The Cognitive Immune System

How do we know when a belief or behavior qualifies as pathological? Are institutions vulnerable to pathological beliefs and behaviors? Nicolas de Condorcet sought answers to these questions using Enlightenment reason. This chapter argues that Condorcet’s modern liberal approach to diagnosing and treating pathological beliefs and behaviors (1) didn’t go far enough, and (2) contained significant blind spots that we are only now coming to appreciate through scientific discoveries. Currently the United States and much of the world is crippled by two pandemics: the coronavirus (a physical virus) and the right-wing cult (a cognitive virus). This chapter introduces the theory of the cognitive immune system and discusses the affordances and limits of the metaphor to medical epidemiology.

Critical Essay: Wicked problems in the Age of Uncertainty

We are, apparently, living in unprecedented times, an Age of Uncertainty, when wicked problems whirl all around as we struggle to cope with Covid-19, environmental catastrophe and the right-wing populism that threatens to unravel all kinds of international agreements. In this personal reflection, 15 years after I wrote an article on wicked problems and the social construction of leadership, I take a look back, and forward, to see whether there ever was an Age of Certainty when only tame problems temporarily troubled us, or whether our understanding of the world is itself a social construction, open to dispute and thus we have always lived in uncertain times. In the process of this evaluation, I consider whether collaborative leadership, often associated with wicked problems, is as ubiquitous and effective as some proponents make out, and if it isn’t, what this says about our ability to address such problems.

Attitudes toward sex doll ownership: Scale development and preliminary validation

Sex dolls are beginning to become more mainstream, both in the public’s consciousness and in academic research. However, there is no current systematic examination of public attitudes toward sex dolls within the peer-reviewed literature, which represents a barrier to the efficient study on this topic. In this paper we report the development and initial validation of such a measure. Using an international public sample (N = 377) we found that public attitudes toward sex doll owners were underpinned by three factors: ‘Acceptability of Doll Ownership’, ‘Doll Owners as Immoral’, and ‘Doll Owners as Dysfunctional’. Scores on each of these factors, which make up the Sex Doll Ownership Attitudes Scale (SDOAS), were predicted by participant sex, religiosity, permissive sexual attitudes, right-wing authoritarianism, and the endorsement of moral intuitions that favor personal liberty. We present a full form 66-item version of the SDOAS, as well as an 18-item short form which both possess strong psychometric properties. We highlight potential future uses of the SDOAS as this emerging field of study continues to rapidly grow.

How right-wing populists instrumentalize news media: Deliberate provocations, scandalizing media coverage, and public awareness for the Alternative for Germany (AfD)

The rise of right-wing populist parties in Western democracies is often attributed to populists’ ability to instrumentalize news media by making deliberate provocations (e.g., verbal attacks on migrants or politicians from other parties) that generate media coverage and public awareness. To explain the success of populists’ deliberate provocations, we drew from research on populism and scandal theory to develop a theoretical framework that we tested in three studies examining the rise of German right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) between January 2015 and December 2018. In Study 1, an input–output analysis of 17 deliberate provocations by AfD politicians in German news media revealed much more coverage about their attacks on migrants than about their attacks on political elites, although all were covered in predominantly scandalizing ways. Next, Study 2, involving media database research and an analysis of Google Trends data, showed that the provocations had increased overall media coverage about the AfD and influenced public awareness of the party

Elite Cues and Economic Policy Attitudes: The Mediating Role of Economic Hardship

Do voters update their attitudes toward economic issues in line with their material self-interest? The consensus among students of public opinion is that material self-interest plays a very limited role and that competing non-material factors, such as partisanship or ideological predispositions, do most of the heavy lifting. This paper moves beyond comparing the role of material and non-material factors. Instead, we examine how these factors combine to shape policy preferences. Specifically, we propose a friendly amendment to Zaller’s influential model according to which attitudinal change results from the interaction between changes in elite messaging on the one hand and individual political predispositions on the other. In Zaller’s model, partisanship and ideological predispositions help explain why some resist and others embrace new elite messaging. We hypothesize that material self-interest also conditions the effect of elite messaging. Using British individual-level panel data collected over more than a decade, we show that material hardship predicts who, among left-wing voters, resist new right-wing partisan cues. Our results highlights the incremental impact of material self-interest on economic attitudes.

How Is Collective Identity Possible in Democracies? Political Integration and the Leitkultur Debate in Germany

The quest for a common collective identity has become a challenge for modern democracy: Liberal demands for greater inclusion and individual freedom, aspirations for a strong and solidaric political community, as well as nationalist or right-wing populist calls for exclusion and a preservation of hegemonic national identities are creating tensions that cannot be overlooked. This article therefore formulates the central question of how collective identity can be possible in a liberal democracy. Based on a case study on Germany, it will therefore be examined whether Leitkultur as a model of political integration can serve in generating a functional democratic collective identity. The necessary benchmarks guiding the analysis will be defined beforehand from a systems-theoretical perspective, balancing inclusion and exclusion within three crucial dimensions: normative basics, historic continuity, and affirmative bindings. The results show that a static definition of a German Leitkultur would in the long run neither achieve functional inclusion nor be able to generate the necessary cohesion of a political community, especially regarding the second and third identity dimensions.