Effect of political position on group perception

Abstract

The question of how political ideology influences the perception of others is central for an understanding of relations between political groups. To characterize how political positions shape social perception, 106 students were selected according to political affinity and asked to describe political groups using either psychological or sociological qualifiers. Right-wing subjects were more likely to use psychological terms to describe political groups, whereas left-wing ones preferred sociological descriptors. Students with a right-wing position reported greatest satisfaction with psychological descriptors, while those with a left-wing position were more concerned with the relevance of qualifiers for constructing an ‘objective’ perception of reality. These observations confirm the existence of differing inclinations in the perception of social facts and social groups. Such perceptive/cognitive processes, linked to ideological patterns, seem to be inseparable from the contents to which they apply, and express the social positioning and the ideological orientations of their authors. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.