"A series of new conceptualizations of left-wing authoritarianism have recently been proposed to counterbalance the traditional focus on right-wing authoritarianism in political psychology. This article scrutinizes conceptual confusions in the literature on authoritarianism that have been exacerbated by these new conceptualizations, including a pseudo-debate about the existence of left-wing authoritarianism; a conflation of the psychological phenomenon of authoritarianism with the more general category of all antidemocratic predispositions; and a number of logical, conceptual, and statistical fallacies that obscure psychological differences between antidemocratic predispositions on the right and the left. It proposes that antidemocratic predispositions on the right typically involve an authoritarian adherence to established norms along with violence and repression directed at perceived threats to, or deviations from, these norms, whereas those that occur on the left more commonly involve a motivation to overthrow the established authority along with violence and repression directed at perceived threats to superordinate ideological values. It concludes with a call for a broadened and reinvigorated program of research that studies the complexity and diversity of antidemocratic predispositions on the left, the right, and beyond, and their causal impact on antidemocratic attitudes and actions, drawing on insights from multiple traditions and fields of research."

"Although distinctions between the study of persons, populations, and mechanisms are helpful for illuminating mismatches between research assumptions, problems, and methods, it may be difficult to construe these as entirely discrete branches of psychological science. I suggest that it is more appropriate to view person-levelness (or person-sensitivity) as an ideal we should actively aspire toward, within the constraints placed by other goals such as generalizability and feasibility, when pursuing knowledge about individuals. It is an ideal that we can never hope to perfectly realize—the degree to which it is realized will always be a matter of degree, and there is therefore no clearline of demarcation between the person level and other branches of psychology. This ideal can nonetheless stimulate more person-sensitive conceptualizations, measurements, and analyses."

"We examined whether employees (N = 710) who experience low levels of political fit and who self-censor their political opinions at work, are more likely to display lower job satisfaction and perceived social community, and higher turnover intentions, burnout, and fear of social isolation. The results largely confirmed these associations, and showed that the associations between perceived political fit and job satisfaction, social community, turnover intentions, and burnout were statistically mediated by willingness to self-censor. This suggests that employees who experience lower levels of person-organization fit with regards to their political ideology have a higher tendency to censure themselves, which is negatively related to their well-being, perceived social belonging, and job satisfaction. Furthermore, we found that the willingness to self-censor political opinions at work was slightly higher on average among those who were politically to the left, female, younger, and less educated. The findings point to the complexity of navigating political ideologies in the workplace."

Article from Neuroscience News: "Truth relativism and its ties to conspiracy theory beliefs"
Article from Dagens Nyheter (DN): "Därför dras vissa lättare till konspirationsteorier"
Article from Forskning.se: "Magkänsla bidrar till tron på konspirationsteorier"

"This research investigated whether belief in truth relativism yields higher receptivity to misinformation. Two studies with representative samples from Sweden (Study 1, N = 1005) and the UK (Study 2, N = 417) disentangled two forms of truth relativism: subjectivism (truth is relative to subjective intuitions) and cultural relativism (truth is relative to cultural context). In Study 1, subjectivism was more strongly associated with receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit and conspiracy theories than cultural relativism was. In Study 2 (preregistered), subjectivism predicted higher receptivity to both forms of misinformation over and above effects of analytical and actively open-minded thinking, profoundness receptivity, ideology, and demographics; the unique effects of cultural relativism were in the opposite direction (Study 1) or non-significant (Study 2)."

Article from PsyPost: "New research demonstrates that political ideology can taint logical reasoning"

"This study investigated ideological belief bias, and whether this effect is moderated by analytical thinking. A Swedish nationally representative sample (N = 1005) evaluated non-political and political syllogisms and were asked whether the conclusions followed logically from the premises. The correct response in the political syllogisms was aligned with either leftist or rightist political ideology. Political orientation predicted response accuracy for political but not non-political syllogisms. Overall, the participants correctly evaluated more syllogisms when the correct response was congruent with their ideology, particularly on hot-button issues (asylum to refugees, climate change, gender-neutral education, and school marketization). Analytical thinking predicted higher accuracy for syllogisms of any kind among leftists, but it predicted accuracy only for leftist and non-political syllogisms among rightists. This research contributes by refining a promising paradigm for studying politically motivated reasoning, demonstrating ideological belief bias outside of the United States across diverse political issues, and providing the first evidence that analytical thinking may reduce such bias."

