The Subtle Influence of Check and X Marks: How Symbolic Markings Influence Judgment

Symbols can exert an influence on how we think, feel, and even behave. Here we examine whether symbolic markings serve as primes and influence how people make judgments. We propose that making either a check or an X mark to indicate an opinion can lead people to process the same information differently, thereby influencing the judgment people make. Across four experiments, we find that the check and X marks carry different symbolic associations; people associate check with good and X with bad. We also find downstream consequences of these mental associations. People who make positively connoted check marks (as opposed to negatively connoted X marks) to indicate their judgments are more agreeable toward familiar, controversial social policies as well as market research survey items on values and life styles. Differential symbolic markings with check and X marks seem to shape how people think and make judgments.     

Knowing Versus Caring: The Role of Affect and Cognition in Political Perceptions

This paper examines the importance of political knowledge in shaping accurate perceptions of the political world—specifically, how levels of general political knowledge influence the accuracy of specific political judgments, how those judgments might also be shaped by "wishful thinking," and how political knowledge attenuates the impact of wishful thinking on political judgments. Predictions of who would win the U.S. presidential election in 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996, as surveyed in the National Election Studies conducted in those years, were used as a measure of the accuracy of political perceptions. Analysis of these data reveals that both political knowledge and wishful thinking are important determinants of the accuracy of people's perceptions; in addition, the impact of wishful thinking on perceptions is attenuated by political knowledge.     

Political Consequences of Partisan Prejudice

Political conflict sometimes spills over into unrelated areas of our lives. A growing literature documents examples of partisan considerations influencing judgments and behaviors in ostensibly nonpolitical contexts such as the workplace, academia, and dating, among others. To date, the focus has been on demonstrating these phenomena, with scant consideration of their downstream effects. When politics spills over into nonpolitical settings—that is, when political considerations influence nonpolitical judgments or behaviors—what are the consequences? I address this question with a novel theory and a nationally representative survey experiment. I find that norms exist regarding the spillover of political considerations into nonpolitical matters—and that spillover can have its own political consequences. When one's copartisans discriminate against members of the other party, it can lead to decreased partisan identification and depolarization. Partisan discrimination in nonpolitical settings can—in some sense ironically—reduce affective polarization. That said, partisans also appear to hold a double standard: They expect copartisans to give an edge to fellow copartisans.     

Can I trust you? Negative affective priming influences social judgments in schizophrenia

Successful social interactions rely on the ability to make accurate judgments based on social cues as well as the ability to control the influence of internal or external affective information on those judgments. Prior research suggests that individuals with schizophrenia misinterpret social stimuli and this misinterpretation contributes to impaired social functioning. We tested the hypothesis that for people with schizophrenia, social judgments are abnormally influenced by affective information. Twenty-three patients with schizophrenia and 35 healthy control participants rated the trustworthiness of faces following the presentation of neutral, negative (threat-related), or positive affective primes. Results showed that all participants rated faces following negative affective primes as less trustworthy than faces following neutral or positive primes. Importantly, this effect was significantly more pronounced for participants with schizophrenia, suggesting that schizophrenia may be characterized by an exaggerated influence of negative affective information on social judgment. Furthermore, the extent that the negative affective prime influenced trustworthiness judgments was significantly associated with patients' severity of positive symptoms, particularly feelings of persecution. These findings suggest that for people with schizophrenia, negative affective information contributes to an interpretive bias, consistent with paranoid ideation, when judging the trustworthiness of others. This bias may contribute to social impairments in schizophrenia.     

Evaluating everyday explanations

People frequently rely on explanations provided by others to understand complex phenomena. A fair amount of attention has been devoted to the study of scientific explanation, and less on understanding how people evaluate naturalistic, everyday explanations. Using a corpus of diverse explanations from Reddit’s “Explain Like I’m Five” and other online sources, we assessed how well a variety of explanatory criteria predict judgments of explanation quality. We find that while some criteria previously identified as explanatory virtues do predict explanation quality in naturalistic settings, other criteria, such as simplicity, do not. Notably, we find that people have a preference for complex explanations that invoke more causal mechanisms to explain an effect. We propose that this preference for complexity is driven by a desire to identify enough causes to make the effect seem inevitable.     

