Political Psychology Workshop

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Friday, 5/18/2012, 12:30-2:00pm, Pick 506
Travis Carter, UChicago Booth School of Business
Nation as motivation: How American cues implicitly activate a goal for power

Findings across 7 experiments show that Americans possess an implicit association between America and the goal for power, such that incidental exposure to American cues automatically activates a general goal for power. Subtle exposure to American cues increased the accessibility and desirability of power, and led to a greater desire for more American power. The implicit association between America and the power goal also led to effects in non-national contexts, including increased importance of high status job attributes, and increased motivated bias when given feedback on a power-related personality test.  Although political ideology strongly predicted explicit beliefs about America and power, it did not predict any of the implicit effects of America on power.  Instead, the only predictor of the effect of American cues on the desire for power was degree of American news exposure, such that the effects emerged only for those with at least some moderate exposure.  This suggests that the implicit association between America and the power goal is formed through media exposure and is independent of explicit beliefs about how America should use its power.  Theoretical and practical implications will be discussed.

 

Special time & location: Thursday, 5/10/2012, 4-5:30pm, Rosenwald 011
Co-sponsored with the Department of Psychology:
Brenda Major, University of California-Santa Barbara
The American Dream and Legitimization of Social Inequality
All cultures have shared beliefs about why some people have more than others, or a dominant status ideology. In the United States, the dominant status ideology has been called The American Dream — the belief that status and wealth are individually earned and gained by hard work and merit. My talk will describe a series of experiments in which I show how endorsing or activating beliefs associated with the American Dream affect feelings of personal entitlement, perceptions of discrimination, and psychological responses to discrimination, and how they do so differently for members of advantaged vs. disadvantaged social groups. Collectively, these experiments illuminate the psychological processes by which embracing the American Dream legitimizes and perpetuates social inequality.

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Friday, 4/27/2012, 12:30-2pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Daniel Wisneski, University of Illinois at Chicago
Moralized politics: Exploring the concept of chronic political moralization
In two studies, we examined the concept of attitude moralization in politics. Specifically, we assessed participants’ tendency to imbue their political views with a sense of morality and investigated the consequences of this political moralization and whether political moralization is distinct from similar concepts. In Study 1 we introduce and establish the reliability and predictive validity of a new measure of political moralization in the context of the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Across three waves of data collection taking place in the three months surrounding election day, we examined the relationship between political moralization and people’s level of political engagement (i.e., attention to the election news, likelihood showing up to vote), political orientation, and political extremity. In Study 2 we further tested the convergent and discriminant validity of our political moralization measure. We also examined the relationship between our measure and several other psychological constructs to provide insight into the characteristics of political moralizers. Across both studies, results showed that our measure of political moralization is sufficiently reliable and predicts politically relevant variables, such as political news consumption and voting behavior. Furthermore, we find that moralization within the political domain is distinct from similar constructs. Most importantly, political moralization is distinct from moralization of everyday phenomena outside of politics and appears to occur at similar rates for both the political left and right.

Friday, 3/30/2012, 12:30-2pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Mark J. Landau, University of Kansas
More than words: Metaphorical thought in social life
Metaphor, traditionally viewed as a superfluous linguistic ornament, is in fact a cognitive tool used to understand an abstract concept in terms of a dissimilar, more concrete concept. This talk presents an overview of research exploring metaphor’s role in social perceptions, attitudes, and behavior. Avenues for future research are discussed.

Special time & location: Thursday, 3/8/2012, 4:30-6pm, in Stuart 105
Cindy D. Kam & Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, Vanderbilt University
Name Recognition and Candidate Support
The mass media devote a great deal of attention to high profile elections, but in American political life, such elections are the exception, not the rule.  The majority of electoral contests feature candidates who are relative unknowns.  In such situations, does name recognition breed contempt, indifference, or affection?  Existing work presents modest theory and mixed evidence.  Using three laboratory experiments, we provide conclusive evidence that name recognition can affect candidate support; and, we offer strong evidence that a key mechanism underlying this relationship is inferences about candidate viability and not inferences about traits or experience. We further show that the influence of name recognition breaks down in the face of more a more germane cue, incumbency.  We conclude with a field experiment that demonstrates the robustness of the name recognition effect to a real world political context, that of yard signs and a county election.

Friday, 3/2/2012, 12:30-2pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Chad Levinson, UChicago
Moral Subsidy: The Role of Domestic Non-Governmental Organizations in U.S. Foreign Policy
The problem of interest group influence in foreign policy has troubled politicians, analysts and scholars for some time. However, the record of success among some of the most influential interest groups in U.S. politics presents a decidedly mixed picture. Some groups succeed in small matters, but fail in large ones. More puzzling, some groups get their way on major issues, but fail in minor ones. This dissertation aims to determine what kind of influence foreign policy oriented interest groups have on the political process. I argue that domestic non-governmental organizations involved in foreign policy debates have leverage over a particular form of political information. They provide “moral subsidy” for a previously chosen policy when the executive suffers some persuasive deficit. The proposed research will explore the concept of moral subsidy, identify it as an important feature of the politics of U.S. foreign policy, test its effectiveness, and explore its consequences. Note to the Political Psychology workshop: Chapter 4 of the proposed dissertation will test experimentally whether moral subsidy has the intended effect of persuading individuals to support a chosen policy initiative. Do subjects assess the virtue of a policy more favorably when non-governmental actors speak on its behalf, relative to policies that are promoted only by President? I anxiously await your comments on experimental research design.

