Linda Skitka
Biographic Data
| ID | 4134718 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Linda Skitka |
| GIVEN NAMES | Linda |
| FAMILY NAME | Skitka |
| SIGNATURE | SKITKA L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7078-0650 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 979 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Morality cut both ways: The role of cognition and emotion in attitude moralization and demoralization
4,464), we contrasted the moralization of attitudes about male circumcision (typically viewed as a matter of preference or convention in the United States) with the demoralization of attitudes about female circumcision (a practice most Americans see as immoral). For male circumcision, stronger negative emotional reactions consistently mediated the association between exposure to evocative information and stronger moral conviction, even when accou…
Values in Context: The (Dis)connections Between Moral Foundations and Moral Conviction
Moral foundations theory (MFT) argues that liberals and conservatives form different moral positions because liberals emphasize the values of harm and fairness, whereas conservatives emphasize the values of group loyalty, authority, and purity. In five studies (total N = 3,327), we investigated whether political orientation moderated the relationship between the perceived relevance of each moral foundation and moral conviction (i.e., the extent t…
What Is, What Was and What Could Be: Simultaneously Comparing How Emotional Reactions to the Past, Present and Future Predict Collective Action
Although separate research programs examine how emotional reactions to the past, present and future predict collective action, research has yet to compare them simultaneously. Across three studies ( N = 2764) and two social issues (plastic pollution and abortion), we examined whether reflecting on a positive or negative past, present or future elicits distinct emotions which indirectly predict collective action. Results revealed multiple counterv…
Conspiracy beliefs and democratic backsliding: Longitudinal effects of election conspiracy beliefs on criticism of democracy and support for authoritarianism during political contests
There are widespread concerns that conspiracy theories undermine democracies. But do conspiracy beliefs increase criticism of democracy and/or support for authoritarianism? Or are antidemocratic people more likely to endorse conspiracy beliefs? To answer these important questions, we collected longitudinal data during two concurrent democratic elections—the 2020 US Presidential Election (N = 609) and the 2020 General Election in New Zealand (N = …
Incivility Is Rising Among American Politicians on Twitter
We provide the first systematic investigation of trends in the incivility of American politicians on Twitter, a dominant platform for political communication in the United States. Applying a validated artificial intelligence classifier to all 1.3 million tweets made by members of Congress since 2009, we observe a 23% increase in incivility over a decade on Twitter. Further analyses suggest that the rise was partly driven by reinforcement learning…
The Psychology of Moral Conviction
This review covers theory and research on the psychological characteristics and consequences of attitudes that are experienced as moral convictions, that is, attitudes that people perceive as grounded in a fundamental distinction between right and wrong. Morally convicted attitudes represent something psychologically distinct from other constructs (e.g., strong but nonmoral attitudes or religious beliefs), are perceived as universally and objecti…
Assigning moral roles within the Second World War in Europe: National similarities, differences, and implications for group‐level moral representations
The moral roles assigned to nations that took part in the Second World War cast a shadow over contemporary international politics. To understand contemporary moral beliefs about the war, we took 11 mostly student samples from 9 nations that took part in the European theatre of war (total N = 1,427). We asked respondents, in free and scaled listings, to identify the war’s heroes, villains, victims, and recipients of help. Nations and individuals s…
The Gender Gap: Who Is (and Is Not) Included on Graduate-Level Syllabi in Social/Personality Psychology
We contacted a random sample of social/personality psychologists in the United States and asked for copies of their graduate syllabi. We coded more than 3,400 papers referenced on these syllabi for gender of authors as well as other characteristics. Less than 30% of the papers referenced on these syllabi were written by female first authors, with no evidence of a trend toward greater inclusion of papers published by female first authors since the…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on nav…
Standing up against moral violations: Psychological processes of moral courage
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
Americans hold their political leaders to a higher discursive standard than rank-and-file co-partisans
Vicarious Retribution in US Public Support for War Against Iraq
US public anger and desire to avenge the September 11, 2001 terror attacks were redirected toward Iraq partly because of its identity as an Arab and Muslim state. Online panel survey data reveal that citizens who were relatively angry about the terror attacks were more belligerent toward Iraq, an effect that was strongest among those who perceived Arabs and Muslims in monolithic terms. The angry desire to avenge 9/11 was more persistent for those…
Liars, Damned Liars, and Zealots: The Effect of Moral Mandates on Transgressive Advocacy Acceptance
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…
