Authoritarian reactions to terrorist threat: Who is being threatened, the me or the we?

Autor/inn/en	Asbrock, Frank; Fritsche, Immo
Titel	Authoritarian reactions to terrorist threat: Who is being threatened, the me or the we?
Quelle	In: International journal of psychology, 48 (2013) 1, S. 35-49Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Link als defekt meldenVerfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	online; gedruckt; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0020-7594; 1464-066X
DOI	10.1080/00207594.2012.695075
Schlagwörter	Sozialer Wert; Autoritarismus; Selbsterhaltung; Soziale Wahrnehmung; Folter; Motivation; Soziale Wahrnehmung; Terrorismus; Drohung; Selbsterhaltung; Autoritarismus; Motivation; Folter; Terrorismus; Drohung
Abstract	Investigated whether increased endorsement of authoritarian attitudes during times of terrorist threat is a response to perceptions of personal or collective threat in 2 experiments (total of 243 German college students mean age 22 years). Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) was measured using the RWA3D scale. Approval of torture, ingroup bias, and national identification were also measured. In Study 1, both general and specific authoritarian tendencies increased after asking 144 subjects to imagine that they were personally affected by terrorism but not when they were made to think about Germany as a whole being affected by terrorism. This finding was replicated and extended in Study 2 (99 subjects), in which personal and collective threat were manipulated orthogonally. Authoritarian and ethnocentric (ingroup bias) reactions occurred only for those who highly identified with their national ingroup under personal threat, indicating that authoritarian responses may operate as a group-level coping strategy for a threat to the personal self. Again, no effects for collective threat were found. In both studies, authoritarianism mediated the effects of personal threat on more specific authoritarian and ethnocentric reactions. Results suggest that the effects of terrorist threat on approval of authoritarianism can, in part, be attributed to a sense of heightened personal insecurity due to terrorist threat. Findings are discussed with regard to basic sociomotivational processes (group-based control restoration, terror management) and how these may relate to recent models of authoritarianism. (ZPID).
Erfasst von	Leibniz-Institut für Psychologie, Trier
Update	2015/4