Small Grant for Exploratory Research: Understanding Political Intolerance: A Test of Deonance Theory

这个项目是根据探索性研究小额拨款(SGER)计划提交的，将调查世贸中心和五角大楼遇袭后公众的态度和行为。特别是，这项研究将探索另一种解释，解释为什么在国家安全受到真正或感知到威胁的时期，人们在政治上变得越来越不宽容。尽管恐惧经常被认为是对国家安全的威胁和日益加剧的政治不容忍之间的联系的一种解释，但恐惧假说似乎并没有完全反映出公民对感知到的威胁的反应的复杂性。例如，人们对9·11恐怖袭击的反应不仅是政治不容忍的增加，而且还有报复的需要，以及参与献血等亲社会行为的强烈需要--这些反应不那么明显地植根于恐惧。研究人员将测试道义理论，该理论认为，厌恶唤醒的动机状态为个体公民创造了一种心理压力，使其参与到旨在恢复道德平衡感的想法、感觉和行为中。人们恢复平衡的最有力方式将是表达道德愤慨(一种综合的心理反应，包括需要惩罚和排斥那些违反道德秩序的人，使用一切可能的手段)，以及进行道德清洗(采取行动支持被违规行为削弱的道德秩序的那些方面)。在其他方面，院长理论预测，在恐怖袭击后确实从事亲社会行为的人可能已经成功地恢复了对道德秩序的看法，因此在政治上将比那些没有这样做的人更宽容。这一假设和其他假设将通过重新联系全国随机抽样的人来检验，这些人在恐怖袭击后的头10天内完成了厌恶唤醒的测量。拟议的调查将包括道德愤怒、道德清洗、对未来恐怖袭击的恐惧和政治不容忍，并应提供对政治不容忍的心理根源和功能的更多了解。

This project, submitted under the Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, will examine public attitudes and behavior following the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In particular, this study will explore alternative accounts for why people become increasingly politically intolerant during periods of real or perceived threats to national security. Although fear is often suggested as an explanation for the link between threats to national security and increased political intolerance, the fear hypothesis does not seem to capture the full complexity of the citizens' reactions to perceived threat. For example, people responded to the September 11 terrorist attacks not only with increased political intolerance, but also with a paralleling need for vengeance, and a heightened need to engage in prosocial behaviors like donating blood - reactions that are less clearly rooted in fear. The researcher will test the theory of deonance, which maintains that a motivated state of aversive arousal creates a psychological pressure for the individual citizen to engage in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that will be designed to restore a sense of moral balance. The most emphatic ways people can restore a perception of restored balance will be by expressing moral outrage (a composite psychological reaction that includes the need to punish and ostracize those who violated the moral order, using whatever means possible) and to engage in moral cleansing (acting in ways to shore up those aspects of the moral order that have been undercut by the transgression). Among other things, deonance theory predicts that people who do engage in prosocial behavior following the terrorist attack may have successfully restored a perception of moral order, and therefore will be more politically tolerant than those who did not. This and other hypotheses will be tested by re-contacting a national random sample of people who completed measures of aversive arousal within the first 10 days after the terrorist attack. The proposed survey will include measures of moral outrage, moral cleansing, fear of future terrorist attacks, and political intolerance, and should provide increased understanding of the psychological origin and function of political intolerance.