"Despite well-known problems associated with political prejudice, research that examines effects of political dissimilarity in organizational contexts is scarce. We present findings from a pre-registered experiment (N = 973, currently employed) which suggest that both Democrats and Republicans negatively stereotype and discriminate against job applicants with a political orientation that is dissimilar to their own. The effects were small for competence perceptions, moderate for hiring judgments, and large for warmth ratings and willingness to cooperate and socialize with the applicant. The effects of political orientation on hiring judgments and willingness to cooperate and socialize were mediated by stereotype content, particularly warmth. Furthermore, for all outcomes except competence judgments, Democrats discriminated and stereotyped applicants to a larger extent than Republicans did. These findings shed light on the consequences of applicants revealing their political orientation and have implications for the promotion of diversity in organizations."

"A representative sample (n = 2282) of Swedish adults completed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which measures moral intuitions concerning care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. A subset (n = 607) completed a measure of intuitions about liberty. Measurement invariance was estimated across sex, age, education, income, left-right placement, religiosity, and party preference groups, based on multigroup confirmatory factor analyses of two-, three-, five-, six-, and eight-factor models, as well as bifactor models (with methods factors or a general factor). Acceptable configural, metric, and scalar invariance was obtained for most group comparisons, particularly based on the more complex models. The clearest exceptions were (1) configural non-invariance in comparisons involving participants with very low education or income, and (2) scalar non-invariance in comparisons of ideological groups based on three- and six-factor models but not the eight-factor model, which distinguished lifestyle liberty from government liberty."

"Did the outbreak of COVID-19 influence spontaneous donation behavior? To investigate this, we conducted a natural experiment on real donation data. We analyzed the absolute amount, and the proportion of total payments, donated by individuals to charitable organizations via Swish—a widely used mobile online payment application through which most Swedes prefer to make their donations to charity—each day of 2019 and 2020. Spontaneous charitable donations were operationalized as Swish-payments to numbers starting with 90, as this number is a nationally acknowledged quality control label that is provided to all fundraising operations that are monitored by the Swedish Fundraising Control. The results show that the Swish-donations fluctuated substantially depending on season (less donations in January–February and during the summer months, and more donations in April–May and during the last months of the year) and specific events (peaks in Swish-donations often coincided with televised charity fundraising galas). Interrupted time-series analyses revealed that spontaneous donations were overall unaffected by the pandemic outbreak."

"Research has suggested that the sense of threat aroused by reminders of death can lead to worldview defense and elevated conservatism. The current studies disentangled the effects ofmortality salience and death anxietyon two core components of conservatism—resistance to change and acceptance of inequality—and on the broader worldviews of normativism and humanismamong Swedish adults. Study 1 (N = 186), which used a mortality salience manipulation, and Study 2 (N = 354), whichmeasured self-reported death anxiety, suggested thatexistentialthreat was most consistently associated with resistance to change and normativism, consistent with theoretical expectations.This was truepredominantly among left-wingers.However,existential threat was not significantly more strongly associated with resistance to change andnormativism than with acceptance of inequality and(low) humanismrespectively, contrary to thehypotheses.Furthermore, Study 3, which was a pre-registered online replication of Study 1with respondents from the United Kingdom, yielded no evidence for any effects of mortality salience on ideology(N = 319) or worldview(N = 199). Aninternal pre-registered meta-analysis of mortality salience effectsindicated that mortality salience had a marginally significant effect only onnormativism. Taken together,the results providedlittle clear evidence of mortality salience effects on ideological preferences and worldviews, but dispositionaldeath anxiety wasassociated with resistance to change, normativism, and acceptance of inequality particularly among leftists."

