Lammers Joris, Pauels Eileen, Fleischmann Alexandra, Galinsky Adam D
University of Cologne, Köln, Germany.
Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Pers Soc Psychol Bull. 2022 Mar;48(3):412-425. doi: 10.1177/01461672211002336. Epub 2021 Apr 17.
Citizens in Western democracies often have negative attitudes toward political bodies, yet consistently re-elect their own representatives to these same political bodies. They hate Congress, but love their own congressperson. In contrast to resource-based explanations, we propose that this is partly due to the wide availability of negative information about politicians in open societies combined with basic processes of information processing. Five studies found that unrelated negative political information decreases attitudes toward political categories such as U.S. governors but has no effect on attitudes of familiar, individual politicians (e.g., one's own governor); additional studies further identify familiarity as the critical process. Importantly, we demonstrate that this effect generalizes to all U.S. regions and remains when controlling for and is not moderated by political ideology. These results place a presumed macrolevel political paradox within the domain of cognitive mechanisms of basic information processing.
西方民主国家的公民常常对政治机构持负面态度，但却始终再次选举他们自己的代表进入这些相同的政治机构。他们讨厌国会，但喜欢自己选区的众议员。与基于资源的解释不同，我们认为这部分是由于开放社会中关于政治家的负面信息广泛可得，再加上信息处理的基本过程。五项研究发现，不相关的负面政治信息会降低对诸如美国州长等政治类别的态度，但对熟悉的个别政治家（例如自己选区的州长）的态度没有影响；更多研究进一步确定熟悉度是关键过程。重要的是，我们证明这种效应适用于美国所有地区，并且在控制政治意识形态并排除其调节作用后仍然存在。这些结果将一个假定的宏观层面的政治悖论置于基本信息处理的认知机制领域内。
