The 'Anti-European Personality': What Can Psychology Tell Us About Euroscepticism?
“All right, so the EU isn't quite Nazi Germany but it does employ some of the same techniques to advance its power [...].”
If you have been following the coverage of issues surrounding the European Union in recent years, you might have come across quotes like this one, which was lifted from article by James Delingpole published in the Daily Express (2015). Although this only represents one example, it is an extreme illustration of the tendency to express strong attitudes against the European Union through negative framing in news media. Such publications express some individuals’ very strong attitude against the United Kingdom’s membership in the European Union with potentially lasting effect on public discourse (check out Galpin & Trenz, 2017 for more information on this). But why do certain people hold such anti-EU sentiments? How can we measure this? And why is it important to look at?
A very recent and very interesting topic of psychological enquiry has becom the examination of personality and its possible links with anti-EU attitudes. One of the first researchers to examine this explicit association were Bakker and de Vreese (2016), who measured EU-related attitudes on multiple levels, including towards widening the EU, identification with the EU and negative affect towards the EU. Interestingly, they found a range of associations between certain traits and pro-EU attitudes, such as a positive association with conscientiousness and trust in the EU. Importantly, they also found an association between high neuroticism and negative affect towards the EU.
Personality and anti-EU attitudes seem to be related in different ways. However, we mustn’t forget considering some methodological points of the study before jumping to conclusions about these findings.
For example, this research approached the measurement of personality in a way, which has been shown to be highly reliable and you may have heard of: The Big-Five model. This neatly divides personality into the dimensions of Agreeableness, Openness to Experience, Extraversion, Conscientiousness and Neuroticism and you can read more about it in papers by Costa and McCrae (1995). However, while the model itself has been validated numerous time, only a reduced adaptation of it is used in this study, which could limit the accuracy of its results (more on accuracy of reduced Big-Five measures in Sleep and colleagues paper, 2021).
While, the majority of studies examining such political attitudes has employed Big-Five measurements, recent research has pointed to the importance of considering better models (such as in Pruysers and colleagues, 2019). These other models include further personality dimensions (for a comparison of models, see Thalmayer and colleagues, 2011), or examine facets of the Big-Five model in greater detail. An example of the latter is found in a recent study by Aichholzer and Rammstedt (2020), which investigated attitudes towards European integration in relation to facets of the Big-Five. This method allowed the researchers to consolidate the influence of Openness with stronger evidence, and to identify new facets predictive of pro-EU attitudes, such as trust. So it appears to be necessary to take further personality facets into account to provide further insight into EU-related attitudes (for an exploration of e.g. trust and optimism, see Peshkopia and colleagues, 2020).
So what? So further research is needed to look into this topic. But we already know that there is a link between individual’s personality traits and their anti-EU attitudes, and that Openness is the hottest contender to be responsible for this.
But, why is research into personality of anti-EU attitudes important? If you are a citizen of the United Kingdom, you need only remember the departure of the United Kingdom from the European union (commonly referred to as Brexit) in 2020, to see the real-world impact anti-EU attitudes can have.
Research into the referendum in 2016 that triggered the Brexit process has shown the importance of personality traits for individuals’ decision to vote against the U.K.’s EU membership. For example, researchers Garretsen and his colleagues (2018) showed that districts in Britain with low average on the Openness-trait were more likely to vote against EU-membership and that this trait was a particular important factor in driving this vote. These are highly reliable findings, as the researchers looked at a large sample (over 400,000 respondents). But most importantly, researchers accounted for other factors, such as the level of education or unemployment rate, when drawing their conclusions. As these have been evidenced to influence voting decisions by numerous past research (for the influence of education on voting internationally, see Weakliem, 2002), their consideration shows the particular influence of personality on this. As this study also points to the importance of personality for explaining regional differences in anti-EU attitudes, it is an excellent reminder of how research in this area can help us understand politics in the real-world.
As we can see, although there is an evident need for further study, differences between peoples’ personalities seem to foster differences between their EU attitudes and carry important real-world implications. So now, when you see a headline such as After meddling with our vacuums and TVs... now EU officials want control of your CANDLES, you will be able to understand the psychological background of such fears a little better.