Friday, 2/24/2012, 12:30-2pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Amir Shawn Fairdosi, UChicago
The Difference Similarity Makes: How Descriptive Representation Leads to Policy Representation
U.S. legislators often hail from strikingly different social, economic, racial, geographic, generational, and cultural backgrounds than most of the general public. Are legislators who come from similar backgrounds as their constituents more likely to legislate in accordance with those constituents’ policy preferences? And if so, why? In this talk, I turn to the “Why” question, positing that legislators who come from similar backgrounds as their constituents are better able to discern what they want in terms of legislative behavior, and that these reduced information costs account for the increased policy responsiveness from these legislators. Because I will not be presenting results (as I’m building off of the results of a previous chapter), I am hopeful that the psychologists and political psychologists in attendance will help me think of ways to refine and test this explanation.

Friday, 2/17/2012, 12:30-2pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
DATA BLITZ:
Alysson Light, UChicago
Who do we think the unemployed are? Exploring perceptions of a novel (stigmatized?) group
Rebecca Kala Rosen, UChicago
Identity and political attitudes of Cuban immigrants
Ashley Wynn, UChicago
The psychological cost of institutional racism to majority group members

Friday, 2/3/2012, 12:30-2pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Destiny Peery, Northwestern University
Rational Basis or Legal Bias? Lay vs. Legal Conceptions of Discrimination
The US Supreme Court recently decided Ricci v. DeStefano (2009), a discrimination case pitting two theories of discrimination defined by the law (disparate treatment vs. disparate impact) against one another. Ricci highlighted not only two forms of legally actionable discrimination, but also raised questions about the role of victim status in decisions about the outcomes of discrimination cases, as well as possible differences in lay versus legal conceptions of discrimination. The present research examines these questions specifically. Multiple studies investigate lay perceptions of discrimination types recognized by the law, as well as the influence that perceiver and victim status have on these perceptions. These studies examine the role that one’s own status as a majority or minority group member affects (1) perceptions of the two forms of discrimination, (2) perceptions of discrimination against majority groups, and (3) perceptions of discrimination against minority groups. Results suggest that group membership affects perceptions between and within type of discrimination based on who is negatively impacted such that individuals may think discrimination against similar-status individuals is worse than the same discrimination against other-status individuals, particularly when that discrimination is more ambiguous, as in disparate impact claims. In addition, people may, in some cases, be unable to prevent their personal opinions of discrimination (including their biases in favor of seeing discrimination for certain victims but not others) from affecting their legal decision-making.  Future directions and implications for the legal field will be discussed.

Friday, 1/20/2012, 12:30-2pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Paper Discussion
Discussant: Alysson Light, UChicago
Are attitudes well formed and enduring? We will discuss this topic based on Zaller & Feldman, 1992, and Schwarz, 2007. Fazio’s paper provides good background/context for the discussion.
Download papers here:
http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/politicalpsych/files/2012/01/ZallerFeldman1992.pdf
http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/politicalpsych/files/2012/01/schwarz2007.pdf
http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/politicalpsych/files/2012/01/Fazio2007.pdf

Friday, 1/13/2012, 12:30-2pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Juliana Schroeder, UChicago
Are you hearing what I am hearing?  How mental engagement varies by
mode of communication
Our ability to understand a speaker’s mind varies as a function of how the speech is communicated regardless of its content.  In three studies, we find that observers think communicators are less human and sustain more negative perceptions of the speaker in terms of competence, agency, and likability when they read the transcript of the communicator’s speech as opposed to watching or listening to it. We show that perceptions of mind vary as a function of the nature of the speech as well as the mode of communication.   To examine why reading a transcript leads to more negative perceptions, we show that even though observers spend less time reading than watching or listening, they are even more accurate and recall greater number of details when they read compared to watch or listen.  However, observers rate no difference in the mind of communicator when they read the communicator’s firsthand writing compared to listening to the communicator speak their own writing aloud.  These findings have important implications for political communication; a follow-up study shows that observers find speakers to be less persuasive, believe they have thought less hard about their views, and are less rational when they read the transcript of a political speech compared to watching or listening to the speech.

Friday, 1/6/2012, 12:30-2pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Mark Brandt, DePaul University & P.J. Henry, NYU Abu Dhabi
Gender inequality and gender differences in authoritarianism
Authoritarianism may be endorsed in part as a means of managing and buffering psychological threats (e.g., Duckitt & Fisher, 2003; Henry, 2011). Building on this research, we postulated that authoritarianism should be especially prevalent among women in societies with high levels of gender inequality because they especially face more psychological threats associated with stigma compared to men. After establishing that authoritarianism is, in part, a response to rejection, a psychological threat associated with stigma (Study 1), we used multi-level modeling to analyze data from 54 societies to find that women endorsed authoritarian values more than men, especially in individualistic societies with high levels of gender inequality (Study 2). Results show that the threats of stigma for women are not uniform across different cultures, and that the degree of stigma is related to the degree of endorsement of psychologically protective attitudes such as authoritarianism.

Friday, 11/18/2011, 12:30-2pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Alexandra Moffett-Bateau, UChicago
Discussant: Marcus Board, UChicago
Public Housing and the Development of Political Imagination
Housing policy shapes the lived conditions of its residents by making decisions about where they live, whom residents can live with and even how they live. In turn, these lived conditions shape how outsiders view the residents and how residents view themselves and their own individual capacities. My argument takes Joe Soss’ work, as well as the work of others within the policy feedback literature, as a point of departure. Although I agree that welfare recipients undergo political learning from welfare bureaucracies, I disagree that this is where their political development begins and ends. In this paper I argue that Chicago public housing policy has created a public sphere where low-income people develop political imagination through public-spirited conversation. Drawing from six months of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, I find that, despite at times being denied access to the larger public sphere, public housing residents have found ways to effect change within their own smaller public spheres. While public housing resident political advocacy often goes on under the radar of the larger public eye, it is still very much happening in ways that are effective and significant.

