Linda Skitka, Ph.D.
lskitka@uic.edu
University of Illinois at Chicago
Phone: 312-996-4464
Address: Department of Psychology, 1007 W.. Harrison St., M/C 285
City: Chicago, Illinois - 60607-7137
Country: United States
Dr. Skitka earned her PhD in social psychology at the University of California in 1989; her advisor was Philip Tetlock. She has been a professor at the University of Illinios at Chicago for more than 23 years. Hear research focus is at the intersection of political, moral, and social psychology. She is probably best known for two areas of research: 1) the ideo-attribution effect, and 2) moral conviction. The ideo-attribution effect refers to the very well replicated finding that liberals tend to explain social problems in situational terms (e.g., the poor are poor because of situational factors, such as weaker access to educational opportunity or jobs), whereas conservatives tend to explain the same social problem by referencing people’s underlying dispositions (e.g., the poor are poor because they are lazy and unmotivated, or are free-riders on the social system). Dr. Skitka has provided ample evidence of the ideo-attribution effect, but has also discovered boundary conditions on it. Liberals’ and conservatives’ attributions for various social problems become more similar under conditions of scarcity, when the resources needed to address the problem are less necessary for survival, and reverses when conservative values are in conflict with making dispositional inferences. Dr. Skitka also initiated investigation into the notion that knowing the degree to which people hold a given policy position as a moral conviction is something different from knowing whether a given attitude is evaluatively extreme, certain, personally important etc. (in other words, whether the attitude is “strong”). Strength of moral conviction about issues predicts a host of downstream consequences even when controlling for various indices of non-moralized attitude strength, including increased political engagement (intentions to vote, actual voting behavior, and activist intentions). It is also associated with an increased tendency to be outcome, rather than means oriented. When people have a strong moral conviction about a given policy, they don’t care HOW the policy outcome is achieved, so long as the perceived morally correct outcome IS achieved (the “moral mandate effect”), including accepting even violent means to achieve morally convicted ends.
Research Interests
Political Psychology
Experimental Research
Public Opinion
Ideological Differences
Moral Conviction
Political Engagement
Countries of Interest
United States
Ideologically committed people are similarly motivated to avoid ideologically crosscutting information. Although some previous research has found that political conservatives may be more prone to selective exposure than liberals are, we find similar selective exposure motives on the political left and right across a variety of issues. The majority of people on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate willingly gave up a chance to win money to avoid hearing from the other side (Study 1). When thinking back to the 2012 U.S. Presidential election (Study 2), ahead to upcoming elections in the U.S. and Canada (Study 3), and about a range of other Culture War issues (Study 4), liberals and conservatives reported similar aversion toward learning about the views of their ideological opponents. Their lack of interest was not due to already being informed about the other side or attributable election fatigue. Rather, people on both sides indicated that they anticipated that hearing from the other side would induce cognitive dissonance (e.g., require effort, cause frustration) and undermine a sense of shared reality with the person expressing disparate views (e.g., damage the relationship; Study 5). A high-powered meta-analysis of our data sets (N = 2417) did not detect a difference in the intensity of liberals' (d = 0.63) and conservatives' (d = 0.58) desires to remain in their respective ideological bubbles.
People are more likely to become politically engaged (e.g., vote, engage in activism) when issues are associated with strong moral convictions. The goal of this research was to understand the underlying motivations that lead to this well-replicated effect. Specifically, to what extent is moralized political engagement motivated by proscriptive concerns (e.g., perceived harms, anticipated regret), prescriptive concerns (e.g., perceived benefits, anticipated pride), or some combination of these processes? And are the motivational pathways between moral conviction and political engagement the same or different for liberals and conservatives? Two studies (combined N = 2,069) found that regardless of political orientation, the association between moral conviction and political engagement was mediated by the perceived benefits of preferred but not the perceived harms of non-preferred policy outcomes, and by both anticipated pride and regret, findings that replicated in two contexts: legalizing same-sex marriage and allowing concealed weapons on college campuses.
We tested whether conservatives and liberals are similarly or differentially likely to deny scientific claims that conflict with their preferred conclusions. Participants were randomly assigned to read about a study with correct results that were either consistent or inconsistent with their attitude about one of several issues (e.g., carbon emissions). Participants were asked to interpret numerical results and decide what the study concluded. After being informed of the correct interpretation, participants rated how much they agreed with, found knowledgeable, and trusted the researchers’ correct interpretation. Both liberals and conservatives engaged in motivated interpretation of study results and denied the correct interpretation of those results when that inter- pretation conflicted with their attitudes. Our study suggests that the same motivational processes underlie differences in the political priorities of those on the left and the right.
People vary in the extent to which they imbue attitudes with moral conviction, and this variation is consequential. Yet we know relatively little about what makes people’s feelings about a given attitude object transform from a relatively nonmoral preference to a moral conviction. In this article, we review evidence from two experiments and a field study that sheds some light on the processes that lead to attitude moralization. This research explored the roles of incidental and integral affect, cognitive factors such as recognition of harm, and whether attitude-moralization processes can occur outside conscious awareness or require some level of conscious deliberation. The findings present some challenges to contemporary theories that emphasize the roles of intuition and harm and indicate that more research designed to better understand moralization processes is needed.
This research explored people’s reactions to targets who “went too far” to support noble causes. We hypothesized that observers’ moral mandates would shape their perceptions of others’ advocacy, even when that advocacy was transgressive, that is, when it used norm-violating means (i.e., lying) to achieve a preferred end. Observers were expected to accept others’ advocacy, independent of its credibility, to a greater extent when it bolstered their strong (vs. weak) moral mandate. Conversely, observers with strong (vs. weak) moral conviction for the cause were expected to condemn others’ advocacy—independent of its credibility—to a greater degree when it represented progress for moral opponents. Results supported these predictions. When evaluating a target in a persuasive communication setting, people’s judgments were uniquely shaped by the degree to which the target bolstered or undermined a cherished moral mandate.
The current research tested whether exposure to disgusting images increases moral conviction and whether this happens in the presence of incidental disgust cues versus disgust cues relevant to the target of moralization. Across two studies, we exposed participants to one of the four sets of disgusting versus control images to test the moralization of abortion attitudes: pictures of aborted fetuses, animal abuse, non-harm related disgusting images, harm related disgusting images, or neutral pictures, at either sub- or supraliminal levels of awareness. Moral conviction about abortion increased (compared with control) only for participants exposed to abortion-related images at speeds slow enough to allow conscious awareness. Study 2 replicated this finding and found that the relationship between attitudinally relevant disgust and moral conviction was mediated by disgust, and not anger or harm appraisals. Findings are discussed in terms of their relevance for intuitionist theories of morality and moral theories that emphasize harm.
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