Identity-motivated reasoning: Biased judgments regarding political leaders and their actions

Cognition ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 188 ◽  
pp. 64-73
Author(s):  
Sharon Arieli ◽  
Adi Amit ◽  
Sari Mentser
Keyword(s):  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Biased Judgments

Democratic Legitimacy

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Rosanvallon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Constitutional Courts ◽  
International Debate ◽  
The Past ◽  
Democratic Authority ◽  
Original Contribution ◽  
Western Democracies

It's a commonplace occurrence that citizens in Western democracies are disaffected with their political leaders and traditional democratic institutions. But this book argues that this crisis of confidence is partly a crisis of understanding. The book makes the case that the sources of democratic legitimacy have shifted and multiplied over the past thirty years and that we need to comprehend and make better use of these new sources of legitimacy in order to strengthen our political self-belief and commitment to democracy. Drawing on examples from France and the United States, the book notes that there has been a major expansion of independent commissions, NGOs, regulatory authorities, and watchdogs in recent decades. At the same time, constitutional courts have become more willing and able to challenge legislatures. These institutional developments, which serve the democratic values of impartiality and reflexivity, have been accompanied by a new attentiveness to what the book calls the value of proximity, as governing structures have sought to find new spaces for minorities, the particular, and the local. To improve our democracies, we need to use these new sources of legitimacy more effectively and we need to incorporate them into our accounts of democratic government. This book is an original contribution to the vigorous international debate about democratic authority and legitimacy.

Making It Count

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arunabh Ghosh
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Great Leap Forward ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Statistics ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Great Leap Forward

In 1949, at the end of a long period of wars, one of the biggest challenges facing leaders of the new People's Republic of China was how much they did not know. The government of one of the world's largest nations was committed to fundamentally reengineering its society and economy via socialist planning while having almost no reliable statistical data about their own country. This book is the history of efforts to resolve this “crisis in counting.” The book explores the choices made by political leaders, statisticians, academics, statistical workers, and even literary figures in attempts to know the nation through numbers. It shows that early reliance on Soviet-inspired methods of exhaustive enumeration became increasingly untenable in China by the mid-1950s. Unprecedented and unexpected exchanges with Indian statisticians followed, as the Chinese sought to learn about the then-exciting new technology of random sampling. These developments were overtaken by the tumult of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1961), when probabilistic and exhaustive methods were rejected and statistics was refashioned into an ethnographic enterprise. By acknowledging Soviet and Indian influences, the book not only revises existing models of Cold War science but also globalizes wider developments in the history of statistics and data. Anchored in debates about statistics and its relationship to state building, the book offers fresh perspectives on China's transition to socialism.

Motivational underpinnings of support for radical political leaders

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Grzymala-Moszczynska ◽  
Katarzyna Jasko ◽  
Marta Maj ◽  
Marta Szastok ◽  
Arie W. Kruglanski
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
Hillary Clinton ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Personal Significance ◽  
Political Candidate ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Willingness To Engage

In three studies conducted over the course of 2016 US presidential campaign we examined the relationship between radicalism of a political candidate and willingness to engage in actions for that candidate. Drawing on significance quest theory (Kruglanski et al., 2018), we predicted that people would be more willing to make large sacrifices for radical (vs. moderate) candidates because the cause of radical candidates would be more personally important and engagement on behalf it would be more psychologically rewarding. We tested these predictions among supporters of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders. Our findings were in line with these predictions, as the more followers perceived their candidates as radical, the more they viewed leaders’ ideas as personally important, gained more personal significance from those ideas, and intended to sacrifice more for the leader.

Attentional capture helps explain why moral and emotional content go viral

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Brady ◽  
Ana P. Gantman ◽  
Jay Joseph Van Bavel
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Attentional Capture ◽  
Emotional Content ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Psychological Process ◽  
Emotional Stimuli ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Lab Experiments ◽  
Perceptual Systems ◽  
Shed Light

Our social media newsfeeds are filled with a variety of content all battling for our limited attention. Across three studies, we investigated whether moral and emotional content captures our attention more than other content and if this may help explain why this content is more likely to go viral online. Using a combination of controlled lab experiments and nearly 50,000 political tweets, we found that moral and emotional content are prioritized in early visual attention more than neutral content, and that such attentional capture is associated with increased retweets during political conversations online. Furthermore, we found that the differences in attentional capture among moral and emotional stimuli could not be fully explained by differences in arousal. These studies suggest that attentional capture is one basic psychological process that helps explain the increased diffusion of moral and emotional content during political discourse on social media, and shed light on ways in which political leaders, disinformation profiteers, marketers, and activist organizations can spread moralized content by capitalizing on natural tendencies of our perceptual systems.

Task Experience as a Predictor of Superior Loan Loss Judgments

2001 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
William F. Wright
Keyword(s):  
Financial Institution ◽  
Loan Loss ◽  
Senior Managers ◽  
Performance Improvements ◽  
Outcome Feedback ◽  
Timely Feedback ◽  
Judgment Process ◽  
Task Experience ◽  
Biased Judgments

An area of significant importance and risk exposure during an audit of a financial institution is assessing the uncollectible portion of the client's loan portfolio. Auditing the collectibility of a commercial loan can be difficult because this complex judgment is semi-structured and many kinds of information can be relevant. However, timely judgment process and outcome feedback are available and may improve the quality of an auditor's conclusions over time. Therefore, to test for the benefits of task-specific experience, I compare loan judgments provided by inexperienced seniors, experienced managers, and more experienced junior partners and senior managers to a criterion based on the conclusions of senior audit partners. While previous research usually does not indicate performance improvements beyond the level of an audit senior (e.g., Tan and Libby 1997) for this complex task with timely feedback, consistent and substantial performance improvements are reported here. Auditors provided increasingly more appropriate and less biased judgments, and they achieved greater judgment consensus.

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