Deep Analysis Of Politics And political identities by Psychological | Scientific Way on Tendency To voter| Social Group Identities
Analysis Of Politics And political identities by Psychological | Scientific Way on Tendency To voter| Social Group.
The truth is, identity politics has nothing to do with the Left the Right.
People like to throw out the term “identity politics” as a way of claiming their political opponents are illogical or making bad decisions for the country as a whole.
Scientific Research On Voter
According to scientific research on voter behavior, affects the way all of us vote, no matter what politics we have. And, consciously or not, all politicians try to take advantage of that during their campaigns! We often think of votes as logical, position-based choices.
Psychological Science on Voter
In psychological science, this is known as rational choice theory—it assumes voters study each candidate’s positions, and then select the one whose views and policies they most agree with or which benefit them. But research in the past few decades has revealed that identity politics play a huge role in voter behavior.
Tendency to voter for candidates
In other words, we all have a tendency to vote for candidates that most remind us of ourselves and of aspects of our social identity.
We may vote this way even if a candidate’s policies are less aligned with us than the policies of the candidate that we don’t identify with. Identity-based voting stems from our deeply ingrained patterns of social cognition:the way we make sense of ourselves and other people in a society.
Spontaneous trait inference
One way this can happen is a cognitive process known as spontaneous trait inference:
We automatically build up a model of someone’s personality or beliefs based on snippets of their behavior. That person who cut you off on the freeway?
They’re clearly a rude, thoughtless person!—even though you know nothing else about them. Our brains make similar spontaneous assumptions about candidates’ policies and beliefs.
Like, if the guy running for mayor doesn’t mention the city’s homelessness rate in a speech, that’s because he doesn’t care about the residents experiencing homelessness—even though it was one speech of many. The thing is, we don’t always make the same inferences for the same behavior—identity-related stereotypes influence how we fill in gaps.
If that mayoral candidate had been a woman, we may have been more likely to excuse the omission and still believe she cares about people experiencing homelessness.
That's because research shows that women are judged to have greater expertise in social welfare issues simply by virtue of their gender identity. This actually brings me to another social-cognitive phenomenon:the false consensus effect.
Automatically assume that people Who match with their social group.
That’s where we automatically assume that people in a social group that we identify with think the same way we do. Like, I may believe that I consider educational reform very important because I’m a parent. And if so, I may also assume that any candidate who’s a parent will also champion educational reform –even if that candidate has never actually said that they would.
We assume that a shared identity tells us about their positions, because of course people like us just naturally agree with the things we support. And research shows that even tiny, superficial similarities can lead us to believe that a politician thinks like we do about important stuff. Of course, it’s not like we’re just one thing.
Politicians play with complex social identities
We all have complex social identities. So politicians often remind us of the ones that might sway our vote towards them. This is known as identity salience. And we see it all over the place in politics. For instance, questions designed to reinforce a specific identity tend to skew people’s opinions so that they fall in line with that identity.
Something like, “As a parent, what do you think about this policy?” might lead you to vote differently than asking “As a resident of Montana, what do you think about this policy?”
One study in America even found that simply asking people about their political party and who they support can reinforce their identity as a supporter of that candidate, and therefore, potentially influence their voting choices. Another way politicians can use identity salience is to name-drop social groups when talking about who will benefit after they get elected, or refer to a policy, threat, or solution in a way that makes it identity-related. For instance, a candidate giving a talk at their alma mater could say, I think of the college kids whose wings are clipped by the looming specter of crippling debt.”
Our brains fill in the gaps thanks to that false consensus effect.
The candidate doesn’t need to explain how, exactly, their policies will benefit that group, or any group voters might identify with. They just need to subtly suggest that they’re one of us, and our brains fill in the gaps thanks to that false consensus effect.
Even ballet designs can reinforce identification with a given group
Even ballet designs can reinforce identification with a given group. Like, ballots that emphasize parties using logos lead people toward straight-ticket voting, while de-emphasizing party affiliation leads to more split-ticket voting. Similarly, studies suggest using candidate photos on ballots may prime us to think about the races or ethnicities we identify with, and thereby nudge us to vote accordingly.
Believe on Identity politics
Aspects of the election itself can also play a role. Identity voting tends to override rational choices when specific details about a candidate’s policies are not readily available, like in primary elections. It’s also more likely to happen in elections with a huge number of candidates. That’s probably because it’s harder to remember and keep track of every candidate’s views and policies, so we tend to rely on our identities to guide our vote. Identity politics is an inevitable by product of our ancient social-cognitive machinery.
Automatic Assumptions on Shared Identities
We will always make automatic assumptions about others based on our shared identities. But we can recognize this about ourselves, and because of that, we can make sure the votes we cast are for the people and policies we actually want. Basically, we can check to make sure our image of a candidate matches what they’ve said and done, rather than what we might have assumed about them because of our identities.
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