Science Denial Across the Political Divide: Liberals and Conservatives Are Similarly Motivated to Deny Attitude-Inconsistent Science
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. Aft…
The Montagu Principle: Incivility decreases politicians’ public approval, even with their political base
M. W. Montagu asserted that, "civility costs nothing and buys everything." In the realm of social judgment, the notion that people generally evaluate civil people more favorably than uncivil people may be unsurprising. However, the Montagu Principle may not apply in a hyper-partisan political environment in which politicians "throw red meat to their base" by unleashing uncivil, personal attacks against their opponents, satisfying the aggressive d…
Liberals and conservatives are similarly motivated to avoid exposure to one another's opinions
Revenge in US Public Support for War against Iraq
© 2017 The Author. To better understand how desires to avenge the September 11 terror attacks affected US public support for the 2003 Iraq War, we integrate data from two uncoordinated surveys-one measuring revenge motivations and the other beliefs about Iraqi complicity-completed by overlapping samples drawn from the same online panel. Citizens who mistakenly blamed Iraq for 9/11 were more likely to say that going to war would satisfy their desi…
The state of social and personality science: Rotten to the core, not so bad, getting better, or getting worse
The scientific quality of social and personality psychology has been debated at great length in recent years. Despite research on the prevalence of Questionable Research Practices (QRPs) and the replicability of particular findings, the impact of the current discussion on research practices is unknown. The current studies examine whether and how practices have changed, if at all, over the last 10 years. In Study 1, we surveyed 1,166 social and pe…
Moralization and the 2012 U.S. presidential election campaign
People vary in the extent to which they imbue an attitude with moral conviction; however, little is known about what makes an issue transform from a relatively non-moral preference to a moral conviction. In the context of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, we test if affect and beliefs (thoughts about harms and benefits) are antecedents or consequences of participants’ moral conviction about their candidate preferences, or are some combination …
Morality in everyday life
Moral homeostasis in real life vs. the lab Individuals who witnessed a moral deed are more likely than nonwitnesses to perform a moral deed themselves and are also more likely to allow themselves to act immorally. Hofmann et al. asked smartphone users to report their encounters with morality (see the Perspective by Graham). Most moral judgment experiments are lab-based and don't allow for conclusions based on what people experience in their daily…
When ideology matters: Moral conviction and the association between ideology and policy preferences in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Do people's policy preferences toward outgroups in intractable conflict consistently correspond with political ideology? To what extent are policy‐related cleavages between the political right and left in such contexts fueled by moral conviction and emotions? Analyses of a survey of Jewish‐Israelis (N = 119) conducted immediately after a war between Israelis and Palestinians revealed little to no ideological differences in acceptance of “collater…
The Social and Political Implications of Moral Conviction
Scholars often assume that some issues globally evoke moral reactions, whether these issues are presented as moral dilemmas (e.g., trolley problems) or as controversial issues of the day (e.g., the legal status of abortion). There is considerable individual variation, however, in the degree that people report that their position on specific issues reflects a core moral conviction. This chapter reviews theory and research that explores the role mo…
Exploring the Cross-Cultural Generalizability and Scope of Morally Motivated Intolerance
Research conducted in Western cultural contexts has discovered that people are more intolerant of moral than demographic diversity, prefer greater social and physical distance from morally dissimilar others, and actively discriminate against those who do not share their moral attitudes. The goal of the current work was to test whether (a) these findings generalize across cultural contexts and (b) similar patterns would emerge with not only social…
Justice Theory and Research: A Social Functionalist Perspective
There are at least five functionalist metaphors that have guided justice theory and research in social psychology: people as lay or intuitive (a) economists, (b) politicians, (c) scientists, (d) prosecutors, and (e) theologians. These frameworks consider what people care about when thinking about fairness by suggesting that fairness serves different needs and goals. This chapter reviews each of these broad categories of justice research, and conc…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
Moral Conviction: Another Contributor to Attitude Strength or Something More
Moral Conviction and Political Engagement
The 2004 presidential election led to considerable discussion about whether moral values motivated people to vote, and if so, whether it led to a conservative electoral advantage. The results of two studies—one conducted in the context of the 2000 presidential election, the other in the context of the 2004 presidential election—indicated that stronger moral convictions associated with candidates themselves and attitudes on issues of the day uniqu…
Providing public assistance: Cognitive and motivational processes underlying liberal and conservative policy preferences