"Previous research suggests that threat can bolster anti-immigration attitudes, but less is known about the effects of threat on ideological tolerance. We tested the hypothesis that realistic threats — tangible threats to e.g., the safety or financial well-being of one’s group — bolster support for right-wing extremists. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 200) learned that crime and unemployment rates were either increasing (high threat condition) or remaining the same (low threat condition). Consistent with our hypothesis, higher threat lead to a significant increase in tolerance for right-wing, but not left-wing, extremists. In a second, pre-registered extended replication experiment (N = 385), we added a baseline (no threat) condition. Additionally, attitudes to immigrants were examined as a mediator. This experiment produced non-significant threat effects on tolerance of right-wing extremists. Overall, the current research provides weak support for the hypothesis that realistic threats have asymmetric effects on tolerance of political extremists. However, consistent with previous research, people were more tolerant of extremists within their own ideological camp."

"This research investigated the congruence between the ideologies of political parties and the ideological preferences (N = 1515), moral intuitions (N = 1048), and political values and worldviews (N = 1345) of diverse samples of Swedish adults who voted or intended to vote for the parties. Logistic regression analyses yielded support for a series of hypotheses about variations in ideology beyond the left-right division. With respect to social ideology, resistance to change and binding moral intuitions predicted stronger preference for a social democratic (vs. progressive) party on the left and weaker preference for a social liberal (vs. social conservative or liberal-conservative) party on the right. With respect to political values and broader worldviews, normativism and low acceptance of immigrants predicted the strongest preference for a nationalist party, while environmentalism predicted the strongest preference for a green party. The effects were generally strong and robust when we controlled for left-right self-placements, economic ideology, and demographic characteristics. These results show that personality variation in the ideological domain is not reducible to the simplistic contrast between 'liberals' and 'conservatives', which ignores differences between progressive and non-progressive leftists, economic and green progressives, social liberal and conservative rightists, and nationalist and non-nationalist conservatives."

"Moral foundations theory proposes that intuitions about what is morally right or wrong rest upon a set of universal foundations. Although this theory has generated a recent surge of research, few studies have investigated the real-world moral consequences of the postulated moral intuitions. We show that they are predictably associated with an important type of moral behavior. Stronger individualizing intuitions (fairness and harm prevention) and weaker binding intuitions (loyalty, authority, and sanctity) were associated with the willingness to comply with a request to volunteer for charity and with the amount of self-reported donations to charity organizations. Among participants who complied with the request, individualizing intuitions predicted the allocation of donations to causes that benefit outgroups, whereas binding intuitions predicted the allocation of donations to causes that benefit the ingroup. The associations between moral foundations and self-report measures of allocations in a hypothetical dilemma and concern with helping ingroup and outgroup victims were similar. Moral foundations predicted charitable giving over and above effects of political ideology, religiosity, and demographics, although variables within these categories also exhibited unique effects on charitable giving and accounted for a portion of the relationship between moral foundations and charitable giving."

"According to Silvan Tomkins’ polarity theory, ideological thought is universally structured by a clash between two opposing worldviews. On the left, a humanistic worldview seeks to uphold the intrinsic value of the person; on the right, a normative worldview holds that human worth is contingent upon conformity to rules. In this article, we situate humanism and normativism within the context of contemporary models of political ideology as a function of motivated social cognition, beliefs about the social world, and personality traits. In four studies conducted in the U.S. and Sweden, normativism was robustly associated with rightist (or conservative) self-placement; conservative issue preferences; resistance to change and acceptance of inequality; right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation; system justification and its underlying epistemic and existential motives to reduce uncertainty and threat; and a lack of openness, emotionality, and honesty-humility. Humanism exhibited the opposite relations to most of these constructs, but it was largely unrelated to epistemic and existential needs. Humanism was strongly associated with preferences for equality, openness to change, and low levels of authoritarianism, social dominance, and general and economic system justification. We conclude that polarity theory possesses considerable potential to explain how conflicts between worldviews shape contemporary politics."

