion interventions by accounting for individuals’ need to be unique.
How Self-Disclosure Bridges Divides: A Tool for Increasing Political Respect and Willingness to Interact (with Emily Kubin & Kurt Gray)
To combat rising polarization, scholars studied ways to make opponents feel more connected to one another. We explore one underlying mechanism increasing connectedness, suggesting that people feel more connected to opponents who self-disclose (i.e., share personal or sensitive information). We argue that sharing experiences often more powerfully promotes pro-social attitudes (respect and willingness to interact) than facts because they are more self-disclosing. In Studies 1a and 1b, we find that experiences are more self-disclosing than facts, breeding connectedness and prosocial attitudes. In Study 2, we directly test the role of self-disclosure and find that sharing experiences most effectively drive connectedness and pro-social attitudes if self-disclosure is high. Study 3 communicates facts (a key tenant for healthy democracies) through self-disclosure and finds that even facts bridge divides when they appear self-disclosing.
Work in prep.
The Affectively Unpolarized Are Not a Homogeneous Group – And Why This Matters For Democracy (With Joe Phillips & Lilliana Mason)
This paper explores how affectively unpolarized Americans view democracy. Current research extensively tests how affective polarization––people’s strong sympathy toward one party relative to another––affects trust, democratic norms, partisan animosity, and political participation. Problematically, these tests treat the affectively unpolarized as an undifferentiated baseline with homogeneous views on democracy. We challenge this assumption, arguing that the affectively unpolarized represent a large share of the population with possibly heterogeneous views. Cluster analyses and regressions from three representative cross-sectional surveys provide three conclusions. First, substantial shares of the American population are affectively unpolarized. Second, unpolarized individuals cluster as one group feeling lukewarm and one feeling cold toward the two parties. Third, these groups differ in trust, support for democratic norms, partisan animosity, and participation. These results imply that researchers must specify their baseline when testing effects of affective polarization. Moreover, they reveal diverging understandings of democracy even among affectively unpolarized Americans.
Relatively Enthusiastic: Do Positive Emotions Drive Affective Polarization? (with Katharina Lawall & Manos Tsakiris)
Evidence on the relationship between affective polarization and democratic practices remains mixed. This paper joins recent arguments that prevailing measures neglect that affect is a broad concept, within which discrete emotions may explain diverging consequences. We posit that the commonly used feeling thermometers mask variation between a.) emotional dimensions proposed in Affective Intelligence Theory, b.) discrete emotions, and c.) whether either is felt toward the inparty or outparty. To test these claims, we study the relationship between affective polarization and turnout––the most common form of democratic participation. Analyzing cross-sectional data from five European countries, we find that the commonly used affective polarization score is positively associated with turnout. However, the results show important variation between a.) emotion dimensions and b.) discrete emotions, and c.) suggests that mostly inparty feelings drive turnout. The results imply that certain research questions require more nuanced affective polarization measures and raise normative implications.
The Consequences of Experiencing Political Representation: From Emotions to Actions (with Dylan Paltra & Christopher Wratil)
The idea that politicians represent citizens in politics is at the core of representative democracy. But while previous research has focused on how policy positions and descriptive characteristics of politicians and citizens match, little is known about how citizens actually experience representation. We argue that representation experiences can invoke strong emotions that are linked with an individual’s propensity to (dis)engage from/in politics. We draw on thousands of narrated reports from citizens in representative samples fielded in five Western democracies (N = 9,884) to document their representation experiences. Based on extensive emotion and political participation batteries, we examine how different experiences of (mis-)representation evoke patterns of emotions that are associated with changes in individuals’ willingness to participate in politics. Moreover, we find that different forms of representation (e.g., substantive, descriptive) elicit different emotions. These findings indicate that representation experiences are inherently emotional and contribute an individual-level explanation for why individuals (dis)engage from/in politics.
Why Do People Vote the Way They Do? Connecting Economic Voting and Political Psychology (with Greta Gross & Lily Mason)
When citizens decide whom to vote for, do personal or societal concerns drive their choice? Studies on economic voting traditionally distinguish between egotropic and sociotropic motivations, examining, for example, which of the two predicts vote choice better. Surprisingly, however, this seminal distinction remains limited to economic evaluations, even if some scholars implicitly used it for cultural explanations. With this paper, we aim to extend the distinction between personal and societal motivations to non-economic realms more explicitly. We theoretically connect the evidence on this distinction from the economic voting literature to theories of perception and information-processing from political psychology. Using qualitative interviews from Germany and surveys from the US, we inductively analyze non-economic economic and sociotropic motivations, their relationship, and correlates. By making this distinction more accessible to various subfields of political science, we provide a theoretical and empirical guide on why people vote or feel the way they do––for personal, societal, or both reasons.
A Proud People: The Contents of National Pride and its Consequences for Polarization
How do polarized societies find common ground? The Common Ingroup Identity Model (CIIM) suggests that conflict may be reconciled when competing groups (e.g., two political camps) recognize their shared identity (e.g., that all partisans share one national identity). In this project, however, I revisit four theoretical and empirical limitations for why such shared national identities are unlikely to mitigate partisan and social polarization in contemporary Western democracies. Therefore, I turn to national pride as an alternative strategy for finding common ground. Being similar to an identity, pride may offer the gluing function that the CIIM expects identity to provide. However, pride may circumvent the limitations of national identities, thus reducing polarization more effectively. Using large-N, representative data, I first map the contents of national pride. I then examine its consequences for polarization-relevant outcomes. By examining the relationship between an identity and an emotion, this project contributes theoretical and empirical insights into central concepts of political psychology research. Moreover, it may provide a quick, scalable, and cost-efficient intervention for reducing polarization in various Western democracies.