Social group identity plays a central role in political polarization and inter-party conflict. Here, we use ambiguously valenced faces to measure bias in the processing of political ingroup and outgroup faces, while also accounting for inter-party differences in judgments of emotion at baseline. Participants identifying as Democrats and Republicans judged happy, angry, and surprised faces as positive or negative. Whereas happy and angry faces convey positive and negative valence respectively, surprised faces are ambiguous in that they readily convey positive and negative valence. Thus, surprise is a useful tool for characterizing valence bias (i.e., the tendency to judge ambiguous stimuli as negative). Face stimuli were assigned to the participants' political ingroup or outgroup, or a third group with an unspecified affiliation (baseline). We found a significant interaction of facial expression and group membership, such that outgroup faces were judged more negatively than ingroup and baseline, but only for surprise. There was also an interaction of facial expression and political affiliation, with Republicans judging surprise more negatively than Democrats across all group conditions. However, we did not find evidence for party differences in outgroup negativity. Our findings demonstrate the utility of judgments of surprised faces as a measure of intergroup bias, and reinforce the importance of outgroup negativity (relative to ingroup positivity) for explaining inter-party biases.

Uncertainty has been shown to impact political evaluation, yet the exact mech- anisms by which uncertainty affects the minds of citizens remain unclear. This experiment examines the neural underpinnings of uncertainty in political evaluation using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). During fMRI, participants completed an experimental task where they evaluated policy positions attributed to hypothetical political candidates. Policy positions were either congruent or incongruent with candidates’ political party affiliation and presented with varying levels of certainty. Neural activity was modelled as a function of uncertainty and incongruence. Analyses suggest that neural activity in brain regions previously implicated in affective and evaluative pro- cessing (anterior cingulate cortex, insular cortex) differed as a function of the interaction between uncertainty and incongruence, such that activation in these areas was greatest when information was both certain and incongruent, and uncertainty influenced processing differently as a function of the valence of the attached information. These findings suggest that individuals are attuned to uncertainty in the stated issue positions of politicians, and that the neural processing of this uncertainty is dependent on congruence of these positions with expectations based on political party identification. Implications for the study of emotion and politics and political cognition are discussed.

Recent models of cognition suggest that the brain may implement predictive processing, in which top-down expectations constrain incoming sensory data. In this perspective, expectations are updated (error minimization) only if sensory data sufficiently deviate from these expectations (prediction error). Although originally applied to perception, predictive processing is thought to generally characterize cognitive architecture, including the social cognitive processes involved in ideological thinking. Scaling up these simple computational principles to the social sphere outlines a path by which group members may adopt shared ideologies and beliefs to predict behavior and cooperate with each other. Because ideological judgments are of specific interest to others in our political groups, we may increasingly regulate each other’s thinking, sharing the process of error minimization. In this paper, we outline how this process of shared error minimization may lead to shared ideologies and beliefs that allow group members to predict and cooperate with each other, and how, as a consequence, political polarization and extremism may result.

In the target article, Clark and Winegard (this issue) put forth an evolutionary argument for the idea that liberals and conservatives are equally motivated by tribalism and that this motivation for groupishness often biases relevant infor- mation processing in a politically expedient direction for both groups. They discuss the implications for social science research, suggesting that scientists are not immune from ideological epistemology and this has implications for how researchers approach the study of ideological differences, as well as bias in the scientific process more generally. I agree that scientists must be cognizant of their own ideological bias given that it likely does have an impact on the selection of research questions, and given recent surveys of social psy- chologists, appears to also influence how they evaluate the research conducted by peers (Inbar & Lammers, 2012). I begin this commentary with some discussion of areas of agreement—namely, that I agree much of the research focused on studying ideological differences between liberals and conservatives has been oversimplified and that these dif- ferences are likely to be much more nuanced and influenced by political context. While I agree with the basic premise that both liberals and conservatives have tendencies toward tribalism that may result in biased information processing, I argue here that there may still be asymmetries in terms of how this bias is expressed, especially in the context of con- temporary American politics. I end with consideration of whether it is fair to generalize from recent data showing lib- eral bias in social psychology (Inbar & Lammers, 2012; von Hippel & Buss, 2017) to social science as a whole, examining specifically the potential for differences between social psychology and political science, both in terms of member- ship and professional norms.

In this research, we address a longstanding question concerning how individuals evaluate social and political issues. We focus on the role that political self-identification plays when individuals evaluate policy statements. In a laboratory setting, participants completed a task facilitation procedure, in which they made paired sets of judgments about a series of policy statements. Relative to a control task, ideological categorization of policy statements as liberal or conservative influenced the ease of evaluation. On experimental trials that began with ideological categorization, policy evaluations that were consistent with the participant’s own ideology were made more quickly than responses that were ideologically inconsistent and more quickly than responses following a control judgment. In three experiments, we show that this effect is stronger for individuals with more accessible ideological identification (Experiment 1) and more extreme ideological identification (Experiment 2), and that it holds when examining partisan instead of ideological identification (Experiment 3). The findings suggest that the use of ideological category information can facilitate and interfere with evaluative judgments of political issues, and that the use of such categories varies as a function of individual differences in the strength of political identification.

