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Cognition, Social Identity, Emotions
and Attitudes in Political Psychology
• How do people understand the political
world?
• How to they interpret information and make
decision?
• How organized are their thoughts?
• How do emotion affect thoughts and actions
in politics?
• Political Being’s mind: cognition, emotion, social identity,
and attitudes and beliefs.
• Cognition: is central to understanding how people process
information and understand the world around them.
• Cognition is a collective term for the psychological
processes involved in the acquisition, organization, and the
use of knowledge. Knowledge is organized in our minds in a
cognitive system.
• Beliefs or attitudes are often used to describe components
of the cognitive system.
• Psychological process involved in organization and the use
of knowledge
• Cognitive process include perception,
memory, attention, and problem solving to
information processing
Information processing
• Information processing “the subconscious or
unconscious filters through which individual
put the information coming in about the
world around them.” Individuals letting the
information which fit their beliefs and images
and ignore information that doesn’t fit their
beliefs
• Attribution theory: focus on how people
judge and evaluate others
• People process information and they search
for cause in the behavior of others
• Heuristics: attribution theorists argue that
people use heuristics (mental shortcuts in
processing information about others)
• Imaginability: tendency to retrieve
information that is plausible without any
regard for actual probabilities. As a result
individuals construct series of possible
behaviors based on their ability to imagine
their occurrence/probability in real life
situations
• Representative heuristic: another form of
probability judgment. A person may, for
example, evaluate the characteristics of
another person and estimate the likelihood
that that person belongs to particular
occupation
• Misinterpretation of chance, “gambler’s
fallacy”
• Anchoring and adjustment: how individuals
make estimates
• Different starting points yield different
estimates, which are biased toward the initial
values
• Fundamental attribution error: people are
more likely to attribute others’ behavior to
their general dispositions (personality traits or
attitudes)
• Positivity effect: tendency to attribute
positive behaviors to dispositional factors and
negative behaviors to situational factors
(external factors) with individuals we like
• Negativity effect: opposite of positivity effect
• Self-serving bias: individuals are more likely to
take responsibility for successes than failures.
• Egocentric bias: individuals accept more
responsibility for joint outcomes than other
attribute them
• Consistency theories in information processing
process
• Balance theory: indicates that people try to keep
components of cognitive system in balance,
people want to see their environment, the people
in it, and their feelings about it as a coherent,
consistent picture.
• For ex: Being democrat and considering for a
conservative Republican- lack of balance
• Dissonance theory: inconsistencies between
people’s attitude
• For ex: eating a big piece of chocolate cake
while you were on a diet.
• reducing dissonance by changing behaviors :
trivialization (make unimportant)or distortion
of information
• Consistency occurs on three level
• 1- within attitudes between affect and
cognition
• 2-across attitudes
• 3- cognitive entirety (attitudes, beliefs and
values)
• Consistency affects information processing
through selective perception (selective
exposure, selective attention, and selective
interpretation)
• Ignoring and distorting inconsistent
information
• Bolstering: balancing and avoiding
inconsistency through selective exposure
• Political consequences of information
processing:
• Accepting the information that conforms with
expectations can lead people to miss
important information
• Distorting information in a search for
consistency can produce a failure to recognize
the need for value trade-offs in politics
Categorization
• People organize and simplify the environment
to understand complex world which is too
complex for people’s brain to handle
• keep useful knowledge to filter subsequent
information
• Without thinking to much and yet managing
environments effectively
• categories help to process information
• 2 principle of category information: categories
must provide the perceiver with a large
amount of information with as little mental
effort as possible, categories should be suited
to individuals social and physical realities
• Applying organized generic knowledge in the
form of category of schema to process
information
• Stereotype: particular type of cognitive theory,
stereotypes are beliefs about the attributes of
people in particular groups or social categories,
not limited to personality trait descriptions (e.g.
Germans a re hardworking) but can include any
personal attribute- physical, affective, visual, or
behavioral
Categorizing political world
• Image theory: organizing the international
environment in terms of types of states such as
the enemy or the ally
• Policy makers' images of other countries and
their resulting behaviors.
• Image contain information about a country’s
capabilities (military strength, domestic political
stability), culture, intentions, kinds of decision
groups, and perceptions of threat or opportunity
Certain tactics are relevant to each image
1- colonial image: consider that country and its
people to be inferior in terms of culture and
capabilities, people are ruled by small elite and
people are not a threat and are often corrupt
2- enemy image: country is seen as equal in
capability and culture, and threatening intentions,
the enemy is ruled by small elite, competitive and
non-comprimising tactics are used against enemy
due to the lack of trust
• 3- ally image: equal in terms of capability and culture
but very similar to your own country in values, ally are
believed to be good
• 4- barbarian image: superior in capability and culture
but intension can be either harmful or benevolent
• 5- imperialist image: superior in capability and culture
but resisting them would be difficult
• 6- rouge image: superior in capability and culture but
also very harmful in its intentions
• 7- degenerate image: powerful and culturally
advanced, but also week willed, undisciplined.
