The Rationalizing Voter [Paperback]

When citizens think about political leaders, groups and issues, their feelings bias how information is encoded, evaluated and acted upon.Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. This book proposes and empirically tests a theory of motivated political reasoning that predicts that when citizens think about familiar political leaders, groups, and issues, their prior feelings spontaneously bias how information is encoded, retrieved, evaluated, and acted upon.Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. This book proposes and empirically tests a theory of motivated political reasoning that predicts that when citizens think about familiar political leaders, groups, and issues, their prior feelings spontaneously bias how information is encoded, retrieved, evaluated, and acted upon.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 tl“%