Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T10:35:40.217Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ideology and social cognition

Are liberals and conservatives differentially affected by social cues about group inequality?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2020

Jordan Mansell
Jordan Mansell*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
Correspondence: Jordan Mansell, Université du Québec à Montréal, Department of Politics, 405 Rue Sainte-Catherine Est, Montréal, QC H2L 2C4 Email: [email protected]
Get access

Abstract

Research links liberal and conservative ideological orientations with variation on psychological and cognitive characteristics that are important for perceptual processes and decision-making. This study investigates whether this variation can impact the social behaviors of liberals and conservatives. A sample of subjects (n = 1,245) participated in a modified public goods game in which an intragroup inequality was introduced to observe the effect on individuals’ tendency toward self-interested versus prosocial behavior. Overall, the contributions of neither liberal- nor conservative-oriented individuals were affected by conditions of a general intragroup inequality. However, in response to the knowledge that group members voted to redress the inequality, levels of contribution among liberals significantly increased in comparison to the control. This was not true for conservatives. The results provide evidence that differences in ideological orientation are associated with individual differences in social cognition.

Keywords

Ideologyattitudessocial cognitionsocial interactionexperimental
Type
Article
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , Spring 2020 , pp. 9 - 25
Copyright
© Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adolphs, R., Tranel, D., Damasio, H., & Damasio, A. R. (1995). Fear and the human amygdala. Journal of Neuroscience, 15(9), 5879–5891.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alford, J. R., Funk, C. L., & Hibbing, J. R. (2005). Are political orientations genetically transmitted? American Political Science Review, 99(2), 153–167.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alford, J. R., Funk, C. L., & Hibbing, J. R. (2008). Beyond liberals and conservatives to political genotypes and phenotypes. Perspectives on Politics, 6(2), 321–328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Amodio, D. M., Jost, J. T., Master, S. L., & Yee, C. M. (2007). Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism. Nature Neuroscience, 10(10), 1246–1247.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Anderson, L. R., Mellor, J. M., & Milyo, J. (2005). Do liberals play nice? The effects of party and political ideology in public goods and trust games. In Morgan, J. (Ed.), Experimental and Behavorial Economics (pp. 107–131). Emerald Group Publishing Limited.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Anderson, L. R., Mellor, J. M., & Milyo, J. (2008). Inequality and public good provision: An experimental analysis. Journal of Socio-Economics, 37(3), 1010–1028.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barkow, J. H. (Ed.). (2005). Missing the revolution: Darwinism for social scientists. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bell, E., Schermer, J. A., & Vernon, P. A. (2009). The origins of political attitudes and behaviours: An analysis using twins. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 42(4), 855–879.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beramendi, P., Duch, R. M., & Matsuo, A. (2014, December). When lab subjects meet real people: Comparing different modes of experiments [Paper presentation]. Asianian Political Methodology Conference, TaipeI, Taiwan.Google Scholar
Berinsky, A. J., Huber, G. A., & Lenz, G. S. (2012). Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. Political Analysis, 20(3), 351–368.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Botvinick, M., Nystrom, L. E., Fissell, K., Carter, C. S., & Cohen, J. D. (1999). Conflict monitoring versus selection-for-action in anterior cingulate cortex. Nature, 402(6758), 179.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brandts, J., & Charness, G. (2011). The strategy versus the direct-response method: A first survey of experimental comparisons. Experimental Economics, 14(3), 375–398.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cacioppo, J. T., Gardner, W. L., & Berntson, G. G. (1999). The affect system has parallel and integrative processing components: Form follows function. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(5), 839–855.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cacioppo, J. T., Cacioppo, S., & Gollan, J. K. (2014). The negativity bias: Conceptualization, quantification, and individual differences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(3), 309–310.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Camerer, C. (2003). Behavioral game theory: Experiments in strategic interaction. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Camerer, C. F., & Fehr, E. (2004). Measuring social norms and preferences using experimental games: A guide for social scientists. In Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., & Gintis, H. (Eds.), Foundations of human sociality: Economic experiments and ethnographic evidence from fifteen small-scale societies (pp. 55–95). Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Castelli, L., & Carraro, L. (2011). Ideology is related to basic cognitive processes involved in attitude formation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(5), 1013–1016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, P. G., & Goren, P. N. (2016). Operational ideology and party identification: A dynamic model of individual-level change in partisan and ideological predispositions. Political Research Quarterly, 69(4), 703–715.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clifford, S., Jewell, R. M., & Waggoner, P. D. (2015). Are samples drawn from Mechanical Turk valid for research on political ideology? Research & Politics, 2(4), https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168015622072.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dawes, C. T., Johannesson, M., Lindqvist, E., Loewen, P. J., Ostling, R., Bonde, M., & Priks, F. (2012). Generosity and political preferences (IFN Working Paper No. 941). https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2179522##Google Scholar
