Political Orientation as Psychological Defense or Basic Disposition? A Social Neuroscience Examination

Psychological views on political orientation generally agree that conservatism is associated with negativity bias but disagree on the form of that association. Some view conservatism as a psychological defense that insulates from negative stimuli and events. Others view conservatism as a consequence of increased dispositional sensitivity to negative stimuli and events. Further complicating matters, research shows that conservatives are sometimes more and sometimes less sensitive to negative stimuli and events. The current research integrates these opposing views and results. We reasoned that conservatives should typically be less sensitive to negative stimuli if conservative beliefs act as a psychological defense. However, when core components of conservative beliefs are threatened, the psychological defense may fall, and conservatives may show heightened sensitivity to negative stimuli. In two ERP studies, participants were randomly assigned to either an ostensibly real economic threat or a nonthreatening control condition. To measure reactivity to negative stimuli, we indexed the P3 component to aversive white noise bursts in an auditory oddball paradigm. In both studies, the relationship between increased conservatism and P3 mean amplitude was negative in the control condition but positive in threat condition (this relationship was stronger in Study 2). In Study 2, source localization of the P3 component revealed that, after threat, conservatism was associated with increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, regions associated with conflict-related processes. These results demonstrate that the link between conservatism and negativity bias is context-dependent, i.e., dependent on threat experiences.