Friday, 9/30/2011, 12:30-2pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Jon C. Rogowski, UChicago
Electoral Choice, Ideological Conflict, and Political Participation
The responsible party model posits that clearly-defined alternatives between candidates and parties increase political participation. But though party polarization is at historic levels, the effects of this development for participation remain deeply ambiguous. Using candidate survey data from Project Vote Smart to characterize the level of ideological conflict between pairs of candidates in U.S. House and Senate races, this paper reports new evidence that polarization has a demobilizing impact on voter turnout. These results are robust to a wide range of empirical specifications and contexts. Furthermore, the results provide no support for existing explanations that emphasize ideological or partisan intensity for the relationship between polarization and turnout. Instead, I find that increasing levels of candidate divergence reduce turnout primarily among citizens with lower levels of political sophistication. These findings are the most robust evidence to date of the impact of polarization on political participation.

Friday, 5/20/2011, 12-1:30pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Aaron Kay, Duke University
Compensatory Control and the Motivated Defense of Social, Political and Religious Systems

Friday, 4/29/2011, 12-1:30pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
D A T A _ B L I T Z

Ren Belcher, UChicago
Racial Prejudice and Public Opinion on American Health Care Reform
The American health care reform initiatives of 2010 provide a unique opportunity to study the relationship between race, politics and social policy. Not only does the Affordable Care Act promise to reduce dire discrepancies in health conditions between blacks and whites; it is also a major accomplishment of America’s first black President, and has been widely attributed as a presidential undertaking (“Obamacare”). Uncoincidentally, “Obamacare” has been controversial, and it witnessed a much more profound resistance than similar proposals made by Presidents Nixon and Clinton. Observational and experimental studies have already suggested that racial prejudice may explain some of this phenomenon (Knowles et al 2009; Hetherington and Weiler 2010). Still, we do not know much about the specifics of the relationship, and no existing study has addressed the possibility that anti-Obama prejudice is confounded by a more generalized racial resentment, akin to the racially charged opinion associated with welfare policies such as food stamps and federal cash assistance.
This paper uses a survey-embedded experiment to test the hypothesis that racial prejudice reduces support among whites for health care reform. Results indicate that white subjects, especially those who are politically independent, insured and wealthy, react negatively to health care legislation endorsed by a black politician. There is very little evidence that the race of the plan’s beneficiaries has an effect on whites’ reactions. In addition, whites express higher levels of specific concern, racial resentment and colorblindness when considering a plan endorsed by a black politician. In short, public opinion on health care reform is subject to the influence of multi-faceted and substantial racial prejudice, especially surrounding the race of the politician in charge.”

David Raphael, UChicago
The Technetronic Paradox: The Relationship Between Internet Access and the Political Outcome of Democratization Movements
Over the past decade, the Internet has emerged as a political force. During the Arab Spring, autocrats in Egypt, Bahrain, Algeria and Libya disconnected their nations from the Internet in the hopes of quelling domestic democratization movements. Was this a sound tactic? What is the fundamental relationship between Internet access and the political outcome of democratization movements? In order to evaluate this relationship, I employ two case studies: first of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution, which succeeded despite a low level of national Internet access; and second of the Belarusian Jeans Revolution, which failed despite a high level of national Internet access. Through my case analysis, I determine that low access to the Internet cannot prevent the Internet from functioning as a political force. Through a two-step flow model of communication, Internet activism can still flourish in low-access environments. This study has important implications for the ongoing Arab Spring and future democratization movements.

Alex Simon, UChicago
Prime Time Politics – Entertainment Television’s Ability to Inform and Sway Public Opinions
The average American watches almost 1,500 hours of
television every year. Yet, no recent studies have analyzed the impact this content has on the audience’s political perceptions. Most studies also focus on news programs, ignoring the majority of content consumers view, namely entertainment programming. Using the Implicit Assocation Test, I tested the hypothesis that entertainment television can sway public opinion. The results demonstrate strong evidence of movement, both on the implicit and explicit level. My findings reveal the need for more in-depth research into television’s ability to sway opinion.

Friday, 3/11/2011, 12-1:30pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Thomas Leeper, Northwestern University
Discussant: Tom Wood, University of Chicago
Bias in Political Communication Experiments
Research on political communication effects has enjoyed great progress over the past 20 years. A key ingredient underlying these advances is the increased usage of experiments that demonstrate how communications influence opinions and behaviors. A potential problem with nearly all of these studies, however, concerns the lack of attention to events that occur prior the experiment – that is, “pretreatment events.” In this paper, we explore how and when the pretreatment environment affects experimental outcomes. We argue that ignoring pretreatment has led extant work to over-state the malleability of the mass public, miss the identification of potentially two groups of voters – what we call malleability reactive and dogmatic, and contradict macro-level work on aggregate public opinion trends.

Friday, 3/4/2011, 12-1:30pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
John Brehm, Nicole Tutunik, & Danielle Glazer, University of Chicago
Persuasion & Policy Debates
Courtesy of a well-established political psychology literature on
persuasion, we know that both intrinsic (subjective self-interest, or
“core”) and extrinsic (not explicitly self-interest, or “peripheral”)
routes to persuasion affect how people process information about
debates. In this initial report on persuasion in the context of debate
about the health care policy, we examine the content of letters to
editor to the New York Times during the year of debate about Pres.
Obama’s Health Care proposal. Even though one can reasonably assume
that the letter writers are both motivated and able to process information
about the debate (and thus most likely to be in the core route),
that they make significant use of peripheral appeals. Indeed, nearly all
of the letter writers made at least one use of a peripheral appeal. Of
these peripheral appeals, authority, liking, and consistency were most
common, occurring in nearly half of the letters. Further, nearly all
of the appeals to either core or periphery are positive ones. There are,
of course, natural questions to raise about the generalizability of
the results (an elite population, screening by elite editorial board
for interest and germaneness, etc.), but the dominance of the peripheral
routes to persuasion among such an audience is noteworthy.

