Self-Affirmation and Identity-Driven Political Behavior

Abstract

Psychological attachment to political parties can bias people’s attitudes, beliefs, and group evaluations. Studies from psychology suggest that self-affirmation theory may ameliorate this problem in the domain of politics on a variety of outcome measures. We report a series of studies conducted by separate research teams that examine whether a self-affirmation intervention affects a variety of outcomes, including political or policy attitudes, factual beliefs, conspiracy beliefs, affective polarization, and evaluations of news sources. The different research teams use a variety of self-affirmation interventions, research designs, and outcomes. Despite these differences, the research teams consistently find that self-affirmation treatments have little effect. These findings suggest considerable caution is warranted for researchers who wish to apply the self-affirmation framework to studies that investigate political attitudes and beliefs. By presenting the “null results” of separate research teams, we hope to spark a discussion about whether and how the self-affirmation paradigm should be applied to political topics.

Individual, intergroup and nation-level influences on belief in conspiracy theories

“…But alternative approaches designed to indulge the psychological needs that predispose people to conspiracy theories have also had mixed success. For example, early suggestions that self-affirmations 67 or control inductions 77 could be used to reduce conspiracy beliefs subsequently waned owing to mixed evidence for causal effects on conspiracy beliefs 81 , 179 . However, in one of the few studies that took an intergroup approach, inducing empathy towards Chinese people reduced endorsement of the Wuhan laboratory COVID-19 conspiracy 169 .…”

Psychological Underpinnings of Disinformation Countermeasures: A Systematic Scoping Review

“…This includes all efforts before, during or after individuals get in contact with disinformation. Based on existing review papers in the field of disinformation intervention research, we distinguish between five major categories of psychological interventions: boosting, inoculation, identity management, nudging, and factchecking (Kozyreva et al, 2020;Lorenz-Spreen et al, 2020;Lyons et al, 2021;Treen et al, 2020). Boosting aims at strengthening skills and knowledge structures of individuals in order to hamper their susceptibility towards disinformation prior to its encounter (Lorenz-Spreen et al, 2020).…”

“…Third, identity management interventions as well take place prior to disinformation encounter. They aim to reduce individual bias in the selection and evaluation of information that results from personal or social identity threat (Lyons et al, 2021). Coming from the field of behavioral economics, nudging interventions provide small-scaled incentives in the communicative environment that enhance the likelihood of individuals to identify disinformation.…”

“…Although the findings of our systematic scoping review rely on a rich and profound set of data, they are a snapshot in time. Taking into account that most papers in our sample were published between 2019 and 2021, the amount of publications might be even higher for the intervention technique which usually performs highly inconsistent in studies (Lyons et al, 2021),…”

Detecting Motivated Reasoning

“…that the directional motives to believe pleasant things are substitutes (which is contrary to the additive separability assumption invoked in section 4). While theoretically promising, recent work casts doubt on the reliability of these effects Lyons et al (2021) 30 They do find that those who report higher salience for their racial identity diverge more on their evaluation of the situation, though this higher salience could be driven by past experiences which affect how they interpret the vignette.…”