This article explores individual differences in citizens' reliance on cues and values in political thinking. It uses experimental evidence to identify which citizens are likely to engage in heuristic processing and which citizens are likely to engage in systematic processing in developing opinions about a novel issue. The evidence suggests that political awareness crisply distinguishes between heuristic and systematic processors. The less politically aware rely on party cues and not on an issue-relevant value. As political awareness increases, reliance on party cues drops and reliance on an issuerelevant value rises. Need for cognition fails to yield clear results. The results suggest two routes to opinion formation: heuristic processing and systematic processing. Political awareness, not need for cognition, predicts which route citizens will take.

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The events of 9/11 set in motion a massive reordering of U.S. policy. We propose that the American public's response to this redirection in policy derives, in part, from ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism-"prejudice, broadly conceived"-refers to the commonplace human tendency to partition the social world into virtuous ingroups and nefarious outgroups. Support for the war on terrorism, undertaken against a strange and shadowy enemy, should hold special appeal for Americans with an ethnocentric turn of mind. To see if this is so, we analyze the panel component of the 2000-2002 National Election Study. We find that ethnocentrism powerfully underwrites support for the war on terrorism, across a variety of tests and specifications, and the strength of the relationship between ethnocentrism and opinion is influenced in part by the extraordinary events of 9/11. Ethnocentrism is easily found among Americans, but its relevance and potency for politics depends, we suggest, upon circumstance.