Milton Lodge

• Ph.D
• Professor at Stony Brook University

What are the fundamental causes of human behavior and to what degree is it intended, consciously controlled? We review the literature on automaticity in human behavior with an emphasis on our own theory of motivated political reasoning, John Q. Public, and the experimental evidence we have collected (Lodge & Taber, 2013). Our fundamental theoretica...

In this commentary, we embed the volume's contributions on public beliefs about science in a broader theoretical discussion of motivated political reasoning. The studies presented in the preceding section of the volume consistently find evidence for hyperskepticism toward scientific evidence among ideologues, no matter the domain or contextand this...

How is it that the U.S. Supreme Court is capable of getting most citizens to accept rulings with which they disagree? This analysis addresses the role of the symbols of judicial authority and legitimacy—the robe, the gavel, the cathedral-like court building—in contributing to this willingness of ordinary people to acquiesce to disagreeable court de...

An incisive, broad-based overview of political communication, the Oxford Handbook for Political Communication assembles the leading scholars in the field of political communication to answer the question: What do we know and need to know about the process by which humans claim, lose, or share power through symbolic exchanges? Its sixty-three essays...

We offer a theory of motivated political reasoning based on the claim that the feelings aroused in the initial stages of processing sociopolitical information inevitably color all phases of the evaluation process. When a citizen is called on to express a judgment, the considerations that enter into conscious rumination will be biased by the valence...

How is it that the U.S. Supreme Court is capable of getting most citizens to accept rulings with which they disagree? This analysis addresses the role of the symbols of judicial authority and legitimacy – the robe, the gavel, the cathedral-like court building – in contributing to this willingness of ordinary people to acquiesce to disagreeable cour...

Human beings are consummate rationalizers, but rarely are we rational. Controlled deliberation is a bobbing cork on the currents of unconscious information processing, but we have always the illusion of standing at the helm. This book presents a theory of the architecture and mechanisms that determine when, how, and why unconscious thoughts, the co...

The prevalence of implicit measures of attitudes, defined as instruments that capture a respondent’s unconscious, automatic behavioural response to a stimulus, have experienced exponential growth in the study of attitudes over the past two decades (see review by Wittenbrink, 2007). Social scientists interested in psychological behaviour have long b...

Citizens, especially those who are knowledgeable and care the most about politics, are motivated to defend their beliefs and attitudes in the face of discrepant information. These motivated biases strongly influence the way people think about health care policies and the politicians and parties that propose or attack these contentious policies. Thr...

Abstract will be provided by author.How is it that the United State Supreme Court, perhaps the least majoritarian of all American political institutions, is capable of getting most citizens to accept rulings with which they disagree? This analysis addresses the role of the symbols of judicial authority and legitimacy – the robe, the gavel, the cath...

Olivola and Todorov (Elected in 100 milliseconds: appearance-based trait inferences and voting. J Nonverbal Behav, 2010) provide a convincing demonstration that competence ratings based on 1-second exposures to paired photos of US congressional candidates predict election outcomes at better than chance levels. However, they do not account for varia...

A computational model of political attitudes and beliefs is developed that incorporates contemporary psychological theory with well-documented findings from electoral behavior. We compare this model, John Q. Public (JQP), to a Bayesian learning model via computer simulations of observed changes in candidate evaluations over the 2000 presidential ca...

We have previously demonstrated that subliminal (i. e., unnoticed) affective primes (smiley and frowning cartoon faces) influence the valence of thoughts that one recalls and these affect-elicited thoughts mediate the effect of the prior attitude on posterior attitude and on public policy evaluations (Erisen, Lodge, & Taber, 2008). We extend these...

John C. Wahlke - Volume 41 Issue 3 - Samuel C. Patterson, Milton G. Lodge

We develop a computational model of political attitudes and beliefs that incorporates contemporary theories of social and cognitive psychology with well-documented findings from electoral behavior. We compare this model, John Q. Public (JQP), to a Bayesian learning model via computer simulations of empirically observed changes in candidate evaluati...

We review and evaluate a growing literature in social and political psychology on the ubiquity of unconscious thought processes and present a theoretical model, called John Q. Public (JQP), which seeks to explain how citizens form and express their political beliefs, attitudes, and choices. Our most revolutionary claims are that people are generall...