"The authors of The Authoritarian Personality famously posited a psychological affinity between the authoritarian personality syndrome and politically conservative ideology. Seven decades later, we evaluate the empirical evidence bearing on this hypothesis. We conclude that: (a) there is a large body of evidence, including data from six continents and many different measures, documenting a positive association between authoritarianism and right-wing conservatism; (b) the association is observed in studies with ideologically neutral measures of authoritarianism, indicating that it is not a methodological artifact; (c) there is still no convincing counter-evidence that authoritarianism is equally prevalent on the left and right in Western societies, despite many attempts to procure such evidence; and (d) the authoritarian-conservatism nexus possesses both context-dependent and independent features. In summary, the evidence of an affinity between authoritarianism and conservatism is strong, although more research focusing on specific aspects of authoritarianism, ideological subtypes, and contextual moderators is recommended."

"To be able to implement nudges in an effective and ethically defensible manner, it is important to understand why some persons find nudges objectionable. Drawing on moral foundations theory, we investigated the moral roots of attitudes to pro-self nudges (which benefit the agent) and pro-social nudges (which benefit society). This registered report is based on a preregistered replication and extension (N = 607) of a first non-preregistered study (N = 629) with diverse samples of Swedish adults. We found that (a) individualizing moral intuitions concerning harm prevention and fairness were associated with the perceived acceptability of the nudges, (b) binding moral intuitions concerning ingroup loyalties, traditions, and sanctity were associated with the perception that nudges infringe on the agent’s freedom, and (c) individualist concern with freedom from the government’s interference in human lives, and with liberty in general, was associated with the perception that nudges restrict the agent’s freedom and are not acceptable. Opponents of nudging identified through cluster analysis exhibited high concern with liberty and low concern with individualizing and egalitarian values. These results were similar across studies and nudges, and they were consistent with our hypotheses, although individualist concern with freedom from the government specifically was the most robust unique predictor of opposition to nudges. Taken together, our findings suggest that opposition to nudges is rooted in attitudes concerning the conflict between public promotion of social goals, such as well-being, justice, or equality, and respect for the individual’s freedom from interference from the government."

Article from PsyPost: "Swedish study: Bullshit receptivity is robustly linked to social conservatism — and support for the Green Party"
Article at the SPSP-blog (Character & Context): "Receptivity to nonsesnse varies across the political spectrum"
Article from the Oxford Review naming our paper best titled research paper of 2018: "And the best research paper title of 2018 was...."

"This research systematically mapped the relationship between political ideology and receptivity to pseudo-profound bullshit—that is, obscure sentences constructed to impress others rather than convey truth. Among Swedish adults (N = 985), bullshit receptivity was (a) robustly positively associated with socially conservative (vs. liberal) self-placement, resistance to change, and particularly binding moral intuitions (loyalty, authority, purity), (b) associated with centrism on preference for equality and even leftism (when controlling for other aspects of ideology) on economic ideology self-placement, and (c) lowest among right-of-center social liberal voters and highest among left-wing green voters. Most of the results held up when we controlled for perceived profundity of genuine aphorisms, cognitive reflection, numeracy, information processing bias, gender, age, education, religiosity, and spirituality. The results are supportive of theoretical accounts that posit ideological asymmetries in cognitive orientation, while also pointing to the existence of bullshit receptivity among both right- and left-wingers."

"This study confronted the classical idea that generalized prejudice is rooted in a cognitive tendency to sort reality into rigid and simple categories with the more recent idea that prejudice is shaped by moral intuitions. In a diverse Swedish sample (N = 430), moral absolutism was more strongly associated with generalized prejudice against derogated and dissident (but not dangerous) groups than were other aspects of intolerance of ambiguity. But there was little direct association between any aspect of intolerance of ambiguity and generalized prejudice once indirect relations through binding moral intuitions (which elevated prejudice) and individualizing moral intuitions (which decreased prejudice) had been taken into account. These findings suggest that intolerance of ambiguity is associated with generalized prejudice mainly insofar as it leads to a distinctly moral dichotomization of persons into categories such as insiders and outsiders, law-abiding citizens and deviants, and the righteous and the impure."

