Despite overwhelming evidence of the consequences of climate change, many voters—in particular conservatives—oppose pro-environmental policies. Research shows that this opposition can be overcome by reframing the issue in ways that appeal to conservatives’ motives. An important limitation to this literature is that it relies heavily on artificial stimuli in controlled settings, leaving open whether the framing of real political communication shapes conservatives' support for climate action. To address this gap, we examine natural variation in how climate change is framed in top-down political communication across the political spectrum. Drawing on the ternary goal model, we distinguish between progress, maintenance, and protection as three fundamental goals that guide climate action. We propose that maintenance-oriented messaging—reflecting a desire to maintain valued current states—is more effective in increasing conservative political support for climate action. To test this, we use a multilingual machine learning model to rate the goal orientations of pro-environmental policy statements from party platforms across four democracies and then testing voters’ support of these statements. We find that conservatives’ support for pro-environmental statements increases with the degree of maintenance orientation in the text (β = 0.27, p < .001). Moderately strong (+1SD vs -1SD) maintenance orientation reduced the liberal-conservative gap by 31%. In contrast, the degree of progress or protection orientation did not affect conservatives’ support. These findings confirm the importance of policy framing in the debate about climate change and support the practical relevance of maintenance frames to increase conservative support for climate action.

Women in leadership positions are often devalued. Complementing previous approaches, we provide a novel cognitive-ecological explanation for this phenomenon. We suggest that perceiving certain leaders as a subcategory of leaders, a tendency primarily observed for female leaders, focuses attention on their distinct attributes that differentiate them from the broader category of leaders. Since people have predominantly positive perceptions of leaders, such distinct attributes are likely more negative. Three preregistered experiments ( N total = 2,878 US-Americans) confirm our model’s prediction that both subcategories of female and male leaders are judged more negatively than leaders of unspecified gender and that the effect reverses when the overarching category of leaders is viewed negatively. We discuss our findings’ implications for advancing gender equality in leadership.

It is essential to understand the best way to frame a persuasive message aimed at increasing concern about climate change and support for pro-environmental action. Now a Registered Report presents a large-scale study that tests and compares the effectiveness of ten widely cited messaging strategies.

An effective way to foster cooperation is to monitor behavior and sanction freeriding. Yet, previous studies have shown that cooperation quickly declines when sanctioning mechanisms are removed. We test whether explicitly expressing trust in players' capability to maintain cooperation after the removal of sanctions, i.e., vertical communication of trust, has the potential to alleviate this drop in compliance. Four incentivized public-goods experiments (N = 2,823) find that the vertical communication of trust maintains cooperation upon the removal of centralized (Study 1), third-party (Study 2a, 2b), and peer punishment (Study 3), and this effect extends beyond single interactions (Study 4). In all studies, vertical trust communication increases mutual trust among players, providing support to the idea that vertically communicating trust can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Extrapolating our findings to natural environments, they suggest that authorities should carefully consider how they communicate the lifting of rules and sanctions.

We uncover a dissociation between leadership preferences (for progress, protection, or maintenance-oriented leaders) and situational requirements (to make progress, protect, or maintain). Despite maintenance being crucial for sustaining groups’ ongoing activity, we find a bias favoring progress-oriented leaders across contexts. In six preregistered experiments (Ntotal = 3,324), participants consistently preferred progress-oriented leaders even when they recognized maintenance as the primary situational need. In Experiment 1, people preferred progress- over maintenance-oriented political leaders in a mock-election paradigm even when maintenance was explicitly the dominant concern. In Experiment 2, participants chose progress-oriented group leaders in an incentivized group task, despite maintenance investments yielding greater monetary rewards. Furthermore, participants preferred maintenance-oriented over progress-oriented agendas, but showed no (Experiment 3a) or opposite preference (Experiment 3b) when evaluating leaders who advocated identical policies. Our final studies test two explanations regarding the underlying process: Experiment 4 tests the idea that progress-oriented leaders are expected to invest more effort than others. However, manipulating perceived leader effort did not affect the preference for progress-oriented leaders. Instead, Experiment 5 identifies a different mechanism: Participants assume that progress-oriented leaders have wider goal scopes that also include maintenance goals, whereas maintenance-oriented leaders’ goal scope is assumed to be limited to maintenance. Blocking this assumption by explicitly describing progress leaders as maintenance-neutral reversed the preference pattern. Together, these studies point to a systematic bias in leadership selection that persists regardless of situational demands or personal policy preferences, revealing how biased assumptions about progress-oriented leadership shape choices that undermine optimal collective decision-making.

