Sober Second Thought and Negativity Bias

• In Event: Conflict Processes 3 & Political Psychology Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Political Psychology Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

While most citizens support democratic rights in the abstract, a significant number of citizens also have high levels of political intolerance toward their disliked groups. At this intersection where citizens’ political attitudes and behaviors meet the health of the democratic polity, studies on political tolerance explore under which conditions citizens accept and support the extension of rights of citizenship to others whose ideas or interests they oppose. In particular, this study pays attention to theoretical discussions and empirical findings that argue sociotropic consideration is the channel for political tolerance attitude. Yet, the more individuals deliberated about potential consequences to the society, the more politically intolerant were they of the disliked group. To explain this finding, this paper explicitly addresses the role of negativity bias in political decision-making process, where people tend to focus on negative consequences than on positive ones. I replicate and extend the survey experiment from Kuklinski et al. (1991) and show that sociotropic loss consideration matters more for political tolerance judgment than sociotropic gain consideration does. This finding contributes to understanding the enduring problem of political tolerance and suggests how we can promote political tolerance by overcoming the bias.

Author

• Seyoung Jung, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign