RUI: Contemporary Influences on Political Tolerance

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Most people have a standing decision to be tolerant or intolerant. Researchers concerned with tolerance have generally assumed that people rely on these established beliefs when reacting to disliked groups. Yet outburst of intolerance and repression are part of the United States' historical landscape. Why have these outbursts occurred? This research investigation provides a possible explanation for these fluctuations in tolerance. When people feel threatened, which is likely when an unpopular group bursts onto the political scene, a natural response is anxiety. These feelings of anxiety may subsequently result in political intolerance. Preliminary results from a series of pretest studies corroborate the relationships among threat, anxiety and intolerance: people's perceptions of a group's belligerence and treachery result in increased anxiety and, hence, increased intolerance. But how are these threat perceptions, shaped? The investigators will examine the impact of threat on tolerance by studying variations in how the media and political and legal elites present unpopular groups and their ideas. To examine these concerns, the researchers present video stimuli to people in a series of experiments developed in three phases. Phase I involves creating realistic videos about the two most frequently chosen least-liked groups in the pretest studies: racist and pro-choice groups. Four videos for each group will contain combinations of the two experimental manipulations: high and low versions of the probability of the group coming to power, and threatening and reassuring versions of the group violating the norms of proper, orderly behavior. They will also create video segments that have legal or political elites priming abstract democratic principles. Phase II consists of manipulation checks to ensure that the videos actually manipulate the intended qualities. Phase III involves conducting the full experiments. In the first experiment, subjects will be randomly assigned to a video presentation that includes the normative violations and probability manipulations. The second experiment will use these videos with the democratic norms segment added to them. The third set of experiments will examine variations on these basic experiments, including placing tolerance in an electoral context, varying the length of media coverage, and varying the nature of exposure to news stories about the group. The model of political decision making they develop potentially has wide application in the areas of media priming and framing effects, controlled and automatic processing of information, and affective and cognitive reactions to political stimuli.