Abstract: An attitude formation task examined how conservatives and liberals explore information about novel stimuli and form attitudes towards them. When framed as the BeanFest game, conservatives sampled fewer beans and exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry (i.e., better learning for negative than positive beans) than liberals. This has been taken as strong evidence that conservatives are more sensitive to negative stimuli than liberals. We argue that the learning asymmetry and sampling bias by conservatives is due to framing of the game. In addition to the BeanFest, we framed the game as StockFest (i.e., a stock market game) where participants learned about novel stocks. We replicated the pronounced learning asymmetry for conservatives in the BeanFest game, but found a pronounced learning asymmetry for liberals in the StockFest game. We suggest that conservatives and liberals are equally sensitive to negative stimuli but in different domains.
Statement of contribution
Shook and Fazio (2009, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 995–998) used a food foraging game called BeanFest to show that conservatives explore novel food/health environments more cautiously and consequently form more negative attitudes than liberals (i.e., learn and remember more negative than positive beans). This finding is taken as strong evidence that conservatives are generally more negatively biased or threat‐sensitive than liberals. However, it is not known whether such differences are independent or dependent on the nature of the task or stimuli. Although there are some indications that liberals may also be threat‐sensitive in certain domains, most of the evidence comes from self‐reported risk attitudes, which do not address the basic cognitive processes underlying attitude formation, including how liberals learn and remember negative information. We find that when the same task is framed as a stock market game, that is, StockFest, liberals explore novel financial environments more cautiously and consequently form more negative attitudes than conservatives (i.e., learn and remember more negative than positive stocks). Our findings show for the first time that conservatives do not generally form more negative attitudes than liberals. Rather, the basic cognitive processes underlying exploration of novel stimuli and attitude formation are similar for conservatives and liberals, but these processes are evoked by different kinds of stimuli.
Background
It is commonly believed that conservatives and liberals differ in their psychological dispositions, which are assumed to explain their differences in political attitudes (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2014; Hibbing, Smith, Peterson, & Feher, 2014; Jost, 2017; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). Whereas evidence for these differences mostly comes from self‐report measures, there is also evidence from basic cognitive functioning demonstrating that conservatives seem to explore and process negative information and, thereby, develop attitudes differently than liberals (Shook & Fazio, 2009).In the current study, we argue that the difference in attitude formation could reflect the nature of the stimuli or task, rather than actual psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. To examine whether psychological processes are independent of the nature of the stimuli, one would have to vary the experimental stimuli as recommended by the representative stimuli sampling approach (Brunswik, 1947, 1955; Wells & Windschitl, 1999).
Based on this recommendation, we examine whether the assumed differences between liberals and conservatives are general differences or whether they are contingent on the nature of the stimuli. This procedure allows us to evaluate whether differences between liberals and conservatives are stimulus‐unspecific (i.e., domain‐general) or stimulus‐specific (i.e., domain‐specific).
Our study contributes to the existing literature by assessing for the first time whether basic cognitive processes of attitude formation through exploration of novel stimuli actually reflects fundamental psychological differences between liberals and conservatives when the stimuli are varied.
The Negativity Bias Hypothesis (NBH) is a recent influential proposal that links political attitudes to basic psychological and physiological reactions to negative information (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2014). After reviewing a large body of evidence, the NBH suggests that the basic psychological difference between conservatives and liberals is conservatives’ greater sensitivity to negative stimuli compared to liberals. For example, conservatives exhibit stronger attentional biases (Carraro, Castelli, & Macchiella, 2011), physiological (Dodd, Hibbing, & Smith, 2011; Oxley et al., 2008) and neural responses to negative words, images, and sounds than liberals (Ahn et al., 2014; Amodio, Jost, Master, & Yee, 2007; Kanai, Feilden, Firth, & Rees, 2011). The NBH further argues that differences in negativity biases explain conservative’s greater support for protective policies, because they satisfy underlying needs to manage existential anxieties, a notion that has been echoed in many other studies (see Jost, 2017; Jost et al., 2003, for reviews).
