The Effects of General and Domain-Specific Expertise on Political Memory and Judgment

McGraw, Kathleen M.; Pinney, Neil

doi:10.1521/soco.1990.8.1.9

Cited by 119 publications

(85 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…Fiske (1983) initially presented a "practical view of political expertise" comprised of an interlocking set of indicators including knowledge, interest and participation. McGraw and Pinney (1990) subsequently constructed a measure of "political sophistication" from knowledge, media use, and interest (see also Fiske et al 1990;McGraw and Lodge 1996). Indeed, media exposure and political interest may have independent effects on candidate evaluations, wholly separate from any influence of political knowledge (Krosnick and Brannon 1993).…”

Section: An Election-specific Understanding Of Political Sophisticationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because certain voters are more interested in politics, more exposed to information, and more knowledgeable about the campaign, they should draw on more considerations, or "schemata." Sophisticated voters have a more expansive store of evaluative content represented in memory (McGraw and Steenbergen 1995;McGraw and Pinney 1990) and that content should be more accessible and easily activated than that of less sophisticated individuals (Lau and Sears 1986). A greater number of considerations should be brought to bear (Graber 1984;Neuman 1986;Sniderman et al 1991) and sophisticates should have more diversity within their cognitive array, which will be reflected in more schematic categories (Graber 1984;Sniderman et al 1991;Sniderman et al 1990;Luskin 1990).…”

Section: An Election-specific Understanding Of Political Sophisticationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Political Sophistication and Presidential Candidate Considerations: Disentangling the Effects of Knowledge, Interest, and Media Exposure

DeWitt

2013

ARP

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Answers to political sophistication questions are typically tied to theoretical or normative assumptions, which produce given sets of operational guidelines. In this study, I develop an understanding of election specific expertise, conceived of as three distinct dimensions—knowledge, interest, and media exposure. This methodological approach helps provide a richer appreciation of the unique effects of each dimension on the nature, number, and breadth of candidate considerations employed by voters. Results lend support for the overriding claim that sophistication is a critical source of heterogeneity within the American electorate. The classic democratic competency standard of an issue-driven voting public is achieved through a more knowledgeable, interested citizenry. At the same time, knowledge and interest produce divergent influences on particular types of personality-based candidate evaluations while media exposure is most remarkable for its absence of explanatory value.

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Section: An Election-specific Understanding Of Political Sophisticationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: An Election-specific Understanding Of Political Sophisticationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Sophistication and Presidential Candidate Considerations: Disentangling the Effects of Knowledge, Interest, and Media Exposure

DeWitt

2013

ARP

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“…Research has shown that voters' degree of political sophistication affects the way in which they process and organize political information. Political experts have a better knowledge of politics than political novices, and they also organize and process this information in a more meaningful way (Fiske et al, 1983;McGraw and Pinney, 1990;Zaller, 1992). Their issue positions and other political attitudes are more strongly related to one another (e.g., Luskin, 1987) and have a stronger relationship with their voting choices.…”

Section: Ideological Voting and The Role Of Party System Polarizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of party polarization on ideological voting

2008

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Although ideology is a central factor in models of voting choice, little is known about the factors that explain the variation across elections in the strength of ideological voting. This paper suggests that the role of citizens' left-right orientations increases with party system polarization. It improves on previous studies on this question by avoiding potential sources of bias linked with voters' perceptions of the level of polarization, with rationalization effects, and with the specification of the spatial model of the vote. Based on data from the 1999 European Election Study and from an expert survey on party positions, the results confirm that polarization reinforces ideological voting. However, this effect is mediated by party identification and by political sophistication.

