POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY AT STONY BROOK: A RETROSPECTIVE

Abstract

During the 1970s and 1980s, political psychologists at the State University of New York at Stony Brook focused political scientists’ attention on online processing. Borrowing from the new field of social cognition in psychology, they argued that voters’ evaluations of candidates are the products of a summing up of reactions to happenings during a campaign. Voters might not remember the specific events later on, but their running tallies of reactions over the duration of the campaign would ensure that they take the forgotten information into account when entering the voting booth. Later, these same scholars yet again borrowed from (a very changed) psychology, and argued that many people, especially the most politically sophisticated, try to confirm their current political evaluations—for example, by seeking out confirmatory evidence and dismissing evidence that challenges their attitudes. We ask whether online processing and motivated reasoning have the same or different implications for democratic governance, and whether the two empirical perspectives can be reconciled.

Notes

1. For a discussion of these previous efforts, see McGuire 1993.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jason C. Coronel

Jason C. Coronel is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Political Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

James H. Kuklinski

James H. Kuklinski is the Matthew T. McClure Professor, Department of Political Science, and Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign