Tribalism
Laws, Beliefs, and Backlash
Brian Wheaton
Harvard Working Paper, November 2020
Abstract:
Do laws affect the beliefs and attitudes held by the public? I set up a model wherein families care about their children's beliefs, which are shaped by a combination of parental actions and the law set by society. These straightforward assumptions are sufficient to generate systematic backlash against laws - individuals move in the opposite direction of the law in an attempt to preserve the values which are important to them and are placed under threat by the law. Next, I turn to survey data from the ANES to test the implications of the model. I focus on one specific case in-depth: the state Equal Rights Amendments (ERAs), which aimed to legislate gender equality. Using a dynamic difference-in-differences identification strategy, I find robust evidence that ERA passage leads men in particular to undergo a sharp backlash - with sharply more negative attitudes toward male/female equality. This shift translates into a significant increase in Republican vote share, worsened material outcomes for women, and increased marital strife. I also test and confirm the other implications of the model - such as the fact that the backlash is passed on to the next generation and that it endures more strongly in ideologically homogeneous communities. Next, I provide evidence against a variety of alternative mechanisms. And finally, stepping back from the ERAs, I show that virtually every major U.S. social policy law of the past half-century has induced significant backlash. Taken as a whole, these findings suggest that aggressive pushes for social change through legislation may come at a significant cost.
What Motivates Reasoning? A Theory of Goal‐Dependent Political Evaluation
Eric Groenendyk & Yanna Krupnikov
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Rather than exhibiting bias or open‐minded reasoning at baseline, we argue that information processing is motivated by whatever goals a context makes salient. Thus, if politics feels like debate, people will be motivated to argue for their side. If politics feels like deliberation, they will be motivated to seek consensus through open‐minded processing. Results from three experiments demonstrate: (1) Politics evokes thoughts similar to conflictual contexts and dissimilar from deliberative contexts. (2) Consequently, information labeled “political” primes the motivation to counterargue, leading to opinion polarization. Absent such labeling, no such motivation is evident, explaining why bias is common but not inherent to politics. (3) Despite this capacity for bias, people can be motivated to actively process and accept counterattitudinal information by simply making the value of open‐mindedness salient. This suggests open‐minded discourse is possible even absent motivation to evaluate information accurately. We conclude by discussing the implications of our research for political discourse.
Affective Polarization Did Not Increase During the Coronavirus Pandemic
Levi Boxell et al.
NBER Working Paper, October 2020
Abstract:
We document trends in affective polarization during the coronavirus pandemic. In our main measure, affective polarization is relatively flat between July 2019 and February 2020, then falls significantly around the onset of the pandemic. Two other data sources show no evidence of an increase in polarization around the onset of the pandemic. Finally, we show in an experiment that priming respondents to think about the coronavirus pandemic significantly reduces affective polarization.
The Inseparability of Race and Partisanship in the United States
Sean Westwood & Erik Peterson
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Many recent studies consider the overlapping nature of major political identities. Drawing on this research, we posit that partisanship and race are so enmeshed in the public mind that events which independently trigger one of these identities can also activate the other. We find support for this in three behavioral game experiments with 5496 respondents. These studies reveal what we refer to as the “parallel updating” of out-group affect. Shifts in racial affect are accompanied by simultaneous movement in attitudes and behavior towards members of the other political party. Conversely, changes in partisan affect co-occur with movement in views of racial out-groups. Our results speak to the inseparability of racial and partisan affect in the United States and suggest an important link between studies of racial animus and partisan affective polarization.
