626 WHITE ET AL d in th d whether the relation be ness. who pos eats of viol Results ocial affilia arch has found hat hreats of i n a functional perspective.increases t n between the BDW-PT scale and extr the BDWp was not violence would lead people to become more agreeable toward m (rs 20).The relationship betwe les ess als scale,as a wl nd agreeableness.n55)= ossible that the ndividual differer Study 2 den individua s ha es in the percepti 10 At firs ize incre and nan,1998 gation are likely to be m leve g from Study arge was relatively uniane as ons of threat wer lability of a social g durine threa and extroversion but not conscientious may be important.rescarch from wide range of animal spcic and 2fo ounda positive relation betv (Gumnar.2007:Nelson st2009 As n onal threa ).the sie ofprson'predom ed.We propose that this increase in arly impo ver.we have not yet de onstrated that threats of violence are and nce.shift in agreeab s occurs in the opposite direction-that agreeable (iao Ii ling 1986-Perner Ruffman :Van Lange.Ouicn.De violence in the world amily size to determi whether one, both.of these factors n ag (a) whether threats ess.(b)t To more directly s mine the causal relation hetween threats of violence and agreeableness.Study 3 experimentally manipulated agreeableness linkall”) and six items related to abstract societal threats (e.g., “If our society keeps degenerating the way it has been lately, it’s liable to collapse like a rotten log and everything will be in chaos”). Because we were primarily interested in threats of violence, we created a subscale of the six items of the BDW scale that deal with personal, threats of violence (
.70) and analyzed the relation between this subscale, which we refer to as the Belief in a Dan￾gerous World Personal Threat scale (BDW-PT), and agreeable￾ness. Results There was a significant, positive correlation between the BDW-PT scale and agreeableness, r(55)
.36, p
.007. As chronic perceptions of threats of violence increased, people also reported being more agreeable. Additionally, there was a signifi￾cant, positive correlation between the BDW-PT scale and extro￾version, r(55)
.27, p
.041. There was not a significant correlation between the BDW-PT scale and openness, conscien￾tiousness, or neuroticism (rs .20). The relationship between BDW-PT and agreeableness also survived controlling for the other Big Five personality characteristics (
.24, p
.036). Finally, there was a marginally significant correlation between the BDW scale, as a whole, and agreeableness, r(55)
.25, p
.064. Discussion Study 2 demonstrates a positive correlation between individual differences in the perception of threat and agreeableness. At first blush, it might seem as though people who chronically perceive threats of violence are disagreeable, hostile, and untrusting of others. However, the individual level finding from Study 2 fits with the results of Study 1 and the notion that people respond to threats of violence in socially affiliative ways. Additionally, Study 2 found that the relation between perceptions of threat and agree￾ableness was relatively unique, as perceptions of threat were related to agreeableness and extroversion but not conscientious￾ness, openness to experience, or neuroticism. Together, Studies 1 and 2 found a positive relation between threats of violence and agreeableness. As national threats of vio￾lence or chronic individual perceptions of threat increased, agree￾ableness also increased. We propose that this increase in agree￾ableness is a functional strategy for overcoming and surviving threats of violence, because agreeableness can facilitate affiliation. However, we have not yet demonstrated that threats of violence are creating these shifts in agreeableness. There may be an unknown variable causing both increases in threats of violence and increases in agreeableness. Although unlikely, another alternative explana￾tion may be that the relation between threats of violence and agreeableness occurs in the opposite direction—that agreeable people encourage their governments to spend a greater percentage of their GDP on the military and chronically see more threats of violence in the world. Study 3: Situation-Level Threats of Violence and Agreeableness To more directly examine the causal relation between threats of violence and agreeableness, Study 3 experimentally manipulated threats of violence and later measured agreeableness. Additionally, we sought to deepen our understanding of this relation by exam￾ining two potential moderators. First, we examined whether the relation between threats of violence and agreeableness was target-specific, focusing particu￾larly on whether agreeableness is directed toward ingroup versus outgroup members. One possibility is that threat-induced increases in agreeableness reduce threats by leading individuals to act in a nonthreatening and pacifying manner toward those who pose threats of violence. If so, threats of violence should lead to general and noncontingent increases in social affiliation and agreeableness. However, because past research has found that threats of violence can lead to both affiliation and aggression, we suspected that changes in agreeableness would be not be universal across targets. From a functional perspective, increases in agreeableness might only occur to the extent that they enhance one’s ability to affiliate with close others. Therefore, we hypothesized that threats of violence would lead people to become more agreeable toward people to whom they are close but not toward people outside of this select group. In fact, it is possible that people may become less agreeable toward people outside of their protective coalition, be￾cause there would be little benefit in trying to affiliate with strangers given that outgroup others might actually be the source of threat. In addition to being target-specific, it is also possible that there are individual differences in the extent to which people adopt affiliative strategies under threat. Indeed, one such difference might be the size of one’s social group. Research across a range of animal species has suggested that, as group size increases, the survival advantages ac￾crued through affiliation and aggregation also increase (Watt & Chap￾man, 1998). Thus, affiliation and aggregation are likely to be more successful threat-response strategies for members of large groups than members of small groups. As a consequence, one might expect individuals who belong to larger groups to be especially likely to shift in agreeableness under threat. Although the current availability of a social group during threat may be important, research from a wide range of animal species has found that threat responding is heavily influenced by early developmental experiences (Gunnar, 2007; Nelson et al., 2009; Wiedenmayer, 2009). Therefore, the size of a person’s predomi￾nant childhood social group— his or her family—may be particu￾larly important in determining whether a person attempts to affil￾iate under threat. Specifically, people who grew up in large (as opposed to small) families may be more likely to adopt affiliation strategies and, as a consequence, shift in agreeableness, under threat. Consistent with this line of reasoning, larger family size is associated with a range of psychological variables that likely play a role in affiliation and aggregation, such as increased prosociality, increased theory of mind abilities, and greater perceived likelihood of cooperation (Jiao, Ji, & Jing, 1986; Perner, Ruffman, & Leekam, 1994; Van Lange, Otten, De Bruin, & Joireman, 1997). In Study 3 we measured both current social group size and childhood family size to determine whether one, or both, of these factors moderate the effect of threat on agreeableness. Thus, Study 3 had three major goals: (a) to experimentally test whether threats of violence influence agreeableness, (b) to examine whether this relation is target-specific, and (c) to examine whether social group size moderates the threat– agreeableness link. 626 WHITE ET AL. This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. 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