Increasingly, governments report on public service quality, which has the potential to inform evaluations of performance that underlie voters’ opinions and behaviors. We argue these policies have important effects that go beyond informing voters. Specifically, we contend that the format in which policymakers choose to report information will steer the direction of opinion by exacerbating or mitigating biases in information processing. Using the case of school accountability systems in the United States and a variety of experimental and observational approaches, we find that letter grade systems for rating public school performance, as opposed to other reporting formats, exacerbate negativity bias. Public opinion proves more responsive to negative information than to positive information in letter grade systems than in alternate formats. Policymakers, then, do not simply inform public opinion; rather, their decisions about how to present information shape the interpretations that voters ultimately draw from the information provided.

If the life sciences are to have much to say about politics, there needs to be a universal element to political orientations. In this essay, I argue that the recent prominence of nativist, law-and-order, populist politicians reveals the nature of this universal element. All social units have to address bedrock dilemmas about how to deal with norm violators and how welcoming to be to outsiders as well as to proponents of new lifestyles. Might differences on these core dilemmas be the universal element of political life? Using the followers of one of the most prominent examples of a nativist political leader—Donald Trump—as an example, I present data showing that Trump’s most earnest followers are different from others—even those who share their general ideological leanings—not on traditional economic or social issues, but rather on the group-based security issues that grow out of the bedrock dilemmas of social life.

Work on procedural utility suggests that decision makers derive more value from outcomes earned with freedom of choice. We experimentally tested tradeoffs between procedural and outcome utility, examining financial losses as an important boundary condition. Participants completed a simulated consumer sales task (Exp. 1) or card task (Exp. 2) with or without choice. Participants reported their satisfaction with monetary outcomes. When given choice, participants reported greater self-determination. Participants also reported higher outcome satisfaction, but only for gains. Choice did not influence satisfaction for losses. In Experiment 2, Participants also preferred choice when selecting between financial gains. However, when choice was costly (large disparity in pay) or posed losses, most participants sacrificed choice for better payoffs. Results are consistent with a cognitive model in which participants shift their attention from procedural utilities to financial outcomes when faced with losses. Financial outcomes may take precedence over choice when financial outcomes are threatened.

When people judge risk or the probability of a risky prospect, single case narratives can bias judgments when a statistical base-rate is also provided. In this work we investigate various methodological and procedural factors that may influence this narrative bias. We found that narratives had the strongest effect on a non-numerical risk measure, which was also the best predictor of behavioral intentions. In contrast, two scales for subjective probability reflected primarily statistical variations. We observed a negativity bias on the risk measure, such that the narratives increased rather than decreased risk perceptions, whereas the effect on probability judgments was symmetric. Additionally, we found no evidence that the narrative bias is solely produced by adherence to conversational norms. Finally, changing the absolute number of narratives reporting the focal event, while keeping their relative frequency constant, had no effect. Thus, individuals extract a representation of likelihood from a sample of single-case narratives, which drives the bias. These results show that the narrative bias is in part dependent on the measure used to assess it and underline the conceptual distinction between subjective probability and perceived risk.

We test the political capital hypothesis that Supreme Court decisions simultaneously legitimate policy and harm support for the Court, at least under certain conditions. Our data suggest that the Court’s “legitimacy-conferring” capacity is weak. Learning that the Supreme Court upheld an affirmative action policy increased public support for the constitutionality and desirability of that policy, but only among Democrats pre-disposed towards that reaction. Furthermore, Democrats did not develop more favorable views of the Court. Consistent with the political capital hypothesis, Republicans developed more negative views of the Court when the Court associated itself with affirmative action policy.

This is a registered report for a study of racial and ethnic variation in the relationship between negativity bias and political attitudes. Pioneering work on the psychological and biological roots of political orientation has suggested that political conservatism is driven in large part by enhanced negativity bias. This work has been criticized on several theoretical fronts, and recent replication attempts have failed. To dig deeper into the contours of when (and among whom) negativity bias predicts conservatism, we investigate a surprisingly overlooked factor in existing literature: race and ethnicity. We propose that political issues represent threat or disgust in different ways depending on one’s race and ethnicity. We recruited 174 White, Latinx, and Asian American individuals (in equal numbers) to examine how the relationship between negativity bias and political orientation varies by race/ethnicity across four domains: policing/criminal justice, immigration, economic redistribution, and religious social conservatism.

This study tests two sets of competing hypotheses about the relationship between trait reactivity to positive and negative stimuli (i.e., motivational reactivity), moral stances on social principles (i.e., social morality), and political ideology. The classic view contends that a specific political ideology or social morality results from a specific motivational reactivity pattern, whereas the dynamic coordination account suggests that trait motivational reactivity modulates an individual’s political ideology and social morality as a result of the majority political beliefs in their immediate social context. A survey using subjects recruited from a liberal-leaning social context was conducted to test these hypotheses. Results support the dynamic coordination account. Reactivity to negativity (indexed by defensive system activation scores) is associated with the adoption of the dominant social morality and political ideology. Reactivity to positivity (indexed by appetitive system activation scores) is associated with the adoption of nondominant social moral and political stances.

We assess individuals’ responses to news about threat, compared to news about positive indicators of well-being, using data from nine experiments conducted across eight countries. The general proposition is that exposure to news about threat increases tendencies to “tune in” to information, compared to those presented with news about better times. The evidence strongly supports this expectation: without exception, the average respondent recalls and seeks more information about terrorist threat than good times. Further, this pattern of results generalizes to other threats. The study thematically and geographically extends research on negative information and political learning. It also has broader implications: absorbing newsworthy information is foundational to the types of attitudes citizens express and the extent to which, and how, they engage in the world around them.