We examined the effects of incidental anger on perceived and actual polarization between Democrats and Republicans in the context of two national tragedies, Hurricane Katrina (Study 1) and the mass shooting that targeted Representative Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona (Study 2). We hypothesized that because of its relevance to intergroup conflict, incidental anger exacerbates the political polariz...

Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this premise during the most recent general election in Sweden, in whi...

Ideological preferences within the American electorate are contingent on both the environmental conditions that provide the content of the contemporary political debate and internal predispositions that motivate people to hold liberal or conservative policy preferences. In this article we apply Jost, Federico, and Napier's (2009) top-down/bottom-up theory of political attitude formation to a ge...

Political thought and behavior play an important role in our lives, from ethnic tensions in Europe, to the war in Iraq and the Middle Eastern conflict, to parliamentary and presidential elections. However, little is known about how the individual's political attitudes and decisions are shaped by subtle national cues that are so prevalent in our environment. We report a series of experiments tha...

During the past half century, the political attitude of the Eastern European people toward the state, government and society changed dramatically. So did their value systems. Inglehart's materialist vs. postmaterialist comparative analysis gives a measure of this value change, but not enough as to fully characterize the phenomena underlining the differences in political culture before and after...

This paper proposes that understanding of political phenomena including political attitudes and political sophistication can be enriched by incorporating the theories and tools of cognitive neuroscience. In particular, the cognitive neuroscience of nonconscious habitual cognition (akin to bicycle riding) and various memory systems are reviewed in order to describe the different types of informa...