Friday, 2/25/2011, 12-1:30pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Rosalind Chow, Carnegie Mellon University
The good and the bad of affirmative action support: Why
dominant group members support redistributive policies
When and why will dominant group members support affirmative
action policies? Research suggests that concerns about justice often
drive dominant group members’ support. In this talk, I will present
two alternative accounts for dominant group support: the desire for
positive group-esteem and the desire to maintain the group’s dominant
position. Across a number of studies, I will present evidence that
dominant group members will increase their support to group-harming
redistributive policies when they perceive their own group to be
unfairly advantaged, but not when they perceive the subordinate group
to be unfairly disadvantaged, suggesting against a strict account of
justice. In addition, I will discuss evidence that a desire to
protect the dominant group’s position will sometimes lead
pro-hierarchy dominant group members to, ironically, increase their
support for redistributive policies.

Friday, 2/18/2011, 12-1:30pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Elizabeth Jacobs, Loyola University Chicago
What’s fair isn’t always fair: The case for group-level justice research
Establishing fair procedures to regulate intragroup disagreements should
engender cooperation while inhibiting conflict. Yet what is a “fair”
procedure might vary for members of different factions. To understand
perceptions of fairness in group decision-making, the present research
developed and utilized the Fair Group Procedures Scale. Exploratory and
confirmatory factor analyses revealed a four-factor structure along two
dimensions: the means of distributing decision-making power
(proportionality to equality) and the normative value of the approach
(desirable to undesirable). Data suggest that deeming a particular
decision-making procedure “fair” is predicted by one’s majority/minority
position within a group. Furthermore, experimental data suggest that
social change (i.e., reversals of majority/minority positions) affects
procedural fairness preferences. Results support the socially
constructed nature of fairness its potential role in intragroup
conflict.

Friday, 2/11/2011, 12-1:30pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Marissa Guerrero, University of Chicago
Symbolic Opposition and Material Support: Explaining Racial Differences in Attitudes about Welfare Benefits and Behavior Regulations
Given the incredible decentralization of United States welfare policy and the numerous programs that serve morally regulatory functions as well as materially redistributive ones, it no longer makes sense to gauge welfare opinion through simple questions about general spending. I use new data from a nationally representative study to show that compelling and nuanced racial differences between Blacks and Whites emerge on policies that exist at the nexus of benefits and behavior regulation. I offer an account of these differences rooted in lived experience and ideology.

Friday, 1/21/2011, 12-1:30pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Jocelyn Dautel, University of Chicago
The Cost of Conflict: Children’s Reasoning about Ethno-Political Identity in Northern Ireland
Understanding the developmental origins of prejudice may be critical in preventing social conflict. This research is a preliminary exploration of children’s social reasoning based on ethno-political identity in Northern Ireland. Children’s beliefs about identity, nationality, stability of group boundaries, and intergroup relations are investigated. Further, we explore how such reasoning may be malleable given early exposure to different environments.

Friday, 1/7/2011, 12-1:30pm, in Pick 506 (5828 S University Ave)
Jasmine DeJesus, University of Chicago
Young children’s reasoning about national group membership
Current political and legal debates have raised questions concerning the origins and malleability of national identity. Previous research in social psychology suggests that adults implicitly associate “American” with “White”, and children associate more positive attributes with those whom they identify as part of their own national group. The present research investigates the role of race, social behavior, and language – a feature found to robustly influence children’s social evaluations – in guiding children’s reasoning about national group membership.

11/19/2010
Emma Wyatt, University of Chicago
Feeling Targeted: A Profile of Your Most Engaged Listener
Emma is investigating feeling targeted by persuasive discourse – specifically putting together a model of the behavioral, physiologic, and neural patterns marking felt-targetedness. Her work aims to be applicable to such diverse fields as advertising, politics, and science writing.

11/1/2010
Chris Mann, University of Miami
When Will Election Day Be Extinct in Illinois (and the US)? The Power of Convenience in Voter Preference for Voting By Mail and Early Voting
Dr. Mann is exploring why voters chose to shift away from traditional Election Day voting to cast ballots early in-person or by mail. This involves the psychology behind voter choices, institutional change (laws and administrative rules on conducting elections), and sometimes even the psychology behind the decisions and actions of county clerks and other election administrators. The empirical evidence is drawn from several multi-state field experiments about voter preference for early voting and/or voting by mail, observational data from voter registration rolls on the increasing use of these forms of convenience voting, surveys of voters about convenience voting, and surveys of election officials about their attitudes and actions to promote these forms of convenience voting.

10/29/2010
Ingrid Johnsen Haas, Ohio State University
The Uncertainty Paradox: Feelings of Threat Moderate the Effect of Uncertainty on Intolerance
Past research in political psychology has shown that uncertainty can lead to closed-mindedness and intolerance. However, research on power and persuasion shows that certainty sometimes has similar effects. We discuss the relationship between threat and uncertainty and how threat may influence these effects. Specifically, we hypothesize that responses to uncertainty depends on feelings of threat and demonstrate this in two experiments. Results show that uncertainty increases intolerance when threat is present, but certainty increases intolerance with threat is absent.

