Threat Strategy Theory: A Proposal for a Needs-Based (and not Content-Based) Understanding of Sociopolitical Attitudes and Behavior

Political psychology tends to focus on the dispositions or situations that predict socially unjust outcomes. I propose instead a model of sociopolitical conflict as qualitatively similar to family conflict and interpersonally harmful behavior, in which sociopolitical attitudes are driven by threat-motivated needs and guided by four different threat strategies.