Political polarization at the elite level is a major concern in many contemporary democracies, which is argued to alienate large swaths of the electorate and prevent meaningful social change from occurring, yet little is known about how individuals respond to political candidates who deviate from the party line and express policy positions incongruent with their party affiliations. This experiment examines the neural underpinnings of such evaluations using functional MRI (fMRI). During fMRI, participants completed an experimental task where they evaluated policy positions attributed to hypothetical political candidates. Each block of trials focused on one candidate (Democrat or Republican), but all participants saw two candidates from each party in a randomized order. On each trial, participants received information about whether the candidate supported or opposed a specific policy issue. These issue positions varied in terms of congruence between issue position and candidate party affiliation. We modeled neural activity as a function of incongruence and whether participants were viewing ingroup or outgroup party candidates. Results suggest that neural activity in brain regions previously implicated in both evaluative processing and work on ideological differences (insula and anterior cingulate cortex) differed as a function of the interaction between incongruence, candidate type (ingroup versus outgroup), and political ideology. More liberal participants showed greater activation to incongruent versus congruent trials in insula and ACC, primarily when viewing ingroup candidates. Implications for the study of democratic representation and linkages between citizens’ calls for social change and policy implementation are discussed.

This work examines the impact of uncertainty and threat on support for political compromise. In Study 1, uncertainty, threat, and support for compromise were measured. Uncertainty increased support for compromise only when paired with positive or neutral affect. Studies 2 and 3 used an experimental design to examine the impact of incidental affect on support for political compromise as a function of political identification. Uncertainty was more likely to increase support for compromise in positive or neutral contexts and for political moderates and liberals. The combination of uncertainty and threat led conservatives to express reduced support for compromise.

Racial disparities in policing and recent high-profile incidents resulting in the deaths of Black men have ignited a national debate on policing policies. Given evidence that both police officers and Black men may be associated with threat, we examined the impact of perceived threat on support for reformed policing policies. Across three studies we found correlational evidence that perceiving police officers as threatening predicts increased support for reformed policing practices (e.g., limiting the use of lethal force and matching police force demographics to those of the community). In contrast, perceiving Black men as threatening predicted reduced support for policing policy reform. Perceived threat also predicted willingness to sign a petition calling for police reform. Experimental evidence indicated that priming participants to associate Black men with threat could also reduce support for policing policy reform, and this effect was moderated by internal motivation to respond without prejudice. Priming participants to associate police officers with threat did not increase support for policing policy reform. Results indicate that resistance to policing policy reform is associated with perceiving Black men as threatening. Moreover, findings suggest that publicizing racially charged police encounters, which may conjure associations between Black men and threat, could reduce support for policing policy reform.

People respond to dissimilar political beliefs in a variety of ways, ranging from openness and acceptance to closed‐mindedness and intolerance. While there is reason to believe that uncertainty may influence political tolerance, the direction of this influence remains unclear. We propose that threat moderates the effect of uncertainty on tolerance; when safe, uncertainty leads to greater tolerance, yet when threatened, uncertainty leads to reduced tolerance. Using independent manipulations of threat and uncertainty, we provide support for this hypothesis. This research demonstrates that, although feelings of threat and uncertainty can be independent, it is also important to understand their interaction.

Over the past decade, intuitionist models of morality have challenged the view that moral reasoning is the sole or even primary means by which moral judgments are made. Rather, intuitionist models posit that certain situations automatically elicit moral intuitions, which guide moral judgments. We present three experiments showing that evaluations are also susceptible to the influence of moral versus non-moral construal. We had participants make moral evaluations (rating whether actions were morally good or bad) or non-moral evaluations (rating whether actions were pragmatically or hedonically good or bad) of a wide variety of actions. As predicted, moral evaluations were faster, more extreme, and more strongly associated with universal prescriptions—the belief that absolutely nobody or everybody should engage in an action—than non-moral (pragmatic or hedonic) evaluations of the same actions. Further, we show that people are capable of flexibly shifting from moral to non-moral evaluations on a trial-by-trial basis. Taken together, these experiments provide evidence that moral versus non-moral construal has an important influence on evaluation and suggests that effects of construal are highly flexible. We discuss the implications of these experiments for models of moral judgment and decision-making.

Prior research has shown that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) plays an important role in the representation of the evaluation of stimuli, regardless of stimulus modality. Based on these findings, researchers have proposed that the OFC serves a common currency function, allowing for the direct comparison of different types of perceptual stimuli (e.g. food, drink, money). The present study was designed to extend this research and investigate whether these same regions of OFC that have been identified in previous research are involved in evaluating imagined stimuli. Specifically, we asked participants to draw on prior attitudinal knowledge to generate internal representations of liked and disliked exemplars from different categories during functional magnetic resonance imaging. The results of this study support the idea that imagined stimuli (regardless of stimulus category) are evaluated in the OFC using a common system that has been identified in previous research for externally perceived stimuli.

Although early research implicated the amygdala in automatic processing of negative information, more recent research suggests that it plays a more general role in processing the motivational relevance of various stimuli, suggesting that the relation between valence and amygdala activation may depend on contextual goals. This study provides experimental evidence that the relation between valence and amygdala activity is dynamically modulated by evaluative goals. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants evaluated the positive, negative, or overall (positive plus negative) aspects of famous people. When participants were providing overall evaluations, both positive and negative names were associated with amygdala activation. When they were evaluating positivity, positive names were associated with amygdala activity, and when they were evaluating negativity, negative names were associated with amygdala activity. Evidence for a negativity bias was found; modulation was more pronounced for positive than for negative information. These data suggest that the amygdala flexibly processes motivationally relevant evaluative information in accordance with current processing goals, but processes negative information less flexibly than positive information.

This study investigated the influence of exposure to a tornado disaster and disaster‐related posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology on physical health complaints and primary health care utilization among rural medical patients. One‐hundred five patients completed self‐report measures assessing disaster exposure, PTSD symptoms, and self‐reported physical health complaints. Objective rates of health care utilization were gathered by a review of medical records. Tornado disaster exposure and generalized psychological distress were associated with physical health complaints one year following the disaster. After controlling for age, gender, and levels of predisaster health care utilization, PTSD Cluster C (avoidance) symptoms were associated with increased rates of postdisaster health care utilization. Implications of these findings for interventions within the medical system are discussed.