Department of Social Psychology, Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands.
Br J Soc Psychol. 2023 Jan;62(1):30-46. doi: 10.1111/bjso.12574. Epub 2022 Sep 11.
Within the context of polarized societal debates (e.g. abortion, racism, climate change), scholars often assume that individuals have clear-cut positions, either in favour of or against the debated issue. However, recent work suggests that such debates can also be breeding grounds for felt ambivalence. Moving beyond previous work that mainly focused on ambivalence as internal cognitive conflict, we propose and test a social discrepancy hypothesis, which suggests that the discrepancies ambivalents perceive between and within their own opinion and the opinion of actors in their social network and society (e.g. friends, family, opinion-based groups) positively explain their levels of felt ambivalence. In doing so, we quantitatively extend recent qualitative work by examining whether these social tensions are indeed felt within. To this end, we employed a multi-survey research project (Ns = 184, 181, 187) in the context of different societal debates in the Netherlands. Supporting our hypothesis across different debates, results showed that ambivalents' perceived opinion differences in the social environment explained their felt ambivalence. This suggests that polarized societal debates offer social discrepancies that, for ambivalents at least, can facilitate an internalization of social tensions.
在两极分化的社会辩论（例如，堕胎、种族主义、气候变化）背景下，学者们通常假设个人对争议问题有明确的立场，要么支持，要么反对。然而，最近的研究表明，此类辩论也可能滋生明显的矛盾心理。超越之前主要关注矛盾心理作为内部认知冲突的工作，我们提出并检验了一个社会差异假设，该假设表明，矛盾心理者感知到的自己的观点与他们社交网络和社会中的行为者（例如朋友、家人、基于观点的群体）的观点之间以及内部的差异，积极地解释了他们感到的矛盾心理程度。为此，我们通过检查这些社会紧张感是否确实在内部感受到，从数量上扩展了最近的定性工作。为此，我们在荷兰不同的社会辩论背景下，采用了一项多调查研究项目（N 分别为 184、181、187）。支持我们的假设，结果表明，矛盾心理者感知到的社会环境中的观点差异解释了他们感到的矛盾心理。这表明，两极分化的社会辩论提供了社会差异，至少对矛盾心理者来说，这些差异可以促进社会紧张感的内化。
