Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T04:48:17.790Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

4 - The Psychology and Neuroscience of Partisanship

from Part I - Foundations of Political Psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2022

By
Elizabeth Harris ,
Philip Pärnamets ,
Anni Sternisko ,
Claire Robertson  and
Jay J. Van Bavel
Edited by
Danny Osborne  and
Chris G. Sibley
Danny Osborne
Affiliation:
University of Auckland
Chris G. Sibley
Affiliation:
University of Auckland
Get access

Summary

Why have citizens become increasingly polarised? One answer is that there is increasing identification with political parties – a process known as partisanship. This chapter focuses on the role that social identity and partisanship play in contemporary politics. Partisan identities influence political preferences, such that partisans are more likely to agree with policies that were endorsed by their political party, regardless of the policy content, and, in some cases, their own ideological beliefs. We will describe how partisanship mirrors other forms of social identity, both behaviourally and in the brain. However, partisanship also has distinct biological origins, and consequences in political domains such as fake news sharing, conspiracy theory beliefs, and voting behaviour. Our chapter focuses on the psychology and neuroscience of partisanship within broader sociopolitical contexts.

Keywords

PartisanshipPolarisationSocial identityNeurosciencePolitics
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Political Psychology , pp. 50 - 67
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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

Anduiza, E., Gallego, A., & Muñoz, J. (2013). Turning a blind eye: Experimental evidence of partisan bias in attitudes toward corruption. Comparative Political Studies, 46(12), 1664–1692.Google Scholar
Anwar, S., Bayer, P., & Hjalmarsson, R. (2012). The impact of jury race in criminal trials. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127(2), 1017–1055.Google Scholar
Barberá, P. (2015). Birds of the same feather tweet together: Bayesian ideal point estimation using Twitter data. Political Analysis, 23(1), 76–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baron, J., & Jost, J. T. (2019). False equivalence: Are liberals and conservatives in the United States equally biased? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(2), 292–303.Google Scholar
Bartels, L. M. (2000). Partisanship and voting behavior, 1952–1996. American Journal of Political Science, 44(1), 35–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartels, L. M. (2002). Beyond the running tally: Partisan bias in political perceptions. Political Behavior, 24(2), 117–150.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bartlett, J., & Miller, C. (2010). The power of unreason: Conspiracy theories, extremism and counter-terrorism. Demos.Google Scholar
Bartra, O., McGuire, J. T., & Kable, J. W. (2013). The valuation system: A coordinate-based meta-analysis of BOLD fMRI experiments examining neural correlates of subjective value. Neuroimage, 76, 412–427.Google Scholar
Blais, A., & Young, R. (1999). Why do people vote? An experiment in rationality. Public Choice, 99(1–2), 39–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boxell, L., Gentzkow, M., & Shapiro, J. M. (2020). Cross-country trends in affective polarization (No. w26669). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w26669.Google Scholar
Brewer, M. B. (1979). In-group bias in the minimal intergroup situation: A cognitive-motivational analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 86(2), 307–324.Google Scholar
Brewer, M. B. (1999). The psychology of prejudice: Ingroup love and outgroup hate? Journal of Social Issues, 55(3), 429–444.Google Scholar
Bronstein, M. V., Pennycook, G., Bear, A., Rand, D. G., & Cannon, T. D. (2019). Belief in fake news is associated with delusionality, dogmatism, religious fundamentalism, and reduced analytic thinking. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 8(1), 108–117.Google Scholar
Brown, A. (2020, 24 April). Most Democrats who are looking for a relationship would not consider dating a Trump voter. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/24/most-democrats-who-are-looking-for-a-relationship-would-not-consider-dating-a-trump-voter/Google Scholar
Brown, D. (1991). Human universals. McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Bullock, J. G. (2007). Experiments on partisanship and public opinion: Party cues, false beliefs, and Bayesian updating [Ph.D. dissertation]. Stanford University.Google Scholar
