Do People Contrast and Assimilate Candidate Ideology? An Experimental Test of the Projection Hypothesis

Karyn Amira

Journal of Experimental Political Science, 2018, vol. 5, issue 3, 195-205

Abstract: In political psychology, positive projection happens when we perceive the positions of liked candidates as closer to our own positions while negative projection means we perceive the positions of disliked candidates as further from our own positions. To date, there is still confusion about whether affective feelings lead to perceptions of candidate positions or perceptions of candidate positions lead to affective feelings. This paper pins down one of these causal directions. I manipulate positive and negative feelings towards a fictitious candidate in a survey experiment to introduce them exogenously and examine whether they affect perceptions of candidate ideology. In line with some previous findings, the results indicate modest positive projection effects but no negative projection effects. Explanations for this asymmetry are discussed.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:jexpos:v:5:y:2018:i:03:p:195-205_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Experimental Political Science from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().