Caught in the Middle: Response Dynamics of Political Partisan Conspiracy Theories and Independent Responders

abstract: Political party identification has an immense influence on shaping individual attitudes and processes of reasoning to the point where otherwise knowledgeable people endorse political conspiracies that support one's political in-group and simultaneously disparage an out-group. Although recent research has explored this tendency among partisans, less is known about how Independents respond in comparison. Previous research fails to identify the Independent as a unique type of voter, but rather categorizes this group as ostensibly partisan, not a separate phenomenon to investigate. However, most Independents purport neutrality and, by recent polls, are becoming a substantial body worthy of concerted focus. Many questions arise about who Independents really are. For example, do all who identify as Independent behave in a similar manner? Are Independents ideologically different than what is represented by a partisan label? Is the Independent category a broad term for something entirely misunderstood? A thorough investigation into the greater dynamics of the political environment in the United States is an enormous undertaking, requiring a robust interdisciplinary approach beyond the focus and intent of this study. Therefore, this study begins the journey toward understanding these phenomena; do Independents, as a whole, uniformly respond to statements about political conspiracy theories? To explore these possibilities, explicit responses are bypassed to evaluate the implicit appeal of political conspiracy theories. An action dynamics (mouse-tracking) approach, a data rich method that records the response process, demonstrates Independents are not in fact a homogeneous group, but rather seem to fall into two groups: non-partisan leaning and partisan leaning. The analysis exposes that relative to the baseline and control stimuli: (1) Non-leaning Independents reveal an increased susceptibility to implicitly endorse bi-partisan directed conspiracy theories when compared to leaners. (2) Republican-leaners demonstrate a stronger susceptibility to endorse right-wing aligned conspiracy theories (against Barack Obama), similar to Republican partisans. (3) Democrat-leaners, unlike Democrat partisans, do not demonstrate any particular susceptibility to implicitly endorse either right/left-wing aligned conspiracy theories (against Barack Obama or George W. Bush). Drawing from major theories from social, political, and cognitive psychology will contribute to an understanding of these phenomena. Concluding remarks include study limitations and future directions.Dissertation/ThesisMasters Thesis Psychology 201

Breaking the Epistemic Pornography Habit: Cognitive Biases, Digital Discourse Environments, and Moral Exemplars

Purpose: This paper analyzes some of the epistemically pernicious effects of use of the Internet and social media. In light of this analysis, it introduces the concept of epistemic pornography and argues that epistemic agents both can and should avoid consuming and sharing epistemic pornography. Design/Methodology/Approach: The paper draws on research on epistemic virtue, cognitive biases, social media use and its epistemic consequences, Fake News, paternalistic nudging, pornography, moral philosophy, moral elevation, and moral exemplar theory to analyze the epistemically pernicious effects of the Internet and social media. Findings: There is a growing consensus that Internet and social media activate and enable human cognitive biases leading to what are here called failures of epistemic virtue . Common formulations of this problem involve the concept of Fake News , and strategies for responding to the problem often have much in common with paternalistic nudging . While Fake News is a problem and the nudging approach holds out promise, the paper concludes that both place insufficient emphasis on the agency and responsibility of users of the Internet and social media, and that nudging represents a necessary but not sufficient response. Originality/Value: The essay offers the concept of epistemic pornography as a concept distinct from but related to fake news - distinct precisely because it places greater emphasis on personal agency and responsibility - and, following recent literature on moral elevation and moral exemplars, as a heuristic that agents might use to economize their efforts at resisting irrational cognitive biases and attempting to live up to their epistemic duties

State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review 2015

This annual review tracks the latest research in the growing field of implicit bias. In addition to trends in the public domain and scholarly realm, the publication provides a detailed discussion of new 2014 literature in the areas of criminal justice, health and health care, employment, education, and housing, as well as the latest ideas for debiasing

Ideological diversity, hostility, and discrimination in philosophy

Members of the field of philosophy have, just as other people, political convictions or, as psychologists call them, ideologies. How are different ideologies distributed and perceived in the field? Using the familiar distinction between the political left and right, we surveyed an international sample of 794 subjects in philosophy. We found that survey participants clearly leaned left (75%), while right-leaning individuals (14%) and moderates (11%) were underrepresented. Moreover, and strikingly, across the political spectrum, from very left-leaning individuals and moderates to very right-leaning individuals, participants reported experiencing ideological hostility in the field, occasionally even from those from their own side of the political spectrum. Finally, while about half of the subjects believed that discrimination against left- or right-leaning individuals in the field is not justified, a significant minority displayed an explicit willingness to discriminate against colleagues with the opposite ideology. Our findings are both surprising and important, because a commitment to tolerance and equality is widespread in philosophy, and there is reason to think that ideological similarity, hostility, and discrimination undermine reliable belief formation in many areas of the discipline

