The Intersection of Threat, Disposition, and the Political
Threats are prevalent in the world and have become particularly commonplace in America’s political landscape. And yet, individuals can vary significantly in the ways in which they react to threats in the political environment. Research on threat has often looked at a standard set of explanatory background characteristics such as biological sex, race/ethnicity, party identification, etc. However, there has not been as much focus on the psychological characteristics that make up the individual – their disposition. In this study, I argue that threat contexts will also cause those with certain dispositions to feel unsettled in such a way that they will express attitudes and opinions they might not otherwise express. Although there has been some research done looking at threat and disposition, I contend that Kruglanski's (1989) theory of lay epistemic – specifically need for closure (NFC) – is a valuable and understudied theoretical tool in understanding the link between threat, disposition, and mass political attitudes. This linkage is examined over the three empirical chapters. The first empirical chapter lays out the various methodologies employed in three different studies, how NFC was measured in each, and reviews cursory predictors of NFC in the three studies finding that they do not always correlate with what is expected based upon extant literature. The second and third empirical chapters test four different hypotheses to see how NFC is related to various political issue attitudes and evaluations across three differing time periods as well as when threat is directly primed. The findings from these analyses show that threat and NFC are related to political outcomes both directly and indirectly, but these effects are not uniform, and these findings are largely contingent upon context. The takeaways from this investigation help contribute to the understanding of reactions in the face of various threatening situations – something Americans have been finding themselves in more and more. Disposition, perception of threat, and context are incredibly important.
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