Dodd, M. D., Balzer, A., Jacobs, C. M., Gruszczynski, M. W., Smith, K. B., & Hibbing, J. R. (2012). The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 367(1589), 640–649.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Elliott, R., Zahn, R., Deakin, J. W., & Anderson, I. M. (2011). Affective cognition and its disruption in mood disorders. Neuropsychopharmacology, 36(1), 153–182.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ellis, C., & Stimson, J. A. (2011). Pathways to conservative identification. In Sniderman, P. M. & Highton, B. (Eds.), Facing the challenge of democracy: Explorations in the analysis of public opinion and political participation (pp. 120–152). Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fehr, E., & Gachter, S. (2000). Cooperation and punishment in public goods experiments. American Economic Review, 90(4), 980–994.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, S., & Johnston, C. (2014). Understanding the determinants of political ideology: Implications of structural complexity. Political Psychology, 35(3), 337–358.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friesen, A., & Ksiazkiewicz, A. (2015). Do political attitudes and religiosity share a genetic path? Political Behavior, 37(4), 791–818.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fung, J. M., & Au, W. T. (2014). Effect of inequality on cooperation: Heterogeneity and hegemony in public goods dilemma. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 123(1), 9–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gintis, H., Smith, E. A., & Bowles, S. (2001). Costly signaling and cooperation. Journal of theoretical biology, 213(1), 103–119.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gosling, S. D., Rentfrow, P. J., & Swann, W. B. (2003). A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains. Journal of Research in Personality, 37(6), 504–528.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grafen, A. (1984). Natural selection, kin selection and group selection. Behavioural Ecology: An Evolutionary Approach, 2, 62–84.Google Scholar
Gu, X., Hof, P. R., Friston, K. J., & Fan, J. (2013). Anterior insular cortex and emotional awareness. Journal of Comparative Neurology, 521(15), 3371–3388.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hatemi, P. K., Alford, J. R., Hibbing, J. R., Martin, N. G., & Eaves, L. J. (2009). Is there a “party” in your genes? Political Research Quarterly, 62(3), 584–600.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hatemi, P. K., Gillespie, N. A., Eaves, L. J., Maher, B. S., Webb, B. T., Heath, A. C., … & Montgomery, G. W. (2011). A genome-wide analysis of liberal and conservative political attitudes. Journal of Politics, 73(1), 271–285.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hatemi, P. K., Hibbing, J. R., Medland, S. E., Keller, M. C., Alford, J. R., Smith, K. B., … & Eaves, L. J. (2010). Not by twins alone: Using the extended family design to investigate genetic influence on political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 54(3), 798–814.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hatemi, P. K., Medland, S. E., Klemmensen, R., Oskarsson, S., Littvay, L., Dawes, C. T., … & Christensen, K. (2014). Genetic influences on political ideologies: Twin analyses of 19 measures of political ideologies from five democracies and genome-wide findings from three populations. Behavior Genetics, 44(3), 282–294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hibbing, J. R., Smith, K. B., & Alford, J. R. (2014). Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(3), 297–307.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Janoff-Bulman, R. (2009). To provide or protect: Motivational bases of political liberalism and conservatism. Psychological Inquiry, 20(2–3), 120–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson, D. D., Blumstein, D. T., Fowler, J. H., & Haselton, M. G. (2013). The evolution of error: Error management, cognitive constraints, and adaptive decision-making biases. Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 28(8), 474–481.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jost, J. T. (2009). “Elective affinities”: On the psychological bases of left–right differences. Psychological Inquiry, 20(2–3), 129–141.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jost, J. T., & Amodio, D. M. (2012). Political ideology as motivated social cognition: Behavioral and neuroscientific evidence. Motivation and Emotion, 36(1), 55–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jost, J. T., Federico, C. M., & Napier, J. L. (2009). Political ideology: Its structure, functions, and elective affinities. Annual review of psychology, 60, 307–337.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kanai, R., Feilden, T., Firth, C., & Rees, G. (2011). Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults. Current Biology, 21(8), 677–680.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kondo, H., Osaka, N., & Osaka, M. (2004). Cooperation of the anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for attention shifting. Neuroimage, 23(2), 670–679.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lamm, C., & Singer, T. (2010). The role of anterior insular cortex in social emotions. Brain Structure and Function, 214(5–6), 579–591.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lilienfeld, S. O., & Latzman, R. D. (2014). Threat bias, not negativity bias, underpins differences in political ideology. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(3), 318–319.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Loewen, P. J. (2010). Affinity, antipathy and political participation: How our concern for others makes us vote. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 43(3), 661–687.