Previous research in a wide variety of policy domains (e.g., azidothymidine for AIDS patients, low-income housing) has indicated that under no scarcity, liberals tend to help all claimants for assis-tance, whereas conservatives withhold assistance from people who are personally responsible for their predicament (Skitka & Tetlock, 1992). Three studies explore 6 explanations for this robust finding: deterrence, self-interest, punitiveness, mindless…
The Social and Political Implications of Moral Conviction
Scholars often assume that some issues globally evoke moral reactions, whether these issues are presented as moral dilemmas (e.g., trolley problems) or as controversial issues of the day (e.g., the legal status of abortion). There is considerable individual variation, however, in the degree that people report that their position on specific issues reflects a core moral conviction. This chapter reviews theory and research that explores the role mo…
Liberals and conservatives are similarly motivated to avoid exposure to one another's opinions
Allocating scarce resources: A contingency model of distributive justice
Dispositions, scripts, or motivated correction? Understanding ideological differences in explanations for social problems
Social and cognitive strategies for coping with accountability: Conformity, complexity, and bolstering
Are Outcome Fairness and Outcome Favorability Distinguishable Psychological Constructs? A Meta-Analytic Review
Exploring the psychological underpinnings of the moral mandate effect: Motivated reasoning, group differentiation, or anger
When people have strong moral convictions about outcomes, their judgments of both outcome and procedural fairness become driven more by whether outcomes support or oppose their moral mandates than by whether procedures are proper or improper (the moral mandate effect). Two studies tested 3 explanations for the moral mandate effect. In particular, people with moral mandates may (a) have a greater motivation to seek out procedural flaws when outcom…
Limits on legitimacy: Moral and religious convictions as constraints on deference to authority
Various versions of legitimacy theory predict that a duty and obligation to obey legitimate authorities generally trumps people's personal moral and religious values. However, most research has assumed rather than measured the degree to which people have a moral or religious stake in the situations studied. This study tested compliance with and reactions to legitimate authorities in the context of a natural experiment that tracked public opinion …
When Due Process Is of No Consequence: Moral Mandates and Presumed Defendant Guilt or Innocence
The Montagu Principle: Incivility decreases politicians’ public approval, even with their political base
M. W. Montagu asserted that, "civility costs nothing and buys everything." In the realm of social judgment, the notion that people generally evaluate civil people more favorably than uncivil people may be unsurprising. However, the Montagu Principle may not apply in a hyper-partisan political environment in which politicians "throw red meat to their base" by unleashing uncivil, personal attacks against their opponents, satisfying the aggressive d…
The expulsion from Disneyland: The social psychological impact of 9/11
People expressed many different reactions to the events of September 11th, 2001. Some of these reactions were clearly negative, such as political intolerance, discrimination, and hate crimes directed toward targets that some, if not many, people associated with the attackers. Other reactions were more positive. For example, people responded by donating blood, increasing contributions of time and money to charity, and flying the American flag. The…
Revenge in US Public Support for War against Iraq
© 2017 The Author. To better understand how desires to avenge the September 11 terror attacks affected US public support for the 2003 Iraq War, we integrate data from two uncoordinated surveys-one measuring revenge motivations and the other beliefs about Iraqi complicity-completed by overlapping samples drawn from the same online panel. Citizens who mistakenly blamed Iraq for 9/11 were more likely to say that going to war would satisfy their desi…
When ideology matters: Moral conviction and the association between ideology and policy preferences in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Do people's policy preferences toward outgroups in intractable conflict consistently correspond with political ideology? To what extent are policy‐related cleavages between the political right and left in such contexts fueled by moral conviction and emotions? Analyses of a survey of Jewish‐Israelis (N = 119) conducted immediately after a war between Israelis and Palestinians revealed little to no ideological differences in acceptance of “collater…
Exploring the "Lost and Found" of Justice Theory and Research
Moralization and the 2012 U.S. presidential election campaign
People vary in the extent to which they imbue an attitude with moral conviction; however, little is known about what makes an issue transform from a relatively non-moral preference to a moral conviction. In the context of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, we test if affect and beliefs (thoughts about harms and benefits) are antecedents or consequences of participants’ moral conviction about their candidate preferences, or are some combination …
Moral Convictions Often Override Concerns About Procedural Fairness: A Reply to Napier and Tyler
Americans hold their political leaders to a higher discursive standard than rank-and-file co-partisans
Vicarious Retribution in US Public Support for War Against Iraq