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“…And most of its effects appear to be primarily ability-based in character. Knowledge has been shown to enhance recall (e.g., Cooke, Atlas, Lane, & Berger, 1993;Fiske, Lau, & Smith, 1990;McGraw & Pinney, 1990;Schneider, Gruber, Gold, & Opwis, 1993), improve comprehension (Eckhardt, Wood, & Jacobvitz, 1991;Engle, Nations, & Cantor, 1990), increase the speed of judgments (e.g., Fiske et al, 1990;Paull & Glencross, 1997), improve cue utilization in decision tasks (Paull & Glencross, 1997), enable appropriate inferences (Pearson, Hansen, & Gordon, 1979), facilitate the objective processing of attituderelevant information (Biek, Wood, & Chaiken, 1996) and the learning of new topic-relevant information (Hansen, 1984;Kyllonen, Tirre, & Christal, 1991;Willoughby, Waller, Wood, & MacKinnon, 1993), and 18 enable the generation of effective counterarguments to a persuasive appeal (Wood, 1982;Wood, Rhodes, & Biek, 1995). Thus, although knowledge seems to enable people to perform various relevant cognitive tasks more effectively, we see no reason to suppose that it should, in and of itself, motivate people to engage in any behavior.…”

Section: Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring the Latent Structure of Strength‐related Attitude Attributes

Visser¹,

Bizer²,

Krosnick³

2006

Advances in Experimental Social Psychology

154

172

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[or she] will do…They draw lines about, and segregate, an otherwise chaotic environment; they are our methods for finding our way about in an ambiguous universe." Gordon W. Allport, 1935, p. 806 It has been nearly 70 years since Gordon Allport famously declared the attitude "the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary American social psychology" (Allport, 1935, p. 798). In the decades since this bold claim, a large literature has accumulated generally reinforcing the notion that attitudes often do, as Allport (1935) suggested, profoundly influence perception, cognition, and behavior. Equally clear from this literature, however, is that attitudes do not always do so. That is, although some attitudes exert a powerful impact on thinking and on behavior, others are largely inconsequential. Similarly, whereas some attitudes are tremendously durable, resisting change in the face of a persuasive appeal and remaining stable over long spans of time, others are highly malleable and fluctuate greatly over time.The term "attitude strength" is often used to capture this distinction, and researchers have identified roughly a dozen attributes of attitudes that are associated with their strength (see .These strength-related attitude attributes include attitude importance, knowledge, elaboration, certainty, ambivalence, accessibility, intensity, extremity, structural consistency, and others. A large literature now exists documenting the relations of these attitude attributes with the four defining features of strong attitudes (i.e., resistance to change, stability over time, and a powerful impact on thought and on behavior; . For example, attitudes to which people attach more personal importance are better predictors of behavior (e.g., Budd, 1986;Parker, Perry, & Gillespie, 1974;Rokeach & Kliejunas, 1972), more resistant to change (Fine, 1957;Gorn, 1975;Zuwerink & Devine, 1996), and more powerfully influence liking of other people (Byrne, London, & Griffitt, 1968;Clore & Baldridge, 1968;Granberg & Holmberg, 1986;Krosnick, 1988b;McGraw, Lodge, & Stroh, 1990), inferences about others' personality traits (Judd & Johnson, 1981), and many other cognitive processes. Similar sorts of relations have been documented between other strength-2 related attitude attributes and the four defining features of strong attitudes (for a review, see . But considerably less is known about the relations among the strength-related attitude attributes themselves. In fact, a controversy has emerged in the attitude literature in recent years regarding the underlying structure of these attributes.In this chapter, we review this controversy and the empirical evidence and conceptual assumptions that have fueled it. We then draw on a diverse set of recent studies to shed new light on the conceptual and practical utility of the competing perspectives. Finally, we consider the implications of our findings for the conceptualization of attitude strength and for the methods by which it is studied. We begin below by defining each strength-rela...

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The Effects of General and Domain-Specific Expertise on Political Memory and Judgment

Cited by 119 publications

References 20 publications

Political Sophistication and Presidential Candidate Considerations: Disentangling the Effects of Knowledge, Interest, and Media Exposure

Political Sophistication and Presidential Candidate Considerations: Disentangling the Effects of Knowledge, Interest, and Media Exposure

The impact of party polarization on ideological voting

Exploring the Latent Structure of Strength‐related Attitude Attributes

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