From chaos to conviction: Competitive social worldview mediates the associations between childhood unpredictability and ideological attitudes

Abstract

Across four online self-report studies with college students and community members (N = 597; N = 273; N = 1,100; N = 882), we examined whether perceived childhood harshness and unpredictability were associated with ideological attitudes through dangerous and competitive social worldviews. Perceived childhood unpredictability consistently predicted a competitive social worldview, which, in turn, mediated its associations with social dominance orientation, anti-hierarchical aggression, equalitarianism, and the need for chaos. These findings suggest that perceiving one’s early environment as unpredictable may foster a competitive view of the world, which can lead to ideological attitudes that either uphold (e.g., social dominance orientation) or disrupt (e.g., need for chaos) social hierarchies. In contrast, perceived childhood harshness was not reliably linked to the dangerous worldview or to ideological attitudes via this pathway. This research contributes to the limited literature on how early life experiences shape ideological beliefs, highlighting the role of competitive social worldviews as a key mediator of the effects of childhood unpredictability.