Cambridge University Press eBooks· 2013· Book chapter
The Rationalizing Voter
- 1,199citations
- 2013year
Short summary
Political behavior stems from automatic feelings and thoughts, with conscious deliberation often serving to rationalize these pre-existing impulses.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Political behavior is driven by both automatic impulses and conscious deliberation.
- Conscious thought often rationalizes pre-existing automatic feelings and ideas.
- Environmental contextual factors (e.g., titles, symbols, question wording) exert significant influence, particularly when unnoticed.
- A dual-process theory explains political beliefs, attitudes, and behavior.
- The impact of automatic feelings on political judgments is a central focus.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. Citizens are very sensitive to environmental contextual factors such as the title 'President' preceding 'Obama' in a newspaper headline, upbeat music or patriotic symbols accompanying a campaign ad, or question wording and order in a survey, all of which have their greatest influence when citizens are unaware. This book develops and tests a dual-process theory of political beliefs, attitudes and behavior, claiming that all thinking, feeling, reasoning and doing have an automatic component as well as a conscious deliberative component. The authors are especially interested in the impact of automatic feelings on political judgments and evaluations. This research is based on laboratory experiments, which allow the testing of five basic hypotheses: hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion and motivated reasoning.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2013 · DOI ↗
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