Conservatism as a General Factor of Social Attitudes *

Previous studies showed the existence of general factors in cognitive abilities, personality traits, and psychopathology symptoms. We hypothesized a similar factor on the apex of social attitudes’ hierarchy; furthermore, we assumed that this factor reflects a conservatism-liberalism dimension. This hypothesis is tested by factorizing the space of “isms” - a broad and comprehensive model of social attitudes obtained by the lexical paradigm, in an online study ( N = 380; M age = 32.34[SD = 11.74]; 66.8% females; participants were of Serbian nationality). A General factor is obtained and it was positively loaded by Tradition-oriented Religiousness (.76), Unmitigated Self-Interest (.76), and Subjective Spirituality (.34), with negative loadings of Communal Rationalism (-.53) and Inequality Aversion (-.46). Afterwards, we explored the nomological network of this factor: it correlated positively with the Social Dominance Orientation measure of Social Domination, Social Conservatism, Conservation Values, and Binding Moral Foundations; it also had negative associations with the Social Dominance Orientation measure of Egalitarianism, Self-transcendence Values, Individualizing Moral Foundations, Openness to Experience, Support for EU Integrations, Kosovo Independence, and Immigrants’ Integration. The obtained nomological network is congruent with the author: Acknowledgments. The idea of a General Factor of Social Attitudes was conceived in numerous talks the author had with his friend and colleague Boban Petrović. Author would also like to express his gratitude to his students who participated in this research as initial disseminators of the survey. interpretation of the General factor as conservatism. The data suggest that lay people have a singular core attitudinal dimension which they use to interpret and make sense of societal events and this fundamental dimension is conservatism-liberalism.

numerous talks the author had with his friend and colleague Boban Petrović. Author would also like to express his gratitude to his students who participated in this research as initial disseminators of the survey. Data Availability Statement. Data used in the analyses for this manuscript can be found on this link: https://mfr.osf.io/render?url=https%3A%2F%2Fosf.io%2Fv75a4%2Fdownload Conflict of interest. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Ethical Approval. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed Consent. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. * This is an early electronic version of the manuscript that has been accepted for publication in Psihologija journal. Please note that this is not the final version of the article and that it can be subjected to minor changes before final print. Please cite as: Međedović, J. (2023). Conservatism as a General Factor of Social Attitudes. Psihologija. Advance online publication. doi: https://doi.org/10.2298/PSI210512012M

Social Attitudes
Attitudes represent complex dispositional constructs with the function to evaluate an (attitudinal) object and consequently, generate a consistent response towards the object of evaluation. If they are oriented towards social phenomena, they are labeled social attitudes. They may be defined as sets of beliefs regarding objects of relevance in religious, economic, political, ethnic, and other societal areas (Kerlinger, 1972). Attitudes are complex because they incorporate perception and information processing of the social phenomena, emotional reactions, and behaviors related to the social events that are evaluated (Kerlinger et al., 1976). Since they are indispensable for understanding societal events and predicting behavior, attitudes were a frequent topic of research in social sciences. The most studied social attitudes are authoritarianism (Adorno, et al., 1950;Altemeyer, 1981;Duckitt et al., 2010), dogmatism (Rokeach, 1954), conservatism (Wilson, 1973), traditionalism (Bouchard, 2009), religiousness (Saucier & Skrzypińska, 2006) and others.
Consequently, researchers tried to map the whole space of social attitudes as well. These analyses yielded inconclusive results: some authors described this space using two dimensions like Radicalism vs. Conservatism, and Toughmindedness vs. Tender-mindedness (Eyesenk, 1954). Other solutions obtained a higher number of social attitudes including five (Guilford, 1959) and six dimensions (Sidanius, Ekehammar, & Ross, 1979). Heterogeneity of the models regarding the number of analyzed attitudes is the consequence of initial attitudinal dimensions which were explored: different authors started with different sets of more narrow attitudes and this resulted in a large number of factor solutions. Still, there is some congruence between all of the social attitudes' models: most of the solutions extracted attitudes like conservatism, religiousness, nationalism and humanism (Petrović, 2020). The other attitudes are more heterogeneous between the models. PSIHOLOGIJA, 2023, OnlineFirst, 1-15

