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Racist or not racist? Political differences in the perception and definition of racism
Get PDF“Is that racist?” While sometimes the answer may seem obvious, other times it may be more controversial. Heated debate in the U.S. about the extent that racism is still a problem may be partially due to disagreements about what counts as racism, an underexplored topic in social psychology. These two online studies asked U.S. adults to judge behaviors and scenarios on whether or not they were racist. In Study 1, I found large, significant differences between liberals and conservatives in both the number and content of behaviors judged to be racist. In Study 2, I investigated liberals and conservatives’ definitions of racism, both by explicitly asking about their definitions of racism and in judging scenarios that were structured to investigate definitional differences. I found that conservatives favored individual-focused definitions and liberals leaned more towards a systemic/structural definition of racism. When judging scenarios, conservatives placed more importance on whether an act treated people differently based on race, while liberals were relatively more open to judging an act racist that affected people differently, as well as one that treated people differently. In all, liberals and conservatives do not see racism the same way, which likely makes it harder for them to understand each other’s viewpoints. Further exploration of these differences may help show why what one side calls “racism” the other calls “playing the race-card.
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The moralization of obesity: Exploring control attributions and disgust as predictors of judgments about obesity
Get PDFResearch shows that negative attitudes toward obese people are pervasive and difficult to change (Puhl & Heuer, 2009). The present research was designed to expand our understanding of why obesity attitudes are so entrenched by investigating the extent to which people make moral judgments about obesity. Negative moral evaluations about obesity were hypothesized to positively predict greater control attributions for obesity and disgust reactions toward obese people. It was also hypothesized that moralization of obesity is associated with downstream consequences such as endorsement of discrimination against obese people, inflated estimation of health risks associated with obesity, and the perception of general moral weakness in obese persons. Two studies were conducted, each with samples from YourMorals.org and a college student population. Study 1 supported the hypotheses and found that, across both samples, greater moralization was positively associated with control attributions, disgust, and the proposed consequences of moralization. Study 2 tested the hypothesis that moralization of obesity is in part caused by the belief that obesity is controllable. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions in which they read a brief introduction to the survey that emphasized that obesity is largely controllable or uncontrollable. The results from both samples indicated that the manipulation failed to significantly decrease control attributions and thus Study 2 did not provide an adequate test of the causal link between control attributions and moralization. The implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed
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Blinding Evaluations of Scientific Evidence Reveals and Reduces Partisan Biases
Get PDFDo political partisans evaluate new information in a biased way? Despite decades of research, this question has been difficult for psychologists to resolve. Proponents of rationalist accounts claim that ostensible biases can be solely explained by impartial, accuracy-motivated processes; in contrast, proponents of motivated accounts contend that partisans’ evaluations are often influenced by biased, directionally-motivated processes. Embracing the logic of blinding that underlies many scientific practices, I designed and deployed a novel experimental paradigm across four preregistered experiments (N = 4010) to critically test these two accounts. Participants were randomly assigned to evaluate the methodological quality of scientific evidence either before they knew its results (blinded evaluations) or after they knew its results (unblinded evaluations). The critical assumption underlying this design was that blinded participants provided purely impartial, accuracy-motivated evaluations. Unblinded participants, on the other hand, may or may not have been biased by their prior political beliefs when evaluating the new information. Indeed, in every study, unblinded participants were unduly influenced by their prior beliefs compared to their attitudinally-similar counterparts who made blinded evaluations. Partisans’ feelings and expectations produced independent, yet highly intertwined, biasing effects on their evaluations. These biases were most evident in unblinded participants’ denigration of politically-unfriendly information, rather than their veneration of politically-friendly information. Additionally, I found that blinding partisans’ quality evaluations influenced how credible they found politically-unfriendly information and how they updated their beliefs in response to that information. I discuss how these findings can be integrated into existing theoretical models—including Bayesian models of belief updating—to provide more accurate descriptions of political cognition. Ultimately, these results disconfirmed strong rationalist accounts of partisan evaluations and supported the existence of partisan biases
