Worldview Conflict

If we take psychological findings about political and religious belief systems at face value, we predict that people with more traditional belief systems are more likely to be prejudiced, intolerant, and sensitive to group boundaries compared to people with more liberal or progressive belief systems. This view is consistent with the idea that conservatives tend to be higher on need for closure and more sensitive to threat compared to liberals. We have challenged this prevailing view with our work on the ideological-conflict hypothesis (Brandt et al., 2014). We find that both liberals and conservatives will be equally intolerant of groups with differing political worldviews (Wetherell, Brandt, & Reyna, 2013). The effect has been extended to religious fundamentalism (Brandt & van Tongeren, 2017). The impact of ideology is so strong that we find it can cause intolerance in people who profess to be open to experiences (Brandt et al, 2015). This challenges the traditional social psychological view on both prejudice and political polarization, suggesting that our current models of belief systems are incomplete (for a recent review is Brandt & Crawford, 2020).

Key Project Publications

• Bergh, R. & Brandt, M. J. (in press). Generalized prejudice: Lessons about social power, ideological conflict, and levels of abstraction. European Review of Social Psychology. doi | pdf
• Bergh, R. & Brandt, M. J. (in press). Mapping principal dimensions of prejudice in the United States. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123, 154–173. doi | pdf
• Colombo, M., Strangmann, K., Houkes, L., Kostadinova, Z. & Brandt, M. J. (2021). Intellectually humble, but prejudiced people. A paradox of intellectual virtue. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 12, 353-371. doi | pdf | code | data
• Voelkel, J. G., Ren, D., & Brandt, M. J. (2021). Inclusion reduces political prejudice. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 95, 104149. doi | pdf | code | data
• Brandt, M. J. & Crawford, J. T. (2020). Worldview conflict and prejudice. In B. Gawronski (Ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 61, 1-66. doi | pdf
• Crawford, J. T. & Brandt, M. J. (2020). Ideological (a)symmetries in prejudice and intergroup bias. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 34, 40-45. doi | pdf
• Brandt, M. J. & Crawford, J. T. (2019). Studying a heterogeneous array of target groups can help us understand prejudice. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 28, 292-298 doi | pdf
• Brandt, M. J., Crawford, J. T., & Van Tongeren, D. (2019). Worldview conflict in daily life. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10, 35-43. doi | pdf | code | data
• Brandt, M. J. (2017). Predicting ideological prejudice. Psychological Science, 28, 713-722. doi | pdf | code | data
• Crawford, J. T., Brandt, M. J., Inbar, Y., Chambers, J. R., & Motyl, M. (2017). Social and economic ideologies differentially predict prejudice across the political spectrum, but social issues are most divisive. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112, 383-412. doi | pdf
• Brandt, M. J., & Crawford, J. T. (2016). Answering unresolved questions about the relationship between cognitive ability and prejudice. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7, 884-892. doi | pdf | code
• Brandt, M. J., Chambers, J. R., Crawford, J. T., Wetherell, G., & Reyna, C. (2015). Bounded openness: The effect of openness to experience on intolerance is moderated by target group conventionality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109, 549-568. doi | pdf | code
• Brandt, M. J., Reyna, C., Chambers, J., Crawford, J., & Wetherell, G. (2014). The ideological-conflict hypothesis: Intolerance among both liberals and conservatives. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 23, 27-34. doi | pdf