David Sears

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Departments of Psychology and Political Science

This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, soc...

This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, soc...

This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, soc...

This chapter presents a literature review expanding research on political socialization to development of political attitudes and behavior over the full life course . The fundamental question is the extent to which, and under what conditions, early experiences leave predispositions that dominate later experiences. It first addresses development of...

This chapter serves as an introduction to the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology . It provides an overview of the field, focusing on key theories, topics, and empirical approaches. The chapter begins by defining political psychology as the behavior of individuals within a specific political system. This is followed by a lengthy discussion on t...

This volume contains 30 chapters that provide an up-to-date account of key topics and areas of research in political psychology. In general, the chapters apply what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. Chapters draw on theory and research on biopsychology, neuroscience, personality, psychopathology, evolutionary psychology, soc...

What explains the contents of political belief systems? A widespread view is that they derive from abstract values, like equality, tolerance, and authority. Here, we challenge this view, arguing instead that belief systems derive from political alliance structures that vary across nations and time periods. When partisans mobilize support for their...

We argue that the history of political diversity in social psychology may be better characterized by stability than by a large shift toward liberalism. The branch of social psychology that focuses on political issues has defined social problems from a liberal perspective since at least the 1930s. Although a lack of ideological diversity within the...

The civil rights movement and immigration reform transformed American politics in the mid-1960s. Demographic diversity and identity politics raised the challenge of e pluribus unum anew, and multiculturalism emerged as a new ideological response to this dilemma. This book uses national public opinion data and public opinion data from Los Angeles to...

The civil rights movement and immigration reform transformed American politics in the mid-1960s. Demographic diversity and identity politics raised the challenge of e pluribus unum anew, and multiculturalism emerged as a new ideological response to this dilemma. This book uses national public opinion data and public opinion data from Los Angeles to...

Political psychology applies what is known about human psychology to the study of politics. It examines citizens’ vote choices and public opinion as well as how political leaders deal with threat, mediate political conflicts, and make foreign policy decisions. The second edition of the Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology gathers together a dist...

In 2008, ANES included for the first time—along with standard explicit measures of old-fashioned and symbolic racism—the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), a relatively new implicit measure of racial attitudes. This article examines the extent to which four different measures of racial prejudice (three explicit and one implicit) predict public...

The partisan realignment of the White South, which transformed this region from being solidly Democratic to being the base of the Republican Party, has been the focus of much scholarship. Exactly how it occurred is unclear. Widespread individual-level attitude changes would be contrary to the well-known within-person stability of party identificati...

Our previous research shows that the unusually large effects of race and racial attitudes on public evaluations of Barack Obama have spilled over into multiple facets of mass political decision making. This study tests whether that spillover of racialization has extended all the way into partisan attachments. The results presented suggest that mass...

Measures of symbolic racism (SR) have often been used to tap racial prejudice toward Blacks. However, given the wording of questions used for this purpose, some of the apparent effects on attitudes toward policies to help Blacks may instead be due to political conservatism, attitudes toward government, and/or attitudes toward redistributive governm...

The conventional wisdom is that racial prejudice remains largely stable through adulthood. However, very little is known about the development of contemporary racial attitudes like symbolic racism. The growing crystallization of symbolic racism through the lifespan is tested using two data sets that measure the stability, consistency, and predictiv...

Introduction In a challenge to the ongoing American experiment of reconciling unity and diversity, Ernest Gellner (1983) called a multiethnic nation-state an oxymoron, arguing that minority groups ultimately would have to assimilate or secede. Using history to assess the validity of Gellner's claim that cultural unity is necessary for sustaining a...

Recent research finds that naive survey participants' rapid evaluations of the facial competence of United States Congressional candidates predict aggregate vote margins. The predictive power of facial competence has generated considerable interest because it seems to indicate a causal relationship between face and vote choice. Because there is no...

Allport's View of the Role of “Inner Conflict” in White Americans' PrejudiceDevelopments Since AllportNew FrameworkHas Allport Been Supported?Future Research

College campuses provide ideal natural settings for studying diversity: they allow us to see what happens when students of all different backgrounds sit side by side in classrooms, live together in residence halls, and interact in one social space. By opening a window onto the experiences and evolving identities of individuals in these exceptionall...