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Self-Enhanced Reports of Happiness: Implications for Subjective Well-Being Research and the Ideological Happiness Gap
Get PDFResearch on subjective well-being (SWB; i.e., happiness) relies heavily on self-report methodologies. This dissertation explores the influence of self-enhancement, or the tendency to evaluate oneself in an unrealistically positive way, on self-reported judgments of happiness and life satisfaction. Further, it examines how accounting for self-enhancement can influence--and in some ways, even reverse--our understanding of happiness differences between political conservatives and liberals. Three studies in Chapter 2 demonstrate a distorting effect of self-enhancement on self-reports of SWB. It is shown that both dispositional levels of self-enhancement and experimentally manipulated self-enhancement motivation lead to a tendency to report SWB at unrealistically favorable levels in social comparative judgment tasks, as well as on established scales of SWB. Chapter 3 of the dissertation examines group-level differences in self-enhancement between political conservatives and political liberals. Meta-analyses of eight measures of self-enhancement reveal significant positive relationships with general, economic, social, and moral dimensions of political conservatism. Chapter 4 examines whether liberal-conservative differences in self-enhancement explain why conservatives typically report greater SWB than liberals. Chapter 4 finds that conservatives' stronger tendency to engage in self-enhancement fully mediates the ideology--SWB relationship. Three additional studies assess happiness-related behaviors among liberals and conservatives using large archives of text from the U.S. Congressional Record and Twitter, along with photographs from the U.S. Congressional Pictorial Directory and LinkedIn. Chapter 4 shows that liberals use more frequent positive emotional language and less frequent negative emotional language, and also that liberals smile more intensely and genuinely than conservatives. These findings support the hypothesis that conservatives' reports of SWB are attributable to a self-enhancing style of self-report. In the Epilogue, practical implications of the research are discussed, specifically regarding the use of self-report methods to assess and compare group-level differences in SWB for use in public policy decision making. Theoretical implications of the research are also discussed. In particular, the nature of the long-debated relationship between self-enhancement and well-being is discussed, as are recommendations for measuring SWB, along with potential implications for re-conceptualizing multiple (i.e., defensive) manifestations of happiness
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Motivated Reasoning in the Public Domain: Three Variations on a Theme
Get PDFThe concept of motivated reasoning describes when people’s processing of information is driven by prior motivations, such as self-preservation, social-identity threats and worldview maintenance. In the public domain, strong political and social identities shape political and moral debates. In this dissertation I present three papers that address motivated reasoning in the context of three public debates: abortion, hate speech and COVID-19 policies. The first paper examines how abortion attitudes are related to other attitudes not directly related to termination of pregnancy, testing competing ideological explanations abortion attitudes. Across three studies, data show support for the liberal and conservative explanations of abortion attitudes, but the evidence is stronger for the latter. The second paper studies how people judge an ambiguous expression as hate speech, based on the group being targeted and the person’s ideology. I found that liberals are particularly attuned to denounce an ambiguous statement as hate speech, and that the target’s perceived victimhood partially drives these effects. The third paper studies the relationship between COVID-19 related policies, partisanship and exposure to the virus. No relationship was found between the exposure to the virus and changes in policies: people keep partisan policy views, despite of pathogen threats. All studies confirm the main tenet of themotivated reasoning approach: people’s views are often not driven by rational considerations, but rather by motivations to defend their worldview and their social groups
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The Nature and Sources of Viewpoint Bias in Evaluations of Political Protest
