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Party identification is central to the study of American political behavior, yet there remains disagreement over whether it is largely instrumental or expressive in nature. We draw on social identity theory to develop the expressive model and conduct four studies to compare it to an instrumental explanation of campaign involvement. We find strong support for the expressive model: a multi-item partisan identity scale better accounts for campaign activity than a strong stance on subjectively important policy issues, the strength of ideological self-placement, or a measure of ideological identity. A series of experiments underscore the power of partisan identity to generate action-oriented emotions that drive campaign activity. Strongly identified partisans feel angrier than weaker partisans when threatened with electoral loss and more positive when reassured of victory. In contrast, those who hold a strong and ideologically consistent position on issues are no more aroused emotionally than others by party threats or reassurances. In addition, threat and reassurance to the party's status arouse greater anger and enthusiasm among partisans than does a threatened loss or victory on central policy issues. Our findings underscore the power of an expressive partisan identity to drive campaign involvement and generate strong emotional reactions to ongoing campaign events.

We present, test, and extend a theoretical framework that connects disgust, a powerful basic human emotion, to political attitudes through psychological mechanisms designed to protect humans from disease. These mechanisms work outside of conscious awareness, and in modern environments, they can motivate individuals to avoid intergroup contact by opposing immigration. We report a meta-analysis of previous tests in the psychological sciences and conduct, for the first time, a series of tests in nationally representative samples collected in the United States and Denmark that integrate the role of disgust and the behavioral immune system into established models of emotional processing and political attitude formation. In doing so, we offer an explanation for why peaceful integration and interaction between ethnic majority and minorities is so hard to achieve.

A robust finding in the welfare state literature is that public support for the welfare state differs widely across countries. Yet recent research on the psychology of welfare support suggests that people everywhere form welfare opinions using psychological predispositions designed to regulate interpersonal help giving using cues regarding recipient effort. We argue that this implies that cross-national differences in welfare support emerge from mutable differences in stereotypes about recipient efforts rather than deep differences in psychological predispositions. Using free-association tasks and experiments embedded in large-scale, nationally representative surveys collected in the United States and Denmark, we test this argument by investigating the stability of opinion differences when faced with the presence and absence of cues about the deservingness of specific welfare recipients. Despite decades of exposure to different cultures and welfare institutions, two sentences of information can make welfare support across the U.S. and Scandinavian samples substantially and statistically indistinguishable.

Individuals can experience a lack of economic resources compared to others, which we refer to as subjective experiences of economic scarcity. While such experiences have been shown to shift cognitive focus, attention, and decision-making, their association with human morality remains debated. We conduct a comprehensive investigation of the relationship between subjective experiences of economic scarcity, as indexed by low subjective socioeconomic status at the individual level, and income inequality at the national level, and various self-reported measures linked to morality. In a pre-registered study, we analyze data from a large, cross-national survey ( N  = 50,396 across 67 countries) allowing us to address limitations related to cross-cultural generalizability and measurement validity in prior research. Our findings demonstrate that low subjective socioeconomic status at the individual level, and income inequality at the national level, are associated with higher levels of moral identity, higher morality-as-cooperation, a larger moral circle, and increased prosocial intentions. These results appear robust to several advanced control analyses. Finally, exploratory analyses indicate that observed income inequality at the national level is not a statistically significant moderator of the associations between subjective socioeconomic status and the included measures of morality. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for understanding human morality under experiences of resource scarcity. People differ in the extent to which they experience a lack of economic resources compared to others. Here, the authors show that such experiences at the individual level as well as income inequality at the national level are associated with self-reported morality-related outcomes.

Social-welfare policies are a modern instantiation of a phenomenon that has pervaded human evolutionary history: resource sharing. Ancestrally, food was a key shared resource in situations of temporary hunger. If evolved human psychology continues to shape how individuals think about current, evolutionarily novel conditions, this invites the prediction that attitudes regarding welfare politics are influenced by short-term fluctuations in hunger. Using blood glucose levels as a physiological indicator of hunger, we tested this prediction in a study in which participants were randomly assigned to conditions in which they consumed soft drinks containing either carbohydrates or an artificial sweetener. Analyses showed that participants with experimentally induced low blood glucose levels expressed stronger support for social welfare. Using an incentivized measure of actual sharing behavior (the dictator game), we further demonstrated that this increased support for social welfare does not translate into genuinely increased sharing motivations. Rather, we suggest that it is \"cheap talk\" aimed at increasing the sharing efforts of other individuals.