A Lexical Model of Social Attitudes: the Taxonomy of "isms"
The problem of providing a broad and comprehensive taxonomy of social attitudes is similar to other factor-analytic studies: a vast and heterogeneous sample of initial attitudes should be factorized in order to obtain a taxonomy which should cover the most important social attitudes. However, there was no agreement on what this initial pool of attitudes should be composed of. The solution was offered by Saucier (2000): He proposed a lexical approach, similar to the one that provided the taxonomies of basic personality traits. The terms which may reflect social attitudes are the ones with the "ism" suffix, like communism, liberalism, or patriotism. A recent study in English language (Saucier, 2013) extracted five factors of social attitudes based on isms terms: Tradition-oriented Religiousness (traditionalism, authoritarianism, and belief in God), Unmitigated Self-Interest (hedonism, selfishness, and materialistic value orientation), Communal Rationalism (trust in institutions, reason, and a belief that human nature is inherently good), Subjective spirituality (mysticism, spiritual individualism), and Inequality Aversion (egalitarianism, liberalism, and social justice). Other emic research of social attitudes (i.e., the research that examined the structure of social attitudes in specific languages separately) showed that this structure is partially replicable in different languages but with important differences stemming from a cultural and historical context. The research in Romania revealed that the attitudes toward the Romanian Communist party loaded on Unmitigated Self-Interest (Krauss, 2006); the studies in China and Taiwan (Chen, Hsu, Zhou, & Saucier, 2018) revealed additional factors like support for the Communist Party in mainland China and striving for happiness in Taiwan; finally, the study in Serbia (Petrović, 2020) revealed the emergence of a sixth factor which was interpreted as Nationalism. Hence, the isms structure of social attitudes captures not only universal dimensions of social attitudes, but cultural idiosyncrasies as well.

Is there a General Factor of Social Attitudes?
Structural models of human individual differences describe taxonomies of various traits, and measures operationalized in these models tend to correlate between themselves. Consequently, it is usually possible to extract the higherorder factors including the General factora single trait at the top of a hierarchy of personality traits. Previous research showed that a single factor can be found in the taxonomies of cognitive abilities (Carroll, 1993), psychopathological symptoms (Lahey et al., 2012) and personality traits . Furthermore, empirical research showed that General factors are quite robust in all these three domains of human individual differences (Jensen, 1998;Rushton & Irwing, 2009a, b, c, d;Smith et al., 2020). Is there a General Factor of Social Attitudes? One candidate for such a general factor could be Traditionalism, or obedience to traditional authoritythis broad social attitude was viewed as a common factor that encompasses authoritarianism, conservatism, and religiousness (Bouchard, 2009;Ludeke et al., 2013). On the other hand, the other prominent candidate may be the conservatism-liberalism dimension. Conservatism was found as a broad and general dimension of social attitudes which captures the common variance in lexical social attitudes, both on the individual (Stankov, 2009), and the country level (Stankov & Lee, 2009).. In recent emic research of lexical social attitudes in Serbia, a hierarchical factor analysis of these attitudes showed a singular latent dimension at the top of a hierarchy which was interpreted as conservatism-liberalism as well (Petrović, 2020). Hence, the possibility of a General Factor of Social Attitudes is indeed plausible.