"In most industrialized countries, there are substantial gender differences in field of study, resulting in gender segregated labor markets. The present research (N = 457, M age = 14.98) investigated a diverse range of predictors of Swedish adolescents’ choice of preparatory (STEM; humanistic) and terminal (e.g., electrician; health care) programs. The results revealed that social identity related variables (same-gender friendship networks, belonging, and adherence to gender stereotypes) mattered primarily for choice of gender-typed terminal programs, whereas academic self-concept and grades positively predicted selecting STEM and negatively predicted choice of gender-typed terminal programs for both girls and boys. Subject-specific interests were the most powerful and robust predictors overall and mediated the effects of academic self-concept and to a lesser extent social identity variables. The results illuminate the interaction between perceived barriers, opportunities, and interests in determining educational choice, the need to consider gender-typical choice for high-skilled and low-skilled career paths separately, and the importance of jointly considering a multitude of predictors that are typically studied in different fields."

"This paper investigates how donation behavior to charitable organizations and helping intentions towards begging EU-migrants are related. This question was tested by analyzing survey-responses from 1050 participants sampled from the general Swedish population. Although the overall results suggested that donations to charitable organizations were positively related to helping intentions toward beggars, the results differed substantially as a function of whether the organization was perceived to focus its efforts on outgroup-victims or on ingroup-victims. Specifically, whereas donation behavior toward outgroup-focused organizations clearly predicted higher helping intentions toward beggars (also when controlling for demographics, education, income, religiosity and political inclination), donation behavior toward ingroup-focused organizations predicted slightly lower helping intentions towards beggars. We conclude that the type of charitable organization a person donates to might tell us more about her values and preferences than merely whether or not she donates at all."

This is a chapter from a book featuring the leading international experts on authoritarianism. I wrote this together with John Jost and Andrew Shipley several years ago, following a stay at New York University. We discuss the relations between authoritarianism and various aspects of conservatism on the basis of the other chapters.

"Psychological research on personal worldviews has relied almost exclusively on a quantitative approach that is ill-equipped to fully capture human subjectivity. Using Q-methodology, this study revealed the multiplicity of meanings and internal structures of the worldviews of eighty Swedish adults across the domains of metaphysics, epistemology, human nature, morality, and values. Four coherent worldview Q-factors were extracted and interpreted qualitatively. Ontological and epistemological beliefs proved to be the highest in terms of subjective significance and divergence between worldviews, although they have been largely ignored in past research. The results were in part supportive of polarity theory, which describes the structure of worldviews in terms of the opposition between humanistic and normativistic positions, while also suggesting amendments to this theory, by illuminating the differences between hedonistic and openness-focused forms of humanism and between empiricist and rationalist, as well as religious and atheistic, forms of normativism, and the ways in which elements of both positions are combined or rejected. The findings illustrate how Q-methodology can be used to elaborate and correct the understandings of personal worldviews that are produced by traditional quantitative forms of inquiry."

This article has been covered in several pop science outlets, including PsyPost.

"Bullshit-sensitivity is the ability to distinguish pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (e.g. “Your movement transforms universal observations”) from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. “The person who never made a mistake never tried something new”). Although bullshit-sensitivity has been linked to other individual difference measures, it has not yet been shown to predict any actual behavior. We therefore conducted a survey study with over a thousand participants from a general sample of the Swedish population and assessed participants’ bullshit-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven bullshit sentences) and profoundness-receptivity (i.e. their perceived meaningfulness of seven genuinely profound sentences), and used these variables to predict two types of prosocial behavior (self-reported donations and a decision to volunteer for charity). Despite bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity being positively correlated with each other, logistic regression analyses showed that profoundness-receptivity had a positive association whereas bullshit-receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial behavior. These relations held up for the most part when controlling for potentially intermediating factors such as cognitive ability, time spent completing the survey, sex, age, level of education, and religiosity. The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo-profound from the actually profound are more prosocial."

