Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

The Intent and Extent of Collective Threats: A Data-Driven

Conceptualization of Collective Threats and Their Relation to Political
Preferences
Dennis T. Kahn, Fredrik Björklund, and Gilad Hirschberger
Online First Publication, November 29, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000868

CITATION
Kahn, D. T., Björklund, F., & Hirschberger, G. (2021, November 29). The Intent and Extent of Collective Threats: A Data-
Driven Conceptualization of Collective Threats and Their Relation to Political Preferences. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General. Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000868
 Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
© 2021 American Psychological Association
ISSN: 0096-3445 https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000868

The Intent and Extent of Collective Threats: A Data-Driven

Conceptualization of Collective Threats and Their Relation to
Political Preferences

Dennis T. Kahn1, 2, Fredrik Björklund2, and Gilad Hirschberger1

1
Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Reichman University
2
Department of Psychology, Lund University
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.

The purpose of the present article is to systematically investigate how people perceive collective threat
and how such threat perceptions relate to political preferences. Existing threat taxonomies are mostly
derived from top-down analyses and little attempt has been made to examine bottom-up how people
spontaneously perceive threats. One area where this is of central importance is the relationship between
political preferences and threat perception. Prevailing theories in social psychology primarily study se-
curity and stability threats and conclude that conservatives are more sensitive to threats than liberals.
Other perspectives, however, have criticized this position and maintain that the relationship between
threat and political preferences depends on how both constructs are defined. To resolve this issue, we
carried out a systematic, data-driven investigation of how collective threats are perceived. In five prereg-
istered, data-driven studies, carried out on representative cross-cultural samples (aggregate N = 24,341),
we show that people tend to categorize collective threats along two dimensions—their intent (omission/
commission) and extent (local/global). We show that whereas liberals are more concerned than conser-
vatives by omission-based and global threats, conservatives are more concerned than liberals by com-
mission-based and local threats. These results suggest that collective threat is a multidimensional
construct and that political leftists and rightists do not necessarily differ in the extent to which they per-
ceive threats, but rather in the way they prioritize different threats facing society.
Keywords: collective threat, political preferences, data-driven research, multidimensional scaling, politi-
cal identity

Supplemental materials: https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000868.supp

The experience of threat is a primal and powerful motivator of
human attitudes and behavior, but what exactly constitutes a
threat? Although a seemingly simple concept, the term threat is
loaded with layers of meaning that are often not accounted for in
the current literature (Feldman, 2013). Do individual threats differ
from collective threats? Does threat perception always elicit fear-
related motivations, or is the experience of threat more complex
with multiple emotions at play that induce different motivations
and perceptions of justice or injustice (Lambert et al., 2019)? Is
threat only a concern for the political right, or do leftists and right-
ists differ only in what they consider to be threatening, and not in
the extent of feeling threatened? The influence of the experience
of threat on human attitudes and behavior constitutes a fundamen-
tal question for psychological research, but the nature of the threat
construct and its relation to political preferences remains unclear.
The purpose of the present article is to focus specifically on collec-
tive threats and systematically investigate how people perceive
collective threat and how such threat perceptions relate to political
preferences.

Dennis T. Kahn https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7194-8956
This research was supported in part by Fredrik Björklund’s grants from
the Wenner-Gren Foundations in Stockholm (UPD2016-0077) and the
Crafoord Foundation (20190807) and the first authors grants from the Lars
Hierta foundation (FO2017-0278), the Helge Axs:son Johnson foundation
(F18-0218) and the Magnus Bergvall foundation (2017-02270).
All studies were preregistered, all analyses were preregistered unless
otherwise noted, and all materials are accessible through the Open Science
Framework (https://osf.io/9cbvy/).
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dennis T.
Kahn, Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology, Reichman University, P.O.
Box 167, Herzliya, 46150, Israel. Email: dennis.t.kahn@gmail.com
Collective Threat
There are numerous theories of threat in social psychology, but
few focus specifically on collective threat and even fewer make a
clear distinction between individual and collective threat. Thus,
making the case for collective threat as a unique construct is neither
simple nor straightforward. Theories such as realistic conflict theory
(Sherif et al., 1961), social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979,
1986), system justification theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994), right-wing
authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1998) and conservatism as motivated
social cognition (Jost et al., 2003) are theories that focus primarily,
but not exclusively, on collective threat without always defining

