Self-affirmation, political value congruence, and support for refugees

This research tested the potential for self-affirmation on left- and right-wing political values to increase behavioral intentions to provide help and assistance to refugees. We present a pilot study defining left- and right-wing values, and a main study in which participants completed either a self-affirmation task, a group-affirmation task, or participated in a control condition on values that were either congruent or incongruent with their own political views. Results show that left-wing oriented participants showed more supportive intentions in the self-affirmation condition compared to the group-affirmation and control conditions, independent of values congruency. In contrast, right-wing participants showed more supportive intentions in the self-affirmation condition, but only when they affirmed on values that were congruent with their own political views.