Get PDFThe First Amendment grants wide-ranging protections for political speech, but extreme forms of protest are not typically protected. Crucially, First Amendment protections are viewpoint-neutral in spirit: the perspective endorsed in a political protest does not alter its acceptability in legal terms. And yet, political bias is a pervasive feature of human psychology, raising questions about the extent to which people can set aside their personal views when judging the acceptability of a political protest. Across two surveys and two experiments (N = 3890), I present evidence that Americans preferentially evaluate disruptive protests they agree with compared to those they disagree with. Participants did this both in their judgments of the protests’ acceptability (Studies 1, 3, and 4) and in their reactions to the suppression of those protests (Studies 2 and 4). This viewpoint bias was persistent: it did not diminish with increasing knowledge about the First Amendment (Studies 1, 3, and 4), with increasing endorsement of abstract free speech principles (Study 2), or with instructions to evaluate protests using specific criteria (Study 4), and it persisted even when participants considered two protests that were identical save for their viewpoints (Study 3). Finally, biased assessments of protest acceptability can occur even when normative criteria are applied in a viewpoint-neutral way: participants straightforwardly disapproved of protests they saw as extreme (e.g., dangerous, intimidating), regardless of their agreement with the cause, but perceptions of extremity were themselves biased by agreement with the protest cause. Thus, if and when biased judgments of acceptability stem from low-level biases in perceived extremity, then depolarization interventions that simply attempt to promote objective judgment may fail because they target the wrong mechanism of bias. Taken together, the present work suggests that viewpoint bias in evaluations of political protest is both widespread in the population and deeply embedded in perception
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The Importance of Ideology varies across Sociocultural Contexts
Get PDFAlthough ideology is widely studied, less is known about how it varies across sociocultural contexts. Ideology is an organizing structure for political attitudes in that positions on a core set of political attitudes have been found to be aligned along a liberal-conservative ideological dimension. Some personality-based approaches to political psychology suggest that, because ideology arises from low-level psychological features, the political attitudinal structure of ideology is likely to be consistent across sociocultural contexts. However, the cultural psychology perspective suggests that both low-level psychological features and their higher-level political attitudinal manifestations may differ across cultures. The five studies in this dissertation examined this tension using eight datasets from the General Social Survey, applying linear and logistic regression and lasso regression, and the machine learning techniques of random forest classification and regression and support vector machine classification. Across these studies, the importance of ideology as an organizing structure varied across sociocultural contexts, especially across race, education, and income lines. The associations between ideological self-placement and measures of political attitudes were weaker for those with lower incomes and with no college education, and the associations were almost entirely absent for Black Americans. In addition, this dissertation examined other ways that political concerns are prioritized, beyond ideology
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Politics of Trauma: Party Affiliation Moderates the Relationship between Media Exposure to Collective Trauma and Mental Health Consequences
Get PDFMedia exposure to collective traumatic events has a significant impact on mental health, even on those who are not directly exposed to the tragedy. Despite the relevance these events have on political processes and narratives, scarce research has addressed the question of how the effects of media exposure may differ depending on an individual’s political orientation and party affiliation. Previous research in social and political psychology suggests contradictory predictions of who should be most affected by news coverage of a collective tragedy, so I explored this question using existing high-quality datasets collected in the context of a wider research project on collective trauma. I conducted a set of secondary analyses on a large nationally representative sample (n = 4,657), surveyed in the aftermath of two collective traumatic events: the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombings and the 2014 Ebola Outbreak. In the Boston Bombing survey, regression analyses revealed that the effect of media exposure to the tragedy on acute stress was moderated by party affiliation: both Republican and Democrats had lower sensitivity to media exposure than subjects not affiliated with either party. In the Ebola survey, these findings were replicated in two mental health outcomes. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that party affiliation, but not ideology, drove the protective effect for Republicans and Democrats. This suggest that political self-categorization, as a form of social identity, may buffer from uncertainty in collective tragedies
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The Valorization of Effort
Get PDFEffort is valued in human societies, but is it valued beyond what one’s efforts produce? In two experiments, I tested whether or not effort serves as a signal of one’s moral character, even in situations where greater effort did not lead to greater productivity. Participants read short vignettes about a high-effort and low-effort worker in randomized order and evaluated each target on a variety of person perception measures. In both studies, and in both between- and within-subjects analyses, participants perceived the high-effort worker as more moral than the low-effort worker, even when controlling for perceived warmth, competence, and productivity. In the second experiment, participants were also willing to pay the high-effort worker around $1000 more per year than the low-effort worker doing the exact same amount of work. These effects were not moderated by participants’ political orientation or Protestant Work Ethic scores. These results support a cognitive evolutionary account of effort valorization that may transcend cultural boundaries. Future directions and implications for research on effort valorization are discussed
