Affective Reactions to Cultural Attitudinal Incongruence

Against the backdrop of the cultural conflict narrative, this study investigates the affective consequences of cultural attitudinal incongruence. Recent empirical evidence suggests that attitudes toward issues such as climate change, immigration, and gender equality increasingly cluster into broader cultural orientations (Schönheit, Anna-Luise. Forthcoming. “Tracing Cultural Constraint in Europe: Whether and How Attitudes Converge.” Political Behavior). As these attitudes become more structurally aligned, they may serve as efficient cues for social categorization. In the literature on belief systems, such alignment is captured by the concept of attitude constraint, which refers to the extent to which knowing an individual’s position on one issue allows observers to infer that individual’s likely positions on other issues (Converse, Philip E. [1964] 2006. “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics (1964).” Critical Review 18(1–3): 1–74; Boutyline, Andrei, and Stephen Vaisey. 2017. “Belief Network Analysis: A Relational Approach to Understanding the Structure of Attitudes.” American Journal of Sociology 122(5): 1371–1447). As attitudes become more constrained, a single observed position may therefore reveal broader cultural orientations. Drawing on self-categorization theory (Turner, John C., Michael A. Hogg, Penelope J. Oakes, Stephen D. Reicher, and Margaret S. Wetherell. 1987. "Rediscovering the Social Group: A Self-Categorization Theory." New York: Basil Blackwell), which emphasizes how individuals use available cues to classify both others and themselves into social groups, attitudinal cues may facilitate such categorization by allowing individuals to infer broader cultural orientations from a limited set of observed positions. Encountering disagreement on such issues may therefore lead individuals to perceive others as belonging to an opposing cultural camp and to evaluate them less favorably. Building on this perspective, the present study examines whether individuals penalize others for expressing cultural attitudes that are incongruent with their own. Beyond this baseline incongruence penalty, the study investigates whether such reactions vary systematically with political orientation and psychological dispositions. In particular, it considers the role of political extremity and need for cognitive closure. Individuals with more extreme political orientations may exhibit stronger incongruence penalties, reflecting stronger ideological commitments and a greater tendency to rely on culturally salient attitudes when categorizing others. Such individuals may therefore react more negatively to ego-alter incongruence because cultural attitudes provide clear signals about group membership. The study also examines the role of need for cognitive closure, that is, a psychological preference for order, certainty, and clear categorical distinctions (Webster, Donna M., and Arie W. Kruglanski. 1994. “Individual Differences in Need for Cognitive Closure.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67(6): 1049–1062). In light of insights from social psychology, individuals higher in need for cognitive closure are expected to rely more strongly on attitudinal cues when forming impressions of others and therefore to react more negatively to cultural incongruence (Webster, Donna M., and Arie W. Kruglanski. 1997. “Cognitive and Social Consequences of the Need for Cognitive Closure. ” European Review of Social Psychology 8(1): 133–173). Because prior research suggests that need for cognitive closure is associated with ideological rigidity and political extremity (e.g., Luttig, Matthew D. 2018. “The “Prejudiced Personality” and the Origins of Partisan Strength, Affective Polarization, and Partisan Sorting.” Political Psychology 39(S1): 239–256; Luttig, Matthew D. 2023. "The Closed Partisan Mind. A New Psychology of American Polarization." New York: Cornell University Press), the study further considers whether political differences in reactions to cultural incongruence may partly reflect underlying differences in this psychological disposition.