10/22/2010
Jamila Celestine-Michener, University of Chicago
The Politics of Laying Low: Medicaid, Policy Feedback and Political Inaction in Marginalized Populations
As the nation’s public health insurance option for nearly 60 million low-income Americans, Medicaid is tremendously consequential in the lives of the disadvantaged. Nonetheless, empirical investigations of Medicaid’s affect on individual political outcomes are scant. This paper undertakes just such an inquiry in a two-tiered analysis that draws on a variety of large sample surveys. The first part of the paper examines the overall relationship between Medicaid and political participation while the second part looks within Medicaid populations to identify specific factors that account for Medicaid’s observed link to political behavior. The findings reveal that Medicaid usage is strongly associated with decreased political participation. Moreover, among Medicaid recipients, this dampening participatory impact stems from at least two important forces: 1) an attitudinal disposition towards “laying low” and avoiding resistance within the Medicaid bureaucracy 2) institutional design choices made by particular state Medicaid programs. Taken together, these results tell a disheartening story: as beneficiaries make their way through the bureaucratic morass of the Medicaid system, both their overtly perceived experiences and their less tangible institutional contexts cultivate a passivity that permeates political life and further stifles participation in populations already among the least politically engaged.

10/8/2010
Eric Sosnoff & Peter McMahan, University of Chicago
Discussant: Alexandra Bass, University of Chicago
Why Are Blacks the Most Authoritarian Ethnic Group in America? A Multilevel Analysis
This paper studies the effects of perceived racism among African Americans on authoritarianism. We use multilevel modeling with poststratification to estimate these effects from nationally representative surveys and census data. Our approach represents a methodological advance to the extent that previous approaches lacked the statistical power to produce reliable estimates for sparsely sampled subsets of data. We find that, on the aggregate level, the effect of perceptions of Black-targeted racism among African Americans on their levels of authoritarianism is positive, significant, and large. In contrast, the effect for Whites is reversed. On the state level, these findings hold for almost 80 percent of the states that are adequately sampled. Previous scholarship has done a good job of explaining why Blacks are overwhelmingly Democratic despite their high levels of social conservatism and authoritarianism. The present study, to our knowledge, provides the first explicit and systematic attempt to explain why Blacks have such high levels of authoritarianism in the first place.

10/1/2010
Bethany Albertson, University of Texas – Austin
Anxious Politics: The effects of fear on learning and trust
Contemporary American political life abounds with crises and worry. Terrorist attacks, a warming planet, and flu pandemics all trigger the public’s anxieties. Meanwhile, politicians use fears of economic downturns and cultural changes to evoke the public’s worries about immigration. Political thinkers and democratic theorists express concern that fear may undercut citizens’ abilities to make rational political choices, yet recent research from political science and psychology paints a more hopeful picture of anxiety, suggesting that political fears may lead to more knowledgeable and trusting citizens. In my work with my co-author Shana Gadarian, we argue that anxiety triggers engagement in politics, but that it does so in potentially dangerous ways. This talk will present data from two studies on the effects of anxiety on learning and trust situated in two different substantive areas: immigration and the H1N1 virus. We demonstrate that 1) anxiety triggers learning, but it also prioritizes attention to threatening information, and 2) anxiety can increase trust in relevant governmental and non-governmental actors.

5/10/2010
Emir Kamenica, University of Chicago & Louisa Egan, Northwestern University
Discussant: Tom Wood, University of Chicago
Voters, Dictators, and Peons: Expressive Voting and Pivotality
Why do the poor vote against redistribution? We experimentally examine one explanation, namely that individuals gain direct expressive utility from voting in accordance with their ideology and understand they are unlikely to be pivotal; hence, their expressive utility, even if arbitrarily small, entirely determines their voting behavior. In contrast with a basic prediction of this explanation, we find that the probability of being pivotal does not affect the impact of monetary interest on whether a subject votes for redistribution.

4/26/2010
Marc Hetherington, Vanderbilt University
Discussant: Eric Sosnoff, University of Chicago
Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics
In the years following 9/11, surveys have revealed high levels of public support for policies related to the War on Terror that, many argue, contravene longstanding American ideals. Extant research suggests that such preferences result from the activation of authoritarianism, i.e., that the terrorist attacks caused those predisposed toward intolerance and aggression to become even more intolerant and aggressive. Using data from two national surveys, we argue that the reverse is more likely the case. Those who score high in authoritarianism are, as a baseline, less supportive of civil liberties and more supportive of foreign policies involving the use of force than others, and these preferences do not shift in response to threat. Instead, those who are less authoritarian adopt more restrictive and aggressive policy stands when they perceive a threat to their safety. In other words, many average Americans become susceptible to “authoritarian thinking” when they perceive threat.

4/12/2010
Peter K. Hatemi, University of Iowa
Discussant: Ellie Shockley, University of Chicago
The Neurobiology of Political Preferences: Fusing the Life and Social Sciences
Over the last half century, the technology to identify neurobiological processes involved in decision making and preference formation has become widely available. Indeed, cognitive, developmental, neuroscientific and genetic approaches have emerged as dominant paradigms in exploring human behavior. However, only recently have these approaches been used to explore political traits. In this presentation I provide the results from original empirical studies which further our understanding of the complex interaction of neurobiology and social forces, which are critical in gaining a more complete understanding of cognition, perception, preferences, and ultimately similarities and differences in political behaviors in complex environments. The findings support that the integration of science and social science favors a new model of exploring learning and development – one that embraces complexity, employs a “systems theory” approach, and openly listens to the fascinating dialogues taking place among the myriad forces of change.