The article was delivered as the Presidential Address at the Fourth Annual International Conference of The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, University of California, Irvine, March 28, 1992. It expresses some concerns about the way academic research approaches contemporary politics, and concludes that economics, political science, and...

Despite the successes of the civil rights movement, a largely impermeable color line continues to restrict African Americans from assimilation into the broader American society. In the meantime high rates of immigration have produced an increasingly culturally diverse population. A “people of color” hypothesis suggests that the color line the new i...

This study analyzes the determinants of Whites’ support for punitive and preventive crime policies. It focuses on the predictive power of beliefs about race as described by symbolic racism theory. A dataset with 849 White respondents from three waves of the Los Angeles County Social Survey was used. In order to assess the weight of racial factors i...

This chapter summarizes the available evidence on twelve controversies surrounding symbolic racism, which was proposed over 30 years ago to explain new forms of racial conservatism appearing after the civil rights era. The conceptualization of symbolic racism was originally somewhat fuzzy and has evolved over time; but the measurement of it has bee...

The conceptualization and measurement of symbolic racism have been the subjects of a number of critiques, of which we address four: (1) we briefly review the history of its past conceptualization, which has been somewhat loose, and of its past measurement, which has been more consistent than often suggested. We then address three other critiques em...

Our focus is the regional political realignment that has occurred among whites over the past four decades. We hypothesize that the South's shift to the Republican party has been driven to a significant degree by racial conservatism in addition to a harmonizing of partisanship with general ideological conservatism. General Social Survey and National...

Our focus is the regional political realignment that has occurred among whites over the past four decades. We hypothesize that the South's shift to the Republican party has been driven to a significant degree by racial conservatism in addition to a harmonizing of partisanship with general ideological conservatism. General Social Survey and National...

In Thinking About Political Psychology (see record 2002-17210-000 ), editor David Sears has collected papers from authors who take a hard look at the field of political psychology. One limitation of this volume is that although the field of political psychology encompasses a broad array of topics, this book treats only public opinion and mass polit...

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The theory of symbolic racism places its origins in a blend of anti-Black affect and conservative values, particularly individualism. We clarify that hypothesis, test it directly, and report several findings consistent with it. Study 1 shows that racial prejudice and general political conservatism fall into 2 separate factors, with symbolic racism...

Review essays in the previous handbooks of political psychology have been titled "political socialization" and have focused largely on the childhood acquisition of specifically political orientations (Merelman, 1986; Niemi, 1973). We broaden our scope to the full life span and to a broader array of political and social orientations. We begin with a...

The concept of symbolic racism was originally proposed 30 years ago. Much research has been done and the society itself has changed, yet many of the original items measuring symbolic racism remain in use. The primary objective of this paper is to present and evaluate an updated scale of symbolic racism. The scale proves to be reliable and internall...

Los Angeles has a history of considerable racial and ethnic conflict, ranging from the “zoot suit riots†of 1943 through the Watts riots of 1965 and the so-called “Rodney King†rioting in 1992. Politics in Los Angeles has often reflected this intergroup conflict, from Sam Yorty’s mayoralty campaign against the black Tom Bradley, that many o...

Multiculturalism has emerged to challenge liberalism as an ideological solution in coping with ethnic diversity in the United States. This article develops a definition of political multiculturalism which refers to conceptions of identity, community and public policy. It then analyses the 1994 General Social Survey and a 1994 survey of Los Angeles...

Are Americans less prejudiced now than they were thirty years ago, or has racism simply gone "underground"? Is racism something we learn as children, or is it a result of certain social groups striving to maintain their privileged positions in society? In Racialized Politics, political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists explore the current...

The persistence hypothesis holds that core political predispositions tend to be highly stable through the life span. It has rarely been tested directly, given the scarcity of long-term, large-sample longitudinal studies. We address it using the Terman longitudinal study, in which the party identification and ideology of 1,272 respondents were measu...

