John Jost
New York University
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by John Jost
“For decades Milt Lodge and Chuck Taber have been pioneers in the effort to incorporate knowledge from psychology and neuroscience about the unconscious, affectively charged processing of information to enrich standard models of decision making in political science. This is their magnum opus, and it shows how successful the effort has been. Every reader will learn something important from this book.” (from Amazon)
by Milton Lodge, Charles S. Taber·You?
by Milton Lodge, Charles S. Taber·You?
Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. Citizens are very sensitive to environmental contextual factors such as the title “President” preceding “Obama” in a newspaper headline, upbeat music or patriotic symbols accompanying a campaign ad, or question wording and order in a survey, all of which have their greatest influence when citizens are unaware. This book develops and tests a dual-process theory of political beliefs, attitudes, and behavior, claiming that all thinking, feeling, reasoning, and doing have an automatic component as well as a conscious deliberative component. The authors are especially interested in the impact of automatic feelings on political judgments and evaluations. This research is based on laboratory experiments, which allow the testing of five basic hypotheses: hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion, and motivated reasoning.