4/5/2010
Christopher M. Graziul & Terry Clark, University of Chicago
Political Scenes: Linking the Consumer Environment to Political Identity
One tension within the study of political identity is the extent to which beliefs are inherited from others versus the extent to which these beliefs are rationally constructed. Green, Palmquist and Schickler’s (2004) Partisan Hearts and Minds exemplifies how this debate has only begun to be resolved. Given the cacophony of influences adults become exposed to, large questions remain concerning the mechanisms through which stable partisan beliefs are perpetuated over the life course. We present one possible answer by employing a theoretically motivated accounting of the consumptive options available to voters in a given geographic area. Separate from work and the home, we posit that a vast array of spaces exist in which people voluntarily congregate for both economic and non-economic reasons. Further, we claim that the kinds of amenities available to individuals help shape or represent the communities which frequent them. County-level voting data for the 2000 Presidential Election is considered in conjunction with an original dataset derived from the County Business Patterns data made available by the Census Bureau. We test whether substantive relationships between the kinds of amenities within a county is associated with Republican vote share, after controlling for other variables typically associated with vote choice. Using what we call “Scenes” to describe the average consumptive environment of voters in a given county, multi-level modeling suggests moderate support for Thomas Frank’s thesis that uneducated, poor voters tended to vote more for George W. Bush.

3/29/2010
Lindsey Clark Levitan, Stony Brook University
Networks, Prejudice, and Political Attitudes: Influence of Social Network Members’ Prejudice on Durability and Impactfulness of Individual-level Prejudice
The current research examines the role of social network members in determining both the malleability of prejudice, and the extent to which prejudice influences political attitudes. In particular, this research introduces the concept of prejudice strength, i.e. the durability and impactfulness of prejudice, and examines the extent to which social network attitudinal composition influences prejudice strength. Prior research demonstrates that individuals embedded in social networks that contain a variety of attitudes towards a given political issue have weaker attitudes toward that issue than do individuals whose network members are in agreement with them with respect to that issue. Similarly, it was hypothesized that individuals whose social network members hold diverse views about another group will have weaker prejudice than individuals whose social network members hold prejudices congruent with their own. As a result, these prejudices (or lack thereof) will be more open to change, and have less influence on relevant political attitudes. Two studies examined the extent to which social network composition influences strength of prejudices. A preliminary study demonstrates with a college sample that an individual’s prejudice is more stable if close network members agree with it. Further, this was the case with respect to two different target prejudices: prejudice against gays and prejudice against Muslims. The second study replicates and extends this effect with a national sample. Further, the second study demonstrates that when individuals are surrounded by like-minded others, their prejudice is more closely linked to their political attitudes (here, attitudes toward gay marriage).

3/8/2010
Debbie S. Ma, University of Chicago & Thierry Devos, San Diego State University
The Role of Implicit National Identity in a Historic Bid for the White House
Research has identified a robust propensity to more readily ascribe the American identity to Whites than ethnic minorities (Devos & Banaji, 2005; Devos & Ma, 2008). However, the extent to which this tendency accounts for behavioral responses has never been examined. In the present research, we investigated the role of construal processes in the perception of political candidates and assessed how these perceptions might predict the willingness to support political candidates. Across 4 studies, we examined the degree to which individuals perceived Barack Obama, a Black presidential candidate, as an American relative to White politicians Tony Blair (Study 1), Hillary Clinton (Study 2), and John McCain (Studies 3 & 4). Results showed that Obama was viewed as less American at an implicit level compared to each of the other politicians when race was made focal and that this bias was attenuated, though not always completely eliminated, when personal identity was salient. Moreover, we found that the extent to which individuals implicitly linked the American identity to the politicians predicted willingness to support them, such that those who had difficulty seeing Obama as an American were less likely to support him. This effect held even after controlling for explicitly measured prejudice and political orientation. The results of this research suggest that race may play a more significant role than previously acknowledged in the perception and support of political candidates. Further, these findings are a testament to the notion that unconscious construal processes can be a powerful predictor of very deliberate behaviors.

2/22/2010
Marissa Guerrero, University of Chicago
Responsibilities of Reproduction: American Attitudes on Poverty, Family, and the State
How do attitudes about reproduction and family structure impact beliefs about social welfare? Welfare discourse and history strongly suggest that the regulation of families has always been central to American welfare policies, yet scholars of welfare attitudes have been slow to investigate this dimension. My work uses original survey research to explore the connections between family attitudes and welfare policy prescriptions. In particular, it highlights points of consensus and contention along lines of race, income, and education. My analysis allows us to analyze these ideas about family alongside questions of work ethic and race, which dominate prior studies of welfare attitudes. Furthermore, it shifts the focus away from white attitudes to consider also how Black Americans view these policy questions.

2/8/2010
Betsy Sinclair, University of Chicago
Detecting Social Networks: Design and Analysis of Multilevel Experiments

1/25/2010
Jason Seawright, Northwestern University
Discussant: John Thomas III, University of Chicago
Feeling Like a Change: Affect, Uncertainty, and Support for Outsider Parties
Emotional states are central to understanding how a new or outsider party’s electorate emerges, providing a unifying micro-level theoretical account that potentially reconciles diverse behavioral findings through a simple underlying psychological mechanism. When voters are broadly angry about the state of society, that anger reduces their degree of aversion to uncertainty. Because the risk and uncertainty connected with supporting an outsider who often has little political organization or track record is a central impediment to voting against the established parties, attitudes toward uncertainty have a causal effect on citizens’ choice to support a new as opposed to an established party. Hence, anger becomes a crucial cause of electoral support for outsider candidates; other, more remote causes can potentially be evaluated at least in part in terms of their effects via this anger-based causal pathway. The paper first develops the theoretical justification for this hypothesis, then presents evidence for the theory’s key causal claims drawn from an experiment in Peru.

