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

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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.