Goals of the present research
General factors are powerful explanatory constructs, even if their interpretation is not unequivocal, which is the case with a General Factor of Personality (GEP; Revelle & Wilt, 2013), although the majority of researchers believe that GFP is substantive psychological construct that captures social effectiveness (van der Linden et al., 2016;Van der Linden et al., 2021). Social attitudes are epistemic categories that individuals use in order to understand the social world. If there is a singular dimension of social attitudes, it may represent a core process which serves as a fundamental axis for evaluating socially relevant phenomena. Hence, research on a General Factor of Social Attitudes can have major scientific benefits. We believe that the isms taxonomy represents the most suitable model for a search for the General Factor of Social Attitudes since it provides a broad and comprehensive structure of social attitudes. Our key hypothesis is that the General factor can be extracted from the structure of isms. Furthermore, we assume that the content of such a factor closely corresponds to the conservatism-liberalism dimension. The rationale for our second hypothesis comes from the previous empirical data on conservatism as a general dimension that captures the common variance of social attitudes (Petrović, 2020;Stankov, 2009;Stankov & Lee, 2009).
The main goal of the present study is to extract the general factor from the Isms structure of social attitudes; consequently, the content of this factor needs to be evaluated by exploring its nomological network. Assuming that the General factor represents the conservatism-liberalism dimension, we can hypothesize its associations with other attitudinal and personality characteristics. We used the following measures for the exploration of the General factor's nomological network: 1) We measured other social attitudes like Conservatism (Everett, 2013), Social Dominance Orientation (SDO: Ho et al., 2015) and Religiousness (Bouchard, 2009). Positive relations between the General factor and these constructs are expected (SDO consists of an egalitarianism scale as wellwe expected negative relations between this measure and the General Factor).
PSIHOLOGIJA, 2023, OnlineFirst, 1-15 2) We assessed basic human values (Schwartz, 2003). The General Factor is assumed to positively correlate with Conservation values and negatively with Openness to change. 3) Moral foundations are explored as well (Graham et al., 2011). the General Factor is hypothesized to positively correlate with the Binding Foundations -Ingroup, Authority, and Purity (Van Leeuwen & Park, 2009). 4) Basic personality traits have known relations with conservatism and we assessed six broad personality traits identified in a study based on the lexical paradigm (Milojev et al., 2013). The General Factor should positively correlate with Conscientiousness and negatively to Openness to experience (Sibley et al., 2012). 5) Finally, we explored some specific attitudes relevant to the current political situation in Serbia, since the research is conducted in this country we measured positive attitudes toward joining the European Union, independence of Kosovo, and immigrants; the General Factor of Social Attitudes is assumed to negatively correlate with all these measures.

Method Sample
The survey with the study measures was constructed via the Google Forms platform and administered online. The first webpage of the survey contained information about the study and the informed consent statement. The initial disseminators of the survey were students of the Singidunum University in Belgrade who attended the course on Individual differences. They sent the link to the survey to a broad pool of participants via social networks and asked them to fill the questionnaire and send it further. Participation in the research was voluntary, both for students and other participants. The students did not receive extra credits for participating in the survey, but the research data was used for their further education process in this field (data analysis, writing essays and presentations of the results). The final sample consisted of 380 individuals (M age = 32.34, SD = 11.72, 66% females). Participants were highly educated: 54% finished college, 36% were attending college in the time of data gathering while the rest had finished secondary school.

Measures
The Survey on dictionary-based isms (Saucier, 2013) was used for the assessment of social attitudes obtained via the lexical paradigm. It has 46 items that measure five social attitudes: Tradition-oriented Religiousness, Unmitigated Self-Interest, Communal Rationalism, Subjective Spirituality and Inequality Aversion. For the Serbian version of the inventory see Petrović (2020).
The short measure of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO: Ho et al., 2015) was administered. It provides scores on SDO Dominance and SDO Egalitarianism. Both beliefs are measured via 4 items. For the Serbian version of the inventory see Petrović (2020).
Religiousness was measured via the abbreviated Religiosity scale (containing five items) taken from the Arizona Life History Battery (Figueredo et al., 2007). For the Serbian version of the inventory see Međedović (2020).
PSIHOLOGIJA, 2023, OnlineFirst, 1-15 A short measure of Social Conservatism based on the work of Everett (2013) is administered. Participants were asked to assess how positive or negative they feel toward the following social phenomena: Abortion (reverse-coded), Family, Religion, Traditional marriage, and Patriotism. For the Serbian version of the inventory see Međedović (2021).
Basic Human Values were measured via a 21-item instrument constructed for the European Social Survey (Schwartz, 2003). This inventory provides scores on ten basic values, however we only used scores on higher-order value dimensions: Openness to change vs. Conservation, and Self-transcendence vs. Self-enhancement. For the Serbian version of the inventory see Petrović (2020).
Moral Foundations were explored using the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham et al., 2011). The inventory is divided in two parts with 16 items each which measure five moral foundations: Harm, Fairness, Ingroup, Authority, and Purity. The first two are labeled as Individualizing foundations while the rest are called Binding foundations. For the Serbian version of the inventory see Međedović & Petrović (2016a).
Basic personality traits were explored via the MINI-IPIP-6 questionnaire (Milojev et al., 2013) which has 24 items. It represents a hybrid model of personality where the Honesty-Humility scale is added to the Big Five personality traits: Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness. For the Serbian version of the inventory see Međedović & Bulut (2017).
Finally, we asked the participants to express their attitudes regarding certain political issues pertinent to the current political situation in Serbia: 1) support for Joining the European Union (Serbia currently has the status of a candidate for membership); 2) support for Kosovo Independence (Kosovo proclaimed independence from Serbia in 2008 after violent conflict near the end of 20 th century; Serbia did not acknowledge the independence of Kosovo); 3) support for providing asylum in Serbia for Immigrants. These three attitudes were measured via single item each. We asked participants to express the agreement with every one of them on a 5-point Likert scale where 1 denotes "Completely disagree" while 5 denotes "Completely agree". The same response scale was used for all above-mentioned scales.

