Political information processing

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Political information processing

• How do people make sense of the political world?

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Low levels of political knowledge

• Americans have habitually exhibited low levels of
  political knowledge
• Some scholars argue that this is not necessarily
  as big a problem as it seems at first blush
• The reasons for low levels of knowledge are more
  difficult to pinpoint

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The concern(Ilya Somin)

• An inform(ed) electorate is a prerequisite for
  democracy
• Widespread public ignorance
• prevents democratic government from reflecting
  the will of the people in any meaningful sense,
  undercutting the . . . Defense of democracy as a
  government that is representative of the
  voluntary decisions of the populace.

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• Also, ignorance potentially opens the door for
  elite manipulation of the public and gross policy
  errors caused by politicians need to appeal to
  an ignorant electorate in order to win.

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• To act rationally, people must be aware of an
  issue, have a position on it, and know the
  positions of the candidates on the issues
• From The American Voter
• They also must have an idea what position best
  forwards their own interests
• Somin

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• the fact that a majority of American voters with
  an opinion on the issue believe that the Federal
  government is too large and powerful while
  simultaneously favoring increased spending in
  almost every major area of Federal involvement is
  a clear case of ignorance of tradeoffs that falls
  below the threshold of minimally necessary
  knowledge. (Somin)

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• voters are ignorant not just about specific
  policy issues, but about the basic structure of
  government and how it operates
• most voters lack an ideological view of
  politics capable of integrating multiple issues
  into a single analytical framework derived from a
  few basic principles

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• the level of political knowledge in the American
  electorate has increased only very slightly, if
  at all, since the beginning of mass survey
  research in the late 1930s

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What is involved in thinking?

• A series of steps link the external world to our
  internal consciousness
• The vast majority of information available in the
  outside world is either not noticed at all or is
  ignored/disregarded
• We act as cognitive misers, minimizing the
  amount of effort expended on our myriad mental
  tasks

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How is new information learned?

• Perception
• Register
• Pattern recognition
• Salience evaluation
• Importance determination
• Categorization
• Meaning evaluation
• Comparison with existing schema
• Integration
• Memory trace construction

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How is memory used?

• New information triggers memory search
• Working memory analysis calls up memory traces
• Action/decision needs trigger memory search
• LTM and Working memory info are combined to
  provide guidance needed for action
• Decision rules applied to information in working
  memory
• Action guide applied to motor responses

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Major factors

• Limited capacity
• Perceptual buffer
• Short-term memory

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Learning from the news

• The public is bombarded daily with more news
  than it can handle.
• News is not set up to pass along policy
  information
• Most news touted as significant but much is
  trivial
• Constant crisis atmosphere numbs excitement and
  produces boredom
• Short, tightly packed segments
• Lots of specific information
• Limited context
• Confusing presentation
• Simple presentation
• Conflictual presentation with no guidance for
  audience

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Learning from news

• However, news, along with other media content,
  have a significant impact in giving a general
  view of the political world to audiences
• Political socializationdevelopment of
  orientations that allow the individual to act as
  a citizenstrongly affected by media
• System support, even if questioning of individual
  office holders

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Major influences

• Limited effort
• Satisficing
• Winnowing of the information flow
• Monitoring behavior
• External information search is rare

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Affect referral

• Neither compensatory nor noncompensatory
• Choose according to overall emotional attachment
• Candidate image

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Habitual

• Vote according to prior behavior without
  evaluating options
• Yellow Dog Democrats

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Shortcuts

• Base evaluations on personal experience
• Base on political party
• Base on candidates past records
• Base on single issues
• Base on informed friends/acquaintances

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Political attitudes

• Relatively stable, even in the face of
  disconfirming evidence
• Developed relatively early in life, influence new
  information acceptance and interpretation
• Family and friends
• School
• Media

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Schema-based learning

• New information is evaluated according to the
  existing belief structure
• Contradictory information or information that
  cannot be integrated into existing beliefs often
  is not encoded into memory

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Learning processes (Graber)

• Blending new and old information
• Schemas
• Better informed have large arrays of schemas that
  allow them to assimilate new information faster
  and deeper than those who are less well informed.
• Knowledge Gap
• Often seen as the reason for the strong
  relationship between education and political
  knowledge

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Biases

• Existing schema impact
• Exposure to information
• Attention to information
• Processing of information
• Memory trace
• Associated concepts
• Retrieval of information

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Schema-based bias in reception

• Members of the public have views of political
  parties that tend to set up a schema for viewing
  candidates for that party. This is especially
  true for partisans.
• (Audience members) read or view the news in that
  vein, picking up bits of information that fit
  while rejecting, ignoring, or reinterpreting
  those that do not fit.
• When events or people are not well known by the
  audience, they will tend to accept the new
  information carried in the media.