This chapter evaluates how emotion and, in particular, affect serve to organize the mind, and reviews existing research concerning the ways this organization leads to bias at all stages of the evaluative process. It then applies a simple experimental study to show how the process outlined leads individuals to integrate information about a political...

We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased-information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger tha...

Political science has long relied on explicit responses in order to understand what and how people think. New research in the cognitive sciences suggests that this reliance on conscious considerations provides but a partial picture of how citizens think and reason. Given the limitations of conscious working memory and the growing evidence that much...

With the advent of the political behavior movement in political science in the 1950s, in particular with the publication of The American Voter in 1960, beliefs, feelings, and behavioral dispositions were brought to center stage in the prediction and explanation of political behavior. In line with an implicit assumption of human rationality, the soc...

We report the results of three experimental tests of the “hot cognition” hypothesis, which posits that all sociopolitical concepts that have been evaluated in the past are affectively charged and that this affective charge is automatically activated within milliseconds on mere exposure to the concept, appreciably faster than conscious appraisal of...

We examined the hypothesis that threat alters the cognitive strategies used by high authoritarians in seeking out new political information from the environment. In a laboratory experiment, threat was manipulated through a “mortality salience” manipulation used in research on terror management theory (Pyszczynski, Solomon & Greenberg, 2003). Subjec...

John Q. Public, a computational model of political cognition which incorporates both cognitive and affective mechanisms, is employed as a voter facing political cam-paign information. A series of hypothetical, computa-tional experiments show that the model successfully re-produces a set of well-known empirical phenomena found in electoral research...

The recording of event-related potentials (ERPs) in the brain has allowed for a better understanding of human sensory and cognitive processing. This technique may also prove useful in studying implicit social attitudes and their effects on information processing. Here, ERPs were used in a study of “hot cognition” in the context of political concept...

Although the charge that “politicians pander” is common in American politics, there has been little scholarly consideration of the impact of suspicion of pandering on public opinion. In this article, we develop a model of the antecedents and consequences of political suspicion about possible pandering and report the results of an experiment designe...

We advocate for an experimental approach to the study of personality and politics. In particular, we propose an "interactionist" model of political behavior in which the cognitive and behavioral effects of dispositional variables are qualified by experimentally induced contexts. Our operating assumption is that the political effects of personality...

Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology brings together some of the research on citizen decision making. It addresses the questions of citizen political competence from different political psychology perspectives. Some of the authors in this volume look to affect and emotions to determine how people reach political judgements,...

In this paper, we argue that citizens' views about the personality characteristics of their political leaders are subject to systematic bias, motivated by the desire to maintain existing impressions. We report two studies designed to explore how such trait biases, involving judgments of real politicians, are manifested. Drawing on work in social ps...

We find strong support for an on-line model of the candidate evaluation process that in contrast to memory-based models shows that citizens are responsive to campaign information, adjusting their overall evaluation of the candidates in response to their immediate assessment of campaign messages and events. Over time people forget most of the campai...

This symposium features three critiques of the argument about schema theory proffered by Kuklinski, Luskin, and Bolland. First, Milton Lodge and Kathleen M. McGraw, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, respond from the perspective of cognitive psychology. Then Pamela J. Conover, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and...

This article reports the results of a study that replicates and extends the impression-driven model of candidate evaluation reported in Lodge, McGraw, and Stroh (1989). This model holds that evaluations are formed and updated on-line as information is encountered, and that as a result, citizens need not rely on specific information available from m...

All contemporary models of candidate evaluation are memory-based models in that they treat the direction and strength of evaluation as a function of the mix of positively and negatively valued (valenced) information retrieved from memory. Yet, oddly enough, despite the assumption that memory mediates judgment, none of the major models looks at the...

We describe and test two process models of candidate evaluation. The memory-based model holds that evaluations are dependent on the mix of pro and con information retrieved from memory. The impression-driven model holds that evaluations are formed and updated “on-line” as information is encountered. The results provide evidence for the existence of...

Based on their interest in politics and knowledge of political leaders, individuals are classified into three levels of partisan sophistication: (1) those scoring high in interest and knowledge (partisan schematics), (2) a middle group, and (3) those scoring low (partisan aschematics). In this experimental study, and consistent with findings from c...

