The Impact of Gender on Complex Political Thinking

• In Event: The Political Effects of Attitudes toward Women

Abstract

In this paper we explore how gender affects political thinking on incongruent information. In line with research on motivated reasoning, we investigate how the gender of the information source affects the defensiveness of the political thoughts and their thought quality when people are faced with information counter to their ideological stands. Research (Erisen et al., 2018)* has already shown that incongruent information influences what people recall to mind about a presidential candidate’s policy statements. The volume of people’s political thoughts, their ability to produce arguments, the affective valence of these thoughts, and their integrative complexity are influenced by the congruency between new political information and prior political convictions. However, we do not know how people respond to a female or a male information source in producing arguments on incongruent political information, which has implications for social media communication and for how people respond to information coming from female as opposed to male political candidates. We conducted
an experiment via MTurk manipulating the gender of the information source, a fictional character sharing political information about a candidate, and the congruency of information with respect to participant ideology. Prior results show that incongruency significantly alters how people think about politics. In this paper, we demonstrate the extent to which incongruent information coming from a female source as opposed to a male one alters the integrative complexity of political thoughts, their volume, and people’s ability to come up with rationales on their issue stands. Gender of the information source affects the defensiveness of the negative thoughts that come to mind in response to incongruent information. Also, interaction of participant gender and that of the information source show that changes in the cognitive structure of the thoughts depend on the gender of the respondent. Parallel to studies in motivated reasoning, we also control for political knowledge. The paper sheds light on the impact of gender on how complex thought systems in politics develop.
*Erisen, C., Redlawsk, D., & Erisen, E. (2018) Complex Thinking as a Result of Incongruent Information Exposure. American Politics Research. 46(2): 217-245.

Authors

• Elif Erisen, Hacettepe University

• David P. Redlawsk, University of Delaware

• Cengiz Erisen, Yeditepe University