Cynical Realism and Judicial Fantasy

Recent scholarship on the workings of the court system has cast doubt on the ability of judges to make neutral, unbiased decisions. Statistical analyses of judicial decisions have identified a sizable minority of decisions that appear to be influenced by a judge’s ideology. These findings have fueled a “neutrality crisis” regarding the courts system’s ability to live up to its role as a neutral arbiter. Naïve realism accounts for this ideological bias by suggesting that judges, as humans, are subject to the same sort of perception biases as anyone else and that these unconscious biases can affect their decisions. By locating the source of the “neutrality crisis” in the unconscious, these scholars seek to account for the findings of the political scientists, while maintaining the legitimacy of the current institutional structure. However, this response is cynical. Cynicism anticipates the revelation of some real truth that undermines the ideology supporting the social fabric of society. By framing politically derived decisions as a product of naïve realism and offering advice on how to obscure unconscious judicial bias, legal scholars are employing cynical reasoning to maintain an illusion of neutrality while justifying non-neutral decision-making. This cynical reasoning sacrifices long-term “Rule of Law” interests for the sake of short-term political stability—an unnecessary and detrimental tradeoff. This Note seeks to isolate this issue and offer an alternative solution to the neutrality crisis informed by the latest findings from cognitive psychology and behavior economics. Judges must cultivate an independent ideology that is self-conscious of any personal biases and seeks to overcome those biases so that they may engage legal questions with a more detached, reasoned, and just decision-making process. This method will lead to more neutral, unbiased decisions from the bench and strengthen the rule of law in the United States

Empathy’s Promise and Limits for Those Disproportionately Harmed by the COVID-19 Pandemic

Structural race, ethnicity, and class disparities in the United States concentrated and intensified the health, economic, and psychological impact of COVID-19 for certain populations. Those same structural disparities and the belief system that maintains them may also account for the weak policy response that left the United States with high rates of infection and death, economic devastation of individuals, families, and small businesses, and psychological distress. A more equal society with a stronger pre-pandemic safety net may have prevented or eased the disproportionate hardship and avoided the drama and cliffhanging. Or the shock of a pandemic and likelihood of extreme hardship might have garnered a stronger and more timely policy response. Yet, many federal lawmakers failed to empathize with and take compassionate action to aid the many victims of COVID-19 across American society, and especially to alleviate the disproportionate suffering by Black, Indigenous, Hispanic/Latinx and Asian American communities, along with many working class and impoverished adults and children

Constituents of political cognition: race, party politics, and the alliance detection system.

Research suggests that the mind contains a set of adaptations for detecting alliances: an alliance detection system, which monitors for, encodes, and stores alliance information and then modifies the activation of stored alliance categories according to how likely they will predict behavior within a particular social interaction. Previous studies have established the activation of this system when exposed to explicit competition or cooperation between individuals. In the current studies we examine if shared political opinions produce these same effects. In particular, (1) if participants will spontaneously categorize individuals according to the parties they support, even when explicit cooperation and antagonism are absent, and (2) if party support is sufficiently powerful to decrease participants’ categorization by an orthogonal but typically-diagnostic alliance cue (in this case the target’s race). Evidence was found for both: Participants spontaneously and implicitly kept track of who supported which party, and when party cross-cut race—such that the race of targets was not predictive of party support—categorization by race was dramatically reduced. To verify that these results reflected the operation of a cognitive system for modifying the activation of alliance categories, and not just socially-relevant categories in general, an identical set of studies was also conducted with in which party was either crossed with sex or age (neither of which is predicted to be primarily an alliance category). As predicted, categorization by party occurred to the same degree, and there was no reduction in either categorization by sex or by age. All effects were replicated across two sets of between-subjects conditions. These studies provide the first direct empirical evidence that party politics engages the mind’s systems for detecting alliances and establish two important social categorization phenomena: (1) that categorization by age is, like sex, not affected by alliance information and (2) that political contexts can reduce the degree to which individuals are represented in terms of their race

Explaining Injustice: Structural Analysis, Bias, and Individuals

Why does social injustice exist? What role, if any, do implicit biases play in the perpetuation of social inequalities? Individualistic approaches to these questions explain social injustice as the result of individuals’ preferences, beliefs, and choices. For example, they explain racial injustice as the result of individuals acting on racial stereotypes and prejudices. In contrast, structural approaches explain social injustice in terms of beyond-the-individual features, including laws, institutions, city layouts, and social norms. Often these two approaches are seen as competitors. Framing them as competitors suggests that only one approach can win and that the loser offers worse explanations of injustice. In this essay, we explore each approach and compare them. Using implicit bias as an example, we argue that the relationship between individualistic and structural approaches is more complicated than it may first seem. Moreover, we contend that each approach has its place in analyses of injustice and raise the possibility that they can work together—synergistically—to produce deeper explanations of social injustice. If so, the approaches may be complementary, rather than competing

The Changing German Voter

Over the past half century, the behavior of German voters has changed profoundly—at first rather gradually but during the last decade at accelerated speed. Electoral decision-making has become much more volatile, rendering election outcomes less predictable. Party system fragmentation intensified sharply. The success of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) put an end to Germany’s exceptionality as one of the few European countries without a strong right-wing populist party. Utilizing a wide range of data compiled by the German Longitudinal Election Study, the book examines changing voters’ behavior in the context of changing parties, campaigns, and media during the period of its hitherto most dramatically increased fluidity at the 2009, 2013, and 2017 federal elections. Guided by the notions of realignment and dealignment, the study addresses three questions: How did the turbulences that increasingly characterize German electoral politics come about? How did they in turn condition voters’ decision-making? How were voters’ attitudes and choices affected by situational factors that pertained to the specifics of particular elections? The book demonstrates how traditional cleavages lost their grip on voters and a new socio-cultural line of conflict became the dominant axis of party competition. A series of major crises, but also programmatic shifts of the established parties promoted this development. It led to a segmentation of the party system that pits the right-wing populist AfD against the traditional parties. The book also demonstrates the relevance of coalition preferences, candidate images as well as media and campaign effects for voters’ attitudes, beliefs, and preferences