Abstract
People are biased partisans: they tend to agree with policies from political parties they identify with, independent of policy content. Here, we investigate how physiological reactions to political parties shape bias. Using changes in galvanic skin conductance responses to the visual presentation of party logos, we obtained an implicit and physiological measure of the affective arousal associated with political parties. Subsequently, we exposed subjects to classical party cue experiments where the party sponsors of specific policies were experimentally varied. We found that partisan bias only obtains among those exhibiting a strong physiological reaction to the party source; being a self-reported party identifier is not sufficient on its own. This suggests that partisan bias is rooted in implicit, affective reactions.
Highlights
A citizen’s own position on a political policy appears to be shaped by their favored political party’s position, independent of actual policy content
Partisan bias arises from attempts to defend a cherished group identity: It is distressing to disagree with a group to which one feels emotionally attached [12] and this cognitive dissonance creates motivation for toeing the party line [4]
We report findings based on a direct measure of the affect associated with political parties and demonstrate how partisan bias is tied to the affective component of party identification
Summary
A citizen’s own position on a political policy appears to be shaped by their favored political party’s position, independent of actual policy content. Recent evidence shows that people intuitively treat party affiliations as group affiliations: They use the same psychological mechanisms to form impressions of the party affiliations of others as they do to form impressions about other types of group identities [8]. In this perspective, partisan bias arises from attempts to defend a cherished group identity: It is distressing to disagree with a group to which one feels emotionally attached [12] and this cognitive dissonance creates motivation for toeing the party line [4]
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