How do Americans react to perceptions of racial inequality? We subtly introduce economic inequality in an experiment comparing Black and White groups, while varying whether the inequality occurs by chance or is the result of human agency. Subjects are given the ability to correct that inequality by taking actions that could be costly or not. All subjects are more likely to correct inequality if their racial ingroup is disadvantaged. Black subjects react more strongly when inequality is human-made, whereas the source of inequality does not matter to Whites. When they perceive their ingroup as being treated unfairly, Black subjects are more likely to bear personal costs to correct inequality than White subjects. Subjects’ concept of fairness switches depending on whether their ingroup or outgroup is disadvantaged: they become more likely to behave unfairly themselves to correct inequality against others if the outgroup benefits at the expense of the ingroup.

Do men respond to a masculinity threat by adopting more conservative political attitudes? A highly cited 2013 study by Willer et al. – drawing on substantial work in social psychology – argues in the affirmative, reasoning that endorsing conservative views allows men to reaffirm their gender identity. In two experiments with student convenience samples (Ntotal 100–110, Nmen 40–51), the authors find consistent evidence: inducing masculinity threat increases support for war, homophobic attitudes, and endorsement of dominance hierarchies. We conduct a preregistered replication of this foundational study using a nationally representative probability sample (Ntotal 2774, Nmen 2073). Contrary to original findings, we observe no consistent evidence that masculinity threat alters political attitudes. We further do not find support for design differences between the replication and original study driving contrasting findings. Our results call into question the robustness of evidence linking masculinity threat to political attitudes and underscore the importance of re-evaluating widely accepted findings with representative, large samples.

Feminism has been a major equalizing social movement that has faced powerful resistance. To better understand such opposition, we conceptualize, measure, and analyze perceptions of feminism as a threat, using a novel survey measure of feminism-related threat perceptions in Spain. Our results show that general psychological predispositions to feel threatened are among the most important predictors of perceptions of feminism as a threat. Contrary to expectations, women feel similarly threatened by feminism as men, which is driven by women’s generally higher predisposition to feel threatened. Further, men’s and women’s perceptions of feminism as threatening are associated with different political profiles: Men who feel threatened by feminism tend to sympathize with the far right, while women who feel threatened by feminism do not have a particular political profile. Our results highlight that feminism faces challenges that go beyond the expected anti-feminist attitudes driven by the intersection of gender and ideology.

This article offers an original discursive analysis of the construction of terrorism within travel advice published by the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). It argues that this advice positions terrorism as a very specific – omnipresent, Islamist, and non-state – security threat from which British nationals will never be safe. Three contributions are made. First, empirically, the article offers a descriptively rich exploration of terrorism’s production in an entirely neglected site of discourse. Second, analytically, it details the work done by specific rhetorical mechanisms within FCDO guidance, including the recycling of generic claims relating to terrorism, quantifications of risk, and the imagination of hypothetical attacks. Third, conceptually, it demonstrates the contingent and precarious character of this discourse by highlighting important exclusions that cohere and constitute terrorism as constructed in travel advice. These exclusions – notably the violences of right-wing actors and of states themselves – contribute to a very specific construction of terrorism that helps foreclose discussion of UK responsibility for, or involvement in, terrorism.

Childhood adversity is associated with increased engagement in health risk behaviors (HRBs), such as substance use, violence, and risky sexual behaviors during adolescence, which contribute to leading causes of death and disability throughout the lifespan. Threat and deprivation are two dimensions of adversity that impact health and wellbeing through partially distinct developmental pathways, but no studies have examined if and how HRBs differ by adversity dimension. This pre-registered network analysis examined the independent associations between threat, deprivation, and adolescent HRBs using data from the 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey. We hypothesized that both adversity dimensions would be associated with HRBs, with stronger associations for threat compared to deprivation. Participants were U.S. high school students (N = 7,691; 52% male, 48% female). Forty-six percent were white, 26% multiple races, 12% Black, 7% American Indian/Alaska Native, 4% Asian, < 1% Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, and 20% Hispanic. Consistent with our hypotheses, network structures revealed that both threat and deprivation were associated with HRBs, the patterns of such associations varied by dimension, and the overall strength and number of HRB associations was greater for threat. Findings support the utility of dimensional models in linking childhood adversity to adolescent HRBs, with implications for research and clinical practice.

In times of new geopolitical challenges, many states have revived the concept of total defence, in which all citizens contribute to national defence efforts. How authorities communicate the need of this new defence strategy and when such crisis communication leads to an increased defence willingness is an important research question. We hypothesise that individuals who feel a sense of empowerment or an increased risk of war when exposed to crisis communication are more willing to engage in the defence. To evaluate our hypotheses, we collected representative survey data from 2,068 Swedish respondents, at the same time as the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency was distributing a new brochure on expectations on and advice for citizens in case of war. By analysing the responses of individuals who had read or not read the brochure, we gauge the impact of the crisis communication on defence willingness. The results show that individuals experiencing a higher sense of empowerment and perceiving a higher risk of war when having read the booklet were more willing to engage in total defence activities. This has important implications for our understanding of how specific types of crisis communication influence commitment and defence willingness in the population.

