Ideological Differences in Anchoring and Adjustment During Social Inferences

Resolving uncertainty in a social world

Consider the range of social behaviours we engage in every day. In each case, there are a multitude of unknowns, reflecting the many sources of uncertainty inherent to social inference. We describe how uncertainty manifests in social environments (the thoughts and intentions of others are largely hidden, making it difficult to predict a person's behaviour) and why people are motivated to reduce the aversive feelings generated by uncertainty. We propose a three-part model whereby social uncertainty is initially reduced through automatic modes of inference (such as impression formation) before more control-demanding modes of inference (such as perspective-taking) are deployed to narrow one's predictions even more. Finally, social uncertainty is attenuated further through learning processes that update these predictions based on new information. Our framework integrates research across fields to offer an account of the mechanisms motivating social cognition and action, laying the groundwork for future experiments that can illuminate the impact of uncertainty on social cognition.

Ingroup and outgroup interconnectedness predict and promote political ideology through empathy

In 4 studies ( N = 886), we investigate the effect of intergroup interconnectedness on political ideology and examine whether this is mediated through empathy. In Study 1, ingroup interconnectedness predicted approval and outgroup interconnectedness disapproval of the Trump administration’s executive order on immigration, and empathy toward immigrants differentially mediated these relationships. In Study 2, ingroup interconnectedness negatively predicted and outgroup interconnectedness positively predicted liberalism, whereas the opposite relationships were found for conservatism. Moreover, outgroup interconnectedness positively predicted liberalism through greater empathy, but negatively predicted conservatism through less empathy. Manipulating outgroup interconnectedness (against a control) increased outgroup empathy and liberalism, decreased conservatism (Study 3a), and increased support for a liberal welfare policy (Study 3b), but these effects on ideology only occurred indirectly through greater outgroup empathy. Overall, results suggest ingroup and outgroup interconnectedness differentially predict and promote political ideology through empathy.

The moral foundations of illusory correlation

Previous research has studied the relationship between political ideology and cognitive biases, such as the tendency of conservatives to form stronger illusory correlations between negative infrequent behaviors and minority groups. We further explored these findings by studying the relation between illusory correlation and moral values. According to the moral foundations theory, liberals and conservatives differ in the relevance they concede to different moral dimensions: Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. Whereas liberals consistently endorse the Care and Fairness foundations more than the Loyalty, Authority and Purity foundations, conservatives tend to adhere to the five foundations alike. In the present study, a group of participants took part in a standard illusory correlation task in which they were presented with randomly ordered descriptions of either desirable or undesirable behaviors attributed to individuals belonging to numerically different majority and minority groups. Although the proportion of desirable and undesirable behaviors was the same in the two groups, participants attributed a higher frequency of undesirable behaviors to the minority group, thus showing the expected illusory correlation effect. Moreover, this effect was specifically associated to our participants’ scores in the Loyalty subscale of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. These results emphasize the role of the Loyalty moral foundation in the formation of attitudes towards minorities among conservatives. Our study points out the moral system as a useful fine-grained framework to explore the complex interaction between basic cognitive processes and ideology.