Correlations between the Isms and the Extraction of General Factor
First, we show the descriptive statistics, reliabilities and the correlations between the Isms scales. Tradition-oriented Religiousness (TR) is positively associated with Unmitigated Self-Interest (USI) and Subjective Spirituality (SS) with negative associations with Communal Rationalism (CR) and Inequality Aversion (IA). USI is negatively related to CR and IA. CR is positively correlated with IA and negatively with SS. Finally, SS and IA are positively associated as well. The effect sizes of detected associations have high variation -from low to moderate magnitude. These associations are shown in Table 1.
Correlation analysis showed that most of the bivariate associations between social attitudes are statistically significant. These associations suggested that the existence of a General Factor in the space of isms is empirically plausible. General factors are usually extracted using the Principal Component Analysis (e.g., Erdle & Rushton, 2010;Veselka et al., 2009) and Principal Axis Factoring (e.g., . We have chosen the first method since this analysis is largely explorative in nature and because of the fact that Principal Component analysis usually explains more variance of the analyzed original variables. Thus, we extracted the first principal unrotated component from the lexical social attitudes: it explained 35.36% of the variance of original variables with the eigenvalue of 1.77. We would like to emphasize that we conducted Principal Axis Factoring as well. Both the composition of the General Factor, and the subsequent correlation analysis were exactly the same as with the General Factor obtained via Principal Component Analysis (the only difference was reflected in slightly lower variables' loadings on the latent dimension). This is in line with the data showing that General factors extracted via different methods have very high correlations, ≥ .90 (Van der Linden et al., 2010). Congruently with the correlation analysis TR, USI, and SS had positive, while CR and IA had negative loadings on this latent component. The loadings of Isms scales on this component are shown in Table 1. General factors are frequently extracted from the items of analyzed scales as well. Based on this we also obtained the first principal unrotated component from the Survey on dictionary-based isms items as well: this component explained 12.38% of all inventory items with the λ of 5.70 (if all five components are extracted, the percentages of explained variance for other four components are as following: 9%, 7%, 5% and 4%). Note. GFSAs -General factor of social attitudes extracted on isms scales; * p < .05; ** p < .01.

Nomological network of the General Factor of Social Attitudes
We calculated bivariate associations between the original Isms scales, General factors obtained both on isms scales and items and other measures we collected. These associations are shown in Table 2. General factors extracted on scales and items have very similar patterns of associations with other variables; however, there are a few distinctions between these measures -to highlight the most stable results we will interpret only the associations obtained on both measures of General factors. General Factor of Social Attitudes is positively associated with SDO Domination, Religiousness, Social Conservatism, Conservation Values, Ingroup, Authority, and Purity Moral Foundations. It is negatively associated with SDO Egalitarianism, Self-Transcendence Values, Harm and Fairness Moral Foundations, Agreeableness, Openness and Honesty personality traits, positive attitudes towards joining European Union, Independence of Kosovo, and Immigrants. Once again, the strength of associations was highly variable from low (associations with individualizing Moral Foundations) to high effect sizes (associations with Religiousness and Authority).  Note. TR -Tradition-oriented Religiousness; USI -Unmitigated Self-Interest; CR -Communal Rationalism; SS -Subjective spirituality; IA -Inequality Aversion; GFAs -General factor of social attitudes obtained on isms scales; GFAi -General factor of social attitudes obtained on isms items; * p < .05; ** p < .01.

