ReviewNature reviews psychology2022
Cognitive-motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts.
Review in Nature reviews psychology, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 papers.
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Who cites it
49 citing papers in PubMed.
- Toward an integrated and globally equitable understanding of political polarization.Nature communications · 2026Review
- Metastability and Entropy Peaks in Antagonistic Multiplex Consensus Dynamics.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Self-serving biases shape the relationship between future thinking and remembering of elections.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Cognitive Enhancement Through Music Education: Affective Pathways to Executive Function Improvement in Musicians.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Polarized neural responses to political narratives are sensitive to small variations in self-reported political perspectives.iScience · 2026Article
- The evolving study of political polarization.Open research Europe · 2026Review
- Article
- The influence of ideological and political education identification on college students' sense of social responsibility.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Political identity, algorithmic news exposure, and trust in digital media: the sequential mediating associations of motivated reasoning and misinformation susceptibility.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Disentangling the Three Facets of Mass Ideological Polarization: A Network Approach Across 78 Societies.Public opinion quarterly · 2026Article
- Article
- Why more social interactions lead to more polarization in societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Interbrain Synchrony Mitigates Extremism Within Echo Chambers.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Effects of focal brain damage on political behaviour across different political ideologies.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2025Article
- How perceived coercion polarizes unvaccinated people: The mediating role of conspiracy beliefs.Journal of health psychology · 2025Article
- Cognitive-Affective Dynamics of Political Attitude Polarization: EEG-Based Behavioral Evidence from a COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate Task.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- How opinion variation among in-groups can skew perceptions of ideological polarization.PNAS nexus · 2025Article
- Article
- Message source effects on rejection and costly punishment of criticism across cultures.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- A manifesto for a globally diverse, equitable, and inclusive open science.Communications psychology · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Healthy democratic polities feature competing visions of a good society but also require some level of cooperation and institutional trust. Democracy is at risk when citizens become so polarized that an 'us versus them' mentality dominates. Despite a vast multidisciplinary literature, no coherent conceptual framework of the microlevel dynamics that increase or decrease polarization has been presented. In this Review, we provide a conceptual framework to integrate scientific knowledge about cognitive-motivational mechanisms that influence political polarization and the social-communicative contexts in which they are enacted. Ego-justifying and group-justifying motives lead individuals to defend their own pre-existing beliefs and those of their in-group, respectively. However, a distinct class of system-justifying motives contributes to asymmetric forms of polarization. Whereas conservative-rightist ideology is associated with valuing tradition, social order and maintenance of the status quo, liberal-leftist ideology is associated with a push for egalitarian social change. These cognitive-motivational mechanisms interact with social influence processes linked to communication source, message and channel factors, all of which might contribute to increased or decreased polarization. We conclude with a discussion of unanswered questions and ways in which our framework can be extended to the study of culture and institutions.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.