1
 2 KAHN, BJÖRKLUND, AND HIRSCHBERGER
them as such. Other theories such as terror management theory (TMT;
e.g., Greenberg et al., 1997) or compensatory control theory (Kay
et al., 2008; Landau et al., 2015) focus primarily on individual level
threat, but have used individual level threat (e.g., personal death) and
collective threat (e.g., 9/11) interchangeably (Landau et al., 2015) and
do not make different predictions for these different levels of threat.
One of the first attempts to provide an integrative model of threat
is the meaning maintenance model (MMM; Proulx & Inzlicht,
2012) that focuses on violations of meaning and their maintenance.
According to this model, most compensatory and defensive behav-
ior can be understood as an attempt to maintain or restore meaning.
It is not clear, however, that meaning is a broad enough umbrella
term to capture all compensatory behavior (Galinsky et al., 2012).
In another effort to integrate the literature and define what threat is,
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Jonas and colleagues (2014) suggested that all threats entail an anx-
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
iety-provoking discrepancy that is addressed with defensive behav-
ior. This model is parsimonious and elegant, but it addresses only
the collective level when comparing individual and collective
defenses. It does not, however, attempt to distinguish between indi-
vidual and collective threats.
Whereas some models of threat attempt to integrate disparate
conceptualizations of threat into a unitary definition, others view
threat as a multidimensional construct with different threats predict-
ing different outcomes. The sociofunctional threat-based approach
(Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005) and integrated threat theory (Stephan &
Stephan, 2000) distinguish between threats such as realistic threat,
symbolic threat and safety threat. These different dimensions of
threat are mostly collective-level and are instrumental in revealing
the distinctions between important social phenomena such as intol-
erance and prejudice and in delineating the unique prejudices of
left-wing and right-wing individuals (Crawford, 2014).
There is only sparse literature that attempts to clearly differenti-
ate individual and collective levels of threat. In the aftermath of the
9/11 attacks, Huddy and Feldman (2011) suggested a distinction
between reactions to terrorism as an individual versus collective
threat. They claim that Americans tended to overestimate their per-
sonal vulnerability to terrorism (Huddy et al., 2002), but these
assessments were independent of perceptions of threat to their
nation that were overall higher. The difference was not only in the
perceived magnitude of the threat, but in the behavioral consequen-
ces of threat perception: Individual-level threats tended to promote
self-protective behaviors, such as avoiding public places, whereas
collective threat perceptions influenced policy preferences.
In an effort to provide a theoretical framework to distinguish
between dimensions of threat, the multidimensional existential threat
model (MET; Hirschberger et al., 2016) differentiates between physi-
cal and symbolic threats at the individual and collective levels, with
different predictions for each level. According to this model, individ-
ual-level existential threats will lead to attempts at denial, as TMT
predicts, because individual death cannot be averted. Groups, unlike
individuals, have the potential to exist indefinitely, and then collec-
tive level threat should induce a motivation to prevent or eliminate
the threat rather than deny it (Hirschberger & Ein-Dor, 2020).
In the current research, our conceptualization of collective threat
relies on (a) the distinction between individual and collective
threats offered by Huddy and Feldman (2011); (b) the MET model
(Hirschberger et al., 2016); (c) the ideological conflict hypothesis
(Brandt et al., 2014; Crawford, 2014) that broadens the definition
of collective threat to include not only physical threats but also
threats that other groups pose to worldviews, values, and beliefs;
and (d) the research that shows how different collective threats are
reliably associated with unique outcomes (Bai & Federico, 2020;
Crawford, 2017; Hirschberger et al., 2016; Stephan & Stephan,
2000). We, thus, define collective threat as a state, event or phe-
nomenon that, if materialized, may have strong negative conse-
quences for the future of the group (broadly defined as any
collective from the local group to humanity) and that elicits a
motivation to take action to reduce said threat. Because politics is,
to a large degree, an endeavor to address threats against society,
and because political ideologies provide different solutions to
dealing with collective threats, the study of the relationship
between collective threat perception and political preferences is
potentially important both theoretically and practically.
Collective Threat and Political Preferences
There is a long tradition in social psychology, from Adorno and
colleagues (1950/2019), through Altemeyer (1998) and Duckitt
(2001), to Jost and colleagues (2003), of studying threats emanating
from hostile intergroup relations. This research has concluded that
political conservatives are more concerned about threats and display
a greater motivation to manage threats than do political liberals.
Adorno and colleagues (1950/2019), in their seminal work The Au-
thoritarian Personality, described political ideology as an expression
of basic personality needs. They explained how harsh and punitive
parental strategies are later transformed into perceptions of out-
groups as hostile and threatening. Fear and the experience of threat
are thought to be central in the development of a right-wing authori-
tarian worldview that “. . .see[s] the world as a dangerous place, as
society teeters on the brink of self-destruction from evil and vio-
lence” (Altemeyer, 1998, p. 87). This perception of the world as a
dangerous and threatening place activates the motivational goal of
social control and security that is expressed in authoritarian and con-
servative social attitudes and values (Duckitt, 2001). The ideology of
conservatism is, therefore, motivated by needs to manage uncertainty
and threat, due to the promise of such ideologies to provide stability
and security (Jost et al., 2003, 2017). Consequently, conservatives
(rightists) are considered more threat-sensitive than are liberals (left-
ists) and display a greater motivation to reduce threat and uncertainty
(Altemeyer, 1998; Duckitt, 2001; Jost et al., 2003, 2008, 2017).1
It is important to note that although authoritarianism is strongly
predictive of conservative self-identification and social and politi-
cal attitudes (Federico et al., 2017), authoritarianism is only one
component of conservative ideology that may not always be pres-
ent (Wilson & Sibley, 2013). In the current research, we conceptu-
alize and measure political ideology on a scale ranging from very
liberal/leftist to very conservative/rightist. Using this scale to mea-
sure political ideology enables comparison across a wide range of
political contexts (Inglehart & Klingemann, 1976; Jost et al.,
2017).
1
We use the terms conservative/liberal and right/left interchangeably in
the current article. The terms conservative and liberal are primarily used in
the United States, whereas the terms right and left is used in other
countries, notably in European countries, where the term liberal usually is
reserved for those who support a free-market economy and small
government. We switch between these terminologies in order to stay true to
the terminology used in the theoretical perspective under discussion and
the terms used in the political setting under discussion.
 COLLECTIVE THREAT AND POLITICAL PREFERENCES
Criticism of the Conservatism–Threat Relationship
The conclusion that the need to manage uncertainty and threat
is associated exclusively with conservative ideology has been
criticized in recent years, with several scholars pointing out that
the relationship between political preferences and perception of
threat depends on how threat and political preferences are defined
and operationalized (e.g., Crawford, 2017; Eadeh & Chang, 2020;
Elad-Strenger & Shahar, 2018; Hirschberger et al., 2016; Malka et
al., 2014). For example, some research has shown that the relation-
ship between the need for security/certainty and conservatism
depends on whether political ideology is measured along a social
or economic dimension (Malka et al., 2014; Federico & Malka,
2018). This line of research further suggests that the different
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dimensions of political ideology are weakly, and sometimes even
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
negatively related (Malka, Lelkes, & Soto, 2017). The mixed evi-
dence on the relationship between political ideology and physio-
logical reactions to threat (Bakker et al., 2020; Hibbing et al.,
2014; Oxley et al., 2008) casts further doubt on the simple rela-
tionship that is proposed between conservatism and threat.
Research that conceptualizes threat as a multidimensional con-
struct finds ideological differences in threat perception such that
right-wingers place greater emphasis on physical existential threats,
whereas leftists place greater emphasis on symbolic existential threats
(Bai & Federico, 2020; Hirschberger et al., 2016). Along similar
lines, Crawford (2017) argued that whereas social conservatives are
more influenced by physical threats, liberals and conservatives are
similarly influenced by meaning threats. He further shows that sym-
bolic threats, realistic threats, and safety threats are related to differ-
ent intergroup outcomes (Crawford, 2014). Indeed, the effect of
threat on political preferences appears to be contingent on the type of
threatening issue that is under study. According to the ideology-
affordance perspective on threat and political attitudes (Eadeh &
Chang, 2020; Lambert et al., 2019), different threats should enhance
the appeal of the political party that is perceived as better suited to
address the specific threat. Research supports this position and indi-
cates that threats to health care and the environment, for instance
(issues that liberals care about), produce increased support for com-
ponents of liberal ideology (Eadeh & Chang, 2020).
Drawing from the scholarship on issue ownership (e.g., See-
berg, 2017), that suggests that issues that are important to political
parties are stable over time and across contexts, we expect to find
cross-cultural similarities in the relationship between political ide-
ology and threat perception. Namely, we posit that similarities
among leftists and among rightist in threat perception are based on
similarities in the issues that political partisans deem important.
This issue/threat consistency is expected to hold cross-culturally.
A Data-Driven Conceptualization of Collective Threat
Most, if not all, would agree that political leftists and rightists alike
are concerned about societal phenomena that they consider important
(e.g., Jost et al., 2017). Further, all political groups are strongly moti-
vated to reduce threats to issues that they care about. Collective threat
is typically operationalized in current research as threat against secu-
rity and social stability. Indeed, a considerable part of the literature
has focused its main attention on a single threat—terrorism (Eadeh &
Chang, 2020; Jost et al., 2017). In a recent meta-analysis on threat
and political preferences, 45 out of 55 samples (82%) focused on
3
terrorism, whereas the remaining studies focused mainly on xenopho-
bia and violent crime (Eadeh & Chang, 2020; Jost et al., 2017).
Although terrorism and other threats against security and stability are
unquestionably important and pose a serious threat to society, the ab-
sence of threats against other societal phenomena (e.g., threats
against social justice, threats against the environment, widespread vi-
ral contamination) precludes the possibility to account for a wider va-
riety of phenomena in the description of collective threat. The
decision to include only specific threats in a study is likely to greatly
affect the results, and such decisions may be subject to theoretical or
ideological biases.
From a theoretical perspective, perceptions of justice in particu-
lar should be central to threat perceptions because the sense of
threat, especially when accompanied by feelings of anger, suggests
that something is wrong with the world that needs to be rectified
(Lambert et al., 2019). The sense of injustice and ensuing emo-
tions is a subjective perception that may vary as a function of po-
litical ideology. Thus, a terrorist attack may elicit moral outrage
and lead to greater support of hawkish policies as a form of retrib-
utive justice (Lambert et al., 2010). Threats to health care or to the
environment, however, do not increase support for violence but
rather motivate restorative justice motivations—greater support
for health care and environmental policies (Eadeh & Chang,
2020). The current research offers the opportunity to examine bot-
tom-up whether justice considerations indeed guide people's clas-
sification of collective threats.
To move forward in the discussion on threat and resolve this im-
portant issue a rigorous, systematic and data-driven investigation
of the collective threat construct is needed to determine which
phenomena are perceived as collective threats, how these threats
are organized and categorized, and whether the threat construct
has a unidimensional structure, as it is often operationalized in
current research, or constitutes a multidimensional phenomenon
comprising qualitatively different threats. To reduce risks and
sampling biases (Fiedler, 2011), we propose that the best way to
approach this issue is to adopt a data-driven bottom-up approach
that allows the “data to speak.” This enables the research to
approach representative design (Brunswik, 1955, 1956), having an
unbiased and representative sample of stimuli.
The Present Research
To examine how people spontaneously assess collective threats,
it is important to ensure that the list of threats constitutes a repre-
sentative sample of the phenomena people spontaneously perceive
as collective threats, and that the criteria on which collective
threats are assessed reflect the criteria that people spontaneously
use to assess threats. Previous research has used these guidelines
to clarify the content people spontaneously use to describe stereo-
types (Koch et al., 2016). Based on this research, the present
research examined four central questions:
1. What phenomena do people perceive as collective
threats?
2. How are these phenomena spontaneously categorized?
3. What dimensions do people spontaneously use to com-
pare collective threat?
 4 KAHN, BJÖRKLUND, AND HIRSCHBERGER
4. In what way do the political left and right (or liberals and
conservatives) differ in their concern about collective
threats?
The first step was to generate a list of phenomena that people per-
ceive as collective threats (Study 1). Following this, we examined
how people categorize collective threats, by asking them to assess
similarities between different threats, as well as to intuitively sort
threats (Study 2). In Study 3, we examined how many dimensions
are needed to account for the perception of collective threat and
what the contents of these dimensions are. In Studies 3 through 5,
we also examined the ways in which the political left and right dif-
fer in their concern about threat. Finally, in Study 5 we examined
whether the obtained patterns were universal, looking at representa-
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
tive samples from 22 countries. All studies are preregistered, all
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
analyses are preregistered unless otherwise noted, and all of the
materials are accessible through the OSF (osf.io/9cbvy/).
Study 1
The purpose of Study 1 was to examine what phenomena people
spontaneously perceive to be collective threats. A data-driven
strategy was used, soliciting the phenomena that people mention
when asked what the greatest threats against society are. Partici-
pants were not limited by definitions, examples or instructions and
were asked to provide spontaneous responses.2 The study was pre-
registered on aspredicted.org (aspredicted.org/wn6fp.pdf).
Method
Participants
Data were collected from two samples—one from the United
Kingdom and one from the United States. Each sample was repre-
sentative of the general population in the ages 20 to 69 in terms of
age and gender. Quotas for age and gender were based on the 2011
U.K. census (Office for National Statistics, 2011) and the 2017 U.S.
Census (U.S. Census Bureau, 2017). The samples were taken from
the online Prolific platform (www.prolific.ac), and age and gender