This study tests for long-term continuities in the politics of race. It uses a quasi-experimental method to examine the role of racial issues in presidential voting in the present era. It identifies two earlier historical eras in which it is generally agreed racial issues were a central point of partisan division in national politics: the immediate...

This study investigates political communication as a mediator of the socializing effects of major political events. We earlier found that presidential campaigns are occasions for increased crystallization of partisan attitudes among adolescents (Sears and Valentino, 1997). But what drives the socialization process during the campaign? Either the ca...

W. D. Crano (1997) argued that vested interest should have a moderating effect on attitudes, increasing attitude consistency and attitude-behavior consistency, and presented supportive data concerning whites' opposition to busing. By normal standards, however, the findings are not very strong. In general, the survey literature, which has focused on...

We propose that (1) the preadult socialization of longstanding, stable predispositions is catalyzed by exogenous political events; (2) such events socialize attitudes selectively, only in the specific domains they make salient; and so (3) longstanding predispositions tend to be socialized episodically rather than incrementally. This theory is appli...

We address the role of racial antagonism in whites’ opposition to racially-targeted policies. The data come from four surveys selected for their unusually rich measurement of both policy preferences and other racial attitudes: the 1986 and 1992 National Election Studies, the 1994 General Social Survey, and the 1995 Los Angeles County Social Surve...

Presidential Address delivered to the Annual Meeting of the International Society for Political Psychology, July 7, 1995, Washington, D.C.

Racial prejudice and the protection of realistic interests are examined as two competing explanations for Anglo opposition to bilingual education programs. Past research has left nuclear the extent to which these two theories explain opposition to policies that assist members of minority groups because the two theories generally have been treated i...

Tetlock asserts that the work of Sears and Kinder on symbolic racism is "deeply politicized," which has "profoundly shaped standards of evidence and proof." He is particularly concerned that this research automatically indicts conservatives as racists. Contrary to his presupposition, in 10 empirical studies, conducted over more than two decades of...

On Halloween Eve of 1938, a radio program of Spanish music was interrupted by a special news bulletin reporting strange explosions on the planet Mars. Sometime later, the music was interrupted again with a live report from Grower's Mill, New Jersey, where a "huge cylinder" had struck the earth "with a terrific force" (Koch, 1967) (see Figure 11-1)....

This paper assesses the progress of political psychology as a distinct field in U.S. educational institutions as indexed by course offerings for undergraduates in the area. Using a mail questionnaire to faculty with interests in political psychology, we identified 100 courses from 78 different institutions across the United States and Canada which...

Data are presented from a survey of graduate courses and graduate training programs in political psychology in the United States and Canada. Courses labeled "political psychology" are of relatively recent vintage and are offered most often in political science departments. They generally do not cover the entire field, but focus on one of three majo...

Sears and Lau (1983) presented evidence that apparent self-interest effects can be, and have been, generated in political surveys by question order artifacts. This evidence was based in part on a tabulation of published reports of self-interest effects in the NES series, specifically on the political effects of personal financial situation. From an...

This paper examines the role of race in elections where one of the candidates is black. Using the 1982 California gubernatorial election between Tom Bradley and George Deukmejian as a case study, the paper shows that whereas racial attitudes were a significant influence on the voting decisions of whites, Bradley's background did not stimulate an un...

Bilingual education has become politicized. It is surrounded by controversy, the outcome of which may play a greater role in deciding its future as an educational program than its educational successes. To better understand this political debate and its possible outcome, the present article examines attitudes toward bilingual education among the An...

Throughout our history, white Americans have singled out Afro-Americans for particularly racist treatment. Of all the many immigrant nationalities that have come to these shores since the seventeenth century, Afro-Americans have consistently attracted the greatest prejudice based on their group membership and have been treated in the most categoric...

A study of non-Hispanic attitudes about bilingual education had two goals: (1) to apply symbolic politics theory to bilingual education and (2) to test the theory's assumption that the symbolic meaning of an attitude object determines which symbolic predisposition it evokes. A national sample of 1,170 non-Hispanics were surveyed via telephone inter...