Discussion
Various taxonomies of human individual differences turned out to be composed of correlated traits. Consequently, higher order factors can be extracted from the structures of personality traits, cognitive abilities, and psychopathology (Carroll, 1993;Lahey et al., 2012;. These general factors are powerful explanatory concepts. For example, they showed the existence of the G factor of intelligence, broad propensity towards mental illness, or a possibility of multivariate directional natural selection on personality traits (Verweij et al., 2012). Hence, they can provide new insights into human individual differences. Our current study was guided by an assumption that a similar General Factor may exist in the space of social attitudes as well. Furthermore, we expected that the General Factor of Social Attitudes (GFA) represents a conservatism-liberalism dimension. The obtained data corroborated our expectations: a General Factor was extracted from the isms social attitudes and its nomological network suggests that the General Factor is indeed conservatism-liberalism. Social attitudes are epistemic psychological categories: individuals use them to understand and evaluate societal events -hence they are crucial processes that enable individuals to function in a complex social world. The current data suggest that there is one core axis on which societal phenomena are placed and evaluated, a fundamental dimension which serves as a principal guide throughout social world. It may also be viewed as a basic heuristic used to understand and contemplate societal events -this dimension is conservatismliberalism.

General Factor of Social Attitudes and its Nomological Network
Lexical social attitudes correlate between themselves in the expected manner -similar associations were obtained in previous studies as well (e.g., Petrović & Međedović, 2017;Stankov & Lee, 2016). The pattern of associations suggests that social attitudes are clustered in two groups -the first is composed of Tradition-oriented Religiousness, Unmitigated Self-Interest, and Subjective Spirituality, while the other consists of Communal Rationalism and Inequality Aversion. These two clusters are largely negatively correlated. In fact, they represent the opposite poles of a General Factor extracted from these measures. Hence, this latent dimension is in accordance with previously extracted higherorder factor on Isms social attitudes (Stankov, 2009;Stankov & Lee, 2009). This was the first piece of information that suggested that the General Factor may in fact represent the conservatism-liberalism dimension.
Note that the structure of the General Factor is relatively robust -all loadings are > .30. However, it is also important to emphasize that Subjective Spirituality has the lowest loading on the factor, implying that this attitude has the lowest contribution to the latent dimension. On the other hand, if we examine the structure of the General Factor extracted directly from the inventory items, we could conclude that the part of variance captured by the first principal component may be relatively low (12.4%). This suggests that the extracted General Factor may be less robust than the ones extracted in the other domains of human individual differences. Future research is necessary to compare the stability of the GFA solutions obtained in different populations.
Our assumption regarding the interpretation of the General Factor is further corroborated by the bivariate associations between the General Factor and other beliefs, attitudes, and personality traits measured in the present study. The most direct confirmations come from positive correlations with social conservatism, religiosity, and social dominance scales, with a negative relation with egalitarianism measure. These associations clearly suggest that individuals with higher scores on the General Factor of Social Attitudes are positioned on the conservative end of the ideological specter. Furthermore, the General Factor correlates negatively with all three specific attitudes relevant to the current political life in Serbia (attitudes toward Joining the EU, independence of Kosovo, and immigrants), which was expected as well. These findings PSIHOLOGIJA, 2023, OnlineFirst, 1-15 corroborate previous data that conservative individuals have more negative attitudes toward the EU (Franceško et al., 2006), immigrant workers and asylum seekers (Gregurović et al., 2016) and more antagonistic and volatile sentiments towards the conflict in Kosovo (Međedović & Petrović, 2016b).
We assumed that the General Factor would correlate positively with Conservation and consequently, negatively with Openness to change values, since they are placed on the opposite sides of the value circumplex model (Schwartz, 2003). Our hypothesis is only partially confirmed. The General Factor indeed correlates positively with the Conservation values, however, the association with Openness to change was not detected in our data. A negative association between the General Factor and Self transcendence values emerged instead. Interestingly, this pattern of associations is completely in line with the previous data on the voters of right and left-wing partiesright-wing voters have significantly higher scores on Conservation and lower scores on Self transcendence compared to left-wing voters (Lindeman & Verkasalo, 2005). Furthermore, the obtained associations are in line with previously obtained data on the associations between the values and a broad set of core political values that reflects conservative attitudes: traditional morality, blind patriotism, support for law and order and military intervention (Schwartz et al., 2010).