quotas were based on Prolific’s prescreening.3 The U.K. sample
consisted of 359 participants (50% female, Mage = 43.33) and the
U.S. sample consisted of 309 participants (50% female, Mage =
43.15). The U.K. sample was predominantly White/Caucasian
(93%), with 2% identifying as Black, 1% as East Asian, 2% as
South Asian, and 2% as as other. In the U.S. sample, 80% identi-
fied as White/Caucasian, 6% as Black/African American, 3% as
East Asian, 3% as Latino/Hispanic, 1% as South Asian, and 7% as
other. After completing the study, participants were given a quality
assurance question. The question read as follows: “For us as
researchers, it is very important to get reliable answers to our ques-
tions. It may happen that some of our participants lack the energy
or attention necessary to provide such reliable and accurate
responses. Would you recommend that we use your response in our
analyses of the results? Please note that your response to this ques-
tion does not in any way affect your payment for participating in
the study.” The participants could choose between the options:
“Yes, I recommend that you use my responses in the analyses of
the results”, “No, I do not recommend that you use my responses in
the analyses of the results” and “Other:______.” This method of
data quality control has been used in previous research (Imhoff
et al., 2020; Lamberty & Imhoff, 2019). In our preregistration of
this study, we indicated that participants that did not recommend
using their responses would be excluded from the analyses. In this
study, no participants had to be excluded.
Measures and Procedure
Participants in the study were posed with the open-ended ques-
tion: “What are the three greatest threats against our society in
your view?” They were then asked to provide basic demographic
information. Political preferences were assessed on a scale ranging
from 1 (far left [U.K.]/very liberal [U.S.]) to 7 (far right [U.K.]/
very conservative [U.S.]).
Results
In accordance with the preregistration, we surveyed the list of
threats mentioned by the participants, combining threats that clearly
referred to the same category. For example, terror, terrorism, terro-
rists, and terror attacks were combined into a single “terrorism”
category. We then sorted the threats in each sample separately by
prevalence, identifying the threats that, taken together, accounted
for two thirds (67%) of the threats mentioned in the sample. The
remaining threats belonged to categories that each accounted for
less than .7% of the mentioned threats. As per the preregistration,
this cutoff point was chosen to create a list containing a clear ma-
jority of the mentioned threats, while still ensuring that the list did
not include rarely mentioned threats. We then proceeded to identify
threats that were among the most commonly mentioned in both
samples. We attempted to use the exact terms suggested by the par-
ticipants, to the extent possible. A number of adjustments were
made, however, for categories that referred to the same underlying
threat, but for which somewhat different terms were used in the
United Kingdom and the United States (see online supplemental
material for specific adjustments to threat categories). The final list
of threats commonly mentioned in both samples, in order of preva-
lence across the two samples, was the following:
1. Terrorism
2. Climate change
3. War
4. Poverty
5. Inequality
6. Immigration
7. Racism
8. Environmental damage
2
The preregistration for this study, as referred to in the author note, is
for the U.K. sample. We carried out an exact replication with a U.S. sample
for which we did not create a separate preregistration.
3
All of the research presented here with the exception of Study 5 was
collected on the Prolific platform. Research shows that Prolific produces
higher quality data than other online data services (Palan & Schitter, 2018).
 COLLECTIVE THREAT AND POLITICAL PREFERENCES
9. Crime
10. Nuclear weapons
11. Government
12. Disease
13. Pollution
14. Religion
15. Economic collapse
16. Extremism
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This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
17. Overpopulation
18. Greed
Discussion
The results of Study 1 provided us with a list of phenomena that
participants perceived as collective threats. Doing so was an impor-
tant first step, because no systematic bottom-up examination of this
issue has been carried out in the past. We thereby approach the idea
of representative design (Brunswik, 1955, 1956), ensuring that the
corpus of stimuli material represents what people spontaneously
intend when thinking of the construct in question. It is notable that
from an ideology-affordance perspective (Lambert et al., 2019),
some of the threats on this list represent issues that are perceived to
be “owned” by the political right, such as terrorism and crime (See-
berg, 2017). These threats are often associated with greater retribu-
tive justice motivations (e.g., counterterrorism measures). Other
threats on the list, such as inequality and pollution, are thought to
be “owned” by the political left (Saad, 2007) and are associated
with restorative justice motivations (Eadeh & Chang, 2020). In the
next studies, we determine whether participants indeed use justice-
related criteria to organize collective threats.
Study 2
Study 1 addressed the first research question: what phenomena
do people perceive as collective threats? In Study 2, we moved
forward with examining the second research question—how do
people categorize threats? The two most commonly used methods
for examining how people classify and categorize objects are simi-
larity estimations (e.g., Forgas, 1976; Koch, et al., 2016; Rosen-
berg et al., 1968) and object sorting (e.g., Canter et al., 1985;
Ward, 1977; Ward & Russell, 1981). The advantage of both of
these approaches is that they allow each individual to base his or
her judgment on any dimensions that he or she chooses. These
techniques are therefore particularly suited for the investigation of
how people spontaneously categorize objects without precondi-
tions or theoretical assumptions. Similarity estimation entails esti-
mating how similar pairs of objects are, while object sorting
involves sorting a full set of objects into groups (see online supple-
mental material for advantages and limitations of each method).
To offset the advantages and disadvantages of the two methodolo-
gies, participants in Study 2 carried out similarity estimations as
5
well as a sorting task. The study was preregistered on aspredicted
.org (aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=bw7ng4f).
Method
Participants
A sample of 502 U.K. participants was collected through the
Prolific platform. As per the preregistration, Prolific's prescreening
questionnaire was used to create quotas for gender (50/50) and po-
litical preferences (one third leftists, one third centrists, one third
rightists). This sample was predominantly white (93%), Black 1%,
South Asian 1%, less than 1% of the sample identified as East
Asian or Latino/Hispanic, and 5% identified as other. As in Study
1 and as indicated in the preregistration, a quality assurance ques-
tion was posed to the participants, asking them if they recommend
using their responses (Imhoff et al., 2020). Eleven participants rec-
ommended not to use their responses (2%, which is below com-
mon exclusion standards in online studies; Klein et al., 2014),
making the final sample size 491 (50% female, M age = 38.60).
Measures
Similarity Estimation. The 18 threats generated in Study 1
were used as stimulus material in the study. The participants were
presented with a pair of threats and were asked “To what degree
do you think these two threats belong to different or similar types
of threat?” Participants indicated their responses on a scale ranging
from 1 (very different types of threat) to 7 (very similar types of
threat). All possible combinations of the 18 threats were used,
resulting in 153 threat pairs. To limit the length of the question-
naire and reduce fatigue from answering a large number of similar
questions, each participant was randomly shown half of the threat
pairs (77 threat pairs). The order in which the threat pairs were
presented, as well as the internal order between the two threats,
were counterbalanced.
Sorting Task. Following the similarity estimation task, partic-
ipants were given a sorting task, in which they were shown a list
of all 18 threats and were asked to sort the different threats into
boxes in any way they liked, by dragging and dropping the threats
into a certain box. Eighteen boxes were shown on the screen, in
case the participants wanted to place each threat in a separate box.
A threat could not be placed in more than one box. The instruc-
tions to the participants were “Please sort the threats in the list
below. You can divide them in any way you like, including putting
all of them in the same box, putting each of them in separate boxes
or any number of boxes in between. It is possible to leave some of
the boxes empty. The order of the different items within the box
does not matter, nor does the order of the different boxes.” A
screen shot of the sorting task is included in the online supplemen-
tal material. We also added a comprehension check that is avail-
able in the online supplemental materials. Political preferences
were assessed on a scale from 1 (far left) to 7 (far right).
Results
We analyzed the similarity estimations as well as the sorting
task, using two different dimension reduction techniques, multidi-
mensional scaling (MDS; Borg & Groenen, 2005) and principal
component analysis (PCA; Jolliffe, 2002). The use of two different
 6 KAHN, BJÖRKLUND, AND HIRSCHBERGER
dimension reduction techniques allowed us to triangulate and exam-
ine where the results from the different approaches converge. For
the purpose of the MDS and PCA, we created full matrices for each
of the threat pairs, resulting in 18 3 18 matrices. For the purpose of
the similarity estimates, the lower part of the matrix contained the
mean similarity rating when the threat in the row was presented first
and the upper part of the matrix the similarity rating when the threat
in the column was presented first. For the sorting task, each cell of
the matrix contained the number of instances in which the different
threats appeared in the same box. The upper and lower parts of the
matrix were thus identical for the sorting task.
We then proceeded to run separate MDS analyses on the similar-
ity estimates and the sorting data, using the PROXSCAL procedure
(Busing et al., 1997), treating the scale as ordinal, that is, not lim-
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ited by the assumption that all scale steps are of equal magnitude.
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Similarly, we carried out PCAs for the similarity estimates and the
sorting data, using oblimin rotation, allowing for the scales not to
be orthogonal (Osborne et al., 2008).
These analyses were carried out for one, two, three, and four
dimensions to determine how many dimensions were sufficient to
account for the data. We used a number of criteria to reach this de-
cision. In MDS, the main criterion used is Kruskal’s S, or stress
(Kruskal, 1964), a measure of badness-of-fit. The stress value
should be as low as possible, with a cutoff point of ..2 usually
indicating an unsatisfactory fit to the data (Kruskal & Wish, 1978).
A value of #.15 can be considered satisfactory and values #.10 as
good (Kruskal & Wish, 1978). The use of PCA further gave us an
indication of how much variance is explained by the component so-
lution. There are no firmly established cutoff points for explained
variance, but a common requirement is that the component solution
can explain $60% of the variance (Hair et al., 2014).
Two other criteria are parsimony and interpretability. With regards
to parsimony, dimension solutions containing fewer dimensions were
preferred over solutions containing a larger number of dimensions.
For interpretability, we compared the different dimension solutions
for consistency across the different data collection methods (similarity
estimates and sorting) and the different analysis strategies (MDS and
PCA). Consistency was examined by identifying the extreme values
on each of the dimensions (upper and lower third of coordinates/com-
ponent loadings) and comparing across the four different solutions
(MDS for similarity estimates, PCA for similarity estimates, MDS for
sorting, PCA for sorting). If a certain threat belonged to the upper
third of the same dimension across at least three out of the four differ-
ent solutions, it was said to belong to the upper third of said dimen-
sion (and vice versa for threats belonging to the lower third). For a
dimension solution to be consistent, we expected at least three threats
to consistently belong to the same pole of a certain dimension across
the different analyses. The one-, two- and three-dimensional solutions
satisfied our criteria of consistency in the sense that all dimensions
had at least three threats that belonged to the same pole of a certain
dimension. In the four-dimensional solution, Dimensions 3 and 4 only
had two threats consistently associated with the lower pole, making
the four-dimension solution less interpretable. The full list of threats
associated with the high and low poles of the different dimensions in
the two-, three- and four-dimension solutions can be found in Table 1.
Table 1 presents the dimension solution (i.e., the number of
the dimensions of threat) and the content of each dimension, summa-
rizing the specific threats associated with the extreme poles of each
dimension in the two-, three- and four-dimension solutions. Thus, for
each dimension solution, there are content cells that correspond to
threats on the high and low poles of each dimension. For example,
the threats that had low values on Dimension 1 in the two-dimension
solution were terrrorism, racism, extremism, and war, whereas the
threats with high values on Dimension 1 in the two-dimension solu-
tion were climate change, pollution, environmental damage, overpop-
ulation, and disease.
The results from the MDS and PCA analyses are presented in Ta-
ble 2. The analysis indicated that one dimension was insufficient to
account for the results, both in terms of stress levels (..2 for the
similarity estimates as well as for the sorting task) and in terms of
explained variance (24% and 30% variance explained for similarity
assessments and the sorting task, respectively). The two- three- and
four-dimensional solutions all had satisfactory stress levels (#.15
for both measures) but provided a relatively limited amount of
explained variance (between 39% and 60% variance explained; see
Table 2). The results thus indicated that threat is a multidimensional
rather than unidimensional construct, but did not allow us to deter-
mine whether two, three, or four dimensions are needed to accu-
rately account for how people perceive threats.
Discussion
The results from Study 2 provide the first data-driven examina-
tion of how people categorize collective threats. These results are
consistent with the notion that threat is a multidimensional, rather
than unidimensional construct. We were, however, not able to adju-
dicate with any certainty between the two-, three- and four-dimen-
sion solutions, nor were we able to describe the nature of the
dimensions in question. For these purposes, we carried out Study 3.
Study 3
We had, thus, generated a list of phenomena perceived as collective
threats (Study 1) and examined how these threats are categorized (Study
2). The first preliminary step in Study 3 was to select content criteria
that could be used to interpret the two-, three- and four-dimensional
spaces found in Study 2 and generate a list of content dimensions on
which these threats are perceived to differ. On this basis, Study 3 sought
to (a) to disambiguate and interpret the dimensions; (b) adjudicate
between the two-, three- and four-dimensional solutions; and (c) exam-
ine the relationship between the dimensions of threat extracted from
this study and political identity. This study, therefore, allowed us to
determine the number and nature of the dimensions that are needed to
account for the perception of collective threat. The study was preregis-
tered on aspredicted.org (aspredicted.org/blind.php?x=ym2ku9).
Preliminary Step
Using an independent sample of 60 U.K. Prolific participants,
we generated a list of 18 criteria that could be used to disambigu-
ate and interpret the different dimensions found in Study 2. This
procedure enabled us to establish criteria that reflect what people
spontaneously use to categorize and describe collective threats (for
full details of this procedure see the online supplemental material).
The resulting list contained the following themes:
1. Local/global consequences
2. Avoidability
 COLLECTIVE THREAT AND POLITICAL PREFERENCES 7

