Saving Face: Identifying Voter Responses to Black Candidates and Female Candidates

Much of what we know about the responses of voters to Black candidates and female candidates comes from experimental research. Yet the accuracy of experimental data can be threatened by the possibility that social desirability pressures contaminate self‐reporting. We address this threat in a project that considers psychological approaches to reducing social desirability pressures. Offering participants the opportunity to explain their decisions about sensitive subjects, such as voting for a Black or female candidate, can lessen social desirability pressures. We analyze this approach across three commonly used samples: undergraduate, adult convenience, and adult national. Our results suggest that existing experimental research overestimates voter support for Black and female candidates, but these issues can be mitigated with the simple innovation presented here.     

Managers’ selection preferences: The role of prejudice and multicultural personality traits in the assessment of native and immigrant job candidates

PresentationStatistics across European countries show that immigrants have a disproportionate lower employment probability than persons born in the host country (SOPEMI, 2010). Explanations to this phenomenon are complex.ObjectivesAn experiment was conducted to investigate the relationship between multicultural personality traits and managers’ selection preferences in the hiring of native vs. foreign-born job candidates. We proposed that this relationship was mediated by prejudice.MethodsNorwegian managers (n = 222) were presented with one Turkish immigrant job candidate and two Norwegian-born, less qualified job candidates. The managers completed the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) and the Blatant Prejudice Scale (SBPS).ResultsWe found that the threat and rejection blatant prejudice subscale and Emotional stability predicted the managers’ hiring preferences. Specifically, the higher threat and rejection subscale scores and the lower emotional stability scores, the more likely it is that the managers preferred to hire a native, less qualified candidate over the Turkish immigrant candidate. The effect of emotional stability on candidate preference was not mediated by prejudice.ConclusionsThe results suggest that managers’ feelings of threat due to foreign-born immigrants’ participation in the host society (political conservatism), and threat due to intercultural interactions, are significantly related to foreign-born immigrant job candidates’ chances of being hired.     

Emotional,Sensitive, and Unfit for Office? Gender Stereotype Activation and Support Female Candidates

Women are underrepresented at all levels of elected office. It is suspected that gender stereotypes hinder the electoral success of female candidates, but empirical evidence is inconclusive on whether stereotypes have a direct effect on voting decisions. This empirical conflict stems, in part, from the assumption that voters automatically rely on gender stereotypes when evaluating female candidates. This study explicitly tests the assumption of automatic stereotype activation. I suggest that stereotype reliance depends on whether stereotypes have been activated during a campaign, and it is only when stereotypes are activated that they influence evaluations of female candidates. These hypotheses are tested with a survey experiment and observational analysis. The results show that campaign communication activates stereotypes when they otherwise might not be activated, thereby diminishing support for female candidates.     

God and Country: The Partisan Psychology of the Presidency,Religion, and Nation

Overt love of God and country have seemingly been prerequisites to be president in the United States in recent decades, if not always. Indeed, the 2008 presidential race was replete with campaign messages showcasing such perspectives—that Barack Obama and John McCain were religiously faithful and deeply patriotic. Scholarship demonstrates the potential political power of explicit appeals to America and Christianity; however, little research has examined (a) citizens' perceptions of candidates' ties to faith and nation and (b) how these impressions may be related to electoral attitudes and intended vote. We address this gap, measuring both explicit and implicit indicators of the Christian‐ness and American‐ness of Obama and McCain. We expected and found that both explicit and—in a final‐entry regression position—implicit perceptions of these traits related to voters' overall candidate attitudes and intended vote choice and that they were connected significantly more strongly for our sample of self‐described Republicans than Democrats. Results illuminate these partisan differences and raise questions about their implications for U.S. presidential politics in years to come.     

The Minimal Cue Hypothesis: How Black Candidates Cue Race to Increase White Voting Participation

Racial group interests can compete in politics. One way competition may occur is when Black candidates cue racial thinking among Whites, leading to rivalry at the ballot box. I address this hypothesis with theories of identity, affect, and racial cognition. I argue that Black Congressional candidates cue these factors among Whites, leading the factors of White racial prejudice and White race liberalism to impact Whites' voting participation. I employ logistic regression analysis of data from the American National Election Study in 1988, 1992, and 2000. The effects of racial prejudice on the predicted probability of voting occur among all Whites, as well as White Republicans, White Democrats, and White conservatives. The effects of White race liberalism occur among all Whites, as well as White Democrats and White liberals. The effects are strongest when Whites are in elections with Black candidates that are either challengers or in open seats.     

Motivations, Goals, Information Search, and Memory about Political Candidates

This study investigated the ways in which motivations and goals affect patterns of political information-seeking and the consequent structure of memory about candidates. Undergraduate participants used a computerized system that displayed different layers of information about fictional political candidates; the system recorded the strategies they used to search through this information. Results showed that motivations to engage in effortful processing produced tendencies to engage in within-candidate searches, better recall, and memory structures clustered by candidate. The goal of forming impressions of the candidates, which was expected to lead to within-candidate searching, was in fact modestly associated with weaker tendencies to do so, once effort was taken into account. Impression-formation goals, however, were associated with less attribute-based memory structures. The findings confirm that the manner in which people acquire candidate information has important consequences for the way they store that information in memory, and that these processes vary according to individual motivations and goals.     

Causal judgements about two causal candidates: Accounting for occurrences,estimating strength,and the importance of interaction judgements

When two possible causes of an outcome are under consideration, contingency information concerns each possible combination of presence and absence of the two causes with occurrences and nonoccurrences of the outcome. White (2008) proposed that such judgements could be predicted by a weighted averaging model integrating these kinds of contingency information. The weights in the model are derived from the hypothesis that causal judgements seek to meet two main aims, accounting for occurrences of the outcome and estimating the strengths of the causes. Here it is shown that the model can explain many but not all relevant published findings. The remainder can be explained by reasoning about interactions between the two causes, by scenario-specific effects, and by variations in cell weight depending on quantity of available information. An experiment is reported that supports this argument. The review and experimental results support the case for a cognitive model of causal judgement in which different kinds of contingency information are utilised to satisfy particular aims of the judgement process.     

Introduction to the special issue on “psychological research and practice in organ transplantation”

This paper provides a brief overview of articles in this Special Issue on Psychological Research and Practice in Organ Transplantation. The articles provide empirical information on the psychological adaptation of transplant candidates and recipients, as well as addressing the myriad ethical and clinical issues evident in the field of organ transplantation. Heart, liver, lung, kidney, and bone marrow transplantation for children and adults has increased in frequency in recent years, and the articles address the need for more sophisticated and comprehensive assessment of psychological concomitants. The Guest Editor's Top Ten list of research needs which transplantation psychologists might further address is discussed in this article.