Behavioral, physiological and neural evidence of the role of political ideology in social cognition

The social and economic crisis of the last decade seems to have given new impetus to a thirty years old idea claiming that we are living in post-ideological and post-political world (Fukuyama 1992). This idea is supported by the rising of a wide range of populistic movements claiming their detachment from any political ideology (see for example, Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy, Podemos in Spain, Le Front National in France). Although different, these movements share their opposition to the actual political system and their contempt toward its representatives (i.e., politicians). Starting from this point, we asked ourselves whether this ideological crisis depends on the fact that political ideologies have no longer who can represent them and thus on how political ideology is actually conveyed and perceived by people. Thus, with the present work we aimed at extending the current knowledge on how political ideology affects social cognition, specifically by looking at the impact that presenting political information in different way has on how people perceive, categorize, evaluate and interact with other social entities. In doing so, we either employed different tools and techniques taken both from experimental psychology and neuroscience and we tested politically polarized and non-aligned people to provide a detailed description of these processes. In the second chapter we present three studies that tested whether the way political ideology is conveyed can impact the emergence of the intergroup bias in left and right-wing people. Specifically, we measured how participants evaluated on an emotional and cognitive level their political ingroup and outgroup presented in different forms (i.e., images of politicians, ideological words and items referring to general people belonging to their political ingroup and outgroup). In keeping with this, the study presented in the third chapter explores whether different political ideologies presented in different forms could affect moral decision-making. Specifically, by means of an eye-tracker we measured physiologically whether images of politicians and ideological words representing left and right-wing ideologies and used as primes could affect how politically non-aligned people allocate their attention toward specific information (i.e., personal vs social) and how this, in turn, could drive their tendency to deceive other people during an interactive game. The study in the fourth chapter provides very preliminary evidence of how biases associated to political ideology and another source of social information, such as ethnicity, affect how these information are processed in the brain and, in turn, their impact on people’s ability to discriminate their own facial identity from that of other social entities.