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Boosting belligerence: How the July 7, 2005, London bombings affected Liberals' moral foundations and prejudice

Van de Vyver, J.; Houston, D.M.; Abrams, D.; Vasiljevic, M.

Boosting belligerence: How the July 7, 2005, London bombings affected Liberals' moral foundations and prejudice Thumbnail


Authors

D.M. Houston

D. Abrams



Abstract

Major terrorist events, such as the recent attacks in Ankara, Sinai, and Paris, can have profound effects on a nation’s values, attitudes, and prejudices. Yet psychological evidence testing the impact of such events via data collected immediately before and after an attack is understandably rare. In the present research, we tested the independent and joint effects of threat (the July 7, 2005, London bombings) and political ideology on endorsement of moral foundations and prejudices among two nationally representative samples (combined N = 2,031) about 6 weeks before and 1 month after the London bombings. After the bombings, there was greater endorsement of the in-group foundation, lower endorsement of the fairness-reciprocity foundation, and stronger prejudices toward Muslims and immigrants. The differences in both the endorsement of the foundations and the prejudices were larger among people with a liberal orientation than among those with a conservative orientation. Furthermore, the changes in endorsement of moral foundations among liberals explained their increases in prejudice. The results highlight the value of psychological theory and research for understanding societal changes in attitudes and prejudices after major terrorist events.

Citation

Van de Vyver, J., Houston, D., Abrams, D., & Vasiljevic, M. (2016). Boosting belligerence: How the July 7, 2005, London bombings affected Liberals' moral foundations and prejudice. Psychological Science, 27(2), 169-177. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615615584

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Oct 12, 2015
Online Publication Date Dec 16, 2015
Publication Date Feb 1, 2016
Deposit Date Sep 6, 2018
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Psychological Science
Print ISSN 0956-7976
Electronic ISSN 1467-9280
Publisher SAGE Publications
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 27
Issue 2
Pages 169-177
DOI https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615615584
Related Public URLs http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/23157/

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2015 This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).





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