Bullock, J. G. (2009). Partisan bias and the Bayesian ideal in the study of public opinion. The Journal of Politics, 71(3), 1109–1124.Google Scholar
Bullock, J. G., Gerber, A. S., Hill, S. J., & Huber, G. A. (2015). Partisan bias in factual beliefs about politics. Quarterly Journal of Political Science, 10(4), 519–578.Google Scholar
Carlson, E. (2015). Ethnic voting and accountability in Africa: A choice experiment in Uganda. World Politics, 67(2), 353–385.Google Scholar
Carlson, E. (2016). Finding partisanship where we least expect it: Evidence of partisan bias in a new African democracy. Political Behavior, 38(1), 129–154.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chawke, C., & Kanai, R. (2016). Alteration of political belief by non-invasive brain stimulation. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, Article 621.Google Scholar
Chen, Y., & Li, S. X. (2009). Group identity and social preferences. American Economic Review, 99(1), 431–457.Google Scholar
Che, Y. K., & Mierendorff, K. (2019). Optimal dynamic allocation of attention. American Economic Review, 109(8), 2993–3029.Google Scholar
Cikara, M., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2014). The neuroscience of intergroup relations: An integrative review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(3), 245–274.Google Scholar
Cikara, M., Van Bavel, J. J., Ingbretsen, Z. A., & Lau, T. (2017). Decoding ‘us’ and ‘them’: Neural representations of generalized group concepts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(5), 621–631.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cohen, G. L. (2003). Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(5), 808–822.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coppock, A. E. (2016). Positive, small, homogeneous, and durable: Political persuasion in response to information [Doctoral dissertation]. Columbia University.Google Scholar
Craig, M. A., & Richeson, J. A. (2014). On the precipice of a ‘majority-minority’ America: Perceived status threat from the racial demographic shift affects White Americans’ political ideology. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1189–1197.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
DeSilver, D. (2013, 17 July). Partisan polarization, in Congress and among public, is greater than ever. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/17/partisan-polarization-in-congress-and-among-public-is-greater-than-ever/Google Scholar
DeSilver, D. (2017, 3 November). US trails most developed countries in voter turnout. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/03/in-past-elections-u-s-trailed-most-developed-countries-in-voter-turnout/Google Scholar
Ditto, P. H., Liu, B. S., Clark, C. J., et al. (2019). At least bias is bipartisan: A meta-analytic comparison of partisan bias in liberals and conservatives. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(2), 273–291.Google Scholar
Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Duran, N. D., Nicholson, S. P., & Dale, R. (2017). The hidden appeal and aversion to political conspiracies as revealed in the response dynamics of partisans. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 73, 268–278.Google Scholar
Edelson, J., Alduncin, A., Krewson, C., Sieja, J. A., & Uscinski, J. E. (2017). The effect of conspiratorial thinking and motivated reasoning on belief in election fraud. Political Research Quarterly, 70(4), 933–946.Google Scholar
Enders, A. M., & Smallpage, S. M. (2018). On the measurement of conspiracy beliefs. Research & Politics, 5(1), 1–4.Google Scholar
Enders, A. M., & Smallpage, S. M. (2019). Informational cues, partisan-motivated reasoning, and the manipulation of conspiracy beliefs. Political Communication, 36(1), 83–102.Google Scholar
Enders, A. M., Smallpage, S. M., & Lupton, R. N. (2020). Are all ‘birthers’ conspiracy theorists? On the relationship between conspiratorial thinking and political orientations. British Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 849–855.Google Scholar
Fazio, L. K., Rand, D. G., & Pennycook, G. (2019). Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26(5), 1705–1710.Google Scholar
Festinger, L., Riecken, H. W., & Schachter, S. (1956). When prophecy fails. University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Gerber, A., & Green, D. P. (1998). Rational learning and partisan attitudes. American Journal of Political Science, 42(3), 794–818.Google Scholar
Gerber, A. S., & Huber, G. A. (2010). Partisanship, political control, and economic assessments. American Journal of Political Science, 54(1), 153–173.Google Scholar
