In-group interest cues do not change issue attitudes

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I investigate whether people change their attitudes about societal issues when they learn that those issues affect others like them. In three pre-registered survey experiments, I find that these in-group interest cues have little to no effect on issue attitudes. This is true for social groups based on gender, race/ethnicity, and sexual orientation. People who closely identify with an in-group do not react more strongly to group interest information. Findings suggest that neither linked fate nor in-group favoritism necessarily cause people to care about issues affecting their group. They raise new questions about exactly when and why group memberships influence political attitudes.

KEYWORDS:

• Social groups
• identity
• public opinion
• attitudes
• self-interest

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Andrea Campbell, Devin Caughey, Michele Coscia, Malte Dahl, James Druckman, F. Daniel Hidalgo, Frederik Hjorth, Patrick Kraft, Asmus Leth Olsen, MPSA panel participants and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The pre-analysis plans for this study did not specify that effect sizes for racial groups were expected to be larger than for gender groups. They did, however, specify that LGBT effect sizes were expected to be larger than either.

2 This analysis was not pre-registered. See Appendix section 3.1 (Supplemental Data) for more on intergroup differences in identification.