While there is growing interest in the relationship between pathogen‐avoidance motivations and partisanship, the extant findings remain contradictory and suffer from a number of methodological limitations related to measurement and internal and external validity. We address these limitations and marshal the most complete test to date of the relationship between the behavioral immune system and partisanship, as indexed by which party people identify with and vote for. Using a unique research design, including multiple well‐powered, nationally representative samples from the United States and Denmark collected in election and nonelection contexts, our study is the first to establish in cross‐national data a consistent, substantial, and replicable connection between deep‐seated pathogen‐avoidance motivations and socially conservative party preferences across multiple validated measures of individual differences in disgust sensitivity and using large representative samples. We explore the relative contribution of the pathogen‐avoidance model and sexual strategies for accounting for this relationship.

Social trust forms the fundamental basis for social interaction within societies. Understanding the cognitive architecture of trust and the roots of individual differences in trust is of key importance. We predicted that one of the factors calibrating individual levels of trust is the intrauterine flow of nutrients from mother to child as indexed by birth weight. Birth weight forecasts both the future external environment and the internal condition of the individual in multiple ways relevant for social cognition. Specifically, we predicted that low birth weight is utilized as a forecast of a harsh environment, vulnerable condition, or both and, consequently, reduces social trust. The results of the study reported here are consistent with this prediction. Controlling for many confounds through sibling and panel designs, we found that lower birth weight reduced social trust in adulthood. Furthermore, we obtained tentative evidence that this effect is mitigated if adult environments do not induce stress.

Media stories often reach citizens via a two-step process, transmitted to them indirectly via their social networks. Why are some media stories strongly transmitted and impact opinions powerfully in this two-step flow while others quickly perish? Integrating classical research on the two-step flow of political communication and novel theories from cognitive psychology, this article outlines a model for understanding the strength of political frames in the two-step flow. It argues that frames that resonate with cognitive biases (that is, deep-seated psychological decision rules) will be transmitted more and have a stronger influence on opinion when citizens recollect media frames in their social networks. Focusing on the case of episodic and thematic frames, the study tests this model. It introduces a novel research design: implementing the children’s game ‘Telephone’ in consecutive experimental online surveys fielded to nationally representative samples. This design helps gauge the reliability of transmission and the degree of persuasiveness in actual chains of transmission.

Widespread distrust in politicians is often attributed to the way elites portray politics to citizens: the media, competing candidates, and foreign governments are largely considered responsible for portraying politicians as self-interested actors pursuing personal electoral and economic interests. This article turns to the mass level and considers the active role of citizens in disseminating such information. We build on psychological research on human cooperation, holding that people exhibit an interpersonal transmission bias in favor of information on the self-interested, antisocial behavior of others to maintain group cooperation. We posit that this transmission bias extends to politics, causing citizens to disproportionally disseminate information on self-interested politicians through interpersonal communication and, in turn, contributes to distrust in politicians and policy disapproval. We support these predictions using novel experimental studies, allowing us to observe transmission rates and opinion effects in actual communication chains. The findings have implications for understanding and accommodating political distrust.

How do modern individuals form a sense of the vast societies in which they live? Social cognition has evolved to make sense of small, intimate social groups, but in complex mass societies, comparable vivid social cues are scarcer. Extant research on political attitudes and behavior has emphasized media and interpersonal networks as key sources of cues. Extending a classical argument, we provide evidence for the importance of an alternative and internal source: imagination. With a focus on social welfare, we collected survey data from two very different democracies, the United States and Denmark, and conducted several studies using explicit, implicit, and behavioral measures. By analyzing the effects of individual differences in imagination, we demonstrate that political cognition relies on vivid, mental simulations that engage evolved social and emotional decision-making mechanisms. It is in the mind's eye that vividness and engagement are added to people's sense of mass politics.