Table 1
List of Threats Associated With the High and Low Poles of the Different Dimensions in the Two-, Three- and Four-Dimension Solutions
Solution
Dimension 1 3 4
1 Low
Terrorism Racism Extremism
Racism Religion Racism
Extremism Extremism Religion
Religion Terrorism Terrorism
War War War
High
Climate change Pollution Pollution
Pollution Overpopulation Environmental damage
Environmental damage Disease Climate change
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Overpopulation Environmental damage Disease

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Disease Climate change Overpopulation

Economic collapse Economic collapse
2 Low
Immigration Inequality Crime
Inequality Immigration Economic collapse
Poverty Poverty Immigration
Greed Crime Inequality
Economic collapse
High
Extremism War Environmental damage
Climate change Environmental damage Pollution
Environmental damage Pollution War
War
Terrorism
3 Low
Immigration Pollution
Religion Religion
Pollution
High
Economic collapse Bad government
Bad government Economic collapse
Greed Greed
4 Low
Economic collapse
Immigration
Poverty
High
Crime
Religion

3. Intentional/unintentional 12. Collective-level/individual-level consequences

4. Related to economy 13. Consequence of regular/irregular activity

5. Motivated by emotion 14. Malicious intent

6. Direct/indirect 15. Physical/symbolic

16. Clear perpetrator

7. Interhuman cruelty
17. Related to immigration
8. Targets environment
18. Long-term/short-term consequences
9. Affects some/affects all
It is notable that although many of these criteria are related to
10. Motivated by ideology the concept of justice (e.g., intentional, interhuman cruelty, mali-
cious intent), justice concerns were not explicitly cited as criteria
11. Related to power for categorizing collective threats. It seems, therefore, that if
 8 KAHN, BJÖRKLUND, AND HIRSCHBERGER

Table 2 influence of the general concern about the threat from the assess-
Kruskal’s Stress and Explained Variance for the One-, Two-, ment of the threat on the different criteria. Each participant was
Three- and Four-Dimension Solutions asked to assess each of the 18 threats on seven randomly selected
criteria out of the 19 requiring each participant to make 126 sepa-
Analysis and method Kruskal’s S Explained variance
rate assessments. In addition, the order in which the 18 threats
One-dimension solution were presented was randomized. All participants assessed the
MDS similarity .31 threats on the three valence criteria. An example of the instruction
MDS sorting .22
PCA similarity 24% for the local/global criteria was as follows:
PCA sorting 30%
Two-dimension solution Threats can vary in the degree to which the consequences are felt on a
MDS similarity .15 global scale or on a local scale. For certain threats, the consequences
MDS sorting .13 would mainly be felt locally if the threat were to materialize, whereas
PCA similarity 39% for others, the consequences would be felt globally if the threat were
PCA sorting 46%
to materialize. Please rate the following 18 threats according to how
Three-dimension solution
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MDS similarity .10 local or global the consequences would be.

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MDS sorting .07

PCA similarity 49%
PCA sorting 53%
Four-dimension solution
MDS similarity .07
MDS sorting .06
PCA similarity 57%
PCA sorting 60%
Note. MDS = multidimensional scaling; PCA = principal component
analysis.
justice concerns guide people's classification of collective threats,
this does not occur at the explicit level.
Method
Participants
We carried out power analyses using G*Power (Faul et al.,
2009) to determine sample size for Study 3. According to a previ-
ous meta-analysis (Jost et al., 2017), the effect size of the relation-
ship between political preferences and threat perceptions is small
to medium (rs = .12–.31). The power analysis showed that a sam-
ple size between 79 (for r = .31) and 542 (for r = .12) was suffi-
cient to achieve a power of .80. Based on these analyses, we
settled on a sample size of 300, which would be enough to detect
an effect size of .16 with a power of .80. Participants were
recruited from the Prolific platform, creating quotas for gender,
age and political preference among 300 U.K. participants who did
not take part in any of the earlier studies (91% White/Caucasian,
2% Black, 1% East Asian, 2% South Asian, 4% other). In accord-
ance with the preregistration, 10 participants who recommended
not to use their responses for the data analysis were excluded from
further statistical analyses, making the final sample size 290 (49%
female, M age = 42.96).
Measures
The 18 threats generated in Study 1 and the 18 criteria generated
in the preliminary analysis were used as stimuli in Study 3. We
decided to divide the symbolic/physical criterion into two separate
criteria, since the symbolic/physical division does not entail an
unequivocal pair of opposites. We thus had a list of 19 criteria. In
addition, we also included three valence criteria (concern about
threats, severity of threats, and importance of threats). The purpose
of including these criteria was to be able to tease apart the
For each threat, participants were asked to assess the threat on the
relevant criterion with a slider on a scale from 0–100, anchored at both
sides with short descriptions of the low and high poles of the criterion
(e.g., local consequences/global consequences). Political preferences
were assessed on a scale ranging from 1 (far left) to 7 (far right).
Results
Mean ratings of all threats on each of the 22 criteria (19 threat
criteria plus three valence criteria) were calculated and entered
into an 18 3 22 matrix. This matrix was used as input for a paral-
lel analysis (Ledesma & Valero-Mora, 2007), using O’Connor’s
(2000) matrix. The parallel analysis indicated the existence of two
dimensions. We thus ran a PCA, limiting the number of compo-
nents to two, using oblimin rotation. The first two components
accounted for 74% of the variance. The component solution indi-
cated that 11 out of the 22 criteria loaded ..4 on the first compo-
nent and ,.4 on the second component, while 10 out of the 22
criteria loaded ..4 on the second component and ,.4 on the first
component. The only criterion that did not load ..4 on either com-
ponent was “related to economy.” The full component solution
from the PCA can be found in Table 3.
We then ran these analyses on each of the political groups sepa-
rately to examine whether leftists and rightists perceive threats differ-
ently or only show different levels of concern about threats (see online
supplementary materials for full details of these analyses). The analy-
ses indicated that threat perception was highly similar for leftists and
rightists (i.e., both rightists and leftists agreed that climate change is a
global omission threat and that crime is a local commission threat).
The 16 criteria resulting from this analysis were considered the final
list of criteria associated with the two dimensions. The 6 threats that
had the highest score on the first component were terrorism, war, ex-
tremism, religious fundamentalism, racism and nuclear weapons,
whereas the threats with the lowest scores on this component were dis-
ease, overpopulation, climate change, poverty, pollution and economic
instability. The threats with the highest score on the second component
were climate change, nuclear weapons, environmental damage, pollu-
tion, war and overpopulation, whereas the threats with the lowest score
on the second component were racism, immigration, inequality, crime,
poverty, and religious fundamentalism.
The content description of the two dimensions was chosen based
on the criteria that loaded on the different dimensions in the PCA as
well as the specific threats associated with the high and low poles of
 COLLECTIVE THREAT AND POLITICAL PREFERENCES 9

Table 3 intent (e.g., terrorism, war, extremism). The second dimension was
Component Solution from the Study 3 PCA termed local/global, with threats that are low on this dimension per-
ceived as local threats (e.g., racism, immigration, inequality),
Criteria Component 1 Component 2 whereas threats that are high on this dimension were perceived as
Malicious intent .98 global threats that affect all of humanity (e.g., climate change, nu-
Threats against symbolic values and .96 clear weapons, environmental damage). These dimensions could also
principles
Clear perpetrator .96
be said to capture the intent and extent of collective threat—the
Intentional .96 degree to which the threat is perceived as the result of intentional
Interhuman cruelty .94 action and the extent of the threat in question.
Ideologically motivated .92 We were further interested in comparing the coordinates of the dif-
Direct (active) .91
ferent threats on the two dimensions across Studies 2 and 3, including
Emotional motivation .91
Related to power .85 two different methods of measurement and analyzed using two differ-
Consequence of regular/irregular actions .76 ent dimension reduction techniques. For each threat, we calculated
Avoidable .48 standardized scores for the MDS and PCA of the similarity assessment
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Related to economy
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and sorting task (Study 2) as well as the PCA of the criteria assessment
Affects all .91
Severe .87 (Study 3), resulting in five standardized scores for each threat on each
Global .87 of the two dimensions. The placement of the threats in the two-dimen-
Collective-level consequence .87 sional space was strikingly similar across the different studies, different
Targets environment .84 measurements, and different statistical approaches, as indicated by
Long-term consequences .84
Concerning .76 intercorrelations for placement of the threats on the same dimension
Threats against something tangible or .75 across the different scores between .43 and .98, with 14 out of 20 cor-
physical relations having intercorrelations of ..70. To graph the different
Related to immigration .72 threats in a two-dimensional space, we calculated average placement
Important .65
on the two dimensions for the different threats in Studies 2 and 3.
Note. Component loadings of ,.4 are not displayed in the table. PCA = These composite placements on the different dimensions had high reli-
principal component analysis. ability—Dimension 1 a = .98, Dimension 2 a = .90—again attesting
to the high degree of consistency regardless of measurement and statis-
the different dimensions. We term the first component omission/com- tical approach.
mission with threats low on this dimension perceived as the result of Figure 1 shows the placement of each of the threats in the 2-
indirect, unintentional passivity without malicious intent (e.g., dis- dimensional space, based on this composite placement. Property-fit-
ease, overpopulation, climate change), whereas threats high on this ting analyses was further carried out to compare the suitability of
dimension were perceived as direct, intentional action with malicious the two dimensions for interpreting the threats’ one-dimensional,

Figure 1
Placement of Collective Threats on the Intent and Extent Dimensions Based on Average Placement
on the Composite, Combining Results From Studies 2 and 3

High
War
Nuclear weapons
Environmental damage
Climate change
Pollution
Terrorism

Extremism

Extent
Bad government Religious
Overpopulation
fundamentalism
Racism
Economic collapse
Disease
Greed Crime
Poverty

Immigration
Low Inequality

Low High

Intent
 10 KAHN, BJÖRKLUND, AND HIRSCHBERGER

two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and four-dimensional similar- Table 4

ity space. Details from these analyses can be found in the online Regression Coefficients (b Values) for the Relationship Between
supplemental material (please note that this research was conducted Political Preference and Concern About Threat, Controlling for
before the COVID-19 pandemic. It is likely that today disease Age and Gender, Organized by Rating on the Omission/
would be rated higher in extent). Commission and Local/Global Dimensions
To examine the relationship between political preferences
and concern about threats, we calculated a composite score for Omission/ Political Preference 3
commission Threat Concern
overall concern about threat that includes the three valance crite- Threat M rating b [95% CI]
ria: concern about threats, severity of threat, and importance of
Disease 24.91 .01** [ .12, .10]
threat for each of the 18 threats (reliability scores ranged from a = Overpopulation 32.14 .17** [ .05, .28]
.78 to a = .91 for the different threats). The higher the score on Climate change 38.46 .24** [ .36, .13]
this threat composite, the more the participant was concerned Pollution 41.66 .23** [ .34, .12]
about the threat in question. We carried out linear regressions Poverty 42.98 .34** [ .45, .23]
Environmental damage 43.36 .25** [ .36, .13]
between political preferences and concern about each of the 18
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Economic collapse 44.17 .03** [ .15, .08]

threats separately, controlling for age and gender. We sorted the
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Immigration 44.69 .43** [ .32, .53]

