Information Processing

Abstract

Individuals confront a sea of information in their daily lives. The political psychology of information processing focuses on the ways in which that information is encoded, stored, retrieved, and applied in decision-making. This chapter utilizes a dual-process framework to identify two modes of political information processing: one that is effortful and deliberate, and another that is easy and automatic. The chapter reviews existing research that traces how motivations influence who engages in which mode of information processing, under which conditions. The framework deepens our understanding of a wide range of political phenomena, such as when people update their attitudes in response to new information, when they counterargue against new information, how partisanship influences decision-making, and how to understand the problem of misinformation. The chapter concludes with observations for how the dual-process framework provides guidance for understanding political reasoning in a dynamically evolving information context.