Right-Wing Authoritarian and Explicit Prejudice Attitude Responses to the Paris Terror Attacks: A Within-Subjects Analysis

ABSTRACT

When a terror attack occurs people appear to be prepared, in the short term, to be more accepting of authoritarian sanctions against outgroup members, particularly if sanctions are targeted against members of the outgroup perceived as responsible for the attack. The current study examined forty-two British participants’ scores on measures of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and explicit prejudice (EP) before, within thirty-six hours of, and one year after the November 2015 Paris terror attacks. As higher scores on RWA measures have been linked to considering the world as dangerous and threatening, and desiring that authority control and punish transgressors of societal norms, and higher EP scores have been linked to negative perceptions of outgroups, we hypothesized that participants’ scores on both measures would increase immediately after the terror attack. Analyses showed small but significant increases in RWA and EP scores immediately after the attacks, particularly for those initially scoring lower on these measures, but scores on both measures had returned to baseline levels oneyear later. These findings from a within-subjects sample support recent between-subjects research suggesting that RWA and EP attitudes are impacted in the short term by reported terrorist attacks.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarianism
• prejudice
• attitudes
• terrorism
• reactive liberals

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

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³⁴. Nugier, Roebroeck, Anier, Kleinlogel, Chatard, and Guimond, “The Psychological Effects of Terrorism,” 77–84; Van de Vyver, Houston, Abrams, and Vasiljevic. “Boosting Belligerence,” 169–77.

³⁵. Das, Bushman, Bezemer, Kerkhof, and Vermeulen, “How Terrorism News Reports Increase Prejudice Against Outgroups,” 453–9; Cohu, Maisonneuve, and Testé, “The ‘Charlie-Hebdo’ Effect,” 50–8.

³⁶. Bonanno and Jost, “Conservative Shift Among High-Exposure Survivors of the September 11th Terrorist Attacks,” 311–23; Landau, Solomon, Greenberg, Cohen, Pyszczynski, Arndt, Miller, Ogilvie, and Cook, “Deliver Us from Evil,” 1136–50; Peter Fischer, Tobias Greitemeyer, Andreas Kastenmüller, Dieter Frey, and Silvia Oßwald, “Terror Salience and Punishment: Does Terror Salience Induce Threat to Social Order?” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 43, no. 6 (2007): 964–71.

³⁷. Cohu, Maisonneuve, and Testé, “The ‘Charlie-Hebdo’ Effect,” 50–8; Böhmelt, Bove, and Nussio, “Can Terrorism Abroad Influence Migration Attitudes at Home?” 1–15; Brouard, Vasilopoulos, and Foucault, “How Terrorism Affects Political Attitudes,” 1073–99; Economou and Kollias, “Security Preferences of EU Citizens,” 445–71; Silva, “The (non)impact of the 2015 Paris Terrorist Attacks on Political Attitudes,” 838–50; Lindén, Björklund, and Bäckström, “How a Terror Attack Affects Right-Wing Authoritarianism,” 547–52.

³⁸. Comparison of October 2015 responses between the forty-two participants who engaged with the study at Time two and the sixty-seven who did not take part showed no significant differences on EP and RWA measures. Therefore, it appears that participants who took part at Time two did so based upon availability rather than specific characteristics that may have made them less likely to take part.

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⁴². Participants were randomly allocated to RWA-first or EP-first conditions as a counterbalance. Data from each counterbalance condition were compared and no differences were found between groups and so analyses of combined data were carried out.

⁴³. Stellmacher and Petzel, “Authoritarianism as a Group Phenomenon,” 245–74.

⁴⁴. Bozzoli and Müller, “Perceptions and Attitudes after a Terrorist Shock,” S89–106.

⁴⁵. Nail, McGregor, Drinkwater, Steele, and Thompson, “Threat Causes Liberals to Think Like Conservatives,” 901–07.

⁴⁶. Das, Bushman, Bezemer, Kerkhof, and Vermeulen, “How Terrorism News Reports Increase Prejudice Against Outgroups,” 453–9; Cohu, Maisonneuve, and Testé, “The ‘Charlie-Hebdo’ Effect,” 50–8.

⁴⁷. Cohu, Maisonneuve, and Testé, “The ‘Charlie-Hebdo’ Effect,” 50–8; Lindén, Björklund, and Bäckström, “How a Terror Attack Affects Right-Wing Authoritarianism,” 547–52.

⁴⁸. Cohu, Maisonneuve, and Testé, “The ‘Charlie-Hebdo’ Effect,” 50–8; Silva, “The (non)Impact of the 2015 Paris Terrorist Attacks on Political Attitudes,” 838–50.

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⁵⁰. Nail, McGregor, Drinkwater, Steele, and Thompson, “Threat Causes Liberals to Think Like Conservatives,” 901–7.

⁵¹. Cohu, Maisonneuve, and Testé, “The ‘Charlie-Hebdo’ Effect,” 50–8; Lindén, Björklund, and Bäckström, “How a Terror Attack Affects Right-Wing Authoritarianism,” 547–52.

⁵². Son Hing, Chung-Yan, Hamilton, and Zanna, “A Two-Dimensional Model that Employs Explicit and Implicit Attitudes,” 971–87.

⁵³. Sindre Bangstad, Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamophobia (Zedbooks: London, 2014).

⁵⁴. START, “Global Terrorism Database,” https://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/access/

⁵⁵. David Romano, Stephen Rowe, Robert Phelps, and Greg Simons, “Correlates of Terror: Trends in Types of Terrorist Groups and Fatalities Inflicted,” Cogent Social Sciences 5, no. 1 (2019): 14, 1584957. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311886.2019.1584957

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katie E. Sullivan

Katie E. Sullivan is a Social and Political Research Psychologist at University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

Paul B. Hutchings

Paul B. Hutchings is a Social and Political Psychologist, and Assistant Director of the School of Psychology and Counselling at University of Wales Trinity Saint David.