threats according to their mean rating on the omission/commission Inequality 56.05 .47** [ .57, .36]
and local/global dimensions and present the regression coefficients Bad government 57.47 .22** [ .33, .11]
Greed 67.01 .28** [ .39, .17]
among political preferences and the different threats (see Table 4).
Crime 67.16 .14* [ .03, .25]
Looking at the omission/commission dimension, concern about Nuclear weapons 71.55 .09 [ .20, .02]
three out of the five threats (climate change, pollution, poverty) Racism 74.50 .29** [ .40, .19]
associated with the omission pole were significantly related to Religious fundamentalism 75.85 .15* * [ .04, .26]
left-wing political preferences, whereas concern about three out of War 79.89 .06 [ .17, .05]
Extremism 80.07 .10† [ .02, .21]
the five threats (terrorism, extremism, religious fundamentalism) Terrorism 83.99 .21** [ .10, .32]
associated with the commission pole were significantly related to Immigration 42.33 .43** [ .32, .53]
right-wing political preferences. There were, however, exceptions Racism 44.11 .29** [ .40, .19]
to this pattern. Concern about overpopulation, a threat rated as Inequality 46.50 .47** [ .57, .36]
Crime 47.01 .14* [ .03, .25]
omission-based, was associated with right-wing political preferen-
Religious fundamentalism 48.09 .15* *[ .04, .26]
ces and concern about racism, a threat rated as commission-based, Poverty 50.07 .34** [ .45, .23]
was associated with left-wing political preferences. Turning our Greed 50.74 .28** [ .39, .17]
attention to the local/global dimension, concern about three of Extremism 52.68 .10† [ .02, .21]
the five threats (immigration, crime, religious fundamentalism) Disease 57.05 .01** [ .12, .10]
Bad government 58.14 .22** [ .33, .11]
associated with the local pole were significantly related to right- Terrorism 59.23 .21** [ .10, .32]
wing political preferences, whereas concern about three out of the Economic collapse 63.34 .03** [ .15, .08]
five threats (climate change, environmental damage, pollution) Overpopulation 66.74 .17** [ .05, .28]
associated with the global pole were significantly related to left- War 71.14 .06 [ .17, .05]
Nuclear weapons 78.62 .09 [ .20, .02]
wing political preferences. There were, however, exceptions to
Pollution 78.89 .23** [ .34, .12]
this pattern as well. Concern about racism and inequality were Environmental damage 80.70 .25** [ .36, .13]
rated as local but were nonetheless associated with left-wing polit- Climate change 83.89 .24** [ .36, .13]
ical preferences.
Note. Political Preference 3 Threat Concern refers to the regression
To examine whether the observed pattern constituted a significant coefficient predicting the concern about threat composite using political
linear trend, we carried out multilevel modeling analyses, treating the preferences as the predictor, controlling for age and gender. CI = confi-
different threats as within-subjects clusters of analysis. These analy- dence interval.
ses were not preregistered. Using a multilevel modeling strategy *p , .05. ** p , .001.
allowed us to obtain an overall view of the relationship between
political preferences and concern about threat, taking into account which the threat was perceived as global (b = .40, SE = .03, t =
how each of these threats was rated on the two dimensions. In 14.30, p , .001, LLCI =.35, ULCI = .46) were related to concern
carrying out the MLM-analyses, we followed Heck et al.’s (2013) about threats. Importantly, we were interested in whether the rela-
recommendations. In the first step, we entered only type of threat as tionship between political preferences and concern about threat
a within-subjects predictor and concern about threat as an outcome depended on the degree to which the threat was omission/commis-
variable. This analysis showed that the level of concern differed
sion-based and/or local/global. In order to examine this, in the
depending on the type of threat, t(5003) = 183.04, p , .001, justify-
third and fourth steps, we entered interaction terms between politi-
ing the use of a multilevel model. In the second step, we entered indi-
vidual-level (right-wing) political preferences, as well as group-level cal preference and omission/commission (third step) and political
rating on the omission/commission and local/global dimensions. Age preference and local/global (fourth step). The analyses revealed
and gender were also included as controls. The analysis showed that significant interactions between political preferences and omis-
left-wing political preferences (b = –1.54, SE = .24, t = –6.44, p , sion/commission (b = .03, SE = .01, t = 2.53, p = .011, LLCI =.01,
.001, LLCI = –2.01, ULCI = –1.07), overall degree to which the ULCI = .06) as well as between political preferences and local/
threat was perceived as commission-based (b = .16, SE = .02, t = global (b = –.06, SE = .02, t = –3.15, p = .002, LLCI = –.09,
7.70, p , .001, LLCI =.12, ULCI = .20), and overall degree to ULCI = –.02). The more commission-based and global the
 COLLECTIVE THREAT AND POLITICAL PREFERENCES
threat, the stronger the relationship between right-wing political
preferences and concern about the threat. Conversely, the more
omission-based and global the threat, the stronger the relationship
between left-wing political preferences and concern about the
threat.
Discussion
Study 3 showed that people perceive threats along two main
dimensions—omission/commission and local/global—in other
words, the intent and extent of collective threat. The omission/
commission dimension refers to the degree to which the threat in
question is the result of indirect, unintentional passivity without
malicious intent (omission), or direct, intentional action with mali-
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cious intent (commission). The local/global dimension refers to the
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degree to which the threat is a local phenomenon affecting parts of
the population (local), or a global phenomenon affecting the entire
population (global). This finding constitutes an important theoreti-
cal advancement in the study of threat perception as it reveals
dimensions of threat that were previously unaccounted for using a
data-driven and unconditional examination of the perception of
collective threats. Moreover, although participants did not explic-
itly use justice concerns to classify threats, Figure 1 suggests that
justice-related perceptions may have implicitly affected threat per-
ceptions. Specifically, threats on the left-side of Figure 1 tend to
reflect social justice violations (poverty, environmental damage)
that require restorative justice actions. Threats on the right side of
the figure reflect threats to the physical integrity of the collective
(war, terrorism) that often generate retributive justice motivations
(Lambert et al., 2010).
The results from the study further show that the clarification of
the dimensions along which threats are perceived and categorized
helps to clarify the relationship between political preferences and
concern about threat. First, when considering a wide range of
threats generated by participants themselves and thus relatively
impervious to researcher bias in item selection, leftists were more
concerned by threats than rightists. This is an important result,
since it runs counter to predictions made by many theories in
the field (Altemeyer, 1998; Duckitt, 2001; Jost et al., 2003, 2008,
2017).
We do not however draw the conclusion that leftists are gener-
ally more concerned about threats than rightists. Rather, the con-
clusion that we believe to be the most appropriate is that the
relationship between political preference and concern about threat
depends on the threat under consideration. More specifically, the
more the threat was perceived as commission-based and local, the
more concern about the threat was associated with right-wing po-
litical preferences. The more omission-based and global the threat,
the more concern about the threat was associated with left-wing
political preferences. Thus, political leftists and rightists do not
necessarily differ in their overall concern about threats, but in the
specific threats that they are concerned about. It is however
important to note that despite these clear overall patterns in the
data, there were notable exceptions. For example, concern about
racism, a threat rated as local as well as commission-based,
was nonetheless associated with left-wing political preferences,
whereas concern about overpopulation, a threat rated as omission-
based by our participants, was associated with right-wing political
preferences.
11
Study 4
The main purpose of Study 4 was to examine ideological differ-
ences in the allocation of resources to issues identified as threats
and nonthreat-related societal issues. These issues were further
rated on the local/global and omission/commission dimensions to
examine whether conservatives and liberals would differ in their
resource allocation to threats varying on different dimensions.
Using a resource allocation task enabled us to test our hypotheses
using a different method and a different list of threats. The study
was preregistered on aspredicted.org (aspredicted.org/blind.php
?x=tz4y8i).
Method
Participants
The sample consisted of 401 U.S. participants, representative of
the U.S. population in terms of age, gender and political preferen-
ces. Participants were recruited from the Prolific platform. In ac-
cordance with the preregistration, seven participants (1.75%) who
recommended not to use their responses for the data analysis were
excluded from further statistical analyses. We also identified six
instances of participants with identical Prolific ID’s, providing
clear indication that the same individual completed the question-
naire twice. Although not preregistered, we excluded the second
of these sets of responses for each such individual. Including the
duplicate participants does not affect the results or levels of signifi-
cance in any meaningful way. The final sample size was thus 388
(49% female, M age = 43.27). Most participants identified as
White/Caucasian (79%), with 5% identifying as Black, 2% as East
Asian, 6% as Latino/Hispanic, and 8% as other.
Measures and Procedure
Resource Allocation Task. We were interested in contrasting
allocation of resources to deal with threat-related issues with allo-
cation of resources to deal with nonthreat-related issues. We also
examined allocation of resources to threats that differ on the omis-
sion/commission and local/global dimensions. Participants were
given the following instructions:
Below you will find a list of issues. Your task is to indicate how much
resources (money, time, labor. etc.) you think should be devoted to deal-
ing with each of these issues. Please indicate in percentages how much
resources you think should be devoted to each of these issues in the box
next to the text describing the issue. The total percentage should amount
to 100%. You can divide the resources any way you like. You can fill
out all the boxes or leave some of the boxes empty, as you like.
They were then presented with the list of issues, next to each of
which was a box in which they could enter a number. To aid the
participants, a box appeared at the bottom indicating the sum of
the values they had entered so far. The participants were able to
revise and change the percentages entered in each box as many
times as they wished until the sum of values reached 100%.
Creating a New List of Threats. In Study 1, we asked partici-
pants to list threats that they consider the greatest threats to society. It
is possible that the threats people think of as the greatest threats to so-
ciety are not the threats that people think about often. In that case,
our study of collective threats may be limited to threats that are
 12 KAHN, BJÖRKLUND, AND HIRSCHBERGER
severe but rare and exert little effect on everyday life. To address this
limitation, we used a data-driven strategy again to solicit the collec-
tive threats that people think about often. Using an independent rep-
resentative U.S. sample (N = 300) on the Prolific platform, a new list
of threats was generated that was near identical to the list generated
in Study 1. This new list of threats showed the same pattern of rela-
tionships with political ideology as found in Study 3. For full details
of this analytic step, see Study 1 in the online supplemental material.
We used this list of threats in the current study.
Assessing Intent and Extent of Threats
To assess the threats on the omission/commission and local/
global dimensions, participants in this study were given a general
definition of the different dimensions and were then asked to rate
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each of the threats on the dimensions. For the local/global dimen-
sion, participants were told:
Threats can to a different degree be local and have short-term conse-
quences affecting parts of the population, or global with long-term con-
sequences affecting the entire population. Please indicate whether the
following threats would be local with short-term consequences affecting
part of the population or global with long-term consequences affecting
the entire population. They were then asked to rate the different threats
on a scale ranging from 1 (entirely local) to 5 (entirely global).
For the omission/commission dimension, participants were
given the following instruction:
Threats can, to a different degree, be the result of a person or a group
doing something intentionally to hurt society. While some threats de-
velop on their own and are the result of failure to take action, other
threats come about because someone or some group intentionally is
taking action to hurt society. Please indicate whether the following
threats would be the result of failure to take action, or intentional
action carried out by someone or some group trying to hurt society.
They were then asked to rate each of the threats on a scale rang-
ing from 1 (entirely failure to take action) to 5 (entirely intentional
action). Finally, participants were asked to indicate their age,
gender and political preferences on a scale ranging from 1 (very
liberal) to 7 (very conservative).
Results
Three of the threats (terrorism, crime, and violent protests/riots)
were clearly perceived as threats of commission, whereas two of
the threats (poverty and the COVID-19 pandemic) were clearly
seen as threats of omission. Further, whereas three threats were per-
ceived as global (the COVID-19 pandemic, terrorism, and poverty),
two threats were perceived as local (crime and violent protests; see
Table 5). Mean composites were calculated in accordance with this
division to capture local and global threats and omission and com-
mission threats. Mean composites based on the division generated
in the preliminary analyses (see the online supplemental material)
were calculated to capture threats and nonthreat-related issues.
We carried out linear regressions, controlling for age and gen-
der, to examine the relationship between political preferences and
relative allocation of resources to threat-related versus nonthreat-
related issues, omission versus commission threats and local ver-
sus global threats as well as the specific issues. We sorted the
threats according to their mean rating on the omission/commission
and local/global dimensions and present the regression coefficients
between political preferences and the different threats and non-
threat-related issues (see Table 5). Conservative political preferen-
ces were in this study associated with allocation of resources to
threats over nonthreat-related issues. This relationship, however,
depended heavily on the type of threat. Whereas conservatives
allocated more resources to commission threats (violent protests,
crime, and terrorism), liberals allocated more resources to omis-
sion threats (COVID-19 and poverty). Conservatives further allo-
cated more resources to local threats (i.e., violent protests and
crime), and although liberals generally allocated more resources
to global threats (i.e., the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty), terror-
ism—which in the study was perceived as a global threat—was
associated with conservative political preferences (see Table 5).
As in Study 3, we carried out multilevel modeling analyses to
assess whether the relationship between political preference and
allocation of resources to address a threat differed depending on
the intent and extent of the threat. The different threats were
treated as within-subjects clusters of analysis. These analyses were
not preregistered. In the first step, we entered only type of threat as
a within-subjects predictor and percentage of resources devoted to
dealing with the threat as an outcome variable. This analysis
showed that the resource distribution differed depending on the
type of threat, t(1,566) = 49.16, p , .001. In the second step, we
entered individual-level (right-wing) political preferences, as well
as individual-level rating on the omission/commission and local/
global dimensions. Age and gender were also included as controls.
The analysis showed that right-wing political preferences (b = .77,
SE = .10, t = 7.41, p , .001, LLCI =.56, ULCI = .970), rating of
the threat as omission-based (b = –.68, SE = .14, t = -4.88, p ,
.001, LLCI =-.95, ULCI = –.40) and rating of the threat as global
(b = 1.05, SE = .16, t = 6.46, p , .001, LLCI =.73, ULCI = 1.37)
were related to distribution of resources to the threat. In the third
and fourth steps, we entered interaction terms between political
preference and omission/commission (third step) and political
preference and local/global (fourth step). The analyses revealed
significant interactions between political preferences and omis-
sion/commission (b = .22, SE = .08, t = 2.87, p = .004, LLCI =.07,
ULCI = .36) and between political preferences and local/global
(b = –.50, SE = .09, t = –5.53, p , .001, LLCI = –.67, ULCI =
–.32). The more commission-based and local the threat, the more
allocation of resources to address the threat was associated with
right-wing political preferences; the more omission-based and
global the threat, the more allocation of resources to address the
threat was associated with left-wing political preferences.
Discussion
The main purpose of Study 4 was to examine differences in
resource allocation to threats among liberals and conservatives. The
results from the study showed that while conservatives allocated
more resources to reduce threat, this pattern depended primarily on
the type of threat. Whereas conservatives allocated resources to
local and commission threats, liberals allocated resources to global
and omission threats. These results corroborate the findings of
Study 3 using a different method and an independent list of threats.
 COLLECTIVE THREAT AND POLITICAL PREFERENCES 13