Nostalgia has many benefits for individuals; it can increase meaning, well-being, and belongingness. In contrast, we show in six studies the harmful policy implications of nostalgia. We propose that nostalgia can lead people to appreciate negative aspects of the past and oppose modern measures to reduce them, with negative implications for health, safety, and well-being. Four correlational studies (Ntotal = 3081) show that nostalgia proneness correlates with opposition to smoke-free laws, discounting of car-safety, opposition to gender equality, and enjoyment of politically incorrect humor. Two experimental studies (Ntotal = 1004) causally link nostalgia to these beliefs. Speaking to their irrational nature, these effects occurred even among people who are aware of the negative consequences of these aspects of the past for health, safety, and well-being. For example, even nostalgic non-smokers longed back to the smoke-filled bars of the past. Given the noted rise in nostalgia in Western society in response to societal change, these findings have important policy implications.Public Significance Statement: We show that people who are more likely to experience nostalgia tend to redefine negative elements of the past as positive. For example, they oppose smoke-free laws or discount car-safety. Given that nostalgia is commonly experienced when people feel lost in a fast-changing world, these findings suggest a need to provide consistency and meaning, especially during times of rapid societal change.

Time can be perceived in linear terms, but also in cyclical terms. For example, people may think about the progress of time in terms of years, moving linearly from 2025 to 2026 and further onwards or they may think about time in cyclical terms, following the four seasons in an eternal cycle. We argue that when time is perceived as cyclical, similarities across time are more salient. For example, the four seasons always repeat themselves in the same order. Based on the assumption that similarities across time allows prediction about the future occurrence or non-occurrence of events based on their past (non-)occurrence than dissimilarities, we hypothesize that an experimentally induced cyclical time perception leads people to see the future as more predictable and therefore as less risky. Importantly, we also hypothesize this only applies to uncommon risks, but not to common risks. After all, when people adopt a cyclical time perspective, this allows them to confidently predict that uncommon risks are unlikely to occur in the near future, given their non-occurrence in the past. In contrast, this should not have the same effect for common risks that are likely to occur both in the past and present. We report two pilot studies and three preregistered experiments (total N = 1555) that test these predictions. Experiment 1 shows that the future appears more predictable when people adopt a cyclical time concept. Experiment 2 replicates this and shows it reduces the perceived risk of unlikely threats. Finally, Experiment 3 replicates this but shows time concept does not affect the perceived risk of mundane threats. Together, these studies suggest that a linear versus cyclical time perception affects perceived risks, because it affects how people use knowledge of the past to predict the future.

