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Reactions to Imposed Political Change: A Prospective Experimental Investigation of Jewish Settlers’ Resistance to State Contraction

The implementation of a peace agreement between adversarial parties often carries a price, such as the imposition of political change on a population that opposes the peace agreement. The current research uses a resistance to change perspective and focuses on Jewish settlers in the West Bank as a case example of reactions to potential imposed political change. An experimental field study of Jewish West Bank settlers (N = 453) was conducted to understand the influence of ideology and psychological-contextual factors on resistance to change. On this basis, we examined four determinants, one ideological and three related to psychological resistance: (a) the character of the settlers (ideological vs. quality of life settlers); (b) legitimacy (size of the majority in parliament); (c) recompensation (a unilateral withdrawal with no tangible benefits, or a bilateral quid-pro-quo agreement); and (d) group-affirmations (messages that boost perceived in-group value). We measured explicit support for legal (normative) and unlawful (nonnormative) resistance, and measured implicit aggression using a lexical-decision task. Results showed that both ideological and psychological-contextual factors played a significant role in resistance: Ideological settlers showed greater support for normative resistance, and exhibited high implicit aggression, but primarily in response to perceptions of recompensation. Group affirmations, however, backfired and elicited greater resistance in this group. Quality of life settlers exhibited low support for resistance and responded more positively to group affirmations. Legitimacy played no significant role in resistance to forced evacuation. Results reveal that ideology alone does not predict resistance to imposed political change, suggesting that psychological interventions may help settler populations cope with imposed change.