"This article tries to clarify whether negative charity appeals (i.e., advertisements emphasizing the bad consequences of not helping) or positive charity appeals (i.e., advertisements emphasizing the good consequences of helping) are more effective. Previous literature does not provide a single answer to this question and we suggest that one contributing reason for this is that different studies have operationalized appeal effectiveness in different ways (e.g., actual behavior, self-rated helping intentions, or expressed attitudes about the ad or the organization). Results from four separate studies suggest that positive appeals are more effective in inducing favorable attitudes toward the ad and toward the organization but that negative appeals are more effective (in studies 1A and 1B) or at least equally effective (in studies 1C and 1D) in eliciting actual donations. Also, although people’s attitude toward the appeal (i.e., liking) was a good predictor for the expected effectiveness in increasing donation behavior (in Study 2), it was a poor predictor of actual donation behavior in all four main studies. These results cast doubt on marketing theories suggesting that attitudes toward an advertisement and toward the brand always lead to higher purchase behavior."

The basic premise of this book is that philosophy of science and methodology are intertwined. It combines philosophy of science with a thorough account of different types of psychological methodology in a unique way. Philosophical issues and abstract methodological concepts are illustrated with concrete examples, applied to the domain of psychology. The book comprehensively illuminates both traditional and modern philosophy of science as well as both quantitative and qualitative methods. It also summarizes the critical discussion of general problems in contemporary science and the problems that are specific to psychology. The authors seek to provide a balanced, non-polemical, pluralistic portrait of different traditions and methods - and their importance for psychological science - so that the reader of the book can independently assess their merits.

This book was awarded the Course Literature Prize honor's award from the Studentlitteratur with the following statement from the award committe:

"For a textbook that combines philosophy of science with research methodology and starts from the specific conditions of this topic. In Lundh och Nilsson's work, The science of psychology, basic and complex questions in philosophy of science and methodology are addressed with depth and seriousness. At the same time, the style is so pleasant and nuanced and the voice is so engaging that the reader is led through the text with ease. The curious beginner student as well as the more advanced master student will benefit greatly from Lundh och Nilsson's important and utterly well-written textbook."

"We extend past research on the congruency between moral foundations and morally relevant outcomes to ingroup- and outgroup-focused charitable giving. We measured intentions to donate to outgroup members (begging EU-migrants) and self-reported donations to ingroup (medical research) and outgroup (international aid) charity organizations in a heterogeneous sample (N = 1008) and actual donations to ingroup (cancer treatment) and outgroup (hunger relief) organizations in two experimental studies (N = 126; N = 200). Individualizing intuitions predicted helping in general across self-report and behavioral data. Binding intuitions predicted higher donations to ingroup causes, lower donations to outgroup causes, and less intentions to donate to outgroup members in the self-report data, and they predicted lower donations overall in the behavioral data."

"Polarity Theory suggests that worldview controversies spanning areas such as morality, politics, epistemology, and metaphysics are ultimately rooted in the clash between humanism, which portrays human nature as intrinsically good and valuable, and normativism, which portrays human goodness and value as contingent upon conformity and achievement. Previous research has shown that humanism and normativism are factorially distinct, rather than polar opposites, but has not clarified exactly how they differ. We report results from six samples of Swedish, U.S., and mixed nationality participants, suggesting that normativism is associated with an implicit metaphysics of essentialism and determinism, an absolutist epistemology, and moral intuitions, values, and aspirations pertaining to conformity with norms and the pursuit of excellence, whereas humanism is associated with an anthropocentric metaphysics, a subjectivist epistemology, and moral intuitions, values, and aspirations pertaining to intrinsic preferences and the pursuit of human well-being. The results demonstrate that humanism and normativism contribute independent of each other to the cohesion of personal worldviews, across the domains of metaphysics, epistemology, and conative orientation."

"Although Moral Foundations Theory claims that the foundations of morality are universal, there are still few studies addressing it through non-English measures. In the current research, 540 persons filled out a Swedish translation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, and 332 of them filled out political attitude measures. Confirmatory factor analyses suggested that the fit of the five-factor model was better than alternative models but not optimal, replicating previous findings. Concerns with fairness and prevention of harm predicted political identity leftward, mediated mainly by preference for equality, and concerns with loyalty, authority, and sanctity predicted political identity rightward, mediated mainly by resistance to change and system justification, as hypothesized. Fairness and authority concerns were the best predictors of political ideology."