Irrational Wanting and Subrational Liking: How Rudimentary Motivational and Affective Processes Shape Preferences and Choices

People's wanting and liking reactions reflect not only high-level beliefs, but also the operation of rudimentary biopsychological processes. Previous studies suggest that the following wanting and liking processes may be relevant to political behavior: irrational wanting (where wanting is triggered by activation of the brain dopamine system and becomes dissociated from liking); unconscious liking and wanting (where evaluative judgments and behavior are modified without awareness of the eliciting affective stimuli or of the underlying affective response); and fluency-based liking (where preferences are influenced by the ease of stimulus processing). This review suggests how conceptual and methodological tools from affective neuroscience and psychophysiology can refine our understanding of basic affective and motivational processes that shape political attitudes and choices.     

The Relationship between Cultural Values and Political Ideology, and the Role of Political Knowledge

Cultural theory maintains that four worldviews—egalitarianism, individualism, hierarchicalism, and fatalism—can be used to describe people and societies. We examine survey measures of two of those worldviews—egalitarianism and individualism—to understand their relationship with belief systems. Contrary to what one might expect based on the cultural theory literature, we find that people with low levels of political knowledge seem not to have coherent worldviews regarding these issues. In contrast, people with high levels of political knowledge respond to egalitarianism and individualism questions as if they were opposite ends of a single, liberal-conservative continuum, rather than two of four distinct worldviews. We conclude that cultural theory researchers should take account of the influence of political knowledge whenever they investigate worldviews.     

Naloxone modulates visual judgments of similarity but not dissimilarity

Endogenous opioids have been implicated in mediating (placebo) analgesia, in reward processes, and in the regulation of socially relevant emotions. To explore their potential contributions to higher cognitive functions, we used a novel task with tachistoscopically presented (for 150 ms) pairs of meaningless figures. Healthy right-handed men judged the similarities and dissimilarities between the two figures on a visual analogue scale (VAS) in two separate runs. In a double-blind, between-subjects design, subjects were administered intravenously either 0.2-mg/kg naloxone or placebo 10 min prior to the task, and VAS judgments and response latencies were measured. We found a significant interaction between substance group and type of judgment: The magnitude of the similarity judgments was lower in the naloxone than in the placebo group, while dissimilarity judgments remained uninfluenced by the treatment. Reaction latencies and mood scores, assessed before and after substance administration, did not differ between the two groups, indicating that the findings did not rely on altered motor performance or motivation. We suggest that naloxone decreased the “similarity criterion” in comparative judgments, indicating its potentially modulatory effect on visual cognition. The task introduced here could be used for the implicit study and quantification of subtle affective–cognitive processes beyond the level of mere questionnaire data.     

Feeling states of people experiencing depression,anxiety, or comorbid depression and anxiety symptoms during a multi-day charity cycling ride: An ecological momentary assessment study

ObjectiveRegular exercise has substantial benefits for mental health. The way people feel during exercise impacts motivation. This study investigated whether experiencing depression, anxiety or comorbid depression and anxiety symptoms impacted feeling state responses throughout a charity cycling ride.DesignTo achieve this aim, we conducted an ecological momentary assessment study of feeling states (via Pleasant and Negative Affect Schedule items) across a multi-day cause-based cycling event.MethodMultivariate and univariate generalized linear mixed models was applied to test how affective and self-conscious emotional experiences changed across time and whether feeling state change differed between people experiencing depression, anxiety, or comorbid depression and anxiety symptoms.ResultsFor people experiencing depression symptoms, positive feelings decreased and negative feelings increased throughout the event. People experiencing anxiety symptoms had initially elevated negative feeling states that decreased across the event. For people experiencing comorbid depression and anxiety symptoms, changes in pride mirrored that of people experiencing only depression symptoms (decrease from initially high levels); whereas changes in guilt mirrored that of people experiencing only anxiety symptoms (initially high levels that decreased throughout event).ConclusionsThese findings demonstrate that depression and anxiety symptoms put people at risk for having negative affective and emotional experiences during exercise events and that these effects are further complicated when depression and anxiety symptoms co-occur. Exercise events and interventions must consider how to mitigate the potentially demotivating impacts that negative affective judgments can have on motivation for future exercise participation of people experiencing depression and/or anxiety symptoms.     

More Than Weighting Cognitive Importance: A Dual-Process Model of Issue Framing Effects

Issue frames in policy discourse and news reporting regularly influence citizens' political opinions. Yet, we only have a limited understanding of how and among whom these framing effects occur. I propose a dual-process model of issue framing effects arguing that we must understand mediators of framing (the how question) in connection with individual-level moderators of framing (the whom question). Experimental results show that issue framing affects opinion through different psychological processes depending on who the receiver of the frame is. Among the moderately politically aware or those having weak political values, framing effects were mediated through processes of changing importance of considerations as well as changing content of considerations. Among the highly aware, only the importance change process mediated framing effects, while there were no framing effects among those least aware or those having strong values.     

