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

该项目是根据探索性研究小额赠款（SGER）计划提交的，将研究世界贸易中心和五角大楼遭受袭击后公众的态度和行为。 特别是，这项研究将探讨为什么人们在国家安全受到真实的威胁或被认为受到威胁期间变得越来越不容忍的其他解释。 虽然恐惧常常被认为是对国家安全威胁与政治不容忍加剧之间联系的一种解释，但恐惧假说似乎并没有抓住公民对所感受到的威胁的反应的全部复杂性。 例如，人们对9·11恐怖袭击的反应不仅是政治上的不宽容，而且还伴随着复仇的需求，以及参与献血等亲社会行为的强烈需求--这些反应并不那么明显地源于恐惧。研究人员将测试道义理论，该理论认为，一种有动机的厌恶性唤醒状态会给个体公民创造一种心理压力，促使他们参与旨在恢复道德平衡感的思想、情感和行为。人们恢复平衡的最有效方式是表达道德义愤（一种复合的心理反应，包括需要使用一切可能的手段惩罚和排斥那些违反道德秩序的人）和进行道德净化（采取行动，以海岸那些被违反道德秩序削弱的方面）。其中，道义理论预测，在恐怖袭击后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感知，因此在政治上比那些没有参与的人更宽容。这一假设和其他假设将通过重新联系在恐怖袭击后的前10天内完成厌恶性唤醒措施的全国随机样本来进行测试。拟议的调查将包括道德义愤、道德清洗、对未来恐怖主义袭击的恐惧和政治不容忍的措施，并应使人们更好地了解政治不容忍的心理根源和作用。

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.