US public anger and desire to avenge the September 11, 2001 terror attacks were redirected toward Iraq partly because of its identity as an Arab and Muslim state. Online panel survey data reveal that citizens who were relatively angry about the terror attacks were more belligerent toward Iraq, an effect that was strongest among those who perceived Arabs and Muslims in monolithic terms. The angry desire to avenge 9/11 was more persistent for those…
Comparing Americans' and Ukrainians' Allocations of Public Assistance: The Role of Affective Reactions in Helping Behavior
In the United States, people who are personally responsible for needing assistance arouse more negative and less positive affect and are less likely to be helped than people who are not personally responsible for their plight. The authors investigated whether this finding generalized to Ukraine, a more collectivist society. American and Ukrainian participants evaluated 16 claimants who needed an organ transplant and selected up to 6 claimants to …
Cross-Disciplinary Conversations: A Psychological Perspective on Justice Research with Non-human Animals
Conspiracy beliefs and democratic backsliding: Longitudinal effects of election conspiracy beliefs on criticism of democracy and support for authoritarianism during political contests
There are widespread concerns that conspiracy theories undermine democracies. But do conspiracy beliefs increase criticism of democracy and/or support for authoritarianism? Or are antidemocratic people more likely to endorse conspiracy beliefs? To answer these important questions, we collected longitudinal data during two concurrent democratic elections—the 2020 US Presidential Election (N = 609) and the 2020 General Election in New Zealand (N = …
Social and cognitive strategies for coping with accountability: Conformity, complexity, and bolstering
Gender roles and the categorization of gender-relevant behavior
Allocating scarce resources: A contingency model of distributive justice
Of ants and grasshoppers: The political psychology of allocating public assistance
A grasshopper that had merrily sung all the summer was almost perishing with hunger in the winter. So she went to some Ants that lived nearby, and asked them to lend her a little of the food they had put by. "You shall certainly be paid before this time of year comes again". said she. "What did you do all summer?" asked they. "Why, all day long, and all night long too, I sang, if you please", answered the grasshopper. "Oh! you sang, did you?" sai…
Psychological Perspectives on Justice: Theory and Applications
Justice, equity, and fairness are central concerns of everyday life, whether we are assessing the fairness of individual acts, social programmes, or institutional policies. This book explores how the distribution of costs and benefits determine our intuition about fairness and why individual behaviour sometimes deviates from normative theories of justice. To make any comparison, one must first state how fair distributions of resources or burdens …
Offense Classification and Social Facilitation in Juvenile Delinquency
Considerable research has investigated the effects of social facilitation on either positive or neutral behaviors, but little if any research has examined whether the presence of others can lead to greater levels of negative behavior. The purpose of this project was to explore the influence of social facilitation on patterns and severity of offenses committed by juvenile delinquents. Study l compared the severity of crime (as measured by the offe…
The Family-of-Origin Scale With Adolescents: Preliminary Norms
The Family-of-Origin Scale (FOS) is a 40 item, ten-subscale, Likert instrument founded upon psychodynamic models of family functioning. The FOS is based upon two subordinate constructs - Autonomy and Intimacy - associated with positive individual adjustment. The original FOS was designed to assess adults' retrospective views of their family. The scale has been recently modified to assess adolescents' perceptions of current family functioning. The…
Providing public assistance: Cognitive and motivational processes underlying liberal and conservative policy preferences
Previous research in a wide variety of policy domains (e.g., azidothymidine for AIDS patients, low-income housing) has indicated that under no scarcity, liberals tend to help all claimants for assis-tance, whereas conservatives withhold assistance from people who are personally responsible for their predicament (Skitka & Tetlock, 1992). Three studies explore 6 explanations for this robust finding: deterrence, self-interest, punitiveness, mindless…
A latent variable model of the Family-of-Origin Scale for adolescents
Ameliorating the Effects of Parental Divorce: Do Small Group Interventions Work
The Rainbows for Children program (an intervention aimed at ameliorating the effects of parental divorce) was evaluated using a pre- and post-test design that compared program participants to a control group of non-participants. AU children indicated higher levels of depression and lower levels of behavioral academic selfesteem than normative samples of children who do not come from divorced fami- lies. Children with higher indications of imtiond…
Gender as Schematic Category: A Role Construct Approach
This study was designed to examine the hands of unprimed constructs people use in an openended social perception task (Kelly Rep Test, Kelly, 1955). Three samples of subjects used their own natural categories or person schemes in judgments of familiar others. Results indicated that whereas the most prevalently used constructs with familiar others are best described as idiosyncratic, gender related trait sets of Agency and Communion were used wide…
Does automation bias decision-making?