Table 5
b Coefficients for the Relationship Between Political Preference and Resource Allocation, Controlling for Age and Gender, Organized
by Rating on the Omission/Commission and Local/Global Dimensions
Omission/commission Local/global Political Preference 3 % Resource
Issue M % resource M rating M rating b [95% CI]
Threat 10.58 .20** [.10, .29]
Omission 14.44 2.23 .25** [ .35, .16]
Commission 8.00 3.58 .42** [.33, .51]
Local 8.37 2.74 .40** [ .31, .49]
Global 12.05 3.79 .14** [ .24, .04]
Poverty 11.34 2.17 3.54 .20** [ .30, .10]
COVID-19 17.55 2.30 4.07 .14** [ .24, .04]
Violent protests 6.80 3.20 2.55 .33** [.23, .42]
Crime 9.94 3.40 2.93 .32** [ .22, .41]
Terrorism 7.27 4.13 3.74 .26** [ .16, .36]
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Nonthreat 11.78 .20** [ .29, .10]

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Healthcare 17.40 .16** [ .26, .06]

LGBTQ rights 4.56 .43** [ .52, .34]
Education 14.72 .11* [ .20, .01]
Family and children 10.43 .15** [ .05, .25]
Note. Political Preference 3 % Resource represents the regression coefficient predicting the percentage of resources allocated to a certain threat using
political preferences as the predictor, controlling for age and gender. CI = confidence interval.
* p , .05. ** p , .001.

Study 5
Study 5 was carried out to examine on a global scale whether the
political left and right differ in their concern about threat and more
specifically to examine whether the political left is concerned about
omission-based global threats whereas the political right is con-
cerned about commission-based local threats. We were further inter-
ested in examining whether these patterns were context-dependent
or are cross-culturally valid. Because Studies 1 through 4 were con-
ducted on predominantly White samples, Study 5 provided an op-
portunity to test our predictions on diverse samples worldwide. This
study was based on an analysis of the data from Pew Research
Center’s (2017) global attitudes and trends survey from 2017.
Method
Participants
The survey was carried out in 38 countries in large (N = 1000)
representative samples—altogether 41,953 participants. In 22 of
these countries (Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile,
Colombia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Mex-
ico, Netherlands, Peru, Poland, South Korea, Spain, Sweden,
United Kingdom, United States, and Venezuela; aggregate N =
22,529), participants were asked to indicate their political prefer-
ences on a left–right scale.4 The participants from these 22 coun-
tries constituted the study’s sample.
Measures
Political preferences were measured on a scale ranging from 0
(left) to 6 (right). In the United States, participants were asked to
indicate their political orientation on a scale from 1 (very conserva-
tive) to 5 (very liberal). The U.S. scale was reversed and recoded to
align with the other countries (1 = 6, 2 = 4.5, 3 = 3, 4 = 1.5, 5 = 0).
Participants were asked to rate to what extent different phenom-
ena constituted a threat. They were asked, “I’d like your opinion
about some possible international concerns for (survey country). Do
you think that ____ is a major threat, a minor threat or not a threat to
(survey country)?” The threats that were listed included the follow-
ing: global climate change, the condition of the global economy, the
Islamic militant group known as ISIS, cyberattacks from other coun-
tries, and large number of refugees leaving countries such as Iraq
and Syria. Participants were finally asked to what degree China,
the United States and Russia constituted threats, but the results
regarding these country-based threats were not analyzed, since these
items referred to the origin of the threat rather than its’ nature.
Preliminary Analyses
To map the threats from the Pew Research Center’s Global
Trends and Attitudes Survey on the local/global and omission/
commission dimensions, we conducted a preliminary study. This
study also provided an opportunity to verify the two-dimensional
model of collective threat and the relationship between political
preferences and threat, using a different list of threats, generated
by independent researchers. An independent representative sample
of U.S. participants recruited on the Prolific platform (N = 303)
was used in this preliminary study (see Study 2 in online supple-
mentary materials). The results of this preliminary study provide
the basis for our analyses in Study 5.
Results
We carried out multilevel modeling analyses, treating the different
threats as within-subjects clusters of analysis and the different coun-
tries as between-subjects clusters of analysis. In the first step, we
entered only type of threat as a within-subjects predictor, country as
a between-subjects predictor and concern about threat as an outcome
variable. This analysis showed that the overall proportion of variance
4
Data about race/ethnicity were available only for Brazil, Israel, and the
United States. In Brazil, 40.68% identified as White, 14.98% as Black, and
36.86% as Mulato/Parda; in Israel, 66% identified as Jewish, 33.97% as
Arab; in the United States, 71.8% identified as non-Hispanic White, 8.05%
as non-Hispanic Black, 10.73% as Hispanic, and 9.43% as other.
 14 KAHN, BJÖRKLUND, AND HIRSCHBERGER
in concern about threats that lies between countries (the intraclass
correlation) was 18.88%. In other words, the overall level to which
the different phenomena were perceived as great threats differed
from country to country (Wald Z = 52.90, p , .001), justifying carry-
ing out a multilevel model. In the second step, we entered individual-
level (right-wing) political preferences, as well as average ratings of
the threats from the preliminary analyses (see the online supplemen-
tal material) on the omission/commission and local/global dimen-
sions. Age and gender were also included as controls. The analysis
showed that rating of the threat as commission-based (b = .18, SE =
.004, t = 50.93, p , .001, LLCI = .18, ULCI = .19) and rating of the
threat as global (b = .26, SE = .004, t = 69.46, p , .001, LLCI = .25,
ULCI = .27) were related to concern about threats, whereas political
preferences were unrelated to concern about threat (b = –.004, SE =
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.003, t = –1.17, p = .241). In the third and fourth steps, we entered
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interaction terms between political preference and omission/commis-
sion (third step) and political preference and local/global (fourth
step). The analyses revealed significant interactions between political
preferences and omission/commission (b = .05, SE = .003, t = 17.87,
p , .001, LLCI =.05, ULCI = .06) as well as between political pref-
erences and local/global (b = –.09, SE = .003, t = –29.55, p , .001,
LLCI = –.10, ULCI = –.08). The more commission-based and local
the threat, the more concern about the threat was associated with
right-wing political preferences and the more omission-based and
global the threat, the more concern about the threat was associated
with left-wing political preferences.
In the fifth step of the analysis, we were mainly interested in
whether the interaction between Political Preferences 3 Omission/
Commission and the interaction between Political Preferences 3
Local/Global varied between the different countries. In this step,
we allowed the slopes for the interactions between Political Prefer-
ences 3 Omission/Commission and Political Preferences 3
Local/Global to randomly vary across the different countries. The
analysis indicated that the interaction between Political Preferen-
ces 3 Omission/Commission (Wald Z = 2.64, p = .008) and Politi-
cal Preferences 3 Local/Global (Wald Z = 3.11, p = .002) had
small but significant variations across the different countries.
To probe these differences between countries, we carried out two
multilevel modeling analyses separately in each of the 22 countries
in the sample. In the first of these analyses, political preference,
omission/commission and the interaction between the two were
entered as fixed effects, controlling for age and gender. In the sec-
ond analysis, political preference, local/global and the interaction
between the two were entered as fixed effects along with the control
variables. Dawson’s (Dawson & Richter, 2006; Dawson, 2014)
Excel templates for plotting two-way interactions were used in
order to visualize and interpret the interaction effects in the different
countries. With regard to the omission/commission dimension, the
results clearly confirmed the overall pattern that the more commis-
sion-based the threat, the more concern about the threat was associ-
ated with right-wing political preferences. We visualize this pattern
across all countries in Figure 2. Further, for the local/global dimen-
sion, the more global the threat, the more concern about the threat
was associated with left-wing political preferences. This pattern
across all different countries is presented in Figure 3. Interactions
along these patterns could clearly be seen in the United States,
United Kingdom, Argentina, Australia, Canada, Germany, Greece,
Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden. There
was further a significant Political Preferences 3 Omission/
Commission interaction (but not a significant Political Preferences
3 Local/Global) interaction in South Korea and significant Political
Preferences 3 Local/Global interactions (but not significant Politi-
cal Preferences 3 Omission/Commission interactions) in Brazil,
Chile and France. These patterns were not observed in Colombia,
Italy, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. We include the interaction
graphs for all the different countries in the online supplemental ma-
terial. The obtained patterns were thus the strongest in countries in
North America, Western and Southern Europe, and Australia,
although they were less in effect in Latin American countries.
Discussion
The results of Study 5 corroborate Studies 3 and 4 and indicate
that more concern about commission-based threats was associated
with right-wing political preferences, and more concern about omis-
sion-based threats was associated with left-wing political preferen-
ces. Study 5 demonstrates that this result is robust and is even
obtained in response to threats generated by independent research-
ers, as well as when including participants from a wide range of
countries in most parts of the world. Results from Studies 3, 4, and
5 established that more concern about local threats is associated
with right-wing political preferences whereas more concern about
global threats is associated with left-wing political preferences.
Taken together, our studies indicate that the more omission-based
and global the threat, the more concern about the threat is associ-
ated with left-wing political preferences, whereas the more commis-
sion-based and local the threat, the more concern about the threat is
associated with right-wing political preferences. The results of
Study 5 corroborated the findings of the previous studies across rep-
resentative samples from 22 countries located in five different con-
tinents. It seems that the overarching ideological difference in
concern about threat is not as clear and robust as much of the litera-
ture suggests and depends on the types of threat examined in each
specific study. When differences in the meaning of different threats
are not considered, such general ideological differences seem mean-
ingless. The cross-cultural samples further allowed us to examine
differences across countries and whether the obtained effects were
stronger in some countries than others. The analyses showed that
the patterns mainly stemmed from liberal Western democracies in
North America, Europe, and Australia and we thus limit our conclu-
sions regarding the link between political preference and concern
about threat to such countries at present.
General Discussion
The results from five preregistered studies reveal how collective
threats are perceived cross-culturally and how these perceptions
are related to political preferences. Specifically, this series of stud-
ies clarifies the kind of phenomena that people perceive as collec-
tive threat and demonstrate that people tend to categorize
collective threats according to their extent (local/global) and intent
(omission/commission). The results further show that whereas po-
litical rightists (or conservatives) are concerned about commission
threats and local threats more than are leftists (or liberals), leftists
are concerned about omission and global threats to a greater
degree than rightists. We arrive at this conclusion employing a
systematic bottom-up investigation: after compiling a list of phe-
nomena that participants spontaneously perceived as collective
 COLLECTIVE THREAT AND POLITICAL PREFERENCES 15