Social Identity
• Groups that we belong are called in-groups
• Groups that we do not belong are called out-groups
• Groups as social categories and as a part of general
cognitive organization of the social and political world
• Us vs them
• in these situation people are likely to discriminate
against out-group (them) and in favor of the in-group
(us)
• Intergroup conflict
• Social identity is “that part of an individual’s
self-concept which derives from his/her
knowledge of his/her membership in a social
group together with the value and emotional
significance attached to that membership”
• Intergroup discrimination is a result of a
motivation to evaluate one’s own group more
positively than a relevant out-group
Affect and Emotion
• People have emotional responses to political
issues, actors , and events, and also political
principles and ideals that they value
• Cognitive phenomena such as stereotypes,
information processing and making political
decision involve both affect and emotion
• affect and emotion are difficult to study
• We cannot understand mass violence, including
genocide, without understanding the role of
emotions
• Affect: a generic term for a whole range of
preferences, evaluations, moods, and emotions
• Emotion: complex assortment of affect, beyond
merely good feelings or bad to include delight,
serenity, anger, sadness, fear and more.
• Cognition (cognitive system, system of thoughts
and ideas) and affect (affective system, feelings
and emotions) are a set of interconnected
parallel systems
• Affect and emotion influence information
processing, decision making, as some
predispositions for behaviors.
• Emotions and behaviors they influence are
intricately related to goals at stake in a
situation
• We would expect positive emotions to be
associated with in-groups and negative
emotions out-group
• Negative emotion, anger, in political behaviors
• Anger: blame for undesirable behavior and
resulting undesirable events, is directed to
another person or group. Anger produces a
desire to regain control, remove the
obstruction, and, if necessary, attack the
source of injury
• Guilt, shame, sympathy, pity, envy, fear and
anxiety can also affect political behavior
• Positive emotions such as pride in the
achievements of one’ group or country, or
happiness when an opportunity to achieve
important goals, does well in things like
economic development and growth or in
international competitions, are associated
with politics
• Emotions (superior, oppressive, inferior) that
are associated with groups of varying degree
of power
• Minorities with low power felt fear regarding
high power or majority groups; members of
high status group felt disgust in regard to low
status groups
• Certain emotions are associated with
particular images
• The Diabolical Enemy: the image of an enemy is
associated with intensely perceived threat and
very intense affect and emotions
• Diabolical enemy is seen as irrevocably
aggressive in motivation, monolithic in
decisional structure, and highly rational in
decision making
• Emotions associated with this image: anger,
frustration, envy, distrust, fear.
• Causes security dilemmas and spiral conflict
• The Barbarian: this image appears when an
intense threat is perceived as superior in terms of
capability but as inferior culturally
• Image of barbarians is of an aggressive people
who are monolithic in decisional structure,
cunning, and willing to resort brutality to take full
advantage of superiority
• Emotions associated with: anger and fear
• Fear make people to avoid direct conflict and
search for allies to deal with this threat
• Imperial Image: this image occurs when the
people of polity perceive threat from another
polity viewed as superior in terms of both
capability and culture especially during the
colonialism in the 19th century
• Imperial power is perceived to be motivated by
desire to exploit the resources of the colonized
people
• Less monolithic decisional structure
• Emotions associated: fear
• Self-protection and avoiding conflict
• Rogue Image: during the Cold Wars, the leaders of the
West held an image of a dependent of the enemy, in which
a country was viewed as inferior in capability and culture
but controlled and supported by the enemy which
disappeared in 1990s but former allies of the Soviet Union
were seen as both inferior and threatening.
• Incompatibility of their values with the rest of nations,
aggressive behaviors, decisions are made by small elite and
cannot be deal with rationally.
• Responses to this type of states are driven by sense of
superiority and force, often, individual is assumed to be
responsible for the behaviors of rouge state
• Degenerate Image: one associated with
perception of an opportunity to achieve a goal
at the expense of a country that is relatively
equal or even greater capability and culture
• Emotions associated with: disgust, anger and
hatred.
• Desire to eliminate the offensive group and
lead dangerous underestimation of an
adversary's abilities
• Colonial Image: image associated with
perception of opportunity is the colonial image,
which is the flip side of the imperial image
• It occurs when an opportunity is identifies to gain
control over another polity or group perceived as
significantly inferior in capability and culture
• Behaviors associated with image: wanting to
avoid contamination from contact with the
inferior or moving forcefully against them to
punish bad behavior
Attitudes
• Attitudes: enduring system of positive and
negative beliefs, affective feeling, and emotions,
and action tendencies regarding attitude objects
the entity being evaluated
• “an organized set of beliefs, persisting over time,
which is useful in explaining the individual
response to tendencies”
• Cognitive, affective and behavioral components
• Criticism: affect and cognition are not always
consistent and attitudes and behavior are often
inconsistent
• Person’s attitudes determine his/her behavior,
a person who favors a certain politician is
imply to vote for him.
• Studies challenge direct connection between
attitudes and behavior
• people do not always behave accordance with
their attitudes
• Attitude that are stronger and consistent over
a time directly relevant with behavior,
Inconsistency can come from weak affect
• Situational pressure: when a person engage in
overt behavior, they can be influence both by
their attitudes and by the situation they are in
such as social norms