Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Do People Really Become More Conservative As They Age?, Johnathan C. Peterson, Kevin Smith, John Hibbing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Folk wisdom has long held that people become more politically conservative as they grow older, although several empirical studies suggest political attitudes are stable across time. Using data from the Michigan Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Study, we analyze attitudinal change over a major portion of the adult life span.We document changes in party identification, self-reported ideology, and selected issue positions over this time period and place these changes in context by comparing them with contemporaneous national averages. Consistent with previous research but contrary to folk wisdom, our results indicate that political attitudes are remarkably stable over the long term. In contrast …

Ethical Concerns Of Heroism Training, Brian R. Riches, Matt Langdon, Ari Kohen

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Heroism training programs originated in the mid-2000s with the goal to “Train everyday heroes” (Heroic Imagination Project, 2017). Most participants of these programs are students between the ages of 10 and 20. Anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that these programs may create more courageous and prosocial people (Heiner, 2018; Kohen & Sólo, 2019), however there is very little discussion in the emerging academic field of heroism science about the potential ethical concerns of training minors to be heroes (Beggan, 2019; Franco & Zimbardo, 2016; Franco et al., 2017). With the growth of heroism science scholarship, it would be wise to …

Motivated Viewing: Selective Exposure To Political Images When Reasoning Is Not Involved, Clarisse Warren, Stephen Schneider, Kevin Smith, John Hibbing

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Motivated reasoning is an important element of politics especially in these highly polarized times. People selectively expose themselves to information in a fashion that makes it possible to embrace arguments consistent with their existing biases and ignore arguments inconsistent with those biases. Often overlooked in the research on motivated reasoning and selective exposure to information, however, is that a substantial portion of politics is about affective responses—that which makes people feel good and that which makes people feel bad. In this paper, we introduce a novel indicator of people's tendency to prolong exposure to favored political images or to truncate …

Ideological Asymmetries In Social Psychological Research: Rethinking The Impact Of Political Context On Ideological Epistemology, Ingrid J. Haas

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Ideological asymmetries in social psychological research: rethinking the impact of political context on ideological epistemology.

Conclusion

In sum, while I agree with many of the arguments raised by Clark and Winegard (this issue), we should continue to de-bate the degree to which liberals and conservatives are equally motivated by tribalism, especially in the context of contemporary American politics. While there is no doubt that personal political views influence the questions that scientists deem important, I do wonder to what extent the ideological biases recently observed in the field of social psychology generalize to the social sciences as a whole (and …

Ideology And Predictive Processing: Coordination, Bias, And Polarization In Socially Constrained Error Minimization, Nathan E. Wheeler, Suraiya Allidina, Elizabeth U. Long, Stephen P. Schneider, Ingrid J. Haas, William A. Cunningham

Department of Political Science: Faculty Publications

Recent models of cognition suggest that the brain may implement predictive processing, in which top-down expectations constrain incoming sensory data. In this perspective, expectations are updated (error minimization) only if sensory data sufficiently deviate from these expectations (prediction error). Although originally applied to perception, predictive processing is thought to generally characterize cognitive architecture, including the social cognitive processes involved in ideological thinking. Scaling up these simple computational principles to the social sphere outlines a path by which group members may adopt shared ideologies and beliefs to predict behavior and cooperate with each other. Because ideological judgments are of specific interest …