Presidential Physiognomies: Altered Images, Altered Perceptions

Digitized facial images of Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Kennedy were manipulated to test whether subtle feature alterations were powerful enough to shift social perceptions of them. It was expected that exaggeration of facial maturity cues would lead to shifts in perceptions of power (dominance, strength, and cunning) and warmth (honesty, attractiveness, and compassion). Each familiar face was made more neotenous by enlarging eyes and lips, and made more mature by reducing the sizes of these features. Undergraduate perceivers rated one version of each face. Though unaware of feature changes, perceivers were affected by them. In Study 1, neotenous features made Clinton seem more honest and attractive, even to perceivers who did not support him in the 1996 election. In Study 2, mature features made Kennedy, the youngest U.S. president, seem more cunning and made Reagan, the oldest president, appear less powerful and less warm; neotenous features reduced ratings of both Kennedy's and Reagan's power, whereas neotenizing the familiar face of Clinton increased ratings of his honesty and attractiveness without diminishing perceptions of his power. Overall, the results suggested that subtle alterations of proximate physiognomic cues can be used to manipulate perceivers' social perceptions of familiar political leaders.     

Motivation for Collective Action: Group Consciousness as Mediator of Personality, life Experiences, and Women's Rights Activism

Prior research on political activism focused on direct predictors of collective action (e.g., life experiences), with little attention paid to what psychologically motivates individuals to act. The group consciousness literature provides an obvious psychological motive for activism, but ignores individual difference variables that differentiate people who develop group consciousness from those who do not. This article integrates the two literatures on activism and group consciousness, and presents a model whereby group consciousness mediates relationships between collective action and personality and life experiences. The general model was evaluated empirically by examining feminist consciousness and women's rights activism in two samples. Feminist consciousness was found to mediate relationships between activism and anumber of personality and life experience variables, including low authoritarianism, political salience, sexual oppression, and education about women's position in society. The possible extension of this model to other kinds of political activism is discussed.     

On the Varieties of National Attachment: Blind Versus Constructive Patriotism

Two studies explored a theoretical distinction between "blind" and "constructive" patriotism. Blind patriotism is defined as an attachment to country characterized by unquestioning positive evaluation, staunch allegiance, and intolerance of criticism. Constructive patriotism is defined as an attachment to country characterized by support for questioning and criticism of current group practices that are intended to result in positive change. Items designed to investigate these dimensions of national attachment were administered to two groups of undergraduates in separate surveys. Measures of the two constructs derived from factor analysis of the responses proved to be reliable and valid. Blind patriotism was positively associated with political disengagement, nationalism, perceptions of foreign threat, perceived importance of symbolic behaviors, and selective exposure to pro-U.S. information. In contrast, constructive patriotism was positively associated with multiple indicators of political involvement, including political efficacy, interest, knowledge, and behavior. The implications of this distinction for theory and research on patriotism are discussed.     

BOOK REVIEWS

Irene Bloom, J. Paul Martin, and Wayne L. Proudfoot (eds.), Religious Diversity and Human Rights
Scott D. Sagan, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons
Diane Vaughan, The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA
Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters
Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen, Culture of Hoor: The Psychology of Violence in the South
Ted Benton (ed.), The Greening of Marxism
Neil J. Kressel, Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide & Terror
Kristen Renwick Monroe, The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity
Stanley A. Renshon, The Psychological Assessment of Presidential Candidates
Ole R. Holsti, Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy
Bernice Lott and Diane Maluso (eds.), The Social Psychology of Interpersonal Discrimination
Milton Lodge and Kathleen M. McGraw (eds.), Political Judgment: Structure and Process
V. M. Bekhterev, Collective Reflexoloby, Part I
James T. Tedeschi and Richard B. Felson, Violence, Aggression, and Coercive Actions     