Goette, L., Huffman, D., & Meier, S. (2012). The impact of social ties on group interactions: Evidence from minimal groups and randomly assigned real groups. American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 4(1), 101–115.Google Scholar
Gollwitzer, A., Martel, C., Brady, W. J., et al. (2020). Partisan differences in physical distancing predict infections and mortality during the coronavirus pandemic. Nature Human Behaviour, 4, 1186–1197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gottlieb, J. (2018). Understanding active sampling strategies: Empirical approaches and implications for attention and decision research. Cortex, 102, 150–160.Google Scholar
Graf, J., & Aday, S. (2008). Selective attention to online political information. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 52(1), 86–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. A. (2009). Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 1029–1049.Google Scholar
Greene, S. (1999). Understanding party identification: A social identity approach. Political Psychology, 20(2), 393–403.Google Scholar
Greene, S. (2002). The social-psychological measurement of partisanship. Political Behavior, 24(3), 171–197.Google Scholar
Harris, E., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2021). Preregistered replication of ‘feeling superior is a bipartisan issue: Extremity (not direction) of political views predicts perceived belief superiority’. Psychological Science, 32(3), 451–458.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hartstone, M., & Augoustinos, M. (1995). The minimal group paradigm: Categorization into two versus three groups. European Journal of Social Psychology, 25(2), 179–193.Google Scholar
Hatemi, P. K., Medland, S. E., Klemmensen, R., et al. (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.Google Scholar
Hawkins, D. (2020, 17 May). Eric Trump claims coronavirus is Democratic hoax, will ‘magically’ vanish after 2020 election. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/17/eric-trump-coronavirus/Google Scholar
Hibbing, J. R., Smith, K. B., & Alford, J. R. (2013). Predisposed: Liberals, conservatives, and the biology of political differences. Routledge.Google Scholar
Hornsby, A. N., & Love, B. C. (2020). How decisions and the desire for coherency shape subjective preferences over time. Cognition, 200, 104244.Google Scholar
Huddy, L. (2001). From social to political identity: A critical examination of social identity theory. Political Psychology, 22(1), 127–156.Google Scholar
Hunt, J. (2017, 2 November). ‘Fake news’ named Collins Dictionary’s official Word of the Year for 2017. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/fake-news-word-of-the-year-2017-collins-dictionary-donald-trump-kellyanne-conway-antifa-corbynmania-a8032751.htmlGoogle Scholar
Imhoff, R., Dieterle, L., & Lamberty, P. (2021). Resolving the puzzle of conspiracy worldview and political activism: Belief in secret plots decreases normative but increases nonnormative political engagement. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 12(1), 71–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Iyengar, S., & Krupenkin, M. (2018). The strengthening of partisan affect. Political Psychology, 39(4), 201–218.Google Scholar
Iyengar, S., Lelkes, Y., Levendusky, M., Malhotra, N., & Westwood, S. J. (2019). The origins and consequences of affective polarization in the United States. Annual Review of Political Science, 22, 129–146.Google Scholar
Johnston, R. (2006). Party identification: Unmoved mover or sum of preferences? Annual Review of Political Science, 9, 329–351.Google Scholar
Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339–375.Google Scholar
Jost, J. T., Hennes, E. P., & Lavine, H. (2013). ‘Hot’ political cognition: Its self-, group-, and system-serving purposes. In Carlston, D. E. (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of social cognition (pp. 851–875). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Jost, J. T., Noorbaloochi, S., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2014). The ‘chicken-and-egg’ problem in political neuroscience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 37(3), 317–318.Google Scholar
Jurkowitz, M., Mitchell, A., Shearer, E., & Walker, M. (2020). US media polarization and the 2020 election: A nation divided. Pew Research Center.Google Scholar
Kahan, D. M., Peters, E., Dawson, E. C., & Slovic, P. (2017). Motivated numeracy and enlightened self-government. Behavioural Public Policy, 1(1), 54–86.Google Scholar
