2018
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2018.01.004
|View full text |Cite
|
Sign up to set email alerts
|

The Partisan Brain: An Identity-Based Model of Political Belief

Abstract: Democracies assume accurate knowledge by the populace, but the human attraction to fake and untrustworthy news poses a serious problem for healthy democratic functioning. We articulate why and how identification with political parties - known as partisanship - can bias information processing in the human brain. There is extensive evidence that people engage in motivated political reasoning, but recent research suggests that partisanship can alter memory, implicit evaluation, and even perceptual judgments. We p… Show more

Help me understand this report

Search citation statements

Order By: Relevance

Paper Sections

Select...
2
1
1

Citation Types

19
356
1
7

Year Published

2018
2018
2024
2024

Publication Types

Select...
7
2

Relationship

0
9

Authors

Journals

citations
Cited by 498 publications
(437 citation statements)
references
References 95 publications
(102 reference statements)
19
356
1
7
Order By: Relevance
“…Deepening political conflict has caused partisans in the U.S. and beyond to develop increasingly hostile feelings toward each other (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes, 2012;Mason, 2018), making it natural to presume that deeply committed partisans are willing to strategically share hostile political rumors to target members of the opposing party and, thus, mobilize audiences on behalf of their own party. Consistent with this expectation, a number of studies have shown that partisanship plays a major role in predicting political conspiracy beliefs (Uscinski and Parent, 2014;Miller, Saunders and Farhart, 2016) and beliefs in "fake news" stories (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017;Van Bavel and Pereira, 2018). Thus, in the United States, Republican voters tend to believe stories that denigrate Democrats and Democratic voters tend to believe stories that denigrate Republicans.…”
Section: Helping Your Party or Destroying The System?mentioning
confidence: 89%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…Deepening political conflict has caused partisans in the U.S. and beyond to develop increasingly hostile feelings toward each other (Iyengar, Sood and Lelkes, 2012;Mason, 2018), making it natural to presume that deeply committed partisans are willing to strategically share hostile political rumors to target members of the opposing party and, thus, mobilize audiences on behalf of their own party. Consistent with this expectation, a number of studies have shown that partisanship plays a major role in predicting political conspiracy beliefs (Uscinski and Parent, 2014;Miller, Saunders and Farhart, 2016) and beliefs in "fake news" stories (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017;Van Bavel and Pereira, 2018). Thus, in the United States, Republican voters tend to believe stories that denigrate Democrats and Democratic voters tend to believe stories that denigrate Republicans.…”
Section: Helping Your Party or Destroying The System?mentioning
confidence: 89%
“…A standard explanation in social psychology, cognitive science and political science is that people's current motivations to share hostile political rumors reflect partisan motivations (Allcott and Gentzkow, 2017;Van Bavel & Pereira, 2018;Spohr, 2017). Most individuals form partisan identities in adolescence and early adulthood in the form of strong emotional attachments to a political party (Campbell et al, 1960), which influence a range of political and social behaviors (Arceneaux and Vander Wielen, 2017;Cohen, 2003).…”
Section: Helping Your Party or Destroying The System?mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…The second key insight is that besides individual differences, belief in conspiracy theories is highly sensitive to social context. For instance, ideological motivations influence political conspiracy beliefs depending on election results (e.g., Democrats believe governmental conspiracy theories particularly if there is a Republican in the White House, and vice versa; Wright & Arbuthnot, 1974; see also Golec de Zavala & Federico, 2018;Uscinski & Parent, 2014;Van Bavel & Pereira, 2018). Moreover, throughout history people have believed conspiracy theories particularly in impactful societal crisis situations, such as during fires, floods, earthquakes, rapid societal change, violence, and wars (McCauley & Jacques, 1979; see also Van Prooijen & Douglas, 2017).…”
Section: Conspiracy Theories: An Emerging Research Domainmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Contemporary research suggests that partisanship affects our cognition at a fundamental levelpotentially shaping our memories and evaluations of events, and at times, even coloring sensory perceptions ( Van Bavel & Pereira 2018). These are the very foundations upon which ethnography is built.…”
Section: Arlie Hochschild Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger Anmentioning
confidence: 99%