Explaining Preferences from Behavior: A Cognitive Dissonance Approach

Acharya, Avidit; Blackwell, Matthew; Sen, Maya

doi:10.1086/694541

Cited by 88 publications

(57 citation statements)

References 52 publications

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“…Acharya et al (2015) document that contemporary differences in political attitudes across counties in the US South are correlated with the local prevalence of slavery around 1860, but this correlation is not present amongst second generation immigrants in those same counties. Voigtländer and Voth (2012) find strong persistence in anti-Semitism within Germany over more than five centuries.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Historical Roots of Political Extremism: The Effects of Nazi Occupation of Italy

2017

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in Historical Roots of Political Extremism: The Effects of Nazi Occupation of Italy februAry 2017Any opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author(s) and not those of IZA. Research published in this series may include views on policy, but IZA takes no institutional policy positions. The IZA research network is committed to the IZA Guiding Principles of Research Integrity. The IZA Institute of Labor Economics is an independent economic research institute that conducts research in labor economics and offers evidence-based policy advice on labor market issues. Supported by the Deutsche Post Foundation, IZA runs the world's largest network of economists, whose research aims to provide answers to the global labor market challenges of our time. Our key objective is to build bridges between academic research, policymakers and society. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. were choosing political affiliations and forming political identities. In this paper we study how these traumatic events shaped the new political system. We exploit geographic heterogeneity in the intensity and duration of the civil war, and the persistence of the battlefront along the "Gothic line" cutting through Northern-Central Italy. We find that the Communist Party gained votes in the post-war elections where the Nazi occupation and the civil war lasted longer, mainly at the expense of the centrist and catholic parties.This effect persists until the early 1990s. Evidence also suggests that this is due to an effect on political attitudes. Thus, the foreign occupation and the civil war left a lasting legacy of political extremism and polarization on the newborn Italian democracy. JEL Classification:D72, C21

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Historical Roots of Political Extremism: The Effects of Nazi Occupation of Italy

2017

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“…Over the past decade, neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that the act of choosing between similarly-valued options causes changes in the brain's encoding of subjective values (Izuma et al, 2010;Voigt et al, 2018). This has lent neurobiological support to the theory, and cognitive dissonance reduction is now the popular explanation behind a broad variety of important irrational sociopsychological phenomena, ranging from, for example, post-vote political opinion changes (Beasley & Joslyn, 2001) to post-violence hostile attitude worsening (Acharya, Blackwell & Sen, 2015). This is not to say, however, that the theory of cognitive dissonance reduction has remained unchallenged.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Choosing what we like vs liking what we choose: How choice-induced preference change might actually be instrumental to decision-making

Lee

Daunizeau

2019

Preprint

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For more than 60 years, it has been known that people report higher (lower) subjective values for items after having selected (rejected) them during a choice task. This phenomenon is coined "choice-induced preference change" or CIPC, and its established interpretation is that of "cognitive dissonance" theory. In brief, if people feel uneasy about their choice, they later convince themselves, albeit not always consciously, that the chosen (rejected) item was actually better (worse) than they had originally estimated. While this might make sense from a pragmatic psychological standpoint, it is challenging from a theoretical evolutionary perspective. This is because such a cognitive mechanism might yield irrational biases, whose adaptive fitness would be unclear. In this work, we assume that CIPC is mostly driven by the refinement of option value representations that occurs during (and not after) difficult choices.This makes CIPC the epiphenomenal outcome of a cognitive process that is instrumental to the decision. Critically, our hypothesis implies novel predictions about how observed CIPC should relate to two specific meta-cognitive processes, namely: choice confidence and subjective certainty regarding pre-choice value judgments. We test these predictions in a behavioral experiment where participants rate the subjective value of food items both before and after choosing between equally valued items; we augment this traditional design with reports of choice confidence and subjective certainty about value judgments. The results confirm our predictions and provide evidence against the standard post-choice cognitive dissonance reduction explanation. We then discuss the relevance of our work in the context of the existing debate regarding the putative cognitive mechanisms underlying cognitive dissonance reduction.

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“…While party affiliation clearly encompasses a broad range of beliefs, we take it as a proxy for belief on a particular topic. confronted with ideas that do not match their own [22,35,36,40]. This brings out the primary assumption of this paper: people do not form their opinions based on evidence, but rather choose the opinions that they hold and the individuals with whom they surround themselves for the purpose of maximizing fitness as we have defined it.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Opinion formation on dynamic networks: identifying conditions for the emergence of partisan echo chambers

Evans

2018

R. Soc. open sci.

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Modern political interaction is characterized by strong partisanship and a lack of interest in information sharing and agreement across party lines. It remains largely unclear how such partisan echo chambers arise and how they coevolve with opinion formation. Here, we explore the emergence of these structures through the lens of coevolutionary games. In our model, the payoff of an individual is determined jointly by the magnitude of their opinion, their degree of conformity with their social neighbours and the benefit of having social connections. Each individual can simultaneously adjust their opinion and the weights of their social connections. We present and validate the conditions for the emergence of partisan echo chambers, characterizing the transition from cohesive communities with a consensus to divisive networks with splitting opinions. Moreover, we apply our model to voting records of the US House of Representatives over a timespan of decades to understand the influence of underlying psychological and social factors on increasing partisanship in recent years. Our work helps elucidate how the division of today has come to be and how cohesion and unity could otherwise be attained on a variety of political and social issues.

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Explaining Preferences from Behavior: A Cognitive Dissonance Approach

Cited by 88 publications

References 52 publications

Historical Roots of Political Extremism: The Effects of Nazi Occupation of Italy

Historical Roots of Political Extremism: The Effects of Nazi Occupation of Italy

Choosing what we like vs liking what we choose: How choice-induced preference change might actually be instrumental to decision-making

Opinion formation on dynamic networks: identifying conditions for the emergence of partisan echo chambers

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