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Biases in information processing

• Evaluate the probability of something based on
  its similarity to a class
• Candidate with certain demographic attributes are
  assumed to be like a similar group of people
• Stereotyping
• Priming
• Difficulty for non-traditional candidates

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Management of cognitive resources

• Most scholars argue that some sort of master
  control mechanism exists
• Operating system
• Conflicts in demands are constant, and must be
  managed
• How do we know what to focus on?
• The means by which management occurs is the
  allocation of attention

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Signal variance and attention

• Attention is allocated based on a number of rules
• Much more research is needed in this area

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Certain stimuli draw attention

• Indicators of personal relevance
• Loud party syndrome (your name)
• Surprising/unusual stimuli
• Physical deviance from the norm
• Loudness, color, movement
• Unexpected ideas, contrasts, etc. (humor)
• Personal interest
• Varies widely among individuals

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Certain stimuli draw attention

• Perceived importance

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Cognitive information processing

• A number of steps occur in a relatively ordered
  manner
• Some processes may be occurring simultaneously
• There is always something going on

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A flow diagram of the memory system. Shiffrin
Atkinson, 1969 Reprinted from Miller (1997).
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The first step

• Some sort of environmental data must be picked up
  by the sense organs
• Once picked up, sensory buffers hold the info
  from the sense organs that has been turned into
  electrical signals
• If there is some sort of pattern recognized that
  has enough priority to move forward, the
  information is brought into working memory

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Randy Garcia
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www.digitalexperience.dk/?m200710
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Second step

• Working memory is where the significance of
  patterns is determined
• Is the pattern mundane/unimportant?
• Can it be accommodated by existing schema?
• Does it add new information to the schema or does
  it contradict the existing schema?
• If so, is it worth integrating into Long Term
  Memory (LTM)?

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Working memory

• Very limited capacity 7/-2
• Strategies for enhancing capacity Chunking
• Therefore, its up or out for ideas
• Identifies appropriate existing content
  (schema) for interpretation of new content
• Or else master control does while working memory
  rehearses the new material
• Constructs memory traces for later recall

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A flow diagram of the memory system. Shiffrin
Atkinson, 1969 Reprinted from Miller (1997).
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Biases

• Availability heuristic
• The ease with which things come to mind
  influences the use of those things in evaluations
• Increases their importance in decision-making
• Media coverage
• Advertising
• Personal history
• Social group

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Long term memory

• Once stored in LTM, memories last for long
  periods of time
• Often said to last a lifetime
• Organization schemes are thought to be
  hierarchical
• Specific instances filed under general concepts,
  etc.
• Schema
• Schema are at least somewhat idiosyncratic

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Levels of political knowledge

• Most scholars see the levels of political
  knowledge as quite low.
• Factual knowledge quite low
• However, several scholars, including Graber, say
  that factual knowledge is not necessary for the
  voter to make an appropriate choice
• Myth of the omnicompetent citizen
• Spinach news

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So What?

• Those low in political knowledge tend also to opt
  out of voting, several other political behaviors
• Lack of knowledge leads to cognitive shortcuts
  that may be erroneous

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Pew Research
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Political decision-making

• Determining who to vote for

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How do people approach decision-making?

• Cognitive misers
• Most behavior is habitual
• Limited capacity
• Limited interest
• Limited attention
• Limited information storage
• Broad-based cues (political party)
• Limited effort expended on decisions
• Impact of affect

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Modeling decision-making

• Attribute-evaluation matrix
• A number of strategies can be modeled with the
  matrix
• Research on public opinion can help campaign
  planners to determine matrix, develop strategy

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Evaluative dimensions
Bush Kerry
Foreign policy
Taxes
Flag burning
Tobacco
Personality
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Performance
Bush Kerry
Foreign policy 6 4
Taxes 7 3
Flag burning 2 6
Tobacco 5 7
Personality 2 4
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How do citizens use the matrix?

• Compensatory and non-compensatory strategies
• Compensatory means that a low score on one
  attribute is weighed against a high score on
  another.
• Becomes a complicated and demanding task to
  identify attributes and score each of the
  candidates on each attribute

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Compensatory strategies

• Used by more sophisticated and interested
  citizens
• Provide a number of points of entry for political
  strategists
• Are relatively rare

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Noncompensatory strategies

• Low performance on one or two criteria cannot be
  weighed against performance elsewhere
• Once the candidate has failed on some criterion,
  she is no longer in the running

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Noncompensatory strategies

• Rate all candidates on one criterion of
  over-riding importance and
• A. select the one with the highest score on that
  criterion
• Single-issue voting
• B. eliminate all those that do not reach a
  minimum level on that attribute
• Then follow up with additional decision-making
  criteria for those that survived first hurdle

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Noncompensatory strategies

• Common
• Easier than compensatory
• Lead to certain promotional strategies
• Attempt to get voters to apply a criterion that
  you know is generally favorable to your candidate
• Republicansforeign policy, taxes
• Democratspocketbook issues

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Noncompensatory strategies

• Find hot button issues and focus campaign on
  them
• Consistently portray candidate in a positive
  light on issue, opponent in a negative light

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