Ducks Out of Water? The Fit Between Personal Political Ideology and Community Realities Regulates Vulnerability to Social Risk

A Community Fit Model of Vulnerability to Social Risk is proposed. It posits that home communities that confirm personal expectations about the inherent stability of the collective social world can provide the tether to a singular, consensual reality people need to feel protected against the risks of living collectively. Five studies assessed community fit through the match between personal political orientation and objective markers of the instability of one’s home community (i.e., population mobility, economic inequality, voting patterns). Considerable evidence suggests that liberals expect greater instability in the collective social world than conservatives. Therefore, unstable home community realities should be consistent with the expectations of liberals (fit) and inconsistent with the expectations of conservatives (misfit). In contrast, stable community realities should be consistent with the expectations of conservatives (fit) and inconsistent with the expectations of liberals. Study 1 revealed that expectationconsistent communities protected individuals against election-induced anxiety about the future when they conferred epistemic certainty—that is, when people experienced a singular, consensual reality. Studies 1 through 5, and an internal meta-analysis across, each revealed that people in expectation-inconsistent or misfitting communities reported greater anxieties about their personal precarity when the risks of living collectively were more (vs. less) salient. However, participants in expectation-consistent fitting communities were comparatively resilient to these same risks. The present findings suggest that expectation-consistent home community realities can offer individuals symbolic protection against the risks of living collectively.