Kevin B. Smith

Recent work has called into question the longstanding intuition that differences in political orientation are attributable to differences in moral values; instead, people may change their reported values to justify their political preferences. To identify which most plausibly causes which, we conducted a three-wave panel study, using quotas to approximate a demographically representative initial sample of U.S. adults and measuring values in four different ways, with each measure grounded in a distinct theoretical framework. We found that: 1) Ideology and partisanship consistently showed greater cross-wave stability than values. 2) Within-subject wave-to-wave shifts in political orientation and values were rarely and weakly related in either direction. Between-subjects analyses replicated existing work: conservatives and liberals tended to value different things. But during these months, respondents did not tend to become more conservative or liberal depending on what they valued, or to come to value anything more or less because of their ideology.

The difference between what Americans know about politics and what they think they know about politics is described as a classic case of Dunning–Kruger, a cognitive bias characterized by overestimation of competence. That bias has potentially malign civic implications, making interventions that reliably reduce overconfidence an issue of high importance. Here, we report the results of a quasi-experiment testing one such intervention among undergraduate students enrolled in an intro political science course: Providing feedback on levels of political knowledge. This naturally occurring experiment was repeated 11 semesters over a half-decade span with consistent null results. These findings are primarily explained by a failure to observe the expected Dunning–Kruger effect—in contrast to the existing literature we find little evidence of such a phenomenon in the realm of political knowledge. Our results suggest that prior reports of overconfidence in political knowledge may be overstated or an artifact of measurement approach.

The following is an introduction by the editors to a symposium on "taking behavior literally" in BPA. We published the manuscripts for this symposium in our 2023 issue. You can find those articles here: Vol. 6 (2023) | Journal of Behavioral Public Administration (journal-bpa.org)

The 2020 U.S. presidential election saw rising political tensions among ordinary voters and political elites, with fears of election violence culminating in the January 6 riot. We hypothesized that the 2020 election might have been traumatic for some voters, producing measurable symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We also hypothesized that negative sentiment toward the opposing party correlates with PTSD. We measured PTSD using a modified version of the PCL-5, a validated PTSD screener, for 573 individuals from a nationally representative YouGov sample. We modeled the association between affective polarization and PTSD, controlling for political, demographic, and psychological traits. We estimate that 12.5% of American adults (95% CI: 9.2% to 15.9%) experienced election-related PTSD, far higher than the annual PTSD prevalence of 3.5%. Additionally, negativity toward opposing partisans correlated with PTSD symptoms. These findings highlight a potential need to support Americans affected by election-related trauma.

Baumeister and Bushman (this issue) offer a cultural animal theory of partisan hostility (hereafter CAT) with the specific aim of explaining the root drivers of political conflict. CAT posits that ...

Objectives: To quantify the effect of politics on the physical, psychological, and social health of American adults during the four-year span of the Trump administration. Methods: A previously validated politics and health scale was used to compare health markers in nationally representative surveys administered to separate samples in March 2017 (N = 800) and October 2020 (N = 700). Participants in the 2020 survey were re-sampled approximately two weeks after the 2020 election and health markers were compared to their pre-election baselines. Results: Large numbers of Americans reported politics takes a significant toll on a range of health markers—everything from stress, loss of sleep, or suicidal thoughts to an inability to stop thinking about politics and making intemperate social media posts. The proportion of Americans reporting these effects stayed stable or slightly increased between the spring of 2017 and the fall of 2020 prior to the presidential election. Deterioration in measures of physical health became detectably worse in the wake of the 2020 election. Those who were young, politically interested, politically engaged, or on the political left were more likely to report negative effects. Conclusions: Politics is a pervasive and largely unavoidable source of chronic stress that exacted significant health costs for large numbers of American adults between 2017 and 2020. The 2020 election did little to alleviate those effects and quite likely exacerbated them.

Two prominent theoretical frameworks in moral psychology, Moral Foundations and Dual Process Theory, share a broad foundational assumption that individual differences in human morality are dispositional and in part due to genetic variation. The only published direct test of heritability, however, found little evidence of genetic influences on moral judgments using instrumentation approaches associated with Moral Foundations Theory. This raised questions about one of the core assumptions underpinning intuitionist theories of moral psychology. Here we examine the heritability of moral psychology using the moral dilemmas approach commonly used in Dual Process Theory research. Using such measures, we find consistent and significant evidence of heritability. These findings have important implications not only for understanding which measures do, or do not, tap into the genetically influenced aspects of moral decision-making, but in better establishing the utility and validity of different intuitionist theoretical frameworks and the source of why people differ in those frameworks.

Political scientists have long known that political involvement exacts costs but they have typically defined these costs in relatively narrow, largely economic terms. Though anecdotal evidence suggests that the costs of politics may in fact extend beyond economics to frayed personal relationships, compromised emotional stability, and even physical problems, no systematic evidence on these broader costs exists. We construct and validate batteries of survey items that delineate the physical, social, and emotional costs of political engagement and administer these items to a demographically representative sample of U.S. adults. The results suggest that a large number of Americans believe their physical health has been harmed by their exposure to politics and even more report that politics has resulted in emotional costs and lost friendships.

This article presents a large-scale, empirical evaluation of the psychophysiological correlates of political ideology and, in particular, the claim that conservatives react with higher levels of electrodermal activity to threatening stimuli than liberals. We (1) conduct two large replications of this claim, using locally representative samples of Danes and Americans; (2) re-analyze all published studies and evaluate their reliability and validity; and (3) test several features to enhance the validity of psychophysiological measures and offer a number of recommendations. Overall, we find little empirical support for the claim. This is caused by significant reliability and validity problems related to measuring threat-sensitivity using electrodermal activity. When assessed reliably, electrodermal activity in the replications and published studies captures individual differences in the physiological changes associated with attention shifts, which are unrelated to ideology. In contrast to psychophysiological reactions, self-reported emotional reactions to threatening stimuli are reliably associated with ideology.