The Affect Magnetism Heuristic: Belief Formation in Asymmetric Info Environments

• In Event: Facts, Fake News, and Resistance to the Truth

Abstract

In a world of low information voters and one-sided cues from parties, how do voters form perceptions about where the parties stand on important issues? Do voters use how they feel about political actors and groups to motivate these perceptions, and do these perceptions influence their own issue attitudes? In other words, in asymmetric information environments, does affective polarization cause issue sorting?

Previous work has largely overlooked the interplay between the political information environment and how the interpretation of information by voters affects belief formation. Brady and Sniderman (1985) argue that voters use the likability heuristic to infer the position of a party relative to the other party using how they feel about that party, their own belief, and their prior perception of the party’s position. With the goal of minimizing cognitive inconsistency, voters will adjust their perceptions and affect. Yet, others (e.g. Layman et al. 2010) argue that voters often use perception of party differences to inform their own opinions on issues.

I reconcile this literature by introducing the affect magnetism heuristic, which is based on the assumption that voters’ issue attitudes themselves are variable—in some cases, the most fungible aspect at play. In a world full of asymmetric cues, voters use their feelings about political objects to infer unknown or uncertain positions from those they know, and to the degree these political objects are meaningful to the individual they are likely to adapt their beliefs/opinions to reduce cognitive inconsistency (Carsey and Layman 2006). This is most obvious in the case of political parties where voters have strong feelings about and where political strategy lends rise to asymmetric signals by the parties.

In short, my theory of affective magnetism argues that voters use how they feel about the two parties in conditions of low/asymmetric information to impute what is needed to complete a cognitive task, such as forming a political judgment, evaluation, or opinion.

This initial study will test my theory by simulating the asymmetric information environment parties often induce by way of a survey experiment conducted over two different issue areas--climate change and immigration. Feedback from this initial work will be used to extend this paper to another set of issue areas with the addition of new grant funds.

Author

• Kenneth Mackie, Florida State University