"And the Next Thing You Know . . .": Ideological Differences in Slippery Slope Thinking

Rajen A Anderson; Daan Scheepers; Benjamin C Ruisch

doi:10.1177/01461672251391893

"And the Next Thing You Know . . .": Ideological Differences in Slippery Slope Thinking

Rajen A Anderson^*
, Daan Scheepers
, Benjamin C Ruisch

^*Corresponding author for this work

University of Kent

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › Academic › peer-review

Abstract

Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) contend that a small, innocuous change will lead to cascading negative consequences. Although SSAs are common in political discourse, they have received little empirical attention in this context. In 15 studies (including samples from four countries and a study of natural language usage on the social media site Reddit), we examine who may be most prone to slippery slope thinking and why people in general may engage in such thinking. We consider whether individuals of different political ideologies exhibit different degrees of support for SSAs. We test three competing hypotheses that it is (a) political extremists, (b) political liberals, or (c) political conservatives that more strongly endorse SSAs. We consistently find that conservatives endorse SSAs more due to ideological differences in intuitive thinking. We additionally find evidence of these ideological differences in social media behavior, and that slippery slope thinking has consequences for punitive attitudes.

Original language	English
Journal	Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672251391893
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 13 Nov 2025

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Lficense (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (#1144153) to B. C. Ruisch.

Funders	Funder number
National Science Foundation	1144153

Keywords

decision-making
ideology
intuition
reasoning
slippery slope

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10.1177/01461672251391893Licence: CC BY

Cite this

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abstract = "Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) contend that a small, innocuous change will lead to cascading negative consequences. Although SSAs are common in political discourse, they have received little empirical attention in this context. In 15 studies (including samples from four countries and a study of natural language usage on the social media site Reddit), we examine who may be most prone to slippery slope thinking and why people in general may engage in such thinking. We consider whether individuals of different political ideologies exhibit different degrees of support for SSAs. We test three competing hypotheses that it is (a) political extremists, (b) political liberals, or (c) political conservatives that more strongly endorse SSAs. We consistently find that conservatives endorse SSAs more due to ideological differences in intuitive thinking. We additionally find evidence of these ideological differences in social media behavior, and that slippery slope thinking has consequences for punitive attitudes.",

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"And the Next Thing You Know . . .": Ideological Differences in Slippery Slope Thinking

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