Laura Janelle Gornick

Developing and Evaluating the Social Axioms Survey in Eleven Countries: Its Relationship With the Five-Factor Model of Personality

Based on a deductive, culturally decentered approach, new items were generated to improve the reliability of the original Social Axioms Survey, which measures individuals’ general beliefs about the world. In Study 1, results from 11 countries support the original five-factor structure and achieve higher reliability for the axiom dimensions as measured by the new scale. Moreover, moderate but meaningful associations between axiom and Big-Five personality dimensions were found. Temporal change of social axioms at the culture level was examined and found to be moderate. In Study 2, additional new items were generated for social complexity and fate control, then assessed in Hong Kong and the United States. Reliability was further improved for both dimensions. Additionally, two subfactors of fate control were identified: fate determinism and fate alterability. Fate determinism, but not fate alterability, related positively to neuroticism. Other relationships between axiom and personality dimensions were similar to those reported in Study 1. The short forms of the axiom dimensions were generally reliable and correlated highly with the long forms. This research thus provides a stronger foundation for applying the construct of social axioms around the world.

The hidden implications of radical group rhetoric: Integrative complexity and terrorism

We compared the public rhetoric of two terrorist groups to ideologically-similar non-terrorist groups on integrative complexity and its two sub-components (dialectical complexity and elaborative complexity). We further attempted to use these constructs to understand when the two focal terrorist groups engaged in violent acts. Results suggested that terrorist group rhetoric was uniformly simpler than non-terrorist rhetoric, and that this simplicity was especially in evidence for elaborative forms of complexity. Secondly, results more weakly suggested that a pattern of complex thinking associated with defensive thinking – namely, higher elaborative and lower dialectical complexity – became more prevalent in terrorist rhetoric as a violent act became imminent. These results demonstrate that scoring the complexity of public rhetoric can potentially be used to understand the psychology of terrorist groups from a distance.