The DOI matches its Crossref record; 21 of the 21 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
The Politics of Fear: Is There an Ideological Asymmetry in Existential Motivation?
Abstract
A meta-analysis by Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and Sulloway (2003) suggested that existential needs to reduce threat were associated with political conservatism. Nevertheless, some maintain that fear plays as prevalent a role on the left as the right. In an attempt to resolve this issue, we reviewed evidence from 134 different samples (N = 369,525) and 16 countries—a database 16 times larger than those previously considered. Although the association between fear of death and conservatism was not reliable, there was a significant effect of mortality salience (r = .08–.13) and a significant association between subjective perceptions of threat and conservatism (r = .12–.31). Exposure to objectively threatening circumstances, such as terrorist attacks, was associated with a “conservative shift” at individual (r = .07–.14) and aggregate (r = .29–.66) levels of analysis. Psychological reactions to fear and threat thus convey a small-to-moderate political advantage for conservative leaders, parties, policies, and ideas.
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Cites
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The file drawer problem and tolerance for null results.
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“For each category, we also conducted two “file-drawer” analyses to estimate the degree to which the statistical significance and size of the average effect was likely influenced by publication bias (Orwin, 1983; Rosenthal, 1979).”
MethodPolitical conservatism as motivated social cognition.
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.129.3.339 · Cited by 4,904 · cited 13×
“Although Jost et al. (2003) had identified only one published study that reported a correlation between scores on a “fear of death” scale and political conservatism, there have been at least 33 subsequent tests of the hypothesis carried out in five different countries.”
BackgroundMethodResultInfluentialSelf-citationA Fail-Safe N for Effect Size in Meta-Analysis
Orwin, R. G. (1983) · Journal of Educational Statistics · doi:10.2307/1164923 · Cited by 2,064 · cited 2×
“For each category, we also conducted two “file-drawer” analyses to estimate the degree to which the statistical significance and size of the average effect was likely influenced by publication bias (Orwin, 1983; Rosenthal, 1979).”
MethodThreat, Anxiety, and Support of Antiterrorism Policies
Huddy, L., Feldman, S., Taber, C., & Lahav, G. (2005) · American Journal of Political Science · doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00144.x · Cited by 948
Landau, M. J., Solomon, S., Greenberg, J., Cohen, F., Pyszczynski, T., Arndt, J., Miller, C. H., Ogilvie, D. M., & Cook, A. (2004) · Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin · doi:10.1177/0146167204267988 · Cited by 663
On simpson's paradox and the sure-thing principle
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The Ideological-Conflict Hypothesis: Intolerance Among Both Liberals and Conservatives
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Cited by
Coronavirus Anxiety Scale: A brief mental health screener for COVID-19 related anxiety
Lee, S. A. (2020) · Death Studies · doi:10.1080/07481187.2020.1748481 · Cited by 1,649
Ideological Asymmetries and the Essence of Political Psychology
Jost, J. T. (2017) · Political Psychology · doi:10.1111/pops.12407 · Cited by 696
Self-citationAnalyzing Polarization in Social Media: Method and Application to Tweets on 21 Mass Shootings
Demszky, D., Garg, N., Voigt, R., Zou, J., Shapiro, J., Gentzkow, M., & Jurafsky, D. (2019) · Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers) · doi:10.18653/v1/n19-1304 · Cited by 164
“…accord with existing literature on emotion and political ideology: conservatives score higher than liberals on subjective measures of fear (e.g. Jost et al., 2017; Federico et al., 2009; Hibbing et al., 2014) and disgust sensitivity is also associated with political conservativism (e.g. Inbar…”
Obschonka, M., Stuetzer, M., Rentfrow, P. J., Lee, N., Potter, J., & Gosling, S. D. (2018) · Social Psychological and Personality Science · doi:10.1177/1948550618755874 · Cited by 62
Cole, J. C., Gillis, A. J., van der Linden, S., Cohen, M. A., & Vandenbergh, M. P. (2025) · Perspectives on Psychological Science · doi:10.1177/17456916231186409 · Cited by 61
Metadata
- Authors
- Jost, J. T., Stern, C., Rule, N. O., & Sterling, J.
- Venue
- Social Cognition
- Publisher
- Guilford Publications
- Published
- 2017-08
- Volume
- 35
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 324-353
- ISSN
- 0278-016X (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2736694309
- Cited by
- 310
- References
- 21
- FWCI
- 32.68
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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