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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Subadditivity And The Unpacking Effect In Political Opinions, Renan Levine
Subadditivity And The Unpacking Effect In Political Opinions, Renan Levine
Renan Levine
To explain subadditivity in judgments of probabilities, support theory (Tversky and Koehler 1994) emphasizes the increased availability of information about component events. This paper demonstrates that similar processes occur in responses to public opinion questions. When a broad description of a policy is “unpacked” into more specific component policies, support for the component policies exceeds support for the original, broad policy. This effect is especially strong when one or more of the unpacked policies make information available to the decision-maker that was not accessible when the broad description was provided. This behavior violates Luce’s (1959) axiom of independence of irrelevant …
Fringe Candidates Can Change Perceptions Of Centrist Candidates, Renan Levine
Fringe Candidates Can Change Perceptions Of Centrist Candidates, Renan Levine
Renan Levine
Two experiments demonstrate that adding an extreme third candidate to the choice set causes perceptions of the nearest candidate to appear more centrist. This change in perceptions is large enough to cause this candidate to appear closer to many voters. causal mechanism driving the shift in perceptions is attributed to information about the range of possible values provided by the extreme candidate. This is consistent with “range effects” identified by Parducci (1965) and used to explain behavior in a wide variety of other contexts. In politics, range effects may help a major party candidate win the median voter when an …
Message Or Messenger? The Limits Of Moral Leadership, Renan Levine, Laura B. Stephenson
Message Or Messenger? The Limits Of Moral Leadership, Renan Levine, Laura B. Stephenson
Renan Levine
Media coverage of policies sometimes includes quotes from opinion leaders, including clergy and politicians. In an experiment implemented on campuses in two countries, we test the impact of a religious leader and a political leader by seeing how opinions change when these leaders frame their comments using a material or ethical terms. We find that changing the identity of the messenger alters what considerations factor into our subjects’ deliberations about stem-cell research and government spending cuts to pay off the government debt. However, the efficacy of the leader does not depend on the content of the message. Instead, the messenger …