Authoritarianism and perceived threat from the novel coronavirus.

The threat of COVID-19 has triggered nationalism, prejudice and support for anti-democratic political systems around the world. Authoritarianism-an individual's orientation toward social conformity and individual autonomy-shapes interpretations of and responses to threat. We drew on theories of authoritarianism and threat to propose that authoritarians and libertarians will interpret the threat of COVID-19 in distinct ways.

The generalizability of gender bias: Testing the effects of contextual, explicit, and implicit sexism on labor arbitration decisions.

Decades of social-psychological research show that gender bias can result from features of the social context and from individual-level psychological predispositions. Do these sources of bias impact legal decisions, which are frequently made by people subject to factors that have been proposed to reduce bias (training and accountability)? To answer the question, we examined the potential for 3 major social-psychological theories of gender bias (role-congruity theory, ambivalent sexism, and implicit bias) to predict outcomes of labor arbitration decisions. In the first study, undergraduate students and professional arbitrators made decisions about 2 mock arbitration cases in which the gender of the employee-grievants was experimentally manipulated.

Predictors of depression, stress, and anxiety among non-tenure track faculty.

Nationwide in the United States, 70% of faculty members in higher education are employed off the tenure-track. Nearly all of these non-tenure-track (NTT) appointments share a quality that may produce stress for those who hold them: contingency. Most NTT appointments are contingent on budget, enrollment, or both, and the majority of contingent faculty members are hired for one quarter or semester at a time.

Ideological asymmetry in the relationship between epistemic motivation and political attitudes.

Research on the psychological bases of political attitudes tends to dwell on the attitudes of conservatives, rarely placing a conscious thematic emphasis on what motivates liberals to adopt the attitudes they do. This research begins to address this imbalance by examining whether the need for cognitive closure is equally associated with conservatism in policy attitudes among those who broadly identify with the liberal and conservative labels. Counterintuitively, we predict and find that the need for closure is most strongly associated with policy conservatism among those who symbolically identify as liberals or for whom liberal considerations are made salient.