Given the complexity and ambiguity of things political, there are many ways to think about government and politics. The authors compare class, partisan, and ideological schemata in terms of cognitive content and utility in discriminating among political policies and President Reagan's positions on the issues. The "rich-poor" class schema is found t...

In this paper a direct comparison is made between the cognitive content of ideological and partisan belief systems. A quasi-experimental design was used in a two-part study. Subjects were randomly assigned to either a partisan or ideological condition and asked to categorize and then scale contemporary leaders, groups, and issues as either Democrat...

A long-running controversy has been sparked by the claim that "nonattitudes" are responsible for the instability and low coherence of responses to policy issues in mass surveys. The opposite view holds that fallible measurement instruments are to blame. The present entry into this debate (1) employs multiple measures obtained through magnitude scal...

While such concepts as "belief systems" and "levels of conceptualization" have played a central role in research on "issue voting" and other important questions, political scientists have paid relatively little attention to the processes by which human organisms process the signs and symbols they encounter in political (or in survey interview) situ...

The National Election Studies employ a special "Thermometer Scale" to measure warm-cold evaluations of political leaders, parties, and groups. Analyses comparing the SRC/CPS Thermometer Scale to a conventional 9-point category scale and to a psychophysically validated magnitude scale show that the Thermometer Scale--ostensibly a 100-point interval...

Virtually all we as social scientists claim to know about the strength of political beliefs and preferences is based on category scaling. When category and magnitude scales of opinion strength are compared--either in measuring the perceived strength of physical stimuli or in the evaluation of social-psychological stimuli-magnitude scaling is almost...

To determine the meaning(s) of the concepts Republican, Democrat, and Independent, the most frequently cited attributes of each party label were scaled in terms of their semantic centrality. An analysis of the magnitude scale values demonstrates that the labels Republican and Democrat have unique cognitive properties which easily discriminate one l...

The reliance of social scientists on verbal response measures to evaluate social psychological attitude raises questions related to the validity of the measurement of intensity and meaning produced by these judgmental measures. This study presents a cross-modal (psychophysical and psychophysiological) approach to the evaluation of the direction, in...

The measurement technique most commonly used by political scientists for determining the direction and intensity of opinion is category scaling–a procedure with serious weaknesses. Recent developments in psychophysics for the magnitude scaling and validation of sensory eontinua offer a powerful alternative to category scaling. Paralleling explicitl...

The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to set the ratio scaling of opinion in perspective by reviewing a series of laboratory and field experiments designed to build and validate ratio scales of political opinion; and second, to report in detail on the development of calibration procedures designed to obtain proportional judgments from responde...

The direct use of verbal and physiological response measures to assess the cognitive component of a sociopolitical attitude is made difficult by the multiple meanings of sociopolitical stimuli. In the present study with 12 White undergraduates, a modified differential classical conditioning procedure was used to produce an unambiguous physiological...

The aims of this paper are twofold: first, to illustrate the utility of psychophysical scaling methods in building reliable and valid scales of social opinion, and second, to report research findings on the development and validation of a scale for measuring support for political phenomena. The scaling experiments reported here provide compelling e...

A scale for the apparent intensity of electric shock applied to the forearm was derived from cross-modality matching functions relating noise level, number, and force of handgrip to both line length and shock. For each response mode, the effects of psychophysical regression were estimated from the line judgments and used to make adjustments in the...

An experimental study of 43 women explored the utility of a multiple-indicator approach to the study of political attitudes and behavior by testing the hypothesis that perceived threats to the political community would produce heightened "we-they" feelings and related identifications. The method of testing combined verbal responses and psychophysio...

Abstract will be provided by author.

DISSERTATION (PH.D.)--THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN Dissertation Abstracts International,

Thesis--University of Michigan. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 206-210). Microfilm of typescript.

Incluye bibliografía

This paper, part of a larger study, is a comparative analysis of five Soviet elites—the central Party apparatchicki , and four specialist elites: the central economic bureaucrats, the military, the literary intelligentsia, and the legal profession. By content analyzing representative periodicals for each elite, data are collected on elite attitudes...

This study is an attitudinal analysis of five Soviet elites--the central Party apparatchiki, and four specialist elites: the central economic bureaucrats, the military, the literary intelligensia, and the legal profession. By content analyzing representative elite journals for the years from 1952 through 1965 data were collected to measure the deve...