Are we seeing the same thing? The association between political ideology and consensus of social judgments

People regularly make social judgments such as judging others’ age, sexual orientation, and personality type based on minimal information. When observers judge characteristics of targets in similar ways, consensus is reached. I propose that observers’ political ideology might affect the magnitude of this consensus. As conservatives are more likely than liberals to believe that group memberships (e.g., gender, race) can be accurately gleaned from minimal information, I predicted that conservatives (versus liberals) would rely on visual cues more and thus have greater consensus when making social judgments. Across two studies (N = 3,521) and 20 judgment dimensions, I found that observers’ ideology was often associated with consensus. Contrary to hypotheses, however, judgments on different dimensions displayed different associations of ideology and consensus. Exploring possible explanations for the pattern of results, I investigated the role of epistemic motivation as a mechanism of the relation between political ideology and consensus. Additionally, I tested the role of social acceptability and association with cues as possible moderators. Overall, epistemic motivation did not explain the relation between ideology and consensus in the predicted manner. Interestingly, social acceptability moderated the effect of ideology on consensus: liberals had more consensus than conservatives when a dimension was more socially acceptable to judge, but conservatives achieved greater consensus than liberals when a dimension was less acceptable to judge. Another moderator, association of judgment with visual cues, showed mixed results. This research sheds light on how a person’s political ideology corresponds to basic forms of social cognition when forming judgments.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Psychology

Grantor

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2025

Author dc:creator

• Ashur, Yarden

Contributors dc:contributor

• Stern, Chadly
• Cohen, Dov
• Kurdi, Benedek
• Moran, Tal
• Straka, Brenda

• Political ideology
• Social cognition

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2025 Yarden Ashur

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/129733

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F129733