Uncertainty of Reported Behavior Dynamics and Its Relationship to Socio-Political Ideologies and Affiliation

People's willingness to include others and their level of suspicion of those perceived to not belong are constrained by political affiliation and adherence to ideologies such as neoliberalism, Islamophobia, and ethnocentrism. In an era of heightened polarizing discourse about immigrants, the interaction between changing information and constraints can be leveraged to understand how dynamic narratives affect inclusory and exclusory behaviors. This study provides a combination of time-series generating methods and the survey approach to situate participants in a developing scenario. Eighty-two participants completed the dynamically modified survey in a scenario involving an immigrant family moving in next door and responded to two affordances: perceived invitability and reportability of the family. Participants' responses to each of twelve new situations formed time series of changes in reported inclusion and exclusion. Shannon information was used to quantify the amount of information (or uncertainty) that any given instance in the data series represents about the set of reported behaviors. The results showed clustering around adherence to neoliberal ideology, Islamophobia, ethnocentrism, and political affiliation, along with their relation to uncertainty of the time series. We discuss potential implications for perceptions of others' behavior and the potential of the modified survey and affordance-focus as dynamic and relational methods.