This paper criticizes David Magnusson's interactionistic approach in personality and developmental psychology from a modern philosophical perspective. It has been discussed here.

"A key assumption in the person-oriented approach is that a person must be understood as a complex, integrated system, represented by patterns of within-person variation rather than scores on separate variables. The term 'system' does, however, have multiple meanings, which are not clearly distinguished in the person-oriented literature. I try to disentangle causal interactionism, which describes the psychological consequences and functions of each component of the system as dependent upon its causal interaction with other system components, from content holism, which describes the system components as in part constituted by their relations to each other and the system as a whole. Although the terms 'interactionism' and 'holism' are often treated as combinable and interchangeable, causal interactionism and content holism pertain to distinct kinds of research problems. Causal interactionism construes the person in terms of the hierarchically structured mechanistic systems that underpin his or her attributes and shape them over time, and can be exemplified in terms of Magnusson's developmental approach, whereas content holism is integral to our understanding of the person as an intentional system, whose mental states and actions are interweaved through principles of logic and rationality rather than material causality, and can be exemplified in terms of Stephenson's Q-methodological approach."

"According to Polarity Theory, all ideologies are fundamentally polarized by a conflict between Humanism, which idealizes and glorifies humanity, and Normativism, which portrays human goodness and worth as contingent upon conformity and achievement. Humanism and Normativism have, however, turned out to be distinct worldviews rather than opposite ends of a single bipolar continuum. Introducing a hierarchical model of their structure and developing scales to measure each facet, I previously showed that they are negatively related across views of human nature, interpersonal attitudes, and attitudes to affect, but not across epistemologies and political values. This report presents the eight-item facet scales and fifteen-item short-measures of humanism and normativism, along with descriptive statistics for each item in US and Swedish samples."

This paper criticizes Robert Cloninger's framework for psychology, which is based upon New Age-spirituality, metaphors from quantum physics, and Hegelian metaphysics. I share Cloninger's ambition to develop a non-reductive psychology that takes both the person's body and mind seriously. But I argue that he fails to do this, while trying to articulate a non-reductive approach that is based on contemporary philosophy of mind. I particularly emphasize the importance of taking the person's worldview into consideration.

This paper articulates an integrative framework for personality psychology that treats the person fully as a rational, meaning-making being. I argue particularly that the person's worldview is as important to personality as traditional personality traits.

"Personality psychology inevitably studies human beings not just as mechanical systems, but also as rational agents, whose experiences and actions are imbued with meaning. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the implications of taking this core element of personality psychology seriously, and to thereby contribute to the development of an integrative and normative framework for the field. I argue that personality can be studied both through trait constructs, referring to objective behavioral regularities, and through worldview constructs, referring to subjective sources of meaning, and try to show that worldviews are, contrary to popular belief, not inherently less universal, or in other ways less basic, than traits. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of more systematic study of worldviews, integration across the trait-worldview divide, and complementing the individual differences approach with personalistic methodology, for the development of richer and more unified portraits of personalities."

"According to Polarity Theory, human worldviews are structured by a polarity between Humanism, which glorifies humanity, portraying human beings and their experiences as intrinsically valuable, and normativism, which portrays human beings as able to realize themselves and attain value only in relation to external norms and ideals. Previous research has suggested that humanism and normativism are, contrary to Polarity Theory, virtually uncorrelated. But it has not taken their complex internal structures into account. The current research introduced, and evaluated through confirmatory factor analysis, a hierarchical model of humanism and normativism, differentiating five facets of each construct – view of human nature, interpersonal attitude, attitude to affect, epistemology, and political values – and provided evidence that humanism and normativism are negatively related with regard to the former three but not the latter two. Samples were 531 Swedes completing the Modified Polarity Scale, 491 U.S. participants completing an expanded item set used to develop reliable facet-scales, and 394 Swedes completing a short-version of the newly developed scales. Humanism and normativism scales with proportionate representation of their facets, complemented with facet-scales, are recommended for use in future research."