Abstract

OF THE DISSERTATION Three Essays on the Relationship between Implicit Attitudes and Political Behavior by Vincent Greco Dissertation Director: Richard Lau Considerable evidence supports the view that information processing often operates in an automatic, less conscious mode of cognition (Lodge & Taber, 2013). Such automatic or “implicit attitudes” have been shown to be a strong predictor of a variety of political outcomes (Perez, 2013). Despite such evidence, it remains unclear the mechanism linking implicit attitudes to political decision-making. This dissertation project attempts to shed light on this issue by examining the impact of implicit attitudes on political information search and candidate evaluation. In my experimental design, I use both the implicit association test (IAT) and the dynamic information board methodology (Lau & Redlawsk, 2006) to directly assess the effect of implicit racial attitudes on how subjects search for information and evaluate political candidates in the context of a mock presidential campaign. I also address a key criticism in this literature by exploring under what conditions implicit attitudes are likely to have stronger and weaker effects on political behavior. To do this, I include a set of manipulations that vary a key feature of the information environment (high vs. low cognitive load) and subjects’ emotional state (positive vs. negative). The results from this project provide a direct assessment of both implicit attitudes’ impact on information search and candidate evaluation as well as potential moderating factors. Turning to the results, my main finding is that implicit

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