Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. Citizens are very sensitive to environmental contextual factors such as the title 'President' preceding 'Obama' in a newspaper headline, upbeat music or patriotic symbols accompanying a campaign ad, or question wording and order in a survey, all of which have their greatest influence when citizens are unaware. This book develops and tests a dual-process theory of political beliefs, attitudes and behavior, claiming that all thinking, feeling, reasoning and doing have an automatic component as well as a conscious deliberative component. The authors are especially interested in the impact of automatic feelings on political judgments and evaluations. This research is based on laboratory experiments, which allow the testing of five basic hypotheses: hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion and motivated reasoning.
• Brings together three points of study in an innovative way: motivated biases in political reasoning; unconscious influences on political deliberation and behavior; and primacy of feelings over thinking in political cognition • Based upon laboratory experiments testing five basic hypotheses: hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion and motivated reasoning • Demonstrates that conscious deliberation is often the result of automatically-triggered feelings and thoughts
Contents
1. Unconscious thinking on political judgment, reasoning, and behavior; 2. The John Q. Public model of political information processing; 3. Experimental tests of automatic hot cognition; 4. Implicit identifications in political information processing; 5. Affect transfer and the evaluation of political candidates; 6. Affective contagion and political thinking; 7. Motivated political reasoning; 8. A computational model of the citizen as motivated reasoner; 9. Affect, cognition, emotion: which way the causal arrow?
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