How Knowledge Affects Policy Attitudes: Conditioning versus Main Effects

• In Event: Political Knowledge and Information Processing

Abstract

Policy attitudes seem to be affected by political knowledge. But how does that happen? Does knowing more about a policy—in itself—change people’s attitudes about it? That would be a “main effect.” Or does it unevenly increase or decrease the extent to which given dispositions (like values and/or interests) affect the attitude—thus tilting it in the direction to which the dispositions acquiring greater weight conduce? That would be a “conditioning effect.”
On the standard view, knowledge’s role is conditioning. This is the logic of studies simulating “full-information” policy attitudes. The individual’s dispositions are held constant. What changes, hypothetically, is the individual’s knowledge, enabling him or her to see a given policy’s ramifications more clearly, thus in turn affecting the extent to which he or she supports or opposes it.
There do remain interesting, largely unexamined questions about the nature of the dispositions involved: Are they interests? Values? Something else? The question may not have a “Right Answer,” and the rightest or most useful may depend on one’s dependent variable and theoretical interests. These questions are a secondary concern for this paper.
Our primary concern, however, is with the logically prior question of whether knowledge’s need always have only a conditioning effect. Could it also sometimes have a main effect? We think it may, depending on the issue. Where people commonly hold opposing values and interests, increased knowledge may generally move them further into opposing corners. But where their relevant values and interests are largely shared, it may instead move almost everyone’s attitude almost equally in the same direction. We suggest climate change and nuclear proliferation as possible examples, examining the hypothesis with data from the American National Election Study.

Authors

• Robert C. Luskin, University of Texas, Austin

• Philip Moniz, University of Texas at Austin