The Rationalizing Voter

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.