Figure 2
Simple Slopes Plot of the Interaction Between Political Preferences and Omission/
Commission Across Countries
0.2
0.18
0.16
0.14
Threat concern

0.12
Omission
0.1
Commission
0.08
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0.06
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0.04
0.02
0
Left Right

Note. The terms left and omission refer to one standard deviation below the mean on political
preferences and omission/commission, whereas right and commission refer to one standard
deviation above the mean on political preferences and omission/commission. Error bars repre-
sent 95% confidence intervals for the interaction term.

threats (Study 1), we showed that threat is a multidimensional,
rather than unidimensional construct (Study 2). We further gener-
ated a list of criteria which participants used to disambiguate and
interpret the different dimensions and found that people perceive
collective threat along two main dimensions—omission/commis-
sion and local/global (Study 3). The omission/commission dimen-
sion refers to the degree to which the threat in question is the
result of indirect, unintentional passivity without malicious intent
(omission), or direct, intentional action with malicious intent
(commission). The local/global dimension refers to the degree to
which the threat is a local phenomenon affecting parts of the popu-
lation (local), or a global phenomenon that affect populations
beyond the immediate group (global). These findings were repli-
cated in separate samples in which we collected new lists of

Figure 3
Simple Slopes Plot of the Interaction Between Political Preferences and Local/
Global Across Countries
0.3