Kelley, W. M., Macrae, C. N., Wyland, C. L., Caglar, S., Inati, S., & Heatherton, T. F. (2002). Finding the self? An event-related fMRI study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 14(5), 785–794.Google Scholar
Kevins, A., & Soroka, S. N. (2018). Growing apart? Partisan sorting in Canada, 1992–2015. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique, 51(1), 103–133.Google Scholar
Klein, E. (2020). Why we’re polarized. Profile Books.Google Scholar
Knutson, K. M., Wood, J. N., Spampinato, M. V., & Grafman, J. (2006). Politics on the brain: An fMRI investigation. Social Neuroscience, 1(1), 25–40.Google Scholar
Kozlowski, A., & Murphy, J. P. (2019, 11 September). Issue alignment and partisanship in the American public: Revisiting the ‘partisans without constraint’ thesis.Google Scholar
Krouwel, A., Kutiyski, Y., van Prooijen, J.-W., Martinsson, J., & Markstedt, E. (2017). Does extreme political ideology predict conspiracy beliefs, economic evaluations and political trust? Evidence from Sweden. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 5(2), 435–462.Google Scholar
Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498.Google Scholar
Lelkes, Y., & Westwood, S. J. (2017). The limits of partisan prejudice. The Journal of Politics, 79(2), 485–501.Google Scholar
Lewis, G. J., & Bates, T. C. (2010). Genetic evidence for multiple biological mechanisms underlying in-group favoritism. Psychological Science, 21(11), 1623–1628.Google Scholar
Lewis, G. J., Kandler, C., & Riemann, R. (2014). Distinct heritable influences underpin in-group love and out-group derogation. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 5(4), 407–413.Google Scholar
Lupu, N. (2015). Party polarization and mass partisanship: A comparative perspective. Political Behavior, 37(2), 331–356.Google Scholar
Mason, L. (2018). Uncivil agreement: How politics became our identity. The University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayer, S. J. (2017). How negative partisanship affects voting behavior in Europe: Evidence from an analysis of 17 European multi-party systems with proportional voting. Research & Politics, 4(1).Google Scholar
McConnell, C., Margalit, Y., Malhotra, N., & Levendusky, M. (2018). The economic consequences of partisanship in a polarized era. American Journal of Political Science, 62(1), 5–18.Google Scholar
McGuire, W. (1964). Inducing resistance to persuasion: Some contemporary approaches. In Berkowitz, L. (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 1, pp. 191–229). Academic Press.Google Scholar
McNamara, J., & Houston, A. (1980). The application of statistical decision theory to animal behaviour. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 85(4), 673–690.Google Scholar
Meffert, M. F., Chung, S., Joiner, A. J., Waks, L., & Garst, J. (2006). The effects of negativity and motivated information processing during a political campaign. Journal of Communication, 56(1), 27–51.Google Scholar
Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2011). Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34(2), 57–74.Google Scholar
Miller, J. M., Saunders, K. L., & Farhart, C. E. (2016). Conspiracy endorsement as motivated reasoning: The moderating roles of political knowledge and trust. American Journal of Political Science, 60(4), 824–844.Google Scholar
Mitchell, J. P., Macrae, C. N., & Banaji, M. R. (2006). Dissociable medial prefrontal contributions to judgments of similar and dissimilar others. Neuron, 50(4), 655–663.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Morgan, G. S., Skitka, L. J., & Wisneski, D. C. (2010). Moral and religious convictions and intentions to vote in the 2008 presidential election. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy (ASAP), 10(1), 307–320.Google Scholar
Morisi, D., Jost, J. T., & Singh, V. (2019). An asymmetrical ‘president-in-power’ effect. American Political Science Review, 113(2), 614–620.Google Scholar
Nam, H. H., Jost, J. T., Kaggen, L., Campbell-Meiklejohn, D., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2018). Amygdala structure and the tendency to regard the social system as legitimate and desirable. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(2), 133–138.Google Scholar
Nefes, T. S. (2014). Rationale of conspiracy theorizing: Who shot the President Chen Shui-bian? Rationality and Society, 26(3), 373–394.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pasek, J., Stark, T. H., Krosnick, J. A., & Tompson, T. (2015). What motivates a conspiracy theory? Birther beliefs, partisanship, liberal-conservative ideology, and anti-black attitudes. Electoral Studies, 40, 482–489.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pereira, A., Harris, E., & Van Bavel, J. J. (in press). Identity concerns drive belief: The impact of partisan identity on the belief and dissemination of true and false news.Google Scholar
