The Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic Made People Feel Threatened, but Had a Limited Impact on Political Attitudes in the United States.

We investigated if the COVID-19 pandemic's onset caused changes in political attitudes. Influential theories predict that the pandemic's onset will cause people to adopt more conservative attitudes, more culturally conservative attitudes, or more extreme attitudes. We comprehensively tested the external validity of these predictions by estimating the causal effect of the pandemic's onset on 84 political attitudes and eight perceived threats using fine-grained repeated cross-sectional data (Study 1, = 232,684) and panel data (Study 2, = 552) collected in the United States.

Ideology Strength Versus Party Identity Strength: Ideology Strength Is the Key Predictor of Attitude Stability.

We investigate the relationship between attitude instability and both party identity strength and ideology strength. We test the explorative hypotheses that higher party identity strength (H1) and ideology strength (H2) predict more attitude stability using intensive longitudinal data collected in the United States every 2 weeks over 1 year (Study 1, = 552) and in the Netherlands over 6 months (Study 2, = 1,670). We found mixed support for H1: In the United States, there was no association between party identity strength and attitude stability.

Affective Polarization and Political Belief Systems: The Role of Political Identity and the Content and Structure of Political Beliefs.

We investigate the extent that political identity, political belief content (i.e., attitude stances), and political belief system structure (i.

Perceptions of intolerant norms both facilitate and inhibit collective action among sexual minorities.

This article presents the results of three studies that examine how the perceived opinions of others are related to sexual minorities' support for social change toward greater equality. Results of two cross-sectional studies (Study 1: = 1,220; Study 2: = 904) reveal that perceived intolerance (i.e.

The Impact of Laws on Norms Perceptions.

When opinions in a society change toward more or less tolerance of a group, people do not necessarily see it. Drawing on a quasi-representative survey (Study 1, = 830) and a natural experiment (Study 2, = 437), we investigated people's perceptions of the societal norms toward sexual minorities and the influence of laws on these (mis-)perceptions. Study 1 indicated pluralistic ignorance as participants overestimated the societal disapproval toward same-sex issues.

The Association Between Threat and Politics Depends on the Type of Threat, the Political Domain, and the Country.

Theories link threat with right-wing political beliefs. We use the World Values Survey (60,378 participants) to explore how six types of threat (e.g.

Identity Expression Through Collective Action: How Identification With a Politicized Group and Its Identity Contents Differently Motivated Identity-Expressive Collective Action in the U.S. 2016 Presidential Elections.

Although political action often requires activists to express who they are and what they stand for, little is known about the motivators of such identity expression. This research investigates how and predict in the U.S.

Conservatives' Moral Foundations Are More Densely Connected Than Liberals' Moral Foundations.

We use network psychometrics to map a subsection of moral belief systems predicted by moral foundations theory (MFT). This approach conceptualizes moral systems as networks, with moral beliefs represented as nodes connected by direct relations. As such, it advances a novel test of MFT's claim that liberals and conservatives have different systems of foundational moral values, which we test in three large datasets ( = 854; = 679; = 2,572), from two countries (the United States and New Zealand).

The psychology of online activism and social movements: relations between online and offline collective action.

We review online activism and its relations with offline collective action. Social media facilitate online activism, particularly by documenting and collating individual experiences, community building, norm formation, and development of shared realities. In theory, online activism could hinder offline protests, but empirical evidence for slacktivism is mixed.

The moral dimension of politicized identity: Exploring identity content during the 2012 Presidential Elections in the USA.

It is well known that politicized identities are especially good predictors of collective action, but very little is known about what these identities are. We propose that moral identity content plays a central role in politicized identities. We examined this among (un)politicized Americans in the 2012 US Presidential Elections.

Achieving Harmony among Different Social Identities within the Self-Concept: The Consequences of Internalising a Group-Based Philosophy of Life.

It can be hard for individuals to manage multiple group identities within their self-concept (e.g., being a Christian and a woman).

Politicization during the 2012 U.S. Presidential Elections: bridging the personal and the political through an identity content approach.

We investigated U.S. citizens' politicization (i.