When Due Process Is of No Consequence: Moral Mandates and Presumed Defendant Guilt or Innocence
Do the Means Always Justify the Ends, or Do the Ends Sometimes Justify the Means? A Value Protection Model of Justice Reasoning
This study explored whether personal identity concerns relate in important ways to how people decide whether an event is fair or unfair. Because moral mandates are selective expressions of values that are central to people’s sense of personal identity, people should be highly motivated to protect these positions from possible threat. Consistent with predictions based on a value protection model of justice, whether people had a moral mandate on ab…
Understanding Judgments of Fairness in a Real-World Political Context: A Test of the Value Protection Model of Justice Reasoning
Current theories of justice emphasize social identity reasons for why people care about justice to the relative neglect of personal identity concerns, that is, people’s need to express, defend, and live up to personal moral standards. The authors present a value protection model that predicts that self-expressive moral positions or stands (“moral mandates”) are important determinants of how people reason about fairness. Hypotheses were tested and…
Dispositions, scripts, or motivated correction? Understanding ideological differences in explanations for social problems
Are Outcome Fairness and Outcome Favorability Distinguishable Psychological Constructs? A Meta-Analytic Review
Political Tolerance and Coming to Psychological Closure Following the September 11, 2001, Terrorist Attacks: An Integrative Approach
This study tested hypotheses generated from an integrative model of political tolerance that derived hypotheses from a number of different social psychological theories (e.g., appraisal tendency theory, intergroup emotion theory, and value protection models) to explain political tolerance following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A national field study (N = 550) found that immediate post attack anger and fear had different implications…
Patriotism or Nationalism? Understanding Post-September 11, 2001, Flag-Display Behavior1
People reacted to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in a number of different ways. One reaction was to display the American flag on one's home, car, or person. The goal of this research was to understand the underlying motivations that led to this widespread behavior. Specifically, to what extent was post-9/11 flag-display behavior motivated by patriotism (love of country and in-group solidarity), nationalism (uncritical acceptance of nat…
Moral Conviction: Another Contributor to Attitude Strength or Something More
Confrontational and Preventative Policy Responses to Terrorism: Anger Wants a Fight and Fear Wants "Them" to Go Away
This study used a nationally representative sample (N = 550) to test factors that predicted support for a confrontational (an expanded War on Terror) and a defensive public policy (deporting various groups symbolically associated with the attackers) shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Results indicate that anger but not fear predicted support for expanding the war beyond Afghanistan, and fear but not anger predicted support for deporting Ar…
Exploring the psychological underpinnings of the moral mandate effect: Motivated reasoning, group differentiation, or anger
When people have strong moral convictions about outcomes, their judgments of both outcome and procedural fairness become driven more by whether outcomes support or oppose their moral mandates than by whether procedures are proper or improper (the moral mandate effect). Two studies tested 3 explanations for the moral mandate effect. In particular, people with moral mandates may (a) have a greater motivation to seek out procedural flaws when outcom…
Ethnic Group Differences in Lay Philosophies of Behavior in the United States
This study tested whether national representative samples of Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites in the United States varied in their endorsements of dispositionist, situationist, and interactionist lay philosophies of behavior. Results were generally inconsistent with a lay philosophy of behavior account for ethnic differences in attribution tendencies. Specifically, Asians, Blacks, and Hispanics more strongly endorsed a dispositionist lay phi…
Moral Convictions Often Override Concerns About Procedural Fairness: A Reply to Napier and Tyler
Moral Conviction and Political Engagement
The 2004 presidential election led to considerable discussion about whether moral values motivated people to vote, and if so, whether it led to a conservative electoral advantage. The results of two studies—one conducted in the context of the 2000 presidential election, the other in the context of the 2004 presidential election—indicated that stronger moral convictions associated with candidates themselves and attitudes on issues of the day uniqu…
Psychology (53 works) · Social Psychology (48 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (39 works) · Political science (37 works) · Law (33 works) · Politics (24 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (24 works) · Social Psychology (22 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (14 works)