1/11/2010
Travis Carter, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Long-term effects of a single exposure to the American flag on political behavior and judgment
It’s taken almost as a given that in America, the American flag means different things to different people; radically different ideological viewpoints are still understood to be fundamentally American. However, some have speculated that the American flag has in fact come to symbolize only one side of this ideological divide, specifically the Republican Party. Considering how prominent and ubiquitous the American flag can be in the daily lives of its citizens, and particularly during a national election, what consequences might result from it taking on a political slant? Recent research has demonstrated that the mere presence of national symbols can trigger associated information, and influencing judgments and behaviors in accordance with that information (e.g. Ferguson & Hassin, 2007). Consistent with this idea, in a study conducted during the 2008 American presidential election, we found that, compared to a control condition, a single American flag in the corner of a survey led participants to declare a greater intention to vote for the Republican Party candidate (McCain) over the Democratic Party candidate (Obama), and to shift both implicit and explicit attitudes to the political right. What’s more, these shifts in voting intentions, due to a single exposure to an American flag, led to similar shifts in actual voting behavior. Perhaps most surprisingly, these attitudinal changes appear to have endured considerably longer than typical priming effects. When contacted again seven months after the election, participants in the flag-prime condition reported more negative views about President Obama’s job performance.

1/4/2010
Laurel Brehm, University of Illinois
*Come learn about eyetracking and its uses in social science and psychological research*
Do bilingual speakers have a mental dictionary for each language they speak, or just one dictionary containing words from both languages? Does the access of these words change depending on who the speaker is and what environment they are in? Two eyetracking experiments looking at bilingual lexical access will be discussed, using traditional and low-tech eyetracking methodology, with particular emphasis on when eyetracking is useful and how it can be done with nothing more than a digital video recorder and a tripod.

11/30/2009
Alysson Light, University of Chicago
Consequences of Diverse Social Network Attitudes for Identity and Well-Being
Previous research has established that the diversity of political attitudes represented in our social network members play a profound role in influencing the attitudes we hold and our openness to persuasion (Visser & Mirabile, 2004), as well as our tolerance for people with opposing viewpoints and our degree of political engagement (Mutz, 2002). The present studies expand upon these findings to investigate the effects of such social exposure to divergent attitudes on the strength and coherence of one’s self beliefs, or self-concept clarity. Given the centrality of attitudes to the self, we anticipated that disagreeing with social network members would not only decrease attitude strength, but also decrease the confidence and clarity of one’s self-beliefs. In Study 1, students from the University of Chicago reported their attitudes on a target issue, and also the attitudes of up to five close others. Participants who reported greater divergence between their own attitude and the attitudes of their social network members reported experiencing lower self-concept clarity. In Study 2, a nationally-representative panel survey was conducted in which participants reported their attitudes and their network members’ attitudes on a target issue, responding to items assessing self-concept clarity, subjective well-being, and perceived stress. Individuals whose attitudes differed more from their network members’ reported lower subjective well-being and higher perceived stress. These effects were fully mediated by self-concept clarity. These results suggest that being embedded in social networks that reflect a diversity of attitudes has effects not only on attitude strength and political participation, but also on the structure of the self-concept and psychological well-being.

11/16/2009
Jasmine DeJesus, University of Chicago
Children’s Social Judgments About Accented Speakers: Foreigners, Southerners, and Mean People
Infants, children, and adults all use language to divide their social world. Previous research with adults demonstrates that adults easily make social judgments about others based on the language and accent with which they speak, however little research has investigated the emergence of these judgments in children, or when children become aware of cultural stereotypes (e.g., northerners are smarter, but southerners are nicer). In a series of studies, I examined children’s social judgments about individuals that speak in different foreign and regional accents, and who speak neutral, prosocial, or antisocial content. Through this research, I hope to better understand the way language and behavior influences children’s conceptions of others personalities, geographic origins and social status.

11/2/2009
G. Scott Morgan, University of Illinois at Chicago
The Distinct Effects of Moral and Religious Conviction on Politically Relevant Behaviors

10/19/2009
Tehama Lopez, University of Chicago
White Privilege vs. Black and Latino Disadvantage: How the Framing of Racial Inequality Affects the Policy Preferences of White Americans
When the matter of racial inequality is at hand, most consideration tends to focus upon those who have less than they ought to. But, what happens when we suggest that some people have more than they should? In this experiment I test whether framing racial inequality in terms of white advantage versus black disadvantage or Latino disadvantage affects whites’ attitudes about racial policies. Such policies include racial profiling, affirmative action in the workplace, reparations for slavery and Jim Crow, and tax breaks for businesses that locate in predominately black and Latino neighborhoods. Furthermore, I examine whether the strength of whites’ belief in meritocracy moderates policy opinion.

10/5/2009
Christopher Federico, University of Minnesota
Information, Motivation, and the “Use” of Ideology
Not all citizens in mass democracies are able to make effective use of the left-right ideological spectrum in evaluating political objects. Among other things, this failure to successfully learn use ideology makes it difficult for many citizens adopt ideologically consistent positions toward different political objects and form stable, crystallized opinions about particular political objects. However, research also suggests that political expertise, or factual political knowledge, increases the likelihood that individuals will make effective use of ideology. As such, expertise – an informational variable – has been at the center of most perspectives on the use of ideology. In contrast, my proposal argued that individuals who possess the information needed to understand the left-right continuum and place themselves on it in a substantive way (i.e., by adopting an ideological viewpoint based on its content), are not likely to use their resulting predispositions to form constrained attitudes unless they also have a strong motivation to evaluate the objects they encounter – i.e., a motivation I refer to as evaluative motivation. In several studies, I present evidence for this hypothesis with respect to generalized sources of evaluative motivation (e.g., the need to evaluate) and domain-specific evaluative motivations (e.g., personal involvement in the political domain and attachment to politically significant groups like parties).