Beyond evidence from self‐report measures, strong support for the NBH comes from the intriguing study on the relationship among political ideology, information gain by exploration, and subsequent attitude formation (Shook & Fazio, 2009). The researchers argued that ideological differences in openness to experience may influence how conservatives and liberals explore their social world and form attitudes towards novel stimuli. They predicted that conservatives would exhibit greater caution in exploring novel stimuli that signal potential exposure to negative information. In contrast, liberals would tend to ignore signs of negativity and explore novel situations more indiscriminately. Conservatives’ cautious exploratory strategy would reduce their gain of information and, thereby, decrease correction of any potential negative attitudes towards the stimuli. Consequently, conservatives would exhibit a learning asymmetry and would overestimate the distribution of negative compared to positive stimuli. In contrast, liberal’s greater exploration will facilitate information gain, correction of negative attitudes towards the stimuli, and consequently a balanced estimation of negative and positive stimuli.
To examine their hypothesis, Shook and Fazio (2009) used a performance task (called BeanFest) in which participants form attitudes based on the exploration of information about novel objects (Fazio, Eiser, & Shook, 2004). The game assesses how individuals explore their environment and form attitudes towards differently shaped and marked visual patterns of stimuli referred to as ‘beans’. The game requires participants to approach different beans in order to learn which are positive (i.e., good beans that increase points) and which are negative (i.e., bad beans that decrease points). If they approach a bean, they receive feedback that reveals whether the bean was negative or positive. If they avoid a bean, they do not receive feedback about the value of the bean. This means that only approach behaviour leads to gain or loss of points.
The findings from Shook and Fazio show that conservatives and liberals act differently in the game. Conservatives adopt a more cautious strategy by exploring fewer beans than liberals, whereas liberals adopt a more open strategy by exploring more beans than conservatives. Differences in exploration produce an asymmetry in learning as a consequence. Conservatives learn bad beans better than good beans (i.e., form more negative than positive attitudes), whereas liberals learn both bad and good beans equally well (i.e., form balanced attitudes). These findings are taken as strong evidence supporting the NBH (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2014; Shook & Fazio, 2009).
The NBH argues that ‘in many respects, compared with liberals, conservatives tend to be more psychologically and physiologically sensitive to environmental stimuli generally but in particular to stimuli that are of negatively valenced, whether threatening or merely unexpected and unstructured’ (Hibbing et al., 2014, p. 303). Such a broad statement anticipates that conservatives would generally exhibit greater sensitivity to all kinds of negatively valenced stimuli than liberals. If this is true, then the relationship between political ideology and negativity bias is domain‐general (i.e., does not depend on the type of negative stimuli).
However, one potential limitation of the NBH is that it conceptualizes negative valence very broadly but operationalizes this broad concept too narrowly. Critics have noted that most of the negative stimuli reviewed by the NBH may be subsumed under a general category of stimuli that have potential to cause direct physical or bodily harm (Crawford, 2017; Eadeh & Chang, 2019). Consequently, the functional stimuli sample size for the studies supporting the NBH is N = 1 (Wells & Windschitl, 1999). For instance, in the case of Shook and Fazio’s study (2009), only one instance of negative stimuli (i.e., bad or ‘poisonous’ beans) was used as experimental stimuli. This stimulus, arguably, falls under the category of food/health or the more general category of physically threatening stimuli. Besides these threats, there are other negative stimuli such as loss of money, poverty, financial scams, and bankruptcy. The NBH assumes, without explicitly testing, that conservatives would exhibit greater sensitivity to these categories of negative stimuli as well.
Under‐sampling of a broad range of negative stimuli from non‐physical domains poses a challenge for the NBH. First, stimuli under‐sampling may overstate negativity bias in conservatives and understate negativity bias in liberals. For example, it is possible that liberals also exhibit greater negativity bias towards other stimuli besides physically threatening stimuli. But this may only be observed if other negative stimuli domains are included in research designs. Secondly, stimuli under‐sampling precludes the generalizability of the findings to other stimuli domains (Brunswik, 1947; Kenny, 1985; Wells & Windschitl, 1999). For example, is negativity bias in conservatives restricted to physically harmful stimuli or does this phenomenon generalize to non‐physically harmful domains as well?