Rethinking the link between cognitive sophistication and politically motivated reasoning
Ben Tappin, Gordon Pennycook & David Rand
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Partisan disagreement over policy-relevant facts is a salient feature of contemporary American politics. Perhaps surprisingly, such disagreements are often the greatest among opposing partisans who are the most cognitively sophisticated. A prominent hypothesis for this phenomenon is that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning - commonly defined as reasoning driven by the motivation to reach conclusions congenial to one’s political group identity. Numerous experimental studies report evidence in favor of this hypothesis. However, in the designs of such studies, political group identity is often confounded with prior factual beliefs about the issue in question; and, crucially, reasoning can be affected by such beliefs in the absence of any political group motivation. This renders much existing evidence for the hypothesis ambiguous. To shed new light on this issue, we conducted three studies in which we statistically controlled for people’s prior factual beliefs - attempting to isolate a direct effect of political group identity - when estimating the association between their cognitive sophistication, political group identity, and reasoning in the paradigmatic study design used in the literature. We observed a robust direct effect of political group identity on reasoning but found no evidence that cognitive sophistication magnified this effect. In contrast, we found fairly consistent evidence that cognitive sophistication magnified a direct effect of prior factual beliefs on reasoning. Our results suggest that there is currently a lack of clear empirical evidence that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning as commonly understood and emphasize the conceptual and empirical challenges that confront tests of this hypothesis.
Social and Economic Political Ideology Consistently Operate as Mutual Suppressors: Implications for Personality, Social, and Political Psychology
Thomas Costello & Scott Lilienfeld
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Right-left political views can be decomposed into distinct economic and social dimensions that bear differing relations with external criteria. In three community samples (total N = 1,487), we identified replicable suppressor situations in which statistically controlling for either social or economic political ideology increased the other ideology dimension’s relations with variables reflecting cognitive rigidity, authoritarianism, dangerous worldview, and lethal partisanship. Specifically, positive bivariate relations between social conservatism and these outcomes were enhanced after controlling for economic conservatism, whereas, after controlling for social conservatism, positive bivariate relations between economic conservatism and external criteria became negative and negative bivariate relations were enhanced. We identified similar, albeit less consistent, suppressor phenomena for general personality. Taken together, our results suggest that social and economic conservatism differ substantially in their psychological implications, and that following statistical control, these differences emerge in samples in which social and economic conservatism are highly positively correlated.
Political Polarization and Expected Economic Outcomes
Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Michael Weber
NBER Working Paper, October 2020
Abstract:
We use a large-scale representative survey of households from October 19-21 that elicits respondents’ expectations about the presidential election’s outcome as well as their economic expectations to document several new facts. First, people disagree strongly about the likely outcome of the election, despite widespread publicly available polling information. Most Democrats are very confident in a Biden win while most Republicans are very confident in a Trump win. Second, respondents predict a fairly rosy economic scenario if their preferred candidate wins but a dire one if the other candidate wins. Since most respondents are confident in their favored outcome, unconditional forecasts are similar across parties despite the fact that underlying probability distributions and conditional forecasts are very different. Third, when presented with recent polling data, most voters change their views by little unless they are independent and/or have relatively weak priors about the outcome. Information that emphasizes the uncertainty in polling data has larger effects in terms of reducing polarization in expected probabilities over different electoral outcomes. Fourth, exogenous information that changes individuals’ probability distribution over electoral outcomes also changes their unconditional forecasts in a corresponding manner. These changes in economic expectations in turn are likely to affect household economic decisions.
Disconnected, Not Polarized: Four Decades of the Rural-urban Interface in Mainstream Country Music
Braden Leap & Courtney Heath
Social Currents, forthcoming
Abstract:
Rural scholars have regularly analyzed media representations of rural communities, but there are a lack of analyses considering whether media representations of the rural-urban interface have transformed over the last 40 years as material connections and political divisions between rural and urban places intensified. This article presents a longitudinal analysis of portrayals of the rural-urban interface in mainstream country music from the 1980s to the 2010s. Examining the lyrics of over 800 weeks of songs that topped the Billboard charts, we find that representations of the material connections between rural and urban places have become less common. Specifically, portrayals of migrants crossing the interface have nearly disappeared from mainstream country. There was also a lack of evidence of growing polarization in mainstream country’s portrayals of rural and urban places. Rural places were generally depicted in idyllic terms in every decade, but urban places were also increasingly represented positively. These results indicate that the rural-urban interface portrayed by mainstream country does not align with previous research concerning the interface. In contrast to studies that highlight growing material connections and political divisions between rural and urban places, the interface depicted by mainstream country has become increasingly disconnected materially without becoming polarized politically.
