Primacy of Affect in Automatic and Deliberative Processing of Political Persons, Groups, and Issues

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

In a series of experiments carried out under an earlier project employing an attitude priming paradigm, the researchers found strong support for the automaticity of affect toward political leaders, as well as for groups, and issues. Then to explore the impact of prior attitude on political judgment the researchers looked at how citizens evaluated arguments about two public policies, affirmative action and gun control. They found strong evidence, especially among those subjects who feel the strongest and are the most knowledgeable about an issue, of a prior attitude effect, a disconfirmation, and a confirmation bias, with all three of these effects of prior attitude promoting attitude polarization. In the 1st year of this investigation, building on the demonstration of the automaticity of affect for political leaders, groups, and issues the researchers test basic premises of the primacy of affect hypothesis. Their first pair of studies explores the creation and updating of automatic affect, with one experiment using a fictitious political candidate and the other using real but unknown U.S. Congressmen as stimuli. In years 2 and 3 the investigators turn to the "so-what?" question. They undertake studies testing the primacy of affect theory; to wit: that when one's affect is directly linked to a political object, be it leader, group, or issue, this affective tally will be "primary" in that it enters the judgment process first and dominates subsequent judgments and evaluations from start to finish. Taking their lead from social identity theory which links one's self identifications to affect the researchers explore how one's political identifications (starting with party, ideology, and symbolic identifications and then turning to the most general "we" vs. "they" primes) will spontaneously impact how citizens think about and evaluate new political information that is directly or indirectly linked to self Employing a subliminal variant of the attitude-priming paradigm (to rule out conscious considerations), the investigators predict that the priming of self-identification will automatically invoke a strong affective response which will significantly impact one's political attitudes, orientations, and judgments.