Table 1 Possible predictors
Predictors | Content | Rationale/Hypotheses | |
|---|---|---|---|
Socio-demographics and religious/political attitudes | Age, gender, country, education, profession | - Person’s background - Human Development Index [32] used for country | - Sample description - Possibly associated with normality, especially a medical profession [8, 15,16,17, 27, 33] |
Religiosity [34] | - Tendency of how religiously a person assesses him/herself | - Religious persons might be more receptive to normative proto-normalistic positions [35, 36] | |
Left–right self-placement [37] | - Political attitudes on a left–right dimension | - Normality in medicine and normal sexuality are highly political and the normal has political implications [13, 18] | |
Personality-psychological constructs | Big Five Inventory [38] | - Dimensions of personality: Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Neuroticism | - Personality dimensions might affect a person’s acceptance of normality (e.g. as some sort of status quo) [39, 40] - Relationships between personality, prejudice, and ideological attitudes [41] |
Self-esteem [42] | - Self-esteem of participants | - “Less normal” minority groups might have lower self-esteem [28, 40] | |
Tolerance for Ambiguity [43] | - Dimensions of tolerance for ambiguity: valuing diverse others, change, challenging perspectives, unfamiliarity | - Persons in situations of ambiguity and under uncertainty or who are less tolerant for ambiguity might be more likely to subscribe to the normal [44, 45] | |
Morality-related constructs | Moral Foundations [46] | - Individual priorities in moral reasoning; dimensions: care and harm, fairness and cheating, loyalty and betrayal, authority and subversion, sanctity and degradation | - Persons’ accounts of normality are part prescriptive and part descriptive, they combine information about an ideal and an average – that means normality is a normative concept [3, 4] |
Injustice Sensitivity [47] | - Psychological characteristic of injustice sensitivity; subscales: victim’s, observer’s, perpetrator’s, and beneficiary’s perspective | - It has been argued that the normal stigmatizes, marginalizes, pathologizes, and discriminates against individuals who are defined in contrast to it [2, 11, 14, 17, 22] | |
Genderism and transphobia [48] | - Negative attitudes and propensity for violence toward trans* people | - Sexuality and gender identity might be associated with an idea of normality [11, 18, 49] - Discrimination against and negative attitudes towards non-binary people [50, 51] | |
Qualityof life | Subscale of SF-36: General health [52] | - Overall self-rated health | - It has been argued that normality becomes more important in times of crisis (e.g. disease) [35, 36] |
Critical life events [53] | - Critical life events in the past year | - It has been argued that normality becomes more important in times of crisis (e.g. critical life events) [35, 36] |