Pew Research Center. (2014). Political polarization in the American public. www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/Google Scholar
Pew Research Center. (2017). The partisan divide on political values grows even wider. http://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/the-partisan-divide-on-political-values-grows-even-wider/Google Scholar
Pew Research Center. (2020). In changing U.S. electorate, race and education remain stark dividing lines. https://www.people-press.org/2020/06/02/in-changing-u-s-electorate-race-and-education-remain-stark-dividing-lines/Google Scholar
Ripberger, J. T., Jenkins-Smith, H. C., Silva, C. L., et al. (2017). Bayesian versus politically motivated reasoning in human perception of climate anomalies. Environmental Research Letters, 12(11), Article 114004.Google Scholar
Robbett, A., & Matthews, P. H. (2018). Partisan bias and expressive voting. Journal of Public Economics, 157, 107–120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rollwage, M., Dolan, R. J., & Fleming, S. M. (2018). Metacognitive failure as a feature of those holding radical beliefs. Current Biology, 28(24), 4014–4021.Google Scholar
Ross, L., Lepper, M. R., & Hubbard, M. (1975). Perseverance in self-perception and social perception: Biased attributional processes in the debriefing paradigm. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(5), 880–892.Google Scholar
Samuels, D., & Zucco, C. Jr. (2014). The power of partisanship in Brazil: Evidence from survey experiments. American Journal of Political Science, 58(1), 212–225.Google Scholar
Sarlin, B. (2018, 14 January). ‘Fake news’ went viral in 2016. This expert studied who clicked. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/fake-news-went-viral-2016-expert-studied-who-clicked-n836581Google Scholar
Schaffner, B. F., & Luks, S. (2018). Misinformation or expressive responding? What an inauguration crowd can tell us about the source of political misinformation in surveys. Public Opinion Quarterly, 82(1), 135–147.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shafranek, R. M. (2021). Political considerations in nonpolitical decisions: A conjoint analysis of roommate choice. Political Behavior, 43, 271–300.Google Scholar
Shearer, E., & Gottfried, J. (2017). News use across social media platforms 2017. Pew Research Center. https://www.journalism.org/2017/09/07/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2017/Google Scholar
Sherif, M., White, B. J., & Harvey, O. J. (1955). Status in experimentally produced groups. American Journal of Sociology, 60(4), 370–379.Google 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.Google Scholar
Siddiqui, N. (2020). Who do you believe? Political parties and conspiracy theories in Pakistan. Party Politics, 26(2), 107–119.Google Scholar
Silverman, C. (2016, 16 November). This analysis shows how viral fake election news stories outperformed real news on Facebook. BuzzFeed News. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebookGoogle Scholar
Skitka, L. J., Bauman, C. W., & Sargis, E. G. (2005). Moral conviction: Another contributor to attitude strength or something more? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 88(6), 895–917.Google Scholar
Smallpage, S. M., Enders, A. M., & Uscinski, J. E. (2017). The partisan contours of conspiracy theory beliefs. Research & Politics, 4(4).Google Scholar
Stern, C., West, T. V., & Schmitt, P. G. (2014). The liberal illusion of uniqueness. Psychological Science, 25(1), 137–144.Google Scholar
Sternisko, A., Cichocka, A., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2020). The dark side of social movements: Social identity, non-conformity, and the lure of conspiracy theories. Current Opinion in Psychology, 35, 1–6.Google Scholar
Strandberg, T., Olson, J. A., Hall, L., Woods, A., & Johansson, P. (2020). Depolarizing American voters: Democrats and Republicans are equally susceptible to false attitude feedback. PLoS ONE, 15(2), Article e0226799.Google Scholar
Strandberg, T., Sivén, D., Hall, L., Johansson, P., & Pärnamets, P. (2018). False beliefs and confabulation can lead to lasting changes in political attitudes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 147(9), 1382–1399.Google Scholar
Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006). Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs. American Journal of Political Science, 50(3), 755–769.Google Scholar
