Waxing Nostalgic as a Status Quo Maintaining Practice
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Schermerhorn, Nathaniel
- Graduate Program:
- Psychology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 21, 2023
- Committee Members:
- Kristin Buss (she/her), Program Head/Chair
Theresa Vescio, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Claire Colebrook, Outside Unit & Field Member
Lynn Liben, Major Field Member
Christopher Cameron, Major Field Member - Keywords:
- nostalgia
hegemonic masculinity
status quo
social identity
practice theory - Abstract:
- Psychological research on the experience of nostalgia is still in its nascent stage and has largely focused on how waxing nostalgic serves a palliative function by assuaging negative emotions such as loneliness or lack of belonging (see Routledge, 2015 for a review). However, at the collective level, waxing nostalgic for society’s past has led people to adopt status quo maintaining attitudes and engage in status quo maintaining behaviors (e.g., supporting far right politicians). The goal of my dissertation was to examine the status quo maintaining function of waxing nostalgic at both the personal and the collective level across five studies. In Study 1a (N = 378) and Study 1b (N = 341), participants either reflected on a nostalgic (vs. emotionless) memory from their personal past (Study 1a) or a nostalgic (vs. emotionless) memory about society (Study 1b). Participants then completed measures of status quo maintaining attitudes and motives (i.e., endorsement of hegemonic masculinity, social dominance orientation, system justifying motives, nostalgic deprivation). Results from Studies 1a and 1b did not provide any evidence that merely reflecting on a nostalgic memory – either personal or collective – inspired people to adopt more status quo maintaining attitudes. Study 2a (N = 424) and Study 2b (N = 874), therefore, examined if waxing nostalgic influenced people’s propensity to maintain the status quo following threats to their social identity. Participants completed a Gender Knowledge Test and were given threatening (gender incongruent) or assuring (gender congruent) feedback on their performance. Men and women who received gender threatening feedback experienced greater public discomfort and subsequent anger. However, men who received gender threatening feedback reported greater public discomfort if they also experienced greater nostalgia. This, in turn, led them to become angrier and more strongly endorse hegemonic masculinity. Thus, these findings suggest that waxing nostalgic may lead to maintaining a particular element of the status quo (i.e., legitimizing men’s dominance over women) if a relevant social identity is threatened (i.e., gender identity). Finally, Study 3 (N = 224) sought to examine the status quo maintaining function of waxing nostalgic in a longitudinal field study during the 2022 Penn State football season. Although following football losses (vs. wins) increased participants’ waxing nostalgic for the past of Penn State football, this increased nostalgia did not affect people’s likelihood to adopt attitudes that maintain the status quo. Taken together, findings from this dissertation suggest that waxing nostalgic, on its own, does not inherently lead people to adopt attitudes that maintain the existing status quo. However, there are certain conditions under which waxing nostalgic may interact with other affective experiences that lead people to maintain the status quo and implications for future research are discussed.