Ideology As Motivated Cultural Cognition How Culture Translates Personality Into Policy Preferences
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Ideology as Motivated Cultural Cognition How Culture Translates Personality into Policy Preferences Figure 1 James C. Harman © James Harman September 2017. 1 Abstract In different cultures, the same perceptions make for different policies. This paper summarises the results of a quantitative analysis testing the theory that culture acts as an intermediary in the relationship between individual perceptual tendencies and political orientation. Political psychologists have long observed that more “left-wing” individuals tend to be more comfortable than “right-wing” individuals with ambiguity, disorder, and uncertainty, to equivocate more readily between conflicting viewpoints, and to be more willing to change their opinions. These traits are often summarised under the blanket term of “open- mindedness”. A recent increase in cross-cultural studies, however, has indicated that these relationships are far less robust, and even reversed, in social contexts outside of North America and Western Europe. The sociological concept of culture may provide an answer to this inconsistency: emergent idea-networks, irreducible to individuals, which nonetheless condition psychological motivations, so that perceptual factors resulting in left-wing preferences in one culture may result in opposing preferences in another. The key is that open-mindedness leads individuals to attack the dominant ideas which they encounter: if prevailing orthodoxies happen to be left-wing, then open minded individuals may become right-wing in protest. Using conditional process analysis of the British Election Study, I find evidence for three specific mechanisms whereby culture interferes with perceptual influences on politics. Conformity to the locally dominant culture mediates these influences, in the sense that open-minded people in Britain are only more left-wing because they are less culturally conformal. This relationship is itself moderated both by cultural group membership and by Philip Converse’s notion of “constraint”, individual-level connectivity between ideas, such that the strength of perceptual influence differs significantly between cultural groups and between levels of constraint to the idea of the political spectrum. Overall, I find compelling evidence for the importance of culture in shaping perceptions of policy choices. Key words: culture, perception, political orientation, motivation, conformity, constraint Acknowledgements I am indebted to Dr. Rob Meadows of the University of Surrey, and to Dr. Paul Stoneman of Goldsmith’s, University of London, for their thorough criticism of my work. Without them, my ego would be far greater and my work far poorer. I am also extremely grateful to Professor Steve Borgatti of the University of Kentucky, for creating the free network analysis software Netdraw, and to Professor Andrew Hayes of the Ohio State University, for creating the wonderful PROCESS macro for SPSS, both of which have made the following analysis possible. I am thankful to the team behind the British Election Study, from the universities of Manchester, Oxford, and Nottingham, for making such a valuable data resource freely available to members of the public. My forbearing friends and family members deserve thanks for their proofreading, counselling, and general support. Finally, as always, my greatest gratitude rests with God, who makes all things possible. 2 Table of contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 2 Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................. 2 List of tables and illustrations .................................................................................................................. 4 Introduction: why study policy preferences? .......................................................................................... 5 The theoretical case for a cultural political psychology ........................................................................... 6 Perceptual influences on political orientation ............................................................................ 6 The “WEIRD” bias and cross-cultural contradictions .................................................................. 8 Culture and its conceptual utility ............................................................................................... 9 Motivated cultural cognition: research framework ............................................................................... 10 Methodological choices: paradigm, data, and analysis ......................................................................... 11 Research paradigm: quality or quantity? ................................................................................. 11 Data usage: primary or secondary? .......................................................................................... 11 The British Election Study: data set, ethics, and limitations ..................................................... 12 Grasping slippery ideas: operationalising concepts as variables ........................................................... 13 Political orientation: dimensions and underlying forces .......................................................... 13 Perception: openness, uncertainty, and ambivalence ............................................................. 16 Culture: cluster, conformity, and constraint ............................................................................ 17 Ruling out the alternatives: control variables ........................................................................... 19 Conditional process analysis: hypotheses and how to test them .......................................................... 20 The results ............................................................................................................................................. 23 Overview of results................................................................................................................... 23 The influence of active open-mindedness on leftness, regardless of culture .......................... 25 The influences of active open-mindedness on conformity ...................................................... 25 Moderation by tolerance of uncertainty and response polarisation ........................................ 26 The influences of conformity on leftness ................................................................................. 26 Moderation by cultural cluster and constraint ......................................................................... 27 Direct and indirect effects, at different levels of the four moderators .................................... 27 Discussion: implications for the science of policy preferences ............................................................. 31 Conclusion: limits of the study and needs for further research ............................................................ 33 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................... 34 Technical Appendix ............................................................................................................................... 41 Section 1: question wording, coding and recoding of selected variables ................................. 41 Section 2: annotated summary of key statistical results .......................................................... 53 Section 3: complete PROCESS output for the mediation and moderated mediation models .. 63 Section 4: VNA file for visualising correlations between policy preferences ............................ 71 Section 5: complete SPSS syntax used in the analysis .............................................................. 76 Word count (from introduction to conclusion): 13,071 3 List of tables and illustrations Tables Table 1. Unstandardised regression coefficients from the moderated parallel multiple mediation analysis used to test the thirteen hypotheses…………………………………24 Table 2. Summary of all variables from the British Election Study selected for use in the analysis, including variable names, question-wording, response options, response coding, and response recoding by the author…………………………………..45 Table 3. Cronbach’s alphas for related items grouped into scales……………………………….57 Table 4. Principal component factor analysis results…………………………………………………..59 Table 5. Rotated factor loadings for principal components analyses which saved more than one factor……………………………………………………….……………………………………..62 Table 6. Cluster analysis results for cultural cluster and level of constraint cluster……….63 Table 7. Descriptive statistics for all continuous variables in the analysis..………………..…63 Table 8. Frequencies for all nominal variables in the analysis………………………………………64 Table 9. Bivariate comparisons between the political orientation factors and other selected variables……………………………………………………………………………………….…64 Table 10. Bivariate comparisons between the perceptual factors and other selected variables……………………………………………………………………………………………………..…65 Table 11. Bivariate comparisons between the continuous cultural variables and other selected variables……………………………………………………………………………………….…65 Figures Figure 1. “What a cruel, male-dominated culture!” cartoon by Malcolm Evans……...….. 1 Figure 2. Conceptual diagram for the theory of motivated cultural cognition……………..13