Conservative and liberal attitudes drive polarized neural responses to political content
Yuan Chang Leong et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 3 November 2020, Pages 27731-27739
Abstract:
People tend to interpret political information in a manner that confirms their prior beliefs, a cognitive bias that contributes to rising political polarization. In this study, we combined functional magnetic resonance imaging with semantic content analyses to investigate the neural mechanisms that underlie the biased processing of real-world political content. We scanned American participants with conservative-leaning or liberal-leaning immigration attitudes while they watched news clips, campaign ads, and public speeches related to immigration policy. We searched for evidence of “neural polarization”: activity in the brain that diverges between people who hold liberal versus conservative political attitudes. Neural polarization was observed in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC), a brain region associated with the interpretation of narrative content. Neural polarization in the DMPFC intensified during moments in the videos that included risk-related and moral-emotional language, highlighting content features most likely to drive divergent interpretations between conservatives and liberals. Finally, participants whose DMPFC activity closely matched that of the average conservative or the average liberal participant were more likely to change their attitudes in the direction of that group’s position. Our work introduces a multimethod approach to study the neural basis of political cognition in naturalistic settings. Using this approach, we characterize how political attitudes biased information processing in the brain, the language most likely to drive polarized neural responses, and the consequences of biased processing for attitude change. Together, these results shed light on the psychological and neural underpinnings of how identical information is interpreted differently by conservatives and liberals.
Are politically diverse Thanksgiving dinners shorter than politically uniform ones?
Jeremy Frimer & Linda Skitka
PLoS ONE, October 2020
Abstract:
Americans on the political left and right are engaged in a Culture War with one another, one that is often characterized by mutual fear, antipathy, and avoidance. Are there safe havens from the socially straining effects of this Culture War, times and places where Americans of different political stripes gather and put aside their political differences? Previous research (Chen & Rohla, 2018) implied that there might not be insofar as even intimate family gatherings seem to be subject to Culture War tensions. They found that politically diverse Thanksgiving Dinners were 35-70 minutes shorter than politically uniform ones, representing a 14-27% reduction in overall dinner duration. Noting analytical and methodological limitations in the prior analysis, we conducted two pre-registered studies to test whether diverse dinners are shorter than uniform ones and to attempt to conceptually replicate and extend this prior analysis. Individual analyses yielded mixed results, with null models generally supported but effect estimates generally overlapping with those of Chen and Rohla (2018). A mega-analysis found that, when controlling for various covariates, politically diverse dinners were 24 minutes shorter than politically uniform ones, 95% confidence interval = [9, 39], representing a 6% decrease in the total dinner time [2%-10%]. This final result successfully replicates Chen and Rohla (2018) both in terms of effect overlap and direct-and-significance criteria while nonetheless favoring the conclusion that politics is not straining family ties as much as previously thought.
Exposure to news grows less fragmented with an increase in mobile access
Tian Yang et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The abundance of media options is a central feature of today’s information environment. Many accounts, often based on analysis of desktop-only news use, suggest that this increased choice leads to audience fragmentation, ideological segregation, and echo chambers with no cross-cutting exposure. Contrary to many of those claims, this paper uses observational multiplatform data capturing both desktop and mobile use to demonstrate that coexposure to diverse news is on the rise, and that ideological self-selection does not explain most of that coexposure. We show that mainstream media outlets offer the common ground where ideologically diverse audiences converge online, though our analysis also reveals that more than half of the US online population consumes no online news, underlining the risk of increased information inequality driven by self-selection along lines of interest. For this study, we use an unprecedented combination of observed data from the United States comprising a 5-y time window and involving tens of thousands of panelists. Our dataset traces news consumption across different devices and unveils important differences in news diets when multiplatform or desktop-only access is used. We discuss the implications of our findings for how we think about the current communication environment, exposure to news, and ongoing attempts to limit the effects of misinformation.
