Abstract
The human mind is not necessarily willing to assess costs and benefits every time it faces a decision. It often prefers to rely on cognitive shortcuts (i.e., heuristics) enabling it to decide rapidly and satisfactorily. Most literature on heuristics and biases suggests that a common cognitive shortcut individuals take is looking at what is close to judge what is far. An experiment involving 300 Italian citizens used a questionnaire to test whether it may work the other way around when it comes to politics. This paper investigated whether citizens might use mere exposure to information on a foreign issue as a heuristic to express an opinion on a similar issue at the domestic level. Furthermore, it strived to test whether this occurs more frequently when the individual considers the two cultures involved to be relatively close to each other. Results show data can only partially confirm the expectations.
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