When distributing resources, people often experience a conflict between two fundamental moral principles: The equality principle prescribes that all recipients receive the same, while the proportionality principle prescribes that allocations should be in proportion to the contribution of each recipient. We propose that if people consider recipient units of distributions in hierarchies as categories, rather than individuals, seeking categorical equality leads to individual inequality, because in most hierarchical groups there are fewer higher ranked (e.g., management) than lower ranked members (e.g., workers). Ten preregistered experiments conducted in the United States and China (N = 4,902) confirm this idea and show that participants who focus on categorical (vs. individual) recipients perceive unequal distributions as fairer (Experiment 1) and create more unequal distributions (Experiments 2a-2d), even when this reduces their own payoffs (Experiment 3). This effect occurs because when construing recipient units as categories (vs. individuals), people seek equality at a categorical level, without sufficiently correcting for differences in group size. Supporting this theoretical explanation, this effect is eliminated when thinking of individual-level equality (Experiments 4a-4b). Furthermore, this effect exists only when the higher ranked group is smaller sized, as is often the case in hierarchies (Experiment 5), and only when inequality is consistent with proportionality (Experiment 6). Combined, our results show that when people perceive a hierarchy in categorical (rather than individual) terms, this increases distributive inequality between its higher and lower ranked members. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a wide ideological gap frustrated an effective response to the health crisis. Whereas most liberals supported protective measures, many conservatives opposed them. Five studies ( N total = 3,090) demonstrate that American and German conservatives’ opposition to COVID-19 measures arose partially from nostalgic emotions. We show that framing COVID-19 measures as a return to the past reduces conservatives’ opposition to face masks and vaccinations. An internal meta-analysis shows that although the overall effect of temporal framing is significant, it is small. This research identifies conservatives’ focus on the past as a theoretically relevant antecedent to their opposition to COVID-19 measures and introduces temporal framing as a small but practically feasible strategy to reduce such opposition.

Western conservatives are more focused on the past than are liberals: They experience stronger cultural pessimism and nostalgically yearn back for past society. We test the hypothesis that this ideological difference reflects long-term national-historical developments, by comparing ideological differences in the United States and Türkiye. Using archival data, Study 1 confirms that whereas U.S. society over the last century moved in a liberal direction, Turkish society recently shifted toward greater conservatism. Consistent with predictions, Studies 2 and 3 show that the relationship between political ideology and cultural pessimism is reversed in Türkiye, compared with the United States. Partially consistent with predictions, in both studies, the link between ideology and a nostalgic yearning for the past is attenuated (and essentially blocked) in Türkiye, although not reversed, compared with the United States. Together, these findings suggest that ideological differences in pessimism and nostalgia reflect, at least partially, objective differences in national-historical development.

Across the last 150 years, global CO2 emissions have grown at an increasing, exponential pace. Based on the well-documented tendency to underestimate such exponential growth, we hypothesize and test in three studies (total N = 1796, including one nationally representative US sample) that people would fail to understand the historical, exponential growth of global CO2 emissions. However, we also show that providing a simple rule of thumb can serve as an effective educational boost that helps overcome this biased perception. Participants who were provided with the heuristic that historically, global CO2 emissions have doubled every thirty years provided highly accurate estimates of past emission levels. Compared to participants who relied on intuition, those who applied this doubling heuristic avoided common errors in understanding the current state of the climate change threat and made more realistic expectations of the future consequences of uninterrupted growth. Together, these studies show that overcoming the exponential growth bias helps people form more accurate perceptions of historic CO2 emissions growth and understand the difficulty of curbing future emissions.

A central aspect of political conservatism is the notion that the system is fair. Political conservatives tend to defend the system more than do liberals. Here we test whether the link between political orientation and this system justification tendency depends on the comparisons people make across time. Across five studies, we found that the typically observed link between conservative (vs. liberal) political orientation and system justification is only observed when no temporal comparisons are made, or when the status quo is compared to a future alternative. However, this association is not observed when the status quo is compared to the past. Instead, when comparing the present to the past, the link between political orientation and system justification was blocked (Studies 1, 2, and 4) or even reversed (Study 3). Theoretically, these results connect the system justification literature to literature on temporal comparison and suggest that system justification is meaningfully influenced by comparisons processes.