There is some indication that the relationship between ideology and negativity bias could be domain‐specific (i.e., depends on the type of negative stimuli) rather than domain‐general. Prior self‐report studies demonstrate that the relationship between ideology and risk attitudes differs depending on the risk domain (Choma, Hanoch, Gummerum, & Hodson, 2013; Choma, Hanoch, Hodson, & Gummerum, 2014; Choma & Hodson, 2017). Using the domain‐specific risk‐taking (DOSPERT) scale, Choma et al. (2014) showed that, compared to liberals, conservatives report less risk propensity in ethical and social domains, whereas a trend of higher risk propensity for conservatives emerges in the financial domain. However, in the financial domain, a more complex pattern emerges (three‐way interaction) whereby conservatives show higher risk propensity when expected benefits and risk perceptions are high. In a recent study, Choma and Hodson (2017) demonstrated that risk perception may also vary according to the conceptualization of ideology. They differentiate between social and economic conservatism and show that social conservatism (measured as right‐wing authoritarianism) tends to be positively related to risk perception, whereas economic conservatism (measured via social dominance orientation) tends to be negatively related to risk perception (see also Choma et al., 2013).
Furthermore, recent studies using simulated stock markets and real‐world investment portfolios have demonstrated that liberals are less likely to participate in the stock market (Han, Jung, Mittal, Zyung, & Adam, 2019; Kaustia & Torstila, 2011; Moore, Felton, & Wright, 2010), because they perceive the stock market to be a more dangerous and risky place to invest money than conservatives (Fiagbenu & Kessler, 2019). These findings reveal that conservatives may not be generally risk‐averse than liberals as they report higher risk propensity in the financial domain.
Despite the above evidence, the NBH is still broadly accepted. In their most current meta‐analytic evidence in support of the NBH, Jost et al. (2017, p. 345) emphasized that researchers should ‘agree on the basic fact’ … ‘that conservatives are somewhat more sensitive than liberals to potentially threatening stimuli’. Moreover, proponents of the NBH suggest that Shook and Fazio (2009) provide a convincing argument in support of the NBH because the findings reveal the basic learning and memory processes underlying how conservatives form negative attitudes more than liberals.
Although previous studies (Choma et al., 2013, 2014; 2017; Han et al., 2019) have shown that liberals report greater risk aversion in the financial domain than conservatives, differences in the basic processes of exploration and attitude formation remain to be examined with respect to broader stimuli sampling. If the NBH is valid, conservatives should equally show cautious exploratory behaviour and a learning asymmetry across a variety of stimuli. In contrast, if cautious exploration of novel stimuli and learning asymmetry depend on the quality of the stimuli, then liberals and conservatives should equally exhibit cautiousness and learning asymmetry towards different kinds of stimuli.
The aim of the current study is to examine whether the relationship among political ideology, exploration of novel stimuli, and attitude formation is domain‐specific or domain‐general. The BeanFest paradigm is suitable for examining our competing hypotheses because it is amenable to framing. Previous studies have shown that the BeanFest can be framed as a neutral game whereby participants play for points, or as a life and death game whereby participants play for energy points in order to survive and to avoid dying (Fazio et al., 2004). Whereas Shook and Fazio (2009) used the bland or neutral version, we decided to use the negative version in order to examine how negative framing influences attitude formation as a function of political ideology. Consequently, in addition to the BeanFest, we considered a different variant of the game, which we call StockFest. StockFest is a wealth‐bankruptcy game in which participants learn about the same visual patterns referred to as ‘stocks’. Buying good stocks increases wealth points, whereas buying bad stocks decreases wealth and results in bankruptcy. Both StockFest and BeanFest have exactly the same structure and are represented by the same visual patterns, but only differ by how they are framed.
Both games are suitable for investigating whether the relationship between political ideology, exploration, and attitude formation depends on the nature of the attitude stimuli or not. The domain‐general hypothesis predicts that in both games, conservatives would show more cautious exploration and would consequently form more negative attitudes than liberals whereas liberals would exhibit greater exploration and would form more positive attitudes than conservatives. Alternatively, the domain‐specific hypothesis predicts that in BeanFest, conservatives would exhibit greater caution and form more negative attitudes, whereas liberals will be more exploratory and would form more positive attitudes as a consequence. A reverse pattern is expected in StockFest whereby conservatives would exhibit greater exploratory behaviour and form more positive attitudes, whereas liberals would be more cautious and therefore form more negative attitudes.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment