The Rationalizing Voter

Abstract

Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. Citizens are very sensitive to environmental contextual factors such as the title 'President' preceding 'Obama' in a newspaper headline, upbeat music or patriotic symbols accompanying a campaign ad, or question wording and order in a survey, all of which have their greatest influence when citizens are unaware. This book develops and tests a dual-process theory of political beliefs, attitudes and behavior, claiming that all thinking, feeling, reasoning and doing have an automatic component as well as a conscious deliberative component. The authors are especially interested in the impact of automatic feelings on political judgments and evaluations. This research is based on laboratory experiments, which allow the testing of five basic hypotheses: hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion and motivated reasoning.

The impact of elite frames and motivated reasoning on beliefs in a global warming conspiracy: The promise and limits of trust

“…In contrast, the gap in the belief in the existence of GW versus CC is greater for Republicans than Democrats, with Republicans being more likely to deny the existence of GW than CC (Schuldt et al, 2011;Schuldt et al, 2015; but see Dunlap, 2014). This pattern of responses is consistent with motivated reasoning: people will engage in reasoning processes such as selective-exposure, counter-arguing, and outright denial in the face of identity-threatening or counter-attitudinal information in order to protect, bolster or defend their pre-existing attitudes and identities (Kunda, 1990;Lodge and Taber, 2013).…”

The Deservingness Heuristic and the Politics of Health Care

“…This predicted role of implicit psychological constraints operating behind the support for government spending on health care has important political consequences, as suggested by decades of psychological research on explicit versus implicit processes (Greenwald, Nosek, and Banaji 2003;Haidt 2001). Implicit, intuitive factors often come to dominate judgments and behaviors at the expense of explicit, more effortful considerations related to, for example, ideological consistency and selfinterest (see Haidt 2001; for political applications, see Lodge and Taber 2013;Petersen et al 2011). In the context of health care politics, an underlying implicit bias could make health care support impervious to the kinds of considerations that form the basis of opinion formation on other political issues.…”

Uma facada pelas costas: paranoia e Teoria da Conspiração entre conservadores no refluxo das Greves de 1917 na Alemanha

“…Na visão de mundo dos conservadores, fica evidente a ameaça constante de elementos externos e internos à sua posição. E essa assertiva é corroborada por estudos em Psicologia e Biologia políticas (Hibbing; Smith; Alford, 2014;Lodge;Taber, 2013). Experiências nesses campos mostram não só que a resposta automatizada e as reações emotivas são orientadas por respostas preconcebidas e por predisposições emocionais (ou seja, em temas políticos, as reflexões são imediatamente eliminadas em prol de respostas prontas e imagens preexistentes e, assim, o preconceito político se torna uma característica quase natural do debate).…”