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22 - International and Individual Differences in Support for Human Rights

from Part II - The Politics of Intergroup Attitudes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2022

By
Sam McFarland
Edited by
Danny Osborne  and
Chris G. Sibley
Danny Osborne
Affiliation:
University of Auckland
Chris G. Sibley
Affiliation:
University of Auckland
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Summary

Nations and individuals vary in their support for human rights. International surveys face difficult issues (e.g., acquiring comparable samples, insuring equivalent meaning of survey questions in many languages), and these surveys are limited in the range of human rights issues examined and number of countries surveyed. Internationally, support for different kinds of human rights (civil and economic rights) correlate positively, although the rights that receive stronger support are shaped by a nation’s religion and culture. Individuals’ support for human rights is strongly positively associated with 'identification with all humanity', other universal values (e.g., 'protecting the global environment'), and the moral foundations of care and fairness, and strongly negatively related to ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, the social dominance orientation, and right-wing political ideology, A number of other constructs are also weakly associated with human rights support either positively (e.g., dispositional empathy) or negatively (e.g. need for structure).

Keywords

Human rightsIdentification with all humanityEthnocentrismMoral foundationsPolitical ideology
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology , pp. 346 - 360
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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