One of the crucial manuscripts regarding the Moral foundation theory is based on the differences between conservatives and liberals on moral foundations it is asserted that liberals rely more on Harm and Fairness foundations while conservatives tend to endorse all five foundations more equally (Graham et al., 2009). Furthermore, Binding moral foundations (Authority, Ingroup, and Purity) were found to be positively related both to explicitly and implicitly measured conservatism (Van Leeuwen & Park, 2009). This is why we predicted positive associations between Binding foundations and the General Factor. These correlations were obtained as predicted, accompanied by negative relations between the General Factor and Harm, and Care foundations.
Finally, there is another finding which is in accordance with the previous data: General Factor is negatively associated to Honesty-Humility as a basic personality trait; this result replicates the previous one regarding the relation between Honesty and political behavior (Jonason, 2014). Obtained negative relations between the General Factor, Agreeableness, and Openness are in line with existing literature as well (Chirumbolo & Leone, 2010;Zettler & Hilbig, 2010). The only finding that deviated from our hypotheses was the absence of the correlation between the General Factor and Conscientiousness, since a positive association was expected (Sibley et al., 2012). Note that general personality traits are comprehensive and broad behavioral dispositions, while we used short scales to explore them in the present study. In order to achieve high reliability, the items of these scales must be highly correlated and this consequently largely restricts the broadness of their content (Međedović & Bulut, 2017). This may be the reason why the expected association was not detected -it may be captured with a longer and multifaceted personality measure.
Labeling complex and heterogeneous constructs is always an ungrateful task -the same applies to the current situation. Previous studies suggested that traditionalism may be an attitude that captures the common variance of various other beliefs and values (Bouchard, 2009;Ludeke et al., 2013). This assumption may be in line with the findings of Saucier (2000): the first principal component extracted from the English language isms items indeed reflected traditionally based religiousness. Nevertheless, we have chosen to label the General Factor of Social Attitudes as conservatism-liberalism for several reasons. Firstly, in contrast to traditionalism, conservatism represents a broader term that encompasses wider ideological content. For example, modern definitions of conservatism (e.g., Heywood, 2017) state that conservatism include the terms like traditional social institutions and tradition in general, organic society, hierarchy, authority, and property rights. Hence, the definition of conservatism encompasses traditional values. Secondly, the General Factor extracted from the present data represents a dimension -it has opposite attitudes on its poles. In contrast to conservatismliberalism which is usually viewed as a similar dimension as well (Petrović, 2020), traditionalism does not have the opposite markers on its reverse pole. Finally, the notion of conservatism as a higher-order factor of social attitudes also has a foothold in existing empirical literature (Stankov, 2009;Stankov & Lee, 2009, Petrović, 2020.

Limitations, Future Directions, and Concluding Remarks
The participants that provided us with data for the current study were more educated than the average; hence, the study findings cannot be easily generalized -these data should be replicated on other samples as well. Several constructs that were explored in the present study were operationalized via short scaleslonger scales have various advantages, not only reliability, but higher representativeness of the concept being measured as well. Future research may perform additional tests regarding the nature of the General Factor of Social Attitudes: attempts to discern whether a General Factor is conservatism-liberalism dimension or an another similar attitude may be conceptually very fruitful. If the General Factor is the fundamental dimension people use to understand and evaluate social phenomena then it should be relevant for the process of decision making regarding social events. Hence, the concept of a General Factor of Social Attitudes may indeed help us gain new insights into how people make sense and navigate through complex social contexts. Multi-method and cross-cultural data will further test the robustness and significance of the concept in predicting socially relevant behavioral outcomes.