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mansell, J. (2018). Social cues and ideology: Unpacking the adaptive significance of liberal- conservative behavioral differences. Politics and the Life Sciences, 37(1), 32–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McDermott, R., Fowler, J. H., & Smirnov, O. (2008). On the evolutionary origin of prospect theory preferences. Journal of Politics, 70(2), 335–350.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McElreath, R., & Strimling, P. (2006). How noisy information and individual asymmetries can make ‘personality’ an adaptation: a simple model. Animal Behaviour, 72(5), 1135–1139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oxley, D. R., Smith, K. B., Alford, J. R., Hibbing, M. V., Miller, J. L., Scalora, M., Hatemi, P. K. (2008). Political attitudes vary with physiological traits. Science, 321(5896), 1667–1670.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Petersen, M. B. (2009). Public opinion and evolved heuristics: The role of category-based inference. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 9(3), 367–389.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petersen, M. B. (2017). Evolutionary psychology and political psychology: How to use evolutionary psychology to theorize about political psychology. In Peterson, S. A. & Somit, A. (Eds.), Handbook of Biology and Politics (pp. 125–143). Edward Elgar.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petersen, M. B., & Aarøe, L. (2014). Individual differences in political ideology are effects of adaptive error management. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(3), 324–325.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Petersen, M. B., Sznycer, D., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2012). Who deserves help? evolutionary psychology, social emotions, and public opinion about welfare. Political Psychology, 33(3), 395–418.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Piurko, Y., Schwartz, S. H., & Davidov, E. (2011). Basic personal values and the meaning of left‐right political orientations in 20 countries. Political Psychology, 32(4), 537–561.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Polli, F. E., Barton, J. J., Cain, M. S., Thakkar, K. N., Rauch, S. L., & Manoach, D. S. (2005). Rostral and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex make dissociable contributions during antisaccade error commission. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(43), 15700–15705.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rilling, J. K., Gutman, D. A., Zeh, T. R., Pagnoni, G., Berns, G. S., & Kilts, C. D. (2002). A neural basis for social cooperation. Neuron, 35(2), 395–405.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schreiber, D., Fonzo, G., Simmons, A. N., Dawes, C. T., Flagan, T., Fowler, J. H., & Paulus, M. P. (2013). Red brain, blue brain: Evaluative processes differ in Democrats and Republicans. PLOS One 8(2), e52970.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Schwartz, S. H., Caprara, G. V., & Vecchione, M. (2010). Basic personal values, core political values, and voting: A longitudinal analysis. Political Psychology, 31(3), 421–452.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shook, N. J., & Fazio, R. H. (2009). Political ideology, exploration of novel stimuli, and attitude formation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(4), 995–998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, K. B., Oxley, D. R., Hibbing, M. V., Alford, J. R., & Hibbing, J. R. (2011). Linking genetics and political attitudes: Reconceptualizing political ideology. Political Psychology, 32(3), 369–397.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sosis, R. (2000). Religion and intragroup cooperation: Preliminary results of a comparative analysis of utopian communities. Cross-Cultural Research, 34(1), 70–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sosis, R., & Bressler, E. R. (2003). Cooperation and commune longevity: A test of the costly signaling theory of religion. Cross-Cultural Research 37, 211–239.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sosis, R., & Ruffle, B. J. (2004). Field Experiments on Israeli Kibbutzim. Research in Economic Anthropology, 23, 89–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorisdottir, H., Jost, J. T., Liviatan, I., & Shrout, P. E. (2007). Psychological needs and values underlying left-right political orientation: Cross-national evidence from Eastern and Western Europe. Public Opinion Quarterly, 71(2), 175–203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1990). On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation. Journal of Personality, 58(1), 17–67.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tooby, J., Cosmides, L., & Price, M. E. (2006). Cognitive adaptations for n‐person exchange: The evolutionary roots of organizational behavior. Managerial and Decision Economics, 27(2–3), 103–129.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tuschman, A. (2013). Our political nature: The evolutionary origins of what divides us. Prometheus Books.Google Scholar
van der Plas, E. A., Boes, A. D., Wemmie, J. A., Tranel, D. , & Nopoulos, P. (2010). Amygdala volume correlates positively with fearfulness in normal healthy girls. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5(4), 424–431.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van Vugt, M., & Van Lange, P. (2006). The altruism puzzle: Psychological adaptations for prosocial behavior. In Schaller, M., Kenrick, D., & Simpson, J. (Eds.), Evolution and Social Psychology (pp. 237–261). Psychology Press.Google Scholar
West, S. A., Gardner, A., Shuker, D. M., Reynolds, T., Burton-Chellow, M., Sykes, E. M.et al. (2006). Cooperation and the scale of competition in humans. Current Biology, 16(11), 1103–1106.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wilson, G. D., & Patterson, J. R. (1968). A new measure of conservatism. British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 7(4), 264–269.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Supplementary material: File

Mansell supplementary material

Appendix

Download Mansell supplementary material(File)
File 16.5 MB