Poster 8

The Effects of Political Orientation on Threat Perception

James Worrall

Research shows that political orientation reliably predicts attentional biases towards and away from threat. Further research demonstrates that members of competing groups are reliably hostile with one another. Conservatives are more sensitive to group hierarchies and morals. This study examines the extent to which political orientation predicts perceived threat and how it correlates with threat according to race. I hypothesized that conservative political orientation would predict heightened threat perception, liberal political orientation would predict lowered threat perception, conservative political orientation would be positively correlated with perceived threat of outgroup members, liberal political orientation would be negatively correlated with perceived threat of outgroup members, and that there would be a positive correlation between conservative political orientation and perceived threat of outgroup members when in the angry (threatening) condition. Hypotheses 1, 3, and 5 were supported. Political orientation was defined by liberal, moderate, and conservative beliefs according to the Political Belief Scale. Participants were shown a series of either angry or neutral faces that varied in sex and race. These faces were taken from the Chicago Face Database (CFD). Participants rated their subjective level of threat for each face. The results indicated that conservatives perceived more threat in all conditions, and that conservative participants rated faces of their own race as relatively less threatening than the faces of other races in the heightened threat (angry) condition. Further, moderates perceived less threat as compared to either liberals or conservatives. This study indicates that political orientation is a significant factor in predicting subjective threat.

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