How did the COVID-19 outbreak affect citizens’ democratic preferences? Were the changes persistent or temporary? We track a representative sample of Spanish citizens before, during, and after the pandemic, with eight survey waves from January 2020 to January 2024. We compare democratic attitudes before and after the pandemic with individual fixed effects models. We identify a sharp increase in preferences for technical rather than ideological policy-making at the very onset of the pandemic, as well as significant changes in voters’ preferences for competent rather than honest politicians. These changes are sudden and persistent over 4 years. Using a set of repeated survey experiments, we also document a widespread willingness to sacrifice rights and freedoms to deal with the pandemic as compared to other global threats, such as international terrorism and climate change. But this effect quickly faded over time. Overall, we identify significant changes in democratic attitudes during the pandemic and a durable shift in technocratic preferences that outlived the pandemic, setting the conditions for the long-term legacies of COVID-19 on democracy.

Cycads, an ancient lineage, face a higher threat of extinction than any other plant group. To address this urgent issue, a more comprehensive method for assessing extinction threat, the Conservation and Prioritization Index (CPI), is proposed and tested for cycads in the State of Veracruz, Mexico. The CPI is a multifaceted approach that incorporates techniques used in conservation status assessments by the IUCN and the Mexican NOM-059-SEMARNAT-2010 but incorporates other information, including georeferenced distribution data, endemism in Veracruz, number of locations, extent of occurrence, and distribution area. Using CPI, correlations were found between longitude and extinction risk for Ceratozamia species in Veracruz. Zamia vazquezii and Z. inermis were assessed to have the highest level of extinction risk. Overall, this study indicates that a more holistic approach, incorporating broader sources of environmental health, can be used to more effectively and proactively manage extinction threats to cycads in Veracruz. In this sense, Veracruz can serve as a model for conservation planning in different states in Mexico and worldwide. CPI is a tool that can be applied to other regions to manage another threatened biota. This method enhances objectivity and effectiveness in conservation efforts, promoting data-driven decision-making that can be used globally.

This study investigates the mechanisms driving the effectiveness of free-form communication in promoting cooperation within a sequential social dilemma game. We hypothesize that the self-constructing nature of free-form communication enhances the sincerity of messages and increases the disutility of dishonoring promises. Our experimental results demonstrate that free-form messages outperform both restricted promises and treatments where subjects select and use previously constructed free-form messages. Interestingly, we find that selected free-form messages and restricted promises achieve similar levels of cooperation. We observe that free-form messages with higher sincerity increase the likelihood of high-price and high-quality choices, thereby promoting cooperation. These messages frequently include promises and honesty, while threats do not promote cooperation. Our findings emphasize the crucial role of the self-constructed nature of free-form messages in promoting cooperation, exceeding the impact of message content compared to restricted communication protocols.

In this article Izumikawa Yuki, an international relations expert, dispels two core misconceptions undergirding the notion that China is a particularly belligerent state that unilaterally engages in aggressive behavior threatening the national security of Japan. The first is that the Senkaku Islands, or Diaoyu Islands as they are known in China, are Japan's territory, on which China has been illegally or unfairly encroaching. The other misconception is that if and when China violently grabs Taiwan for itself, preventing Taiwan from gaining independence in some kind of “Taiwan contingency,” Japan will have the duty and the right to defend Taiwan's independence. Even only equipped with a simple map of Taiwan showing the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands close by, and having the knowledge that Taiwan was originally taken away from China by the Empire of Japan during the war of aggression known as the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95), would make one suspicious of the “China threat theory,” but Izumikawa provides readers with some neglected facts concerning international law and history, and pokes holes in the narrative that is broadcasted daily by the mass media.

What causes demographic misperceptions of minority populations? We anticipate that the extent to which members of the majority group perceive the minority group as a threat shapes their estimation of minority group size. While existing research argues that demographic misperceptions of minority groups can lead to a sense of threat, we argue that the opposite relationship may exist—that threat also causes demographic misperception. We test our argument using an experiment embedded in a survey of Muslims in Indonesia. We manipulate perceived threat of Christians in Indonesia and then ask respondents to estimate the size of the Christian population. While Muslims generally overestimated the size of the Christian population, we find that Muslims who felt a greater sense of threat estimated the Christian population to be significantly larger at both the national and provincial levels. This finding provides new insights on the directionality of the relationship between the widely acknowledged connection between threat and demographic misperceptions.