The intent and extent of collective threats: A data-driven conceptualization of collective threats and their relation to political preferences.

Abstract

The purpose of the present article is to systematically investigate how people perceive collective threat and how such threat perceptions relate to political preferences. Existing threat taxonomies are mostly derived from top-down analyses and little attempt has been made to examine bottom-up how people spontaneously perceive threats. One area where this is of central importance is the relationship between political preferences and threat perception. Prevailing theories in social psychology primarily study security and stability threats and conclude that conservatives are more sensitive to threats than liberals. Other perspectives, however, have criticized this position and maintain that the relationship between threat and political preferences depends on how both constructs are defined. To resolve this issue, we carried out a systematic, data-driven investigation of how collective threats are perceived. In five preregistered, data-driven studies, carried out on representative cross-cultural samples (aggregate N = 24,341), we show that people tend to categorize collective threats along two dimensions-their intent (omission/commission) and extent (local/global). We show that whereas liberals are more concerned than conservatives by omission-based and global threats, conservatives are more concerned than liberals by commission-based and local threats. These results suggest that collective threat is a multidimensional construct and that political leftists and rightists do not necessarily differ in the extent to which they perceive threats, but rather in the way they prioritize different threats facing society. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).