Indicates that research in social psychology has largely been based on college students tested in academic laboratories on academiclike tasks. How this dependence on one narrow data base may have biased the main substantive conclusions of sociopsychological research in this era is discussed. Research on the full life span suggests that, compared wi...

Two versions of the "persistence hypothesis" concerning the origins of social tolerance, (1) a "traditional" view that preadult political socialization leaves attitudinal residues which persist through adulthood and (2) a "revisionist" view that preadult learning is supplemented by socialization that continues into early adulthood, are tested again...

In a recent article, Bobo (1983) concluded that whites’ opposition to racial busing is rooted in their perception that blacks pose tangible threats to their own interests, a conclusion that supports realistic group conflict theory and contradicts our own (Kinder & Sears, 1981). We had concluded that threats posed by blacks to whites’ private lives...

We argue that most previous empirical reports of the influence of personal economic situations upon political preferences ("self-interest effects") in the mass public have been due to either of two item-order artifacts: political preferences may have been personalized by assessing immediately after the respondent's own economic situation has been m...

A "person-positivity bias" is proposed such that attitude objects are evaluated more favorably the more they resemble individual humans. Because perceived similarity should increase liking, individuals should attract more favorable evaluations than should less personal attitude objects, such as inanimate objects or even aggregated or grouped versio...

Changes in the economy are associated with changes in support for the incumbent President (or members of his party) at the aggregate level but not generally at the individual level. That is, thepersonal impact of economic hardships has only rarely been linked to individual political responses. This paper finds again that various indicators of perso...

Although theories of prejudice have been extensively catalogued, empirical confrontations between competing theories are rare. The present study tested 2 major theoretical approaches to prejudice by Whites against Blacks: realistic group conflict theory, which emphasizes the tangible threats Blacks might pose to Whites' private lives; and a sociocu...

This article contrasts short-term self-interest and longstanding symbolic attitudes as determinants of (1) voters' attitudes toward government policy on four controversial issues (unemployment, national health insurance, busing, and law and order), and (2) issue voting concerning those policy areas. In general, we found the various self-interest me...

The “positivity bias” is a term used to describe the consistent favorable evaluation of public figures found in surveys over the past 40 years. This paper explored several possible artifactual explanations for this bias,focusing on the survey instrument itself. Two experiments varied the labeling and ordering of scale endpoints, the affective value...

This article contrasts the “self-interest” and “symbolic politics” explanations for the formation of mass policy preferences and voting behavior. Self-interested attitudes are defined as those supporting policies that would maximize benefits and minimize costs to the individual's private material well-being. The “symbolic politics” model emphasizes...

Abstract The possible consequences of self-interest on American public opinion were examined in the context of the United States military involvement in Vietnam Civilians' personal connections to the war, in terms of their friends' and relatives' military service, did make them pay more attention to the war, but such connections seemed to have only...

This paper considers the impact of diffuse support for the political system on public compliance with official policy by studying citizens' reactions to the energy crisis of 1974. Using data from a survey of Los Angeles residents, the paper examines these specific hypotheses: (1) that diffuse support promotes conformity to the government's "line" d...

The conventional explanation for adult white opposition to busing for school desegregation emphasizes a rational, objective self interested component. Whites are seen as opposing busing because its costs far exceed its benefits. However, little of the social psychological literature supports this view. Studies by and large support the findings that...

The primary hypothesis examined was that people giving positive evaluations are themselves regarded as more attractive than when they give negative evaluations. This research tests whether this holds when reciprocity is not at issue. Subjects in six experiments were presented with stimulus persons who varied in the proportion of positive to negativ...

The pattern of individual affective accommodation to no-choice relationships with others was examined in 2 studies on the effects of anticipated interaction. From F. Heider's (1946, 1958) concept of unit–sentiment balance it was predicted that the anticipation of no-choice interaction with other individuals would lead to increased liking for indivi...

The origins of children's attitudes toward freedom of dissent were investigated using questionnaire data from 1384 children in grades 5 through 9. Political socialization of attitudes toward free speech apparently does occur during late childhood and early adolescence. Most children acquire support for the abstract principle of free speech in sloga...