Misinformed About the Affordable Care Act? Leveraging Certainty to Assess the Prevalence of Misperceptions

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112231/1/jcom12165.pd

Racial Attitudes Predicted Changes in Ostensibly Race‐Neutral Political Attitudes Under the Obama Administration

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136427/1/pops12315_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136427/2/pops12315.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136427/3/pops12315-sup-0001-suppinfo01.pd

Why do white Americans oppose race-targeted policies? Clarifying the impact of symbolic racism

Measures of symbolic racism (SR) have often been used to tap racial prejudice towar

The Impact of Social Desirability Pressures on Whites’ Endorsement of Racial Stereotypes: A Comparison Between Oral and ACASI Reports in a National Survey

In the last 60 years, the proportion of white Americans expressing anti-black prejudice in face-to-face survey interviews has declined dramatically. To test whether social desirability pressures affect the expression of anti-black prejudice, we analyzed a within-subjects experiment in the 2008 American National Election Study in which white respondents first reported their endorsement of stereotypes of blacks confidentially via audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI) and weeks or months later orally during second interviews. Shifting to ACASI led to a small but significant increase in negative views of blacks. Unexpectedly, shifting to ACASI also led to a similarly large increase in negative views of whites. Furthermore, the ACASI reports had no more predictive validity than did the oral reports. This evidence suggests that social desirability pressures do not seriously compromise oral reports of racial stereotypes in face-to-face interviews

Americans’ Attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act: What Role Do Beliefs Play?

How do people form their attitudes toward complex policy issues? Although there has long been an assumption that people consider the various components of those issues and come to an overall assessment, a growing body of recent work has instead suggested that people may reach summary judgments as a function of heuristic cues and goal-oriented rationalizations. This study examines how well a component-based model fits Americans’ evaluations of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, an important and highly contentious piece of legislation that contained several constituent parts. Despite strong partisan disagreement about the law, we find that Democrats and Republicans both appear to evaluate the law as a function of their beliefs and what the law would do as well as their confidence in those beliefs. This finding implies that correcting misperceptions and increasing awareness of the components of legislation have the potential to change attitudes