Political expertise and the development of attitude consistency

• Published in: Social cognition 1990-03, Vol.8 (1), p.104-124
• Main Authors: JUDD, C. M, DOWNING, J. W
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Behavior. Attitude; Biological and medical sciences; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Social psychology
• ISSN: 0278-016X; 1943-2798
• DOI: 10.1521/soco.1990.8.1.104

The development of consistency between political attitudes among those who are relatively expert in the political domain is presumed to follow from the fact that such individuals think about political issues frequently and do so in a relatively systematic or principled manner. We conducted a study to examine this hypothesis, varying the frequency with which subjects thought about the implications between pairs of issues. We then examined whether within-subject correlations between subsequently generated judgments of where various political candidates were located on the issue pairs increased as the pairs' implications were judged more frequently. As expected, we found that candidate inferences on issues were more predictable between issue pairs the more frequently expert subjects had thought about the implications between those issue pairs. Less-expert subjects showed no effect of frequency of thought about implications between pairs of issues. Procedural learning in making issue implication judgments was manifested by all subjects and was not related to subjects' expertise. However, procedural learning translated into larger correlations between candidate inferences only among expert subjects. This suggests that these subjects refer to underlying ideological knowledge about these issues in making their issue implication judgments and that this practice is responsible for larger correlations between issues on subsequently generated candidate inferences.