The Rationalizing Voter
Abstract
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.
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Once groups are ideologically polarized, their members may engage in 'normal' or 'cold' cognitive processes, possibly including Bayesian updating, to maintain or exacerbate motivated differences in beliefs, opinions and values.
“Once groups are ideologically polarized (that is, extreme), their members may engage in ‘normal’ or ‘cold’ cognitive processes, possibly including Bayesian updating, to maintain or exacerbate motivated differences in beliefs, opinions and values61,102–105.”
From Cognitive–motivational mechanisms of political polarization in social-communicative contexts (2022) · cites this paper as [102]
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- Authors
- Lodge, M., & Taber, C. S.
- Affiliations
- State University of New York (US)
- Venue
- Cambridge University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Published
- 2013-03-05
- OpenAlex
- W121992860
- Cited by
- 1,281
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 119 · 2025: 126 · 2024: 73 · 2023: 71 · 2022: 104 · 2021: 168 · 2020: 183 · 2019: 107 · 2018: 82 · 2017: 79 · 2016: 70 · 2015: 50 · 2014: 31 · 2013: 6 · 2012: 8
- FWCI
- 79.85
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Cambridge University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
- Keywords
- dual-process theory, automatic cognition, political behavior, political attitudes, political beliefs, affect transfer, motivated reasoning, hot cognition, automaticity, voting behavior, question wording effects
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