5/31/2006
Kenworthey Bilz, Northwestern University Law School

5/17/2006
Vincent Hutchings, University of Michigan
Whose Side Are You On? Explaining Perceptions of Competitive Threat in a Multi-Racial and Multi-Ethnic National Sample

5/3/2006
Shang E. Ha, University of Chicago
Public Attitudes Toward Immigration in Multiracial America

4/19/2006
Larry M. Bartels, Princeton University
Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

3/8/2006
Elizabeth Mullen, Northwestern University
Ideological Differences in Personal and Public Compassion Following Hurricane Katrina

2/22/2006
Kathleen McGraw, Ohio State University
Embodying the Nation-State: Consequences for Attitude Formation

2/8/2006
Tyrone Foreman, University of Illinois at Chicago

1/11/2006
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, University of Chicago
Wounded Warriors: Understanding the Politics of the Strong Black Woman

11/30/2005
Tehama Lopez, University of Chicago
When Americans Recognize Privilege: What are its Implications on the Expression of Opinion Concerning Policies of Social Equality?

11/16/2005
Bethany Albertson, University of Chicago
Mysterious Ways: The Mechanisms of Religious Persuasion in US Politics

11/2/2005
Deva Woodly, University of Chicago
Wresting the Microphone: Authority and Rhetoric in the Transformation of Political Discourse

10/5/2005
Scott Althaus, University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign
Are America’s Wars Really Won or Lost on Television? Debunking the Spin Myth

5/19/2004
Dennis Chong, Northwestern University
The Experiences and Effects of Status Among Racial Minorities

5/19/2004
Dennis Chong, Northwestern University
The Experiences and Effects of Status Among Racial Minorities

5/5/2004
James Kuklinski, University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign
Not ‘Just the Facts Ma’am’: Motivated Reasoning in a High Information Environment

4/21/2004
Michael Schmitt, Purdue University
Responding to Group-Based Inequality: Social Dominance or Social Identity?

4/7/2004
Alice Eagly, Northwestern University
Gender Gaps in Sociopolitical Attitudes: A Social Psychological Analysis

3/10/2004
Jamie Druckman, University of Minnesota
Political Preference Formation: Competition, Deliberation, and the (Ir)relevance of Framing Effects

2/25/2004
John Brehm, University of Chicago
Ambivalence as Internalized Conflict

2/11/2004
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, University of Chicago
Liberation to Mutual Fund: The Political Consequences of Differing Conceptions of Christ in the African American Church

1/14/2004
Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago
Ideological Voting on Federal Courts of Appeals: A Preliminary Investigation

12/3/2003
John Schuessler, University of Chicago
Marketing War: Why Grand Strategy Doesn’t Sell

11/19/2003
Mark Sawyer, University of California – Los Angeles
‘Racial Democracy’ in the Americas: A Latin and North American Comparison

11/5/2003
Michael Reinhard, University of Chicago

10/22/2003
Jeff Mosenkis, University of Chicago
When is Discrimination not Discrimination? Culture and Workplace Promotion Patterns

10/8/2003
James Lindgren, Northwestern University School of Law & University of Chicago
Chasing Cherished Superstitions about Political Conservatives

5/28/2003
Larry Bobo, Harvard University
A Taste for Punishment: Race, Prejudice, and Criminal Justice Punitiveness in America

5/21/2003
Victor Ottati, Loyola University Chicago
The Psychological Determinants Of Political Judgment: Some Past, Present And Future Research

5/7/2003
Bernd Wittenbrink, University of Chicago
The Police Officer’s Dilemma: Using Ethnicity to Disambiguate Potentially Threatening Individuals

4/23/2003
Shira Offer, University of Chicago
The Contribution of Informal Support to the Economic Status and Daily Coping of Former and Current TANF Recipients

4/2/2003
Adam Berinsky, Princeton University
American Public Opinion and World War II

2/26/2003
Karen Stenner, Princeton University
The Authoritarian Dynamic and the Politics of Fear: Racism and Intolerance under Conditions of Threat

2/12/2003
Edith Rickett, University of Chicago
Differential Emotions in Prejudice

1/29/2003
Linda Skitka, University of Illinois at Chicago
Political Tolerance and Coming to Psychological Closure Following the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks: A Model Comparison Approach

1/15/2003
Kenneth Rasinski & Bethany Albertson, University of Chicago
The 9/11 Terrorist Attacks: Ethnic Differences in Emotional Response and Recovery

12/4/2002
Catherine Norris, University of Chicago
Ambivalence and Evaluative Space

11/20/2002
Eric Oliver, University of Chicago
Public Opinion and America’s Obesity Epidemic

11/6/2002
Cynthia Pickett, University of Chicago
Intergroup Harmony vs. Ingroup Loyalty: Gender and Self-Construal as Predictors of Intergroup Goal Orientation and their Implications for Political Behavior

10/23/2002
Scott Blinder, University of Chicago
The Reproduction of Modern Racism: The Role of Parents in the Development of White American Children’s Racial Attitudes

10/9/2002
Jon Krosnick, Ohio State University
Political Psychology vs. Psychological Political Science: What the Distinction Is and Why It Matters