Graduate Student Session

Date: 

Friday, October 28, 2016, 12:00pm to 1:30pm

Location: 

CGIS K401

Four presentations:

1. Naima Green

Activating Intolerance: How Rising Levels of Authoritarianism and the Threat of War Affect Foreign Policy Attitudes in China

Despite growing attention to authoritarianism as a psychological predisposition affecting political preferences in the West, little research has been done to determine the effects of this trait in Eastern societies. This paper applies the authoritarian dynamic theory (Stenner, 2005) to Chinese perceptions of international organizations. The paper shows that authoritarianism, a trait more likely to be found in less educated, lower income, and older citizens in inland provinces, has been on the rise since the early 2000s in China. It finds that authoritarian foreign policy dispositions— namely, lower trust in the United Nations (UN) and the Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC)— can be activated via high levels of war threat in China. Distrustful attitudes towards the United Nations and APEC in the context of increasing regional tensions may be explained by this phenomenon.

2. Tatiana Lau

Overcorrection for Social-Categorization Information Moderates Impact Bias in Affective Forecasting

Plural societies require individuals to forecast how others—both in-group and out-group members—will respond to gains and setbacks. Typically, correcting affective forecasts to include more relevant information improves their accuracy by reducing their extremity. In contrast, we find across five separate experiments that providing forecasters with social category information about their targets makes their forecasts more extreme and therefore less accurate. In both political (e.g., the 2014 Midterm Elections) and sports contexts (the Harvard-Yale football game), forecasters exhibited greater impact bias for both in-group and out-group members (e.g., a “Democrat”, “Republican”, “Harvard Fan”, “Yale Fan”, etc.) than for unspecified targets (e.g., a “person”) when predicting their responses to positive and negative events. Inducing time pressure reduced the extremity of forecasts for group-labeled but not unspecified targets, suggesting that the increased impact bias was due to overcorrection for social category information, not different intuitive predictions for identified targets. Finally, overcorrection was better accounted for by stereotypes than spontaneous retrieval of extreme group exemplars; participants all ranked their targets as average in terms of affective extremity. This effect may have serious consequences; for example, negotiators may eschew conflict-reducing solutions because they overestimate the in-group’s unhappiness over a compromise, or they may also overestimate out-group’s happiness over a concession, leading to an expectancy violation when the out-group seems less than enthused. Because many of the decisions that we make for others rely on these affective forecasts, the insights provided here may help to reduce bias in many domains of consequential decision-making.

3. Gregory Davis

Ideology and Presidential Candidate Support: A Dual Process Inquiry

Throughout the 2016 US presidential election, many have pointed out the sharp differences between major party candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Pointedly, voters and commentators alike have noted a stark difference in worldview in this election, with one side seeing the world as more dangerous and competitive than ever before, and the other side seeing an opportunity for openness and communitarianism. Using an online sample of more than n = 2,500 individuals, we surveyed candidate support and worldviews from US citizens in the weeks just before the election. In this presentation, I will discuss how two worldviews in particular - Social Dominance Orientation and Right Wing Authoritarianism - create a dual process model predicting support for candidate Trump over candidate Clinton. I then will associate the discovered model with the predicted dual process model of Duckitt and Sibley (2009).

4. Amber Spry

Can Alternative Measurement Strategies Provide New Insights for Our Understanding of Group Political Attitudes in the United States?\

How should we think about group preferences in the context of American democracy, where society is becoming increasingly pluralistic and at the same time, groups themselves are becoming increasingly heterogeneous? This chapter uses original survey data collected by the author to examine how people who differ in their expressions of identity may also differ in their policy-related preferences, with particular attention paid to the politics of immigration and welfare. This study adapts a point allocation system originally developed by Taeku Lee (2009) that allows subjects to allocate a fixed number of “identity points” to a number of socially relevant identity categories and compares this new approach with conventional survey methods by randomly assigning respondents to one of six methods of identity measurement and assessing the differences in views on immigration and welfare across the six randomly assigned groups and across identity categories. Existing empirical work relies almost universally on a set of fixed, categorical measures that fail to reflect the multidimensionality many scholars associate with racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and other forms of identity. This new design strategy tested in the 2015 Identity Measurement Survey (N=3,010) demonstrates that respondents vary on a number of different attitudinal outcomes depending on the system of identity measurement to which they are assigned, and that response patterns vary between subsets of respondents. Moreover, we see these differences most strongly when looking at policy views according to the primary identity offered by respondents rather than by ascriptive categorization alone. These results underscore the opportunities afforded by alternative measurement strategies to reveal additional information about the links between identity and policy views when we allow individuals to tell us which identities matter most to them.