Accuracy Motivations,Predispositions, and Social Information in Political Discussion Networks

This analysis studies how variation in individuals' motivation to form accurate judgments affects the process of political discussion. I use a small‐group experiment in which participants compete to elect the simulated candidate who best represents their true preferences. I manipulate economic incentives to control participants' accuracy motivations. The results show that accuracy‐motivated participants, compared to those with weaker accuracy goals, seek discussants with more expertise and a more diverse set of viewpoints, place greater emphasis on socially provided messages, and reduce emphasis on political predispositions. As a result of these differences, however, accuracy‐motivated participants rely more heavily on biased information. Hence, accuracy motivations do not produce more accurate judgments or better decisions. Although previous work on political discussion has largely ignored the role of motivations, these results suggest that accuracy motivations play an important but nuanced role in this process. Strengthened accuracy motivations increase individuals' exposure to political expertise and ideological diversity but also increase their potential to be misled.     

The Automaticity of Affect for Political Leaders, Groups, and Issues: An Experimental Test of the Hot Cognition Hypothesis

We report the results of three experimental tests of the "hot cognition" hypothesis, which posits that all sociopolitical concepts that have been evaluated in the past are affectively charged and that this affective charge is automatically activated within milliseconds on mere exposure to the concept, appreciably faster than conscious appraisal of the object.
We find support for the automaticity of affect toward political leaders, groups, and issues; specifically:

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  Most Ss show significantly faster reaction times to affectively congruent political concepts and significantly slower response times to affectively incongruent concepts;

       
  
  

Voters, Emotions, and Memory

In this paper we argue that emotional response to information encountered in campaigns has implications for the likelihood of remembering that information at the time of the vote. Most voting models are built on what voters remember—whether it is the placement of candidates on issues, or opened ended responses to prompts. That recall of memory is biased is well-known, but the extent to which those biases are driven by affective response to candidate information has not been studied. Using dynamic process tracing, we examine voters' emotional responses, information search, and candidate evaluations during a simulated presidential primary campaign. By manipulating anxiety and the amount of incongruent information that voters encounter, we can detect the direct influence of affect in information processing. We find evidence that voters are more likely to remember information that generates any affective reaction as opposed to information for which the subjects report no emotional response. However, we find little evidence that anxiety has a special role, compared to enthusiasm or anger, in increasing the likelihood that an individual item is remembered. This challenges a primary contention of the theory of Affective Intelligence that anxiety leads to more memories for campaign information.     

On the Importance of Attribution Theory in Political Psychology

Attribution theory, which was initially applied to the study of academic achievement, has generated a large amount of research in psychology. Judgments of causal responsibility, an important facet of attributions, have since been studied in a variety of other contexts, revealing that they pervade our understanding of the social world. The present paper considers the many ways in which causal judgments, particularly attributions of responsibility, influence political life. Examining scholarship primarily from the fields of psychology, political science, and sociology, I discuss how perceptions of responsibility are linked to ideology and how they influence policy attitudes (welfare, affirmative action, abortion, gay rights) and perceptions of international conflict (beliefs about terrorism and war). An argument is made for increased communication among fields and a more systematic application of attributional models to the study of political judgments.     

Relationships Between Meaning in Life,Social and Achievement Events,and Positive and Negative Affect in Daily Life

Research on meaning in life has generally focused on global meaning judgments. This study examined how people's daily experiences, represented by events that occur in daily life, influence their perceived sense of meaning on a daily basis. One hundred sixty‐two college students completed daily reports for 2 weeks. We examined the relationships among daily social and achievement events, daily positive and negative affect, and daily meaning in life. In addition, we tested the possible moderating influence of depressive symptoms on these relationships. Positive daily social and achievement events were related to greater daily meaning, above and beyond the contributions of daily positive and negative affect. Negative social and achievement events were related to less daily meaning, and negative achievement events covaried with daily meaning above and beyond positive and negative affect. Depression moderated the relationships between positive events and meaning, such that people who reported more depressive symptoms had greater increases in daily meaning in response to positive social and achievement events than individuals who reported fewer symptoms. These findings suggest the important role that daily events may play in fluctuations in people's affective experiences and sense of meaning in life.     

