Jaime L. Napier
Email: jnapier at nyu dot edu
Office: Meyer 568
 
 

Personal Information
Hometown: Niagara Falls, NY
Undergraduate Major: B.S. Computer Science and Mathematics
Undergraduate Institution: University of Texas at Austin, 2000

Research Interests
I am interested in how situational and cognitive factors motivate people to adopt certain ideologies. My research focuses on political conservatism and religious fundamentalism. John Jost and I are currently looking at how individual differences, such as need for cognitive closure, can predict political and religious conservatism as well as explain part of the correlations between the two ideologies. Additionally, I'm interested in how situational factors, such as percieved threat and uncertainty, affect people's religious and political ideologies; how death anxiety (such as death avoidance and fear) relates to ideology; and finally, what are the consequences of certain ideologies for the individual.

Current Projects

The Psychological Basis of Ideology and System Justification
In this project, we look at various individual differences, including need for closure, need for order, openness to experience, death anxiety, and perceptions of a dangerous word, and how they relate to political conservatism. We use structural equation methods to test two competing hypotheses: the Extremity Hypothesis (which posits that uncertainty and threat avoidance would lead people to be ideologically extreme in general) and the Matching Hypothesis (which posits that uncertainty and threat avoidance will lead to political conservatism specifically). In addition, we explore the relationship of political conservatism to "system justifying" ideologies, such as opposition to equality, fair market ideology, economic system justification, and right-wing authoritarianism.

 

The Relationship Between Religious Fundamentalism and Political Conservatism
This research extends this motivated social cognition model of ideology to religious fundamentalism to provide a psychological explanation for the association between fundamentalism and political conservatism. Using data from the World Values Survey for the United States (N=1,200), we examine how needs for order, structure, and security and fear of threat variables relate to political conservatism and religious fundamentalism in an effort to identify underlying psychological mechanisms that explain why these two ideologies tend to co-occur. We compare American data to data from countries around the globe.

 

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