Most critical, in Inglehart’s view, is that treating economic and social issues separately creates a false dichotomy:

The interaction between insecurity caused by rapid cultural change and economic insecurity drives the xenophobic reaction that brought Trump to power and is fueling similar reactions in other high-income countries. And the rise of the knowledge society is driving this polarization even farther.

In a June 2009 study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, “Threat causes liberals to think like conservatives,” Paul Nail, a professor of psychology at the University of Central Arkansas, and four colleagues found that

Liberals became more conservative following experimentally induced threats. In fact, the threats consistently caused liberals to become as conservative as conservatives chronically were.

In one test, for example, half of the participants were prompted to think about the threat of death by asking them to describe in writing “the feelings that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and “What do you think will happen physically as you die and once you are dead?” The other half was asked to write about the bland experience of watching television.

The authors found that the threat of death caused those who previously demonstrated a “liberal openness” to experience shifted “toward conservative closure.” Similar shifts from left to right occurred under different variations of the threat scenario.

Nail and his co-authors wrote that “political conservatism has psychological properties that make it particularly appealing when vulnerability is dispositionally or situationally salient,” before adding: “We conclude that significant threats always induce a tendency toward conservative social cognition.”

Four other psychologists — Jaime L. Napier at N.Y.U.- Abu Dhabi; Julie Huang at Stony Brook; Andrew J. Vonasch at the University of Canterbury; and John A. Bargh at Yale — addressed this question from the opposite direction: What happens to conservatives when the sense of threat or insecurity is decreased?

In their March 2018 paper, “Superheroes for change: Physical safety promotes socially (but not economically) progressive attitudes among conservatives,” the four authors conducted a series of experiments including one in which they induced “feelings of physical safety by having participants imagine that they are endowed with a superpower that rendered them invulnerable to physical harm.”

The superpower manipulation “had no effect on Democrats’ level of social conservatism,” they wrote, but Republicans “reported being significantly less socially conservative in the physical invulnerability condition.”

Napier and her three colleagues used the same superpower manipulation in a second experiment designed to measure liberal and conservative resistance to social change based on responses to two questions: “I would be reluctant to make any large-scale changes to the social order” and “I have a preference for maintaining stability in society, even if there seems to be problems with the current system.”