6 - Affective Contagion and Political Thinking

Summary

There are now hundreds of attitude priming studies in the literature (Petty, Fazio, and Briñol, 2009; Wegner and Bargh, 1998), and as seen in earlier chapters we have found strong experimental support for the spontaneous processing of affective information, but to our knowledge there are no experimental analyses of the effects of preconscious feelings on people when they stop to think and reason about political issues (Nosek, Graham, and Hawkins, 2010). What is more, there is good reason to believe that the way citizens evaluate public policy issues may be different from the way they think about and evaluate political persons. Zaller and Feldman (1992) make the case that when evaluating political issues, especially when the political parties take opposing positions (Zaller, 1992), citizens are apt to see two or more sides, and their awareness of the pros and cons may prevent them from forming a crystallized evaluation, especially if they are ambivalent about the issue (Basinger and Lavine, 2005; Lavine, Steenbergen, and Johnston, forthcoming). If this is the case, when called on to form or report a summary evaluation for an issue, citizens may not possess a readily available positive or negative affective tag to retrieve from memory, but rather may rely on memory-based piecemeal processing to sample whatever considerations are accessible in memory and only then construct an evaluation by integrating these conscious recollections into an evaluation (Fiske and Pavelchak, 1986; Tourangeau, Rips, and Rasinski, 2000; Zaller and Feldman, 1992).

Our JQP account of how political judgments are formed and expressed claims that the feelings aroused in the initial stages of processing sociopolitical concepts, including candidates, groups, and political ideas or issues, inevitably color all phases of the evaluation process. When a citizen is called upon to make a judgment, given sufficient time to think and motivation to query memory, the sample of considerations that enters consciousness will be biased by the valence of initial affect. That is, our theory posits that considered thought will be the joint product of memory-based processing and initial feelings, which are routinely triggered by affective tallies formed through online processes as well as affect aroused by contextual events and mood.