Political Psychology

Kuklinski et al

It describes misinformation about politics, and claims that even those who are "informed" about these facts often hold wrong beliefs due to misinformation. Because this misinformation becomes so fundamentally intertwined with true information and one's set of preferences, the misinformed can often be worse for politics than the uninformed. This is compounded by the conviction with which the misinformed hold to their beliefs, as they make it much harder to actually spread the true, correct information.

Gilbert et al

It discusses how one must not take an assertion to be true unless there is evidence presented to uphold the assertion. This canon of René Descartes serves as the basis of the scientific method, and John Stuart Mill adapted it to outline the requisites of a modern democracy. This is because a democracy must allow a free environment in which to process and analyze ideas to determine which has enough evidence to be believed as fact. Such an environment is essential to go from understanding theories and assertions to accepting them as valid statements of fact.

Ross, Lepper and Hubbard

It tested the perseverance of initial attributions and impressions, and found that feedback given during experiments about a subject's ability persisted in affecting the subject and observer's perceptions even after this feedback was invalidated. They refer to this as the "perseverance phenomenon," and believe this phenomenon is relevant outside of experimental conditions because it may mean that social perceptions become separated from the evidence that created them. This would make it difficult to reverse or alter opinions, no matter what future evidence arose to contradict previous evidence. They also point out that, since the feedback received by participants in experiments could continue to affect their self-perceptions after the experiment ended, experimenters have an ethical duty to carefully design the debriefing segment to limit this persistence.

Nelson

Nelson was testing the importance of framing in shaping people's opinions, about the Klu Klux Klan, in this case. Each group was shown news coverage with either a "free speech" frame, which emphasized the KKK's right to speak publically, or a "public order" frame, which emphasized the disturbances caused by their riots. Those who saw it as a "free speech" frame were more tolerant of KKK rally than those who saw it as a "public order" frame. The second study was very similar, except that the news coverage was completely fictional, and its results reaffirmed the result of the first study.

Lord

Polarization hypothesis: polarization increases, rather than decrease or remain the same, when people of opposite views encounter empirical evidence on a highly contested issue (in this case, the death penalty). People interpret things based on their prior beliefs. They 1) remember better confirming evidence (evidence that fits in with their views) and less of disconfirming evidence (evidence that opposes their view); 2) decide that confirming evidence is reliable while disconfirming evidence is not and 3) accept confirming evidence at face value while being critical of disconfirming evidence.

Cohen

Self Affirmation.People tend to stick to their beliefs even when presented with clear, contradictory evidence. This defensiveness is reduced and people thus become more open to persuasion when they are given an alternate source of self-worth (i.e. a compliment that boosts their self-esteem). Assimilation bias and resistance to persuasion are partly mediated by identity-maintenance motivations.

Druckman and Chong

This study seeks to explore the power of framing effects given democratic competition. The hypotheses hold. • The relative strength of a frame is the most important dimension of influence • Weak frames were found to: o have no effect in experiment one if they emphasized unavailable considerations o affected opinion in experiment two only for less knowledgeable respondents in non-competitive contexts o did not move the opinions of knowledgeable respondents in the directions advocated by the frames • Competition between frames prompted more deliberate evaluation of frames by all respondents • Repetition had limited effect. Effect was largest in experiment two and only on less knowledgeable respondents.

Bullock 09

With the same evidence and interpretation and only if such information is of extraordinary quantity or quality, partisans will revise their beliefs according to Bayes' Theorem. However, in the short term, Bayesian learning is compatible with sustained disagreement. Bayesian models can be useful as a heuristics since it allows for a way to account for old and new information.

Mathews

conspiracy theorists and asserts that most scientists have a conceptual misunderstanding of inference. He argues that the rules of inference do not guarantee that "the truth will come out." Rather, the same pieces of evidence may lead those we consider "rational" and those we consider "irrational" (conspiracy theorists) to completely divergent points of view and, as such, that the truth cannot be reached by evidence. Matthews argues that trust is more important than rationality. Conspiracy theorists assign a higher value to beliefs that we may consider "irrational," such as the suggestion that NASA staged the photos of man on the moon. Ultimately, Matthews suggests that scientists spend more time building trust, rather than focusing on the supposed irrationality of conspiracy theorists.

Somin

critiqued lupia, argues against "shortcut" theories, which predict that even voters with minimal political knowledge can cast informed votes. He deals with the following topics: • Information from Daily Life: Somin argues that it does not help voters with issues not encountered in daily life, that ill-informed voters are less likely to make accurate connections between experience and policy, and that determining who is responsible for some experience and whether opponents would improve/worsen the situation is difficult • Political Parties and Information Flows: Somin argues that political affiliation does not tell voters about the effects of policies. In multi-party systems, there are too many parties to keep track of and political affiliation can be a bad predictor of a candidate's stances. Interparty collusion can also reduce the amount of information that voters get. • Cues from Opinion Leaders: Somin argues that political activists differ from the general population and have strong incentives to exaggerate the importance of an issue relative to others and to express politically popular views to maintain support. • Retrospective Voting: Somin argues that it is difficult to determine how responsible a public policy is for some social outcome, whether the current state of affairs is a good or bad thing, which officials are to blame, and to compare how opponent policies would do. • Issues Publics: One-Eyed Men in the Land of the Blind: Somin argues that even people who are informed about a specific topic do not necessarily have the necessary general knowledge to know what to do about it / which public policies are implicated and cannot compare the importance of that issue to other issues. • Miracles of Aggregation: Somin argues that the errors/votes of uninformed people are non-randomly distributed (often draw misleading conclusions or favor the incumbent) and that the opinions of the informed are not representative of the population at large.

Taber and Lodge

identify three cognitive mechanisms that affect how people process information and update attitudes, and question what these findings imply for rational behavior in democracy. 1. Prior attitude effect - people will evaluate "congruent" arguments (arguments that support previous knowledge or understanding of the world) as stronger than "incongruent" arguments (arguments that contradict previous knowledge). 2. Disconfirmation bias - people will spend more time and energy critiquing attitudinally incongruent arguments than congruent arguments. 3. Confirmation bias - when free to choose, people will seek out information that reinforces previous knowledge rather than information that will threaten previous knowledge. These mechanisms result in something the authors call "attitude polarization," whereby a person's original attitudes will become more extreme, even after reading a balanced piece of information. Their research also found that attitude polarization was especially strong in those participants who were the most politically sophisticated or strongly opinionated at the outset.

Druckman

seeks to determine the effects and success of framing effects with relation to political conditions. Experimental design - 580 individuals, all exposed to four randomly ordered framing problems and a background questionnaire. Each of these problems can be framed in either a negative or positive light. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of 8 conditions - Negative or Positive, across Control, Counterframing, Homogenous Group, and Heterogeneous group. counter-framing and heterogenous discussions limit framing effects by prompting deliberate processing and offering reformulations of the problems.

Lupia

◾State-wide vote to reform insurance and most people do not know much about it ◾Profit from taking cues from interest groups ◾Empirical design to see if cues can help you make decisions ◾Three main questions 1.How did you vote 2.Where did the big interest groups stand 3.Questions to know how much they knew about the policies ◾From this survey Lupia concluded that with information shortcuts, in this case voters who lacked information used the stances of the different interest groups and insurance companies, voters who lack encyclopedic information can vote as if they did have such information