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Examining, Correcting, and Failing to Correct Politically Biased Judgments and Memories in Real-World Contexts
Get PDFThis dissertation brings together three projects at the intersection of politics, bias, memory, and decision making. The five studies in total explore how people come to political judgments, when they might be biased in those judgments, how their memory might be affected, and what real-world consequences this can have.The first chapter describes a longitudinal study conducted over the course of the 2016 presidential election. The study collected data from 602 U.S. citizens on Amazon Mechanical Turk during the presidential primaries in May 2016, with questions focused on voters’ feelings towards, and preferences for, the candidates seeking each major party’s nomination. A follow-up survey was sent to participants again in October 2016 just before the general election to see how their attitudes changed and what they remembered about their past preferences. Participants were re-surveyed once more in January 2017 just before the inauguration to look at their reactions to the election, feelings towards the former candidates, and memory of past attitudes. Across a variety of questions, people’s memory for their past attitudes was strongly influenced by their present attitudes; more specifically, those who had changed their opinion of a candidate remembered their past attitude as being more in line with their current feeling than it actually was. This was especially strong among people who were more confident in their memory and their own rationality. I also investigated the presence of false memory, and found high rates of participants remembering news events that didn’t happen and misremembering what candidate they had supported.In the second chapter, three studies are presented in the domain of political polling, looking at how the placement and order of questions can create contexts that appear to increase or decrease political polarization. In all three studies, each with over 800 people, participants had to make judgments about similar accusations against two politicians, one Democrat and one Republican, with each rating on a separate page. On the first judgment, partisans provided strongly disparate ratings, with both Democrats and Republicans giving low credibility to the accusations against their in-group politicians and high credibility to the accusations against the out-group. On participants’ second ratings, however, the groups were much closer together. This is because, after making their first rating, participants’ second rating was more in line with their judgment of the first, similar accusation. In one study (but not others), this consistency was increased by first having participants commit to relevant, general principles about whether people should believe this type of accusation in general.Finally, Chapter 3 takes a look at the growing problem of politically-oriented “fake news,” or completely false stories or headlines. In the real world, such fake news stories are designed to appeal to specific groups of people and be shared widely within these groups. Previous studies found that adding a warning tag to false headlines has minimal effect in reducing belief in these falsehoods. The chapter starts with a secondary analysis of prior data showing a partisan congruency effect, where warnings may help reduce belief in news that goes against a person’s political orientation, but shows less effect when the news supports a person’s political orientation. Following up on that, I conducted a study with over 400 online participants, testing a modified warning that comes before people read false headlines and comparing it to warnings presented at the same time as or after the headline. Participants were shown a series of news items, with the false ones labeled as such with one of the three warning types, and then asked two weeks later how true they thought each headline was. While the before-headline warning was initially very effective, and showed some stronger effects than the other warnings, the follow-up survey two weeks later showed both high levels of belief in the articles and a partisan congruency effect where people were more likely to believe the news that fit with their political orientation, even when they had known just two weeks ago it was false.Across these three chapters, I look at the effects of politics, bias, and motivation on our memory and judgment in real-world political contexts. The effects of political allegiance are apparent not only on our opinions of politicians, but also on our memories of ourselves and the world around us. These effects are incredibly strong, and far too often we are unaware of them. Some manipulations were effective at reducing differences between ingroup and outgroup judgments, while others were not. These studies add to our understanding of the role of political allegiances on our judgments and memories by identifying some sources of these effects, showing how they play out in real-world contexts, and testing solutions that are more and less likely to show long-term impact in these divisive contexts
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