Individuating information influences partisan judgments

Abstract

Three studies examined whether Democrats and Republicans expressed favoritism toward an ingroup political candidate, even when the candidates were presented as positive and bipartisan. Participants rated electability and traits, after reading party consistent (Passage 1) and positive, bipartisan information (Passage 2). Conservatism (Studies 1-3), the cognitive reflection test (Studies 2-3), and ingroup loyalty (Study 3) were examined. Republicans showed initially higher favoritism after the first passage. Both Republicans and Democrats showed lower ingroup favoritism after reading the second passage, although Republicans continued to show more favoritism than Democrats in some circumstances. Conservatism was associated with greater favorability toward the Republican candidate. Our results showed no evidence that CRT or ingroup loyalty mediated these associations. | 427PRICE-BLACKSHEAR Et AL. strongly subscribed to the ideology of their group, we expect that they will be more likely to indicate their ingroup candidate is more electable than their outgroup candidate and rate the their ingroup candidate's traits as more positive than the outgroup candidate, when candidates are described as party consistent. Importantly, as we explain in the following subsections, we subsequently described the same political candidates with information that was party neutral and positive to examine which mechanisms may reduce ingroup favoritism.

The effects of social versus economic ideology similarity information on explicit and implicit political person perception

“…Although we lack data that can directly explain this discrepancy, past literature suggests that there may be issues with the reliability and validity of Likert-type measures of attitudes in political prejudice research. For instance, Price-Blackshear et al (2019) found that an electability Likert-type scale and a semantic differential (i.e., different Likert-type measures of similar constructs) yielded different results within the same sample. In addition, these authors also found that the same semantic differential measure resulted in different findings when administered in two different samples drawn from the same population despite highly similar research designs and identical stimulus materials.…”

Bridging the divide: The effect of individuating information on attitudes toward political outgroup members

“…In one, individuating information reduced people's tendency to rate an ingroup candidate as more electable than an outgroup candidate (Price-Blackshear et al, 2019). In a second, researchers examined when people will rely on individuating information (a politician's position on specific issue) vs. stereotypes (their party membership) when making assumptions about a politician's stance on other political issues (Crawford et al, 2011).…”

Reflective reasoning & philosophy

“…Further, some research has not replicated links between reflection and moral judgments (e.g., Attie & Knobe, 2017; Gawronski et al., 2017), politically liberal preferences (e.g. Price‐Blackshear et al., 2019), and belief in god (e.g., Sanchez et al., 2017). More research has found that the links between reflection and religiosity replicate in only some countries (Gervais et al., 2018) and religions (Byrd & Sytsma, In preparation).…”