Implicit and explicit illusory correlation as a function of political ideology.

Luciana Carraro,Paolo Negri,Luigi Castelli,Massimiliano Pastore

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0096312

Abstract

Research has demonstrated that people who embrace different ideological orientations often show differences at the level of basic cognitive processes. For instance, conservatives (vs. liberals) display an automatic selective attention for negative (vs. positive) stimuli, and tend to more easily form illusory correlations between negative information and minority groups. In the present work, we further explored this latter effect by examining whether it only involves the formation of explicit attitudes or it extends to implicit attitudes. To this end, following the typical illusory correlation paradigm, participants were presented with members of two numerically different groups (majority and minority) each performing either a positive or negative behaviour. Negative behaviors were relatively infrequent, and the proportion of positive and negative behaviors within each group was the same. Next, explicit and implicit (i.e., IAT-measured) attitudes were assessed. Results showed that conservatives (vs. liberals) displayed stronger explicit as well as implicit illusory correlations effects, forming more negative attitudes toward the minority (vs. majority) group at both the explicit and implicit level.

Highlights

In our everyday life, we are endlessly confronted with examples of how liberals and conservatives embrace different views of the world and prioritize different goals and values [1]
In order to explore whether illusory correlation can be detected among liberals, we performed a series of additional analyses centering the predictor of political ideology at one standard deviation above and below the ideology mean, and we examined whether the intercept was significant in order to understand whether a bias occurs for both conservatives and liberals, respectively
Conservatives appear to be more sensitive to negative stimuli as compared to positive stimuli [7,8,9,10,11], and negative information immediately captures the automatic attention of conservatives [8]

Summary

Introduction

We are endlessly confronted with examples of how liberals and conservatives embrace different views of the world and prioritize different goals and values [1]. Recent research has shown that these differences are skin deep and involve personality traits Conservatives, as compared to liberals, appear to more carefully process negative than positive environmental information. Oxley and colleagues [7] showed that the exposure to threatening stimuli (e.g., a bloody face) gave rise to higher changes in skin conductance among conservative participants, as compared to liberal participants. It has been shown that negative information automatically attracts the attention of conservatives [8,9]. In experimental tasks, such as a Dot-Probe Task, conservatives preferentially shift their attention towards threatening rather than positive stimuli [8], indicating that they are personally far more relevant than positive stimuli

Methods

Results

Conclusion