"Moralism" and the Gender Gap: Judgments of Political Ethics in Japan

This article investigates whether women are, as many claim, "moralists"—that is, moral and ethical standard-setters who seek clean politics and have strict standards for public officials. An analysis of data from the 1996 Japanese Elections and Democracy Study survey and from 18 focus groups conducted in 1996 indicates that women in Japan are not moralists. As elsewhere, there is a gender gap in Japan on "issue preference sets," with women favoring a "care" agenda, but women assign political ethics less importance than do men, even though women are more likely to see adverse effects from political corruption. Studying people's judgments of four ethics scenarios reveals minimal gender gaps; controlling for education and age, women's judgments overall are less, not more, strict than men's. Among women, age is a better predictor of moralism than education; older women are stricter than younger women on political ethics. This is attributed to gender-based differences in moral reasoning: Japanese women and men both rely heavily on a "relation-based" frame (which is situation-specific and requires extensive social information), but gender stratification patterns create information inequalities. Younger women lack social information necessary for judging political misconduct, whereas older women overcome the information deficit through life experience.     

Intuitive Political Theory: People's Judgments About How Groups Should Decide

Societies must make collective decisions even when citizens disagree, and they use many different political processes to do so. But how do people choose one way to make a group decision over another? We propose that the human mind contains an intuitive political theory about how to make collective decisions, analogous to people's intuitive theories about language, physics, number, minds, and morality. We outline a simple method for studying people's intuitive political theory using scenarios about group decisions, and we begin to apply this approach in three experiments. Participants read scenarios in which individuals in a group have conflicting information (Experiment 1), conflicting interests (Experiment 2), and conflicting interests between a majority and a vulnerable minority who have more at stake (Experiment 3). Participants judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. Overall, we find that participants prefer majority‐rule voting over consensus, leadership, and chance when a group has conflicting interests or information. However, participants' support for voting is considerably diminished when the group includes a vulnerable minority. Hence, participants showed an intuitive understanding of Madison's concerns about tyranny of the majority.     

Affective Contagion in Effortful Political Thinking

We offer a theory of motivated political reasoning based on the claim that the feelings aroused in the initial stages of processing sociopolitical information inevitably color all phases of the evaluation process. When a citizen is called on to express a judgment, the considerations that enter into conscious rumination will be biased by the valence of initial affect. This article reports the results of two experiments that test our affective contagion hypothesis—unnoticed affective cues influence the retrieval and construction of conscious considerations in the direction of affective congruence. We then test whether these affectively congruent considerations influence subsequently reported policy evaluations, which we call affective mediation. In short, the considerations that come consciously to mind to inform and to support the attitude construction process are biased systematically by the feelings that are aroused in the earliest stages of processing. This underlying affective bias in processing drives motivated reasoning and rationalization in political thinking.     

The Political Relevance of Emotions: “Reassessing” Revisited

Ladd and Lenz (2008 ) question a central claim of affective intelligence theory (AIT), namely that anxiety affects political judgments indirectly by reducing the role of predispositions and increasing the role of contemporary information. They claim that alternative hypotheses, especially the notion that emotions are simply rationalizations of political preferences, better explain the role of emotion in politics. Their ultimate conclusions, however, rest on an overly narrow view of both theory and evidence. Even if one accepts Ladd and Lenz's reanalysis of survey data, there is insufficient evidence to cast aside either AIT or the hypothesis that anxiety affects the mode of political judgment. AIT explains a broad range of political relationships that are unchallenged by the reassessment and which cannot be explained by the offered alternatives. Moreover, numerous experimental studies reject the alternative explanations in favor of an exogenous, often interactive role for anxiety. AIT will surely require amendment, if not abandonment, someday. Competing theories of emotion already exist and, unlike the alternative championed by Ladd and Lenz, these theories too suggest a meaningful role for emotion in political judgment and behavior. For now, given all of the research to date, AIT is a robust competitor, scarcely in need of being “salvaged.” Burgeoning research on the political relevance of emotions will benefit from further debates, replications, and extensions, as long as new claims and evidence are put in proper perspective.     

Finding the Right Value: Framing Effects on Domain Experts

By defining the essence of a policy problem, an issue frame shapes how individuals think about a political issue. In this research, we investigate framing effects among domain experts, an understudied yet increasingly important set of individuals in the policymaking process. Because domain experts have extensive and highly structured knowledge on a particular topic, they are likely to actively process issue frames to which they are exposed. Consequently, we hypothesize that frames consistent with experts' values will be particularly influential, whereas frames inconsistent with their values will lead to contrast effects. We test our hypotheses on a unique set of domain experts by examining professional farmers' attitudes toward no‐till agriculture. Using an experimental design, we find evidence that environmental values interact with frames to influence farmers' interest in no‐till, especially when farmers are exposed to a novel frame.