Taber, C. S., Lodge, M., & Glathar, J. (2001). The motivated construction of political judgments. In Kuklinski, J. H. (Ed.), Citizens and politics: Perspectives from political psychology (pp. 198–226). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific American, 223(5), 96–103.Google Scholar
Tajfel, H. (1974). Social identity and intergroup behaviour. Social Science Information, 13(2), 65–93.Google Scholar
Tajfel, H., Billig, M. G., Bundy, R. P., & Flament, C. (1971). Social categorization and intergroup behaviour. European Journal of Social Psychology, 1(2), 149–178.Google Scholar
Tappin, M. B., Pennycook, G., & Rand, D. R. (2020). Thinking clearly about casual inferences of politically motivated reasoning: Why paradigmatic study designs often undermine casual inference. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 34, 81–87.Google Scholar
Tetlock, P. E. (1985). Accountability: A social check on the fundamental attribution error. Social Psychology Quarterly, 48(3), 227–238.Google Scholar
Toner, K., Leary, M. R., Asher, M. W., & Jongman-Sereno, K. P. (2013). Feeling superior is a bipartisan issue: Extremity (not direction) of political views predicts perceived belief superiority. Psychological Science, 24(12), 2454–2462.Google Scholar
Tucker, J. A., Guess, A., Barberá, P., et al. (2018, March). Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: A review of the scientific literature. Hewlett Foundation. https://www.hewlett.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Social-Media-Political-Polarization-and-Political-Disinformation-Literature-Review.pdfGoogle Scholar
Uscinski, J. E., & Parent, J. M. (2014). American conspiracy theories. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Van Bavel, J. J., Harris, E. A., Pärnamets, P., Rathje, S., Doell, K. C., & Tucker, J. A. (in press). Political psychology in the digital (mis)information age: A model of news belief and sharing. Social Issues and Policy Review.Google Scholar
Van Bavel, J. J., Packer, D. J., & Cunningham, W. A. (2008). The neural substrates of in-group bias: A functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation. Psychological Science, 19(11), 1131–1139.Google Scholar
Van Bavel, J. J., & Pereira, A. (2018). The partisan brain: An identity-based model of political belief. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(3), 213–224.Google Scholar
Van Bavel, J. J., Sternisko, A., Harris, E., & Robertson, C. (2020). The social function of rationalization: An identity perspective. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Van der Linden, S., Panagopoulos, C., Azevedo, F., & Jost, J. J. (2020). The paranoid style in American politics revisited: An ideological asymmetry in conspiratorial thinking. Political Psychology, 42(1), 23–51.Google Scholar
Van Prooijen, J. W., Krouwel, A. P., & Pollet, T. V. (2015). Political extremism predicts belief in conspiracy theories. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 6(5), 570–578.Google Scholar
Verhulst, B., Eaves, L. J., & Hatemi, P. K. (2012). Correlation not causation: The relationship between personality traits and political ideologies. American Journal of Political Science, 56(1), 34–51.Google Scholar
Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151.Google Scholar
Wilson, A., Parker, V., & Feinberg, M. (2020). Polarization in the contemporary political and media landscape, Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 34, 223–228.Google Scholar
Xiao, Y. J., Coppin, G., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2016). Clarifying the role of perception in intergroup relations: Origins of bias, components of perception, and practical implications. Psychological Inquiry, 27(4), 358–366.Google Scholar
Xiao, Y. J., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2019). Sudden shifts in social identity swiftly shape implicit evaluation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 83, 55–69.Google Scholar
Yudkin, D. A., Rothmund, T., Twardawski, M., Thalla, N., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2016). Reflexive intergroup bias in third-party punishment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(11), 1448–1459.Google Scholar
Zimerman, A., & Pinheiro, F. (2020). Appearances can be deceptive: Political polarization, agrarian policy, and coalitional presidentialism in Brazil. Politics & Policy, 48(2), 339–371.Google Scholar
Zmigrod, L., Rentfrow, P. J., & Robbins, T. W. (2020). The partisan mind: Is extreme political partisanship related to cognitive inflexibility? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(3), 407–418.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×