0.25

0.2
Threat concern

0.15
Local
Global
0.1

0.05

0
Left Right
-0.05

Note. The terms left and local refer to one standard deviation below the mean on political
preferences and local/global, whereas right and global refer to one standard deviation above
the mean on political preferences and local/global. Error bars represent 95% confidence
intervals for the interaction term.
 16 KAHN, BJÖRKLUND, AND HIRSCHBERGER
threats (Study 4) and on lists of collective threats, generated by in-
dependent researchers (Study 5). The results from the studies fur-
ther show that whereas leftists are more concerned about
omission-based and global threats political rightists are more con-
cerned about commission-based local threats (Studies 3 through
5). This pattern was validated across representative samples from
22 countries located in five different continents (Study 5).
These results have substantial theoretical implications since
they provide the basis for a unique conceptualization of collective
threat built entirely on lay perceptions, with few preconditions and
assumptions. As such, the two-dimensional model of collective
threat provides an opportunity to reexamine the relationship
between collective threat and political preference while dramati-
cally reducing the risk of bias. The results produced an unequivo-
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cal picture with regards to the number of dimensions along which
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threats differ and the content of these dimensions. The dimensions
in question (omission/commission and local/global) were obtained
from two independent assessments of lay perceptions of threat and
lists of threats compiled by other independent researchers. These
findings allow for a mapping of societal threats into different
types, or categories, of threat and enable us to examine how these
dimensions derived from a bottom-up analysis relate to current
conceptualizations of threat in the literature.
Implications for the Study of Political Preference and
Threat
In this article, we demonstrated the importance of the two-
dimensional model of threat for the study of the motivational bases
of political preferences. According to the theory of conservatism
as motivated social cognition, conservatives are more sensitive to
threat and more motivated to reduce threat and uncertainty than
liberals (Jost et al., 2003). This general conclusion regarding the
role of threat, however, is based almost entirely on research opera-
tionalizing threat as security and stability threats (Eadeh & Chang,
2020; Jost et al., 2017). The current research indicates that the
conclusion reached by this theoretical perspective is overly broad.
We show that the perception of collective threat extends beyond
threats to security and stability to include phenomena that are the
consequence of unintentional passivity—threats that result from
exaggerated stability, a failure to make necessary changes in the
status quo. We reason that any comprehensive conclusion regard-
ing the relationship between the perception of threat and political
preferences, should consider a wider range of collective threats,
including omission threats as well as commission threats and local
threats as well as global threats. Notably, in our studies, we find
that while conservatives tend to be more concerned by threats that
are the result of intentional activity with malicious intent and have
local consequences, they are in fact less concerned than liberals by
threats that are the result of unintentional passivity and have global
consequences. What differentiates, therefore, between conserva-
tives and liberals is not the degree to which they are concerned by
collective threat overall, but rather which collective threats they
are more concerned about. It is notable that these ideological dif-
ferences are specific to concern about threat and not to threat per-
ception. Both rightists and leftists perceive threats in a similar way
on omission/commission and local/global dimensions (Study 3).
The difference between political partisans, therefore, pertains to
their level of concern about collective threats.
Another possible way to understand differences between liberals
and conservatives in threat perception is to expand the anxiety-cen-
tric approach to threat that is currently dominant in the literature.
This approach may inadvertently lead to a greater focus on conserv-
ative threat perception. An alternative would be to consider other
precursors of threat perception. For instance, many threats represent
justice violations and are likely to trigger anger or moral outrage
(Eadeh & Chang, 2020; Lambert, Eadeh, & Hanson, 2019). The
current study provides a basis to continue studying justice motiva-
tions that may underlie threat perception. On the one hand, partici-
pants in our studies did not explicitly use justice criteria when
classifying threats (Study 3). On the other hand, our mapping of
collective threats (see Figure 1) and analyses of ideological differ-
ences in threat perception suggest that justice motivations may have
played an important, albeit implicit, role in threat classification.
Whereas liberals/leftists focused on social justice violations such as
poverty and racism, conservatives/rightists were concerned with
physical harm to the group that is often associated with retributive
justice (Lambert et al., 2019). Overall, the results of the current
research provide a basis for expanding our understanding of what
underlies threat perception and what precipitates ideological differ-
ences in threat perception. Our conclusion that threat is not just a
right-wing issue is also in line with recent research that finds that
ideological rigidity and ideological extremism are not only charac-
teristic of the right and are found among liberals and conservatives
alike (Zmigrod, 2020).
Why Do Liberals and Conservatives Differ in Their
Concern About Different Threats?
Our interpretation of the results regarding the relationship
between omission-commission threats and political preference is
that while conservatives are concerned about threats that threaten
the stability of the status quo (i.e., commission threats), liberals are
concerned about threats that emanate from the status quo—threats
that will occur because of passivity and the failure to make neces-
sary changes and reforms (i.e., omission threats). The degree to
which one endorses change or stability in society lies at the heart of
the conservative-liberal, or right-left, divide (Burke, 1790/1973; Jost
et al., 2003; Jost, Federico, & Napier, 2009; Paine, 1791/1986).
Whereas conservative ideology emphasizes collective stability and
values associated with conservation, tradition and security, liberal
ideology tends to emphasize values associated with openness to
change (e.g., Piurko et al., 2011). Indeed, the ideology of conserva-
tism historically grew out of resistance to chaos, disorder and anar-
chy (e.g., Burke, 1790/1973), while the historical roots of liberal
(e.g., Locke, 1690/1976; Paine, 1791/1986) as well as socialist (e.g.,
Marx, 1867/1974; Rousseau, 1762/1968) ideology can be traced to
attempts to bring about a new social order, by means of collective
reform or revolution. While the danger in omission threats lies in
passivity and the failure to implement necessary changes, the danger
in commission threats lies in the carrying out of an action that threat-
ens security and stability. To use a naval metaphor, if the danger in
omission threats lies in not changing a catastrophic course, the dan-
ger in commission threats lies in someone hijacking the ship, steer-
ing it into dangerous waters. Therefore, conservatives' safeguarding
of collective stability and security may underlie their greater empha-
sis on commission threats, whereas liberals' openness to collective
change may underlie their greater emphasis on omission threats.
 COLLECTIVE THREAT AND POLITICAL PREFERENCES
Our interpretation of left/right differences in emphases on local
versus global threat rests on ideological differences in ingroup
identification. Patriotism and belongingness to the national group
tends to be associated with conservatism and right-wing political
preferences. In contrast, leftists tend to have a stronger degree of
identification with humanity as a whole (McFarland et al., 2012;
Waytz et al., 2016). It could be that because local threats often
threaten the national group and global threats threaten all of
humanity, rightists tend to emphasize local threats, whereas leftists
tend to emphasize global threats. No measures of ingroup identifi-
cation nor attitudes toward stability versus change were included
in the present studies however, so we were unable to test these
interpretations in the present research. We believe that the
endeavor to uncover the reasons and mediating variables that can
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explain why conservatives and liberals differ in their concern
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about omission and commission threats is an important topic for
future research.
Why Omission/Commission and Local/Global?
The presented studies do not provide an answer to why threats
were primarily organized in terms of omission/commission and
local/global. It is however interesting to note the parallel to a long
tradition in attribution theory (Darley & Shultz, 1990; Fincham &
Roberts, 1985; Heider, 1958; Shaver, 1985; Shultz et al., 1981;
Weiner, 1995) and the cognitive development tradition of moral
psychology (e.g., Baron & Ritov, 2004; Hebble, 1971; Shultz et al.,
1986; Yuill & Perner, 1988; Zelazo et al., 1996), which have both
contrasted the relative weight given to consequences versus inten-
tions of negative actions. In moral judgment, people tend to base
their judgment on the scope of the negative consequences and the
degree to which the agent had malevolent intentions (e.g., Cush-
man, 2008). Viewed from this perspective, it is conceivable that
participants in our studies assessed threats in a similar way, compar-
ing them in terms of degree of intentionality (omission/commission)
and the extent of the negative consequences (local/global).
Implications for Threat Taxonomies
The obtained results also have important implications for exist-
ing threat taxonomies. Integrated threat theory (Stephan & Ste-
phan, 2000; Stephan & Renfro, 2002), the multidimensional
existential threat model (Hirschberger et al., 2016) and the com-
pensatory political behavior model (Crawford, 2017) all differenti-
ate between physical and symbolic threats (or realistic/symbolic
threats, physical/meaning threats).
The current research indicates that these theories come close to
the subjective perception people tend to have of collective threats.
Physical threats tend to be commission threats, typically of a local
nature. That is, threats with immediate, local consequences that
are the result of intentional activity, intending to harm others.
These include, notably, threats such as terrorism, war, crime, and
other acts of violence. Symbolic threats that are related to world-
views, values and beliefs are often threats of omission with global
implications (e.g., threats to democracy and human rights), but not
always. Threats to religious beliefs and values, for instance, are
also symbolic in nature but may be local threats that are perceived
as threats of commission (e.g., opposition to a religious practice).
The current research provides a more nuanced understanding of
models of threat that appear in the literature and shows that some
17
of these models fit well with our data-driven strategy. The results
of this bottom-up analysis may provide the necessary fine-tuning
lacking in top-down models.
Applied Importance
Society is becoming ever more divided and polarized along po-
litical partisan lines, with each side being convinced of the virtue
of their own perception of reality and the folly of their opponents’
(Finkel et al., 2020). One of the main points of contention regards
which collective threats are the most pressing and urgent to deal
with. Each side in ideological disputes tends to be convinced that
the other side is unaware, or chooses to ignore, the most pressing
threats against society. In order to decrease such polarization and
deal effectively with the threats and challenges facing society,
what is needed is increased awareness and understanding of the
processes involved in the experience of threat and the effect such
threat experiences have on attitudes, behavior, and decisions. An
increased awareness and understanding of one’s own and others’
perception of collective threats may enable policymakers to con-
sider the full domain of threats to society and be aware of their
own ideological blind spots. Because society ultimately needs to
be aware of both omission and commission threats that may be
local or global for it to survive and thrive, the results of the current
research also provides empirical support for the claim that ideolog-
ical diversity is important (Duarte et al., 2015). Societies that con-
sist of both liberals and conservatives may be better equipped to
detect and deal with the full array of collective threats.
Limitations
The results from these five studies provide validity for the rela-
tionship between collective threat and political preferences across
representative samples from 22 countries. Whereas the first four
studies were conducted among samples that are predominantly
White and from industrialized nations ((WEIRD: White, Educated,
Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples; Jones, 2010),
Study 5 enabled us to test our hypotheses on more diverse popula-
tions. However, one should note that even Study 5 did not sample
populations in some regions of the world such as Africa and most
of the Middle East and this limits the generalizability of our con-
clusions. Study 5 delineated the boundaries and limitations of the
relationship between political preferences and threat perceptions
and clarified the degree of universality of the findings. Our results
indicate that while the difference between political leftists and
rightists is generalizable across a wide range of Western democra-
cies, these differences may be limited to this cultural-political
sphere. This finding is in line with earlier results that have indi-
cated that the left–right division is uncommon outside of Western
cultures (Malka et al., 2017).
To keep the focus on the complexities involved in the percep-
tion of collective threat, we used a relatively simple measurement
of political preference in the present studies, asking people to char-
acterize their political preferences on a unidimensional left–right,
or liberal–conservative, scale. We do however acknowledge that
there are additional potential dimensions on which political prefer-
ence may vary (e.g., Carmines et al., 2012; Feldman & Johnston,
2014). Notably, political preferences are commonly differentiated
along cultural/social and economic political dimensions (Treier &
 18 KAHN, BJÖRKLUND, AND HIRSCHBERGER
Hillygus, 2009) and research has shown that these dimensions are
weakly, sometimes even negatively, related (Malka et al., 2017).
The present studies thus take a first step in examining the relation-
ship between political preferences and threat, using a fully data-
driven approach. Future studies could look at more complex con-
ceptualizations of political preferences.
Because the reported studies are correlational rather than experi-
mental, we cannot draw conclusions about the causal relationship
between perception of threat and political preference. Future stud-
ies could examine the causal relationship by raising the salience of
omission versus commission threats to see whether doing so
affects political preferences in the expected way. Further, whereas
the creation of the lists of threats used in the studies was mostly
data-driven, we do not claim that these lists constitute exhaustive
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
lists of all phenomena people perceive as collective threats. In
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
fact, we were surprised that in lay perceptions of threat (Studies 1
and 4), and expert perceptions of threat (Study 5), threats to de-
mocracy, for instance, were missing. We also thought that justice-
related motivations would play a major role in threat classification
and found evidence for this only at the implicit, but not the
explicit, level. We believe that there would be differences in the
phenomena mentioned across different cultural settings and across
different time periods. We also recognize that contextual factors
such as the emergence of a particular threat (e.g., COVID-19)
could change threat perceptions. We do suggest, however, that
although the specific phenomena experienced as collective threat
may vary, the main dimensions along which they are perceived
(i.e., local/global and omission/commission) will remain stable.
Finally, whereas the relevance of affect to threat seems almost
obvious, the vast majority of the research in the threat literature
has failed to account for the role of affective experience in the per-
ception of threat (Lambert et al., 2019). The current research is no
exception to this rule. The results of our studies, however, hint at
the possibility that justice-related concerns may underlie ideologi-
cal differences in threat perception. These results pave the way for
future research that may wish to better understand the relationship
between collective threats, justice concerns, and affective experi-
ences. For instance, because anger is an action-oriented emotion
that is associated with the motivation to rectify injustices (Lambert
et al., 2010), future studies on the role of anger in addressing com-
mission and omission threats that are either global or local may
further our understanding of the processes underlying ideological
differences in threat perception.
Concluding Thoughts
Although most of the research reported here took place before the
outbreak of COVID-19 – a global viral pandemic that poses a serious
worldwide health threat, the model derived from this research offers a
new perspective and sheds unique light on the type of threat COVID-
19 poses, and on how people perceive such threats. COVID-19 is per-
ceived as a global threat of omission—there is no intentional perpetra-
tor and to offset the potential catastrophic consequences of the threat
substantial preemptive measures must be taken. The various reactions
of politicians to the threat also seem to fit our model quite well.
Whereas liberals tend to emphasize the necessity of public health care
systems that can provide care for all in such times, many conservative
politicians and pundits focus on the global economic consequences of
the extreme reactions governments have taken in response to
COVID-19. Indeed, research shows that conservatives are consider-
ably less concerned about COVID-19 than liberals (Cova & Diaz,
2020; Conway, Woodard, & Zubrod, 2021; Conway, Woodard, &
Zubrod, Chan, 2021). These different responses correspond with our
contention that liberals are more attuned to global threats of omission
such as threats to the environment, to democratic institutions, and to
public health.
Assessment of the threats facing society determines to a large
extent how we face the challenges of the future. Understanding
how we perceive and assess collective threats and how this informs
political preferences is therefore a central question for social psy-
chological research. Using a data-driven strategy, we show that the
perception of threats includes a wide range of phenomena that tend
to be organized around the degree to which it is perceived as a
result of intentional action and its local or global reach. This con-
ceptualization of collective threats allowed us to revisit the relation-
ship between threat and political preferences and, in contrast to
many theories in the field, we show that what differentiates between
conservatives and liberals is not their degree of sensitivity to
threats, but rather which threats they are sensitive to.
Context
Prevailing perspectives in political psychology claim that it is
mainly political rightists, or conservatives, that are motivated by
the experience of uncertainty and threat. At least to some degree,
this seems to resonate well with real world experience. In times of
war or waves of terror attacks, people seem to gravitate toward
more rightist and conservative attitudes. But something seemed to
be missing in this perspective. Looking at statements made by po-
litical leaders from the entire political spectrum, everyone seems
to perceive significant threats against society, regardless of politi-
cal orientation. The question then rather seems to be—what are
rightists and leftists threatened by? In order to provide an unbiased
answer to this question, we decided that the best approach would
be to carry out a data-driven study, wherein participants them-
selves decide which phenomena are defined as collective threat
and how these phenomena should be assessed.
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Received May 4, 2020
Revision received July 3, 2021
Accepted July 7, 2021 n