Search

Neoliberalism asserts that to preserve individual liberty, an effective competitive market must be established to allow individuals to freely choose their economic activities and to reward individuals according to their merits. This ideology has been criticized for condoning social inequality by attributing the presence of social hierarchy to innate or learned personal qualities. We review existing psychological research that has treated neoliberalism as a cluster of personal beliefs and supplement this review with a cross-cultural analysis of 40 societies that differ along two dimensions of neoliberalism: presence of economic freedom and believing in meritocracy. At the individual level, subscription to neoliberalism is positively associated with confidence in personal control, endorsement of system justification, social exclusion of disadvantaged groups, and reluctance to take remedial collective actions that would reduce social inequality. At the society level, the presence of economic freedom and popular support for meritocracy in prototypic neoliberal societies jointly predict greater acceptance of unequal power distribution in these societies, even after controlling for the actual level of economic inequality.

People universally value autonomy, and this is the case particularly in individualist societies. Nevertheless, we hypothesize that even in the US, an individualist society, people are willing to relinquish personal control and choose to be an amorphous entity in a behaviorally homogeneous group when under physical threat because such groups increase the effectiveness in mobilizing collective effort. We found evidence for this hypothesis in two studies. In Study 1, individual differences in perceived physical threat (but not social threat) predicted the preference for joining a homogeneous group, through the mediating effect of lowered endorsement of personal agency. We replicated this result in Study 2, in which the cognitive salience of physical and social threat was experimentally manipulated. We discuss the implications of these results.

This paper investigates the psychological impact of an understudied, yet increasingly popular construct: nostalgia tourism. The research distinguishes between two approaches for constructing historical nostalgia: (a) the genuine approach (i.e. developing nostalgia destinations based on original historical architectures), and (b) the artificial approach (i.e. creating new architectures with collective historical memories). In two experimental studies, the paper explores how the features of nostalgia destinations and people's nostalgia proneness influence people's nostalgia experiences. The results indicate that: (a) both genuine and artificial approaches can elicit people's nostalgic feelings (Study 1 & 2), (b) emotions elicited through the genuine approach are stronger and more positive than the artificial approach (Study 1), and (c) the artificial approach is more effective in eliciting nostagic feelings among people with high nostalgia proneness (Study 2). The research suggests that either personal or non-personal experience could trigger nostalgia, and highlights the role of historical nostalgia plays in tourism.