Date of Award

6-19-2024

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Victor Ottati

Abstract

The ideology as motivated social cognition model conceptualizes conservatism in terms of two unique constructs: political conservatism and psychological conservatism. The former pertains to a predisposition to specific ideological beliefs (e.g., resistance to change), while the latter pertains to the psychological traits that are associated with particular ideologies (e.g., negativity bias). Experimental research demonstrates the mechanistic relationship of epistemic motivations and emergent political behavior. Much of the evidence lies in explicitly ideological outcomes. The current proposal seeks to test the fundamental assumption in this body of work. This is the assumption that increased epistemic motivation should lead to a preference for simple and decisive over more complex and ambiguous stimuli in order to satiate threats and uncertainty. Specifically, I sought to explore this by situationally manipulating threat (Study 1) and uncertainty (Study 2) and measuring participants' level of epistemic motivations and preferences for simple and decisive candidates even when there was no overt political information present. The results of this work largely support the claim that participants with high epistemic motivations prefer candidates with characteristics that satiate their needs for certainty, order, structure, and closure. Tentative findings suggest different epistemic motivations may have varying importance depending on dispositional versus situational influences. Furthermore, uncertainty may be more tied to existential rather than epistemic motivations. Future work should continue to explore the influence of social cognitive motivators and political judgements.

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