As a political ideology, conservatism is primarily focused on maintaining and restoring past society. This aspect is so central that conservatives’ support for policies is increased simply by framing them as a return to the past. Until now, the underlying process of this temporal framing effect is unclear. Drawing on theories of conservatism as motivated social cognition, four preregistered studies (Ntotal = 2,405) test the hypothesis that it results from conservatives’ epistemic and existential beliefs about the past. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that American conservatives’ preference for past-focused political communication is blocked if the past is perceived to be inconsistent with these beliefs. Studies 3 and 4 (a representative UK sample replication) find that the effect is mediated by epistemic and existential beliefs about the past. This research theoretically integrates the earlier-established conservative temporal framing effect into the wider literature of conservatism as motivated social cognition.

Earlier research shows that feelings of power increase a sense of social distance toward others. In this research, we show that there are two sides to this effect. On the one hand, psychological power increases the desire for greater social distance toward others in the social environment. On the other hand, psychological power decreases the sense of distance, meaning that high-power people perceive that their social environment is closer to them, compared to low-power people. Six studies (four preregistered), conducted in the USA, the Netherlands, and China support this idea. Studies 1–4 measure and manipulate power and find that power increases the desire for social distance, but decreases the sense of distance. Studies 5–6 show that the former effect is conditional on the latter: When people in their social environment are prevented from seeking closeness (due to COVID-19 measures), the effect of power on the desire for distance is blocked.

A short‐term obstacle to united political action to fight climate change in various countries is opposition to pro‐environmental policies among conservatives. Three preregistered studies test the hypothesis that because conservatives have a higher need for closure than liberals (Hypothesis 1), framing pro‐environmental policies in a way that appeals to the need for closure, reduces conservatives’ opposition to these policies (Hypothesis 2). Study 1 confirms Hypothesis 1. Next, two studies test Hypothesis 2 and find that conservatives are less opposed to pro‐environmental policies proposed by a politician (Study 2) or an NGO (Study 3) if these policies are framed in a way that appeals to the need for closure, while the opposite is the case for liberals. Across these two studies, we also test the underlying process but find no evidence for the idea that differences in need for closure mediate the effect (Hypothesis 3a). Instead, the effect is primarily driven by inferences about group membership and ingroup bias (Hypothesis 3b, non‐preregistered). That is, these data suggest that framing policies to appeal to closure needs reduces conservatives’ opposition because they infer that the policy is proposed by a fellow conservative.

Collective nostalgia is a form of nostalgia that is contingent upon thinking of oneself in terms of a particular social identity. Research has focused in particular on collective nostalgia for a nation's past. Here, I propose that conservatives and others on the right side of the political spectrum experience stronger collective nostalgia for their nation's past than liberals and those on the left. I first explain the roots of this prediction in conservative political philosophy, review empirical evidence in favor of that idea, and summarize findings that show the significance of this link for policy support. Finally, I review and discuss evidence that qualifies the link between conservatism and collective nostalgia.

Purpose A key obstacle to women’s advancement to managerial roles and leadership positions is the stereotype of the “good” manager, which is characterized by masculine traits. Although this gendered managerial stereotype has been very persistent over the past decades, Powell et al. (2021) recently showed that business students in the USA reported a decreased preference for masculine leadership traits and an increased preference for feminine leadership traits, resulting in a so-called “androgynous” manager profile that contains both masculine and feminine characteristics. This study aims to replicate Powell et al. ’s (2021) findings among an older sample of working adults in The Netherlands. Design/methodology/approach The present study tests for changes in the managerial stereotype in a sample of 5,542 Dutch employees across 2005, 2010 and 2020. Findings In line with Powell et al. (2021), the results confirm employees’ decreased preference for masculine and increased preference for feminine leadership traits in 2020 compared to 2005. Nevertheless, Dutch employees still favored masculine over feminine leadership traits in 2020, contrary to the findings by Powell et al. (2021). Practical implications These observed changes in the managerial stereotype could prove to be an important step forward for women’s advancement to management and leadership positions. Originality/value With the present study, the authors demonstrate cross-cultural generalizability and conclude that the stereotype of a “good manager” is not only changing among US business students but also among working adults in The Netherlands. Overall, this study strengthens the observation that the stereotype of a “good manager” is becoming less gendered.