Ingrid Haas, Ph.D.
ihaas2@unl.edu
Associate Professor
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Year of PhD: 2012
Address: Department of Political Science (531 Oldfather Hall)
City: Lincoln, Nebraska - 68588
Country: United States
About Me:
Dr. Ingrid Haas is Associate Professor of Political Science and Resident Faculty in the Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Psychology. Dr. Haas is interested in understanding the expression of political attitudes and beliefs, and how that expression is influenced by contextual factors such as emotion and identity. She conducts interdisciplinary research on political behavior using theory and methods from political psychology, social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Her specific areas of expertise include attitudes, social cognition, emotion, prejudice, social identity, experimental design, survey design, and functional MRI (fMRI). Dr. Haas directs the Political Attitudes and Cognition (PAC) Lab and serves as Faculty Coordinator of the Political Science Experimental Participant Pool (PSEPP). She teaches courses on political psychology, American politics, and quantitative/experimental research methods. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in social psychology from The Ohio State University and B.A. in psychology and political science from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
Research Interests
Political Psychology
Experimental Research
Attitudes
Political Neuroscience
Neuropolitics
Social Cognition
Social Identity
Emotions And Politics
Political Prejudice
Countries of Interest
United States
Publications:
Journal Articles:
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.
Book Chapters:
This chapter examines the emerging interdisciplinary field of political neuroscience. Existing research using structural and functional neuroimaging to understand political affect, cognition, and behavior is reviewed, considering both similarities and differences across individuals. Focusing on how affective and cognitive processes give rise to political behavior, additional work from neuroscience, psychology, and political science is discussed and integrated. I argue that significant advances in political neuroscience likely require an integration of neuroscience with political science in a way that incorporates social psychological theory. Psychology can help bridge the gap between these seemingly disparate levels of analysis—from brain function to mass political behavior—and may help guide hypothesis generation and experimental design. I consider how the political neuroscience approach may help shed light on important questions in social and political psychology, such as the interplay between cognition and emotion. Limitations of existing work and suggestions for future research are discussed.
This chapter reviews social neuroscience research that links social psychological attitudes and evaluative processes to their presumed neural bases. The chapter is organized into four parts. The first section discusses how attitude representations are transformed into evaluative states that can be used to guide thought and action. The next two sections address the related processes of attitude learning and change. The final section discusses applications of these concepts for the study of prejudice and political behavior.
Other:
The field of political psychology explains political behavior as a function of both individual- and group-level psychological processes. While the field is interdisciplinary, political psychologists tend to work in either psychology or political science departments. Although the overall aim is often similar, researchers from each discipline approach the same questions in different ways, and interested scholars are encouraged to examine literatures from both fields. The general approach to research is to focus on individual political attitudes, emotion, beliefs, and behavior, and attempt to explain these phenomena using psychological research and theory. Historical approaches to research in this field often relied on case studies or qualitative approaches, whereas newer work has incorporated a variety of quantitative methods (surveys, experiments). Related fields of biopolitics and political neuroscience have begun to utilize physiological and neuroscientific methods to address questions of interest to political psychologists. This bibliography provides resources for general overviews of the field of political psychology, as well as relevant textbooks and academic journals. In addition, resources are provided in relation to a variety of specific research topics and areas.
Mass political behavior is the study of how average citizens form and express opinions about politics and decide how to engage with the political system through voting or other forms of political participation. Political scientists interested in mass political behavior have drawn on a variety of disciplinary approaches to understand the topic, including history, economics, sociology, and more recently, psychology, biology, and neuroscience. Political psychologists interested in understanding mass political behavior have applied social psychological theories of attitudes, emotion, social cognition, and social identity to help improve our understanding of political behavior. This entry provides a brief overview of how psychology has been used to study public opinion, voting behavior, and political participation.