Book Reviews

Sudhir Kakar, The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict
Paul Kivel Uprooting Racism Benjamin P. Bowser and Raymond G. Hunt (eds.), Impacts of Racism on White Americans, Second Edition
Michael S. Lund, Preventing Violent Conflicts: A Strategy for Preventive Diplomacy
Marc Howard Ross, The Management of Conflict: Interpretations and Interests in Comparative Perspective
Amos Kiewe (ed.), The Modern Presidency and Crisis Rhetoric
Sarah Sanderson King and Donald P. Cushman (eds.), Political Communication: Engineering Visions of Order in the Socialist World
Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice     

On the Representation of Strong and Weak Attitudes About Policy in Memory

A priming paradigm was used to explore the representation of attitudes about government policies in memory. Participants performed pairs of tasks in quick succession. The focal tasks involved evaluating a policy or thinking of one of its consequences. The results showed that thinking of a consequence of a policy speeded up its subsequent evaluation, regardless of whether the participant held a strong or weak attitude about the policy. Evaluating the policy speeded up thinking of one of its consequences for strong attitudes but not for weak ones. In general, it took participants longer to think of a consequence of a policy than to evaluate it. The implications of these results for existing views of the representation of attitudes in memory are discussed.     

Can Support for Democracy and the Market Be Learned in School? A Natural Experiment in Post-Communist Poland

A new program in civic education was introduced in Poland in 1994 to foster support for democracy and a market economy among youth. This program was based on the active teaching/learning model of education, with frequent student participation in "democratic games" and "market simulations." This paper focuses on a sample of students, ages 14 and 15, who participated in this program and contrasts them with students subjected to the traditional civics program. The main analysis of cross-sectional data (gathered in 1996) reveals two countervailing effects: Relative to students in the control group, students in the treatment group were less likely to take extreme anti-democratic or extreme anti-market positions, and they were less likely to take extreme pro-democratic or extreme pro-market positions. Additional analysis of panel data (1994–1996) supports the conclusion that active participation in civic education results in students' political attitudes regressing toward the mean, that is, in their rejection of extreme stances. These findings not only contradict the no-effect hypothesis but also demonstrate a peculiar, partially intended and partially unintended, impact of civic education in schools on political learning.     

Unity and Diversity in American Political Culture: An Exploratory Study of the National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity

Drawing on participant observation and quantitative analysis, this paper investigates the National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity, a series of local conversation projects organized by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1995 and 1996. After linking this program to debates about American political culture, the paper analyzes the observational and survey data in light of five hypotheses about the conversations. The conversations reveal fundamental, unresolved dilemmas regarding the compatibility between American identity and ethnic pluralism, although the participants sometimes cope with these dilemmas in culturally creative ways.     

Tricking into the Position of the Outcast: A Case Study in the Emergency and Effects of Communist Power

This paper is an experiment in understanding the logic of communism from the perspective of political psychology. In Hungary, communism became a means for transforming the entire psychical make-up of a country in a moment of reduced intensity of consciousness, a transitory or liminal period, produced by the Second World War. In liminal conditions, unconscious impulses are set free that are channeled by the use of archetypical images. As an empirical case study, this paper discusses the speeches of the first post-war Hungarian Communist Party leader, Matyas Rakosi, delivered in the years immediately after the devastations of the war, in an effort to discern the techniques and mechanisms by which the Communist Party managed to capture the allegiance of a large segment of the population. The analysis of these speeches and their effects indicates that communism was not merely a consequence of Soviet occupation, and therefore the withdrawal of the troops did not eliminate the lasting, mostly hidden but still predominant, effects of communism on the countries that were in its grip.     

Women and the Social Movements of the 1960s: Activists, Engaged Observers, and Nonparticipants

Many women in the generation that attended college during the 1960s have reported that they were influenced by the social movements of that era, even women who did not participate in them. In addition to political activists, social movements also appear to include "engaged observers"—individuals who are attentive to movement writings and activities, and express moral and even financial support for them, but who take no other action. Although activism in a movement may be the best predictor of future political action, engaged observation may be related to other indicators of political socialization, such as a powerful felt impact of the movement and well-developed political attitudes. Evidence to support this notion is drawn from studies of three samples of college-educated white and black women.