Does Threat Exposure Increase Conservatism? Evidence for Terrorism-Specific but Not General Causal Effects

Classic theory in political psychology posits that threat exposure produces broad shifts toward ideological conservatism. Although this claim has been cited thousands of times, empirical support has been inconsistent. We investigate whether this heterogeneity emerges due to variation in threat stimuli, operationalizations of ideological outcomes, or heterogenous effects among respondents with different personality profiles. Across four experiments (total N = 3,872; two national samples and two student samples), we systematically varied threat domains and assessed conservatism using 26 theoretically motivated outcome measures utilized in the prior literature, including threat-relevant policy attitudes, symbolic ideology, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, composite operational ideology, and secondary issue attitudes. We find little evidence that threat exposure produces generalized conservative shifts. Even in the case of Islamist terrorism threat, the only domain in which threat effects reliably emerge, threat increases support for terrorism-related conservative policy but does not produce broader conservative shift. These results identify narrow boundary conditions of the conservative shift hypothesis and demonstrate the risks of extrapolating from both narrow operationalizations of experimental stimuli and of dependent variables to make sweeping theoretical claims.