Motivated Closed-Mindedness Mediates the Effect of
Threat on Political Conservatismpops_840 1..27
Hulda Thórisdóttir
University of Iceland
John T. Jost
New York University
In this article we synthesize theory and research from several areas of psychology and
political science to propose and test a causal model of the effects of threat on political
attitudes. Based in part on prior research showing that fear, threat, and anxiety decrease
cognitive capacity and motivation, we hypothesize that under high (vs. low) threat, people
will seek to curtail open-ended information searches and exhibit motivated closed-
mindedness (one aspect of the need for cognitive closure). The subjective desire for cer-
tainty, control, and closure, in turn, is expected to increase the individual’s affinity for
political conservatism, insofar as resistance to change and adherence to authority figures
and conventional forms of morality are assumed to satisfy these epistemic motives more
successfully than their ideological opposites. Consistent with this account, we find in
Studies 1a and 1b that putting people into a highly threatened mindset leads them to exhibit
an increase in motivated closed-mindedness and to perceive the world as more dangerous.
Furthermore, in Study 2 we demonstrate that a subtle threat manipulation increases self-
reported conservatism (or decreases self-reported liberalism), and this effect is mediated by
closed-mindedness. In Study 3, we manipulated closed-mindedness directly and found that
high (vs. low) cognitive load results in a greater affinity for the Republican (vs. Democratic)
party. Finally, in Study 4 we conducted an experiment involving political elites in Iceland
and found that three different types of threat (to the self, group, and system) all led
center-right politicians to score higher on closed-mindedness and issue-based political
conservatism. Implications for society and for the theory of ideology as motivated social
cognition are discussed.
KEYWORDS: cognitive load, closed-mindedness, fear, need for closure, political ideology, political
conservatism, threat
Political Psychology, Vol. xx, No. xx, 2011
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2011.00840.x
1
0162-895X © 2011 International Society of Political Psychology
Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ,
and PO Box 378 Carlton South, 3053 Victoria Australia

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the whole world is growing narrower every day.
At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running,
and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these
long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already,
and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.”
“You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.
Franz Kafka, “A Little Fable”
Shrewd and opportunistic politicians, like Kafka’s cat, have long recognized
the power of fear and threat to influence their constituency (e.g., Bennett, 1995;
Mack, 2004; Robin, 2004). Machiavelli advised his prince in the sixteenth century
that it was “better to be feared than loved” (Machiavelli, 1999/1513). Deep into the
Great Depression in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt famously declared to the Ameri-
can public that “we have nothing to fear but fear itself,” which he described as a
“nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to
convert retreat into advance.” The program of research on which we report here
aims to elucidate the often noted but seldom understood psychological process by
which threat exerts its influence on political attitudes.
Threat and Political Attitudes
Research in the social and behavioral sciences has consistently found that
threat is associated with certain manifestations of political conservatism (e.g., Jost,
Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). In this prior research, the operationaliza-
tion of both constructs has varied widely. Threat has generally been operational-
ized in terms of threatening societal periods, threats to the legitimacy or stability
of the social system, the salience of terrorism, rising immigration, and a host of
other threatening stimuli, including thoughts about one’s mortality. Conservatism
has been gauged in terms of self-reported political orientation, voting behavior,
support for right-wing authoritarianism, and endorsement of various issue posi-
tions that are typically associated with conservatism or right-wing politics (for a
review see Jost, Federico, & Napier, 2009).
Authoritarianism
Authoritarianism was perhaps the first ideological construct to be linked
theoretically and empirically to a personal sense of threat (Adorno, Frenkel-
Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950).1 Fromm (1941) theorized that people
1 Authoritarianism is a syndrome characterized by overemphasis on submission and identification with
strong leaders, rigid conformity to conventional norms and rejection of those who violate them,
cognitive rigidity, ethnocentric prejudice, right-wing orientation, and rejection of the subjective and
tender-minded (Adorno et al., 1950; Altemeyer, 1998; Napier & Jost, 2008).
2 Thórisdóttir and Jost