How the Politicization of Everyday Activities Affects the Public Sphere: The Effects of Partisan Stereotypes on Cross-Cutting Interactions
Amber Hye-Yon Lee
Political Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
People use social cues to decide whether they want to interact with others. As everyday life has become more politicized, we now attach political meaning to seemingly apolitical activities, from the food we eat, to the movies and TV shows we watch, to the car we drive. Do these stereotypes affect social behavior? Using two survey experiments, including one with a nationally representative sample, I show that people use apolitical cues to draw inferences about others’ political leanings. More importantly, these inferences impact decisions about which individuals they want to interact with, which lead to reduced cross-party contact as well as cross-cutting political discussion. The findings have important implications for how partisan stereotypes of everyday attributes might indirectly exacerbate political polarization.
Rigid Religious Faith Promotes Selective Exposure to Attitude-Congruent Political Information
James Cragun
Political Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
When seeking political information, people are motivated to selectively seek information that is congruent with their prior attitudes. However, some individuals may do so more than others, and not much is known about what factors affect such individual differences. Rigid religious faith is one variable that may promote selective exposure. Messages of the importance of rigid faith - the idea that religious beliefs must be held firmly and not doubted - could encourage a habit of selective exposure to information that supports existing religious beliefs. As a side effect, this habit of selective exposure might be applied outside the context of religion. In this study, an information-search task on a non-religious political issue is used to demonstrate that subjects prefer to read a greater number of arguments that are congruent with their prior attitudes on the issue, and this effect of prior attitudes on information-search behavior is found to be stronger among individuals who have rigid religious convictions. A scrambled-sentence task is used to prime half the subjects with religious concepts prior to completing the information-search task. This experiment demonstrates that increased salience of religious faith causes an increase in selective exposure to attitude-congruent political information.
Economic, social and political fragmentation: Linking knowledge-biased growth, identity, populism and protectionism
Dennis Snower & Steven Bosworth
European Journal of Political Economy, forthcoming
Abstract:
This paper examines how economic fragmentation (widening inequality of skills, income and education) gives rise to social fragmentation (via incompatible social identities), generating political fragmentation (via incompatible economic policies). We consider three value-driven identities: individualism, focused on status concerns, communitarianism, focused on social affiliations, and multi-affiliatedness, encompassing both objectives. Under endogenous identity formation high-skill people are drawn to individualism, the lower-skilled to communitarianism, and those of intermediate skill to multi-affiliatedness. Skill- and education-biased growth leads to increasing social polarisation, expanding the individualistic and communitarian groups at the expense of multi-affiliates. This expands the political constituency for closed policies (such as protectionism, immigration controls and nationalism), even when these policies reduce everyone's living standards. Our analysis thereby helps explain the economic and social underpinnings of populism.
The Cost of Opposition: Harming our Own Rather than Helping our Opponent
Rachel Gershon & Ariel Fridman
University of California Working Paper, August 2020
Abstract:
Would you prefer to harm your own side of a cause or aid the opposing side? Across polarized causes (political party, abortion access, and gun control), participants given these unfavorable options consistently choose to harm their own side (N = 1,704). Attitude strength moderates this behavior; those who feel more strongly about an issue are more likely to harm their own group rather than provide equivalent help to the opposition. This preference for removing funding from our own side runs counter to normative theory, as individuals tend to believe that organizations supporting their cause spend their funds more efficiently than opposing organizations. We propose that these decisions are informed by perceived group norms - helping the opposition is a stronger violation of group norms than harming one’s own group. Shifting perceived norms leads to corresponding changes in individuals’ behavior. Implications for compromise and intergroup conflict are discussed.