ABSTRACT
Serving as a testament to the importance of free expression in American society and throughout the democratic world, attitudes toward censorship have been studied in a variety of fields, including communication, social psychology, and political science. Lambe (2002) wrote that “the varied efforts to understand censorship attitudes reflect a normative desire to predict and modify opinions believed to be detrimental to freedom of expression” (p. 188). The goal of censorship research, then, is to identify predictor variables for pro-censorship attitudes. Though its interdisciplinary relevance has led to countless studies reflecting the specific concerns of the fields at hand, Lambe (2002) argued that censorship research would benefit from a unified conceptual framework.
