Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases

Study Ties Political Leanings to Hidden Biases

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 30, 2006

Put a group of people together at a party and observe how they behave.
Differently than when they are alone? Differently than when they are
with
family? What if they're in a stadium instead of at a party? What if
they're
all men?

The field of social psychology has long been focused on how social
environments affect the way people behave. But social psychologists are
people, too, and as the United States has become increasingly
politically
polarized, they have grown increasingly interested in examining what
drives
these sharp divides: red states vs. blue states; pro-Iraq war vs.
anti-Iraq
war; pro-same-sex marriage vs. anti-same-sex marriage. And they have
begun
to study political behavior using such specialized tools as
sophisticated
psychological tests and brain scans.

"In my own family, for example, there are stark differences, not just of
opinion but very profound differences in how we view the world," said
Brenda
Major, a psychologist at the University of California at Santa
Barbara and
the president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology,
which
had a conference last week that showcased several provocative
psychological
studies about the nature of political belief.

The new interest has yielded some results that will themselves provoke
partisan reactions: Studies presented at the conference, for example,
produced evidence that emotions and implicit assumptions often
influence why
people choose their political affiliations, and that partisans
stubbornly
discount any information that challenges their preexisting beliefs.

Emory University psychologist Drew Westen put self-identified
Democratic and
Republican partisans in brain scanners and asked them to evaluate
negative
information about various candidates. Both groups were quick to spot
inconsistency and hypocrisy -- but only in candidates they opposed.

When presented with negative information about the candidates they
liked,
partisans of all stripes found ways to discount it, Westen said. When
the
unpalatable information was rejected, furthermore, the brain scans
showed
that volunteers gave themselves feel-good pats -- the scans showed that
"reward centers" in volunteers' brains were activated. The psychologist
observed that the way these subjects dealt with unwelcome information
had
curious parallels with drug addiction as addicts also reward
themselves for
wrong-headed behavior.

Another study presented at the conference, which was in Palm Springs,
Calif., explored relationships between racial bias and political
affiliation
by analyzing self-reported beliefs, voting patterns and the results of
psychological tests that measure implicit attitudes -- subtle
stereotypes
people hold about various groups.

That study found that supporters of President Bush and other
conservatives
had stronger self-admitted and implicit biases against blacks than
liberals
did.

"What automatic biases reveal is that while we have the feeling we are
living up to our values, that feeling may not be right," said
University of
Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek, who helped conduct the race
analysis. "We
are not aware of everything that causes our behavior, even things in
our own
lives."

Brian Jones, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee, said he
disagreed with the study's conclusions but that it was difficult to
offer a
detailed critique, as the research had not yet been published and he
could
not review the methodology. He also questioned whether the researchers
themselves had implicit biases -- against Republicans -- noting that
Nosek
and Harvard psychologist Mahzarin Banaji had given campaign
contributions to
Democrats.

"There are a lot of factors that go into political affiliation, and snap
determinations may be interesting for an academic study, but the real-
world
application seems somewhat murky," Jones said.

Nosek said that though the risk of bias among researchers was "a
reasonable
question," the study provided empirical results that could -- and
would --
be tested by other groups: "All we did was compare questions that people
could answer any way they wanted," Nosek said, as he explained why he
felt
personal views could not have influenced the outcome. "We had no direct
contact with participants."

For their study, Nosek, Banaji and social psychologist Erik Thompson
culled
self-acknowledged views about blacks from nearly 130,000 whites, who
volunteered online to participate in a widely used test of racial
bias that
measures the speed of people's associations between black or white
faces and
positive or negative words. The researchers examined correlations
between
explicit and implicit attitudes and voting behavior in all 435
congressional
districts.

The analysis found that substantial majorities of Americans, liberals
and
conservatives, found it more difficult to associate black faces with
positive concepts than white faces -- evidence of implicit bias. But
districts that registered higher levels of bias systematically
produced more
votes for Bush.

"Obviously, such research does not speak at all to the question of the
prejudice level of the president," said Banaji, "but it does show that
George W. Bush is appealing as a leader to those Americans who harbor
greater anti-black prejudice."

Vincent Hutchings, a political scientist at the University of
Michigan in
Ann Arbor, said the results matched his own findings in a study he
conducted
ahead of the 2000 presidential election: Volunteers shown visual
images of
blacks in contexts that implied they were getting welfare benefits
were far
more receptive to Republican political ads decrying government waste
than
volunteers shown ads with the same message but without images of black
people.

Jon Krosnick, a psychologist and political scientist at Stanford
University,
who independently assessed the studies, said it remains to be seen how
significant the correlation is between racial bias and political
affiliation.

For example, he said, the study could not tell whether racial bias was a
better predictor of voting preference than, say, policy preferences
on gun
control or abortion. But while those issues would be addressed in
subsequent
studies -- Krosnick plans to get random groups of future voters to
take the
psychological tests and discuss their policy preferences -- he said the
basic correlation was not in doubt.

"If anyone in Washington is skeptical about these findings, they are in
denial," he said. "We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice
predicts voting. Republicans are supported by whites with prejudice
against
blacks. If people say, 'This takes me aback,' they are ignoring a huge
volume of research."