Meaning buffers right-wing authoritarian responses to societal threat via the mediation of loss of perceived control Claudia Manzi a,1 , Michele Roccato b,⇑ , Silvia Russo c,2 a Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Department of Psychology, Largo Agostino Gemelli 1, Milano, Italy b Università degli Studi di Torino, Department of Psychology, Via Verdi 10, 10124 Torino, Italy c Örebro University, Youth & Society, Örebro University, Fakultetsgatan 1, 70182 Örebro, Sweden article info Article history: Received 13 January 2015 Received in revised form 1 April 2015 Accepted 6 April 2015 Keywords: Right-wing authoritarianism Meaning Threat Compensatory control Mediation Moderation DPTE abstract The literature shows that exposure to societal threat stemming from criminality can elicit an increase in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) via the mediation of the loss of perceived control. In this study, we investigated whether the perception of meaning can act as a buffering factor for such process, performing an experiment with 316 Italian university students (67.8% women; mean age = 25.81, SD = 9.18). A mod- erated mediation model showed that the loss of perceived control mediated the relation between societal threat stemming from criminality and RWA, but that the second link was significant only among people low in meaning. Limitations, implications and possible developments of this research are discussed. Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) is the covariation of three attitudinal clusters: (a) authoritarian submission (a strong tendency to submit to authorities, perceived as established and legitimate); (b) authoritarian aggression (a general aggressiveness directed against various people, and perceived to be positively sanctioned by established authorities); and (c) conventionalism (a strong ten- dency to adhere to the social conventions, perceived as endorsed by the established authorities) (Altemeyer, 1996). RWA positively correlates with prejudice, support of death penalty, punitive atti- tudes towards unconventional persons, religiousness, approval of the injustice perpetrated by governing authorities, and obedience in Milgram-style experiments (Altemeyer, 1996). 1.1. Societal threat, loss of perceived control, and RWA In the literature, consistent with the first publications on the topic (e.g., Fromm, 1941), there is converging evidence showing that actual and perceived societal threat is one of the strongest pre- dictors of RWA (Onraet, Van Hiel, Dhont, & Pattyn, 2013). Authoritarianism and a bulk of correlated constructs, such as nega- tive attitude toward minority groups, intolerance, and tendency to discriminate deviant outgroups, spread particularly during periods of high societal threat. This result stems from analyses performed at the ecological (e.g., McCann, 1999; Peterson & Gerstein, 2005; Sales, 1973), at the individual level (e.g., Feldman & Stenner, 1997; Nagoshi, Terrell, & Nagoshi, 2007; Rickert, 1998; Russo, Mirisola, & Roccato, 2014), and even in multilevel studies (Roccato, Vieno, & Russo, 2014). These results have been recently extended and fine-tuned. Social threat might affect different psychological needs (Jonas et al., 2014). People share a basic existential motivation to perceive themselves as being able to control their environment, to avoid high arousal and anxiety (Luck, Pearson, Madden, & Hewett, 1999). Threat impairs perceived control (Fritsche, Jonas, & Kessler, 2011), and people may cope with the existential threat coming from having low levels of perceived control over their environment by endorsing external systems that impose structure and order. The most efficient strategy people can rely on—when- ever their attempts to control directly their world fail—is to submit to powerful others (Kay, Whitson, Gaucher, & Galinsky, 2009).According to the literature on authoritarianism, RWA accounts for people’s tendency to do so (Altemeyer, 1996). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.04.009 0191-8869/Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +39 0116702015; fax: +39 0116702061. E-mail addresses: claudia.manzi@unicatt.it (C. Manzi), michele.roccato@unito.it (M. Roccato), silvia.russo@oru.se (S. Russo). 1 Tel.: +39 0272342686; fax: +39 0272342642. 2 Tel.: +49 19303469. Personality and Individual Differences 83 (2015) 117–121 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Personality and Individual Differences journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/paid