The Rationalizing Voter: Unconscious Thinking on Political Judgment, Reasoning, and Behavior

We are told by the astrophysicist Michio Kaku that 6.4 percent of the universe is visible, with another 23 percent unseen but measurable, leaving much of the universe in the dark. It is much the same in our inner world, where most thinking occurs outside of awareness, available to neither introspection nor direct observation. Humans are designed to process rapidly and implicitly enormous quantities of environmental and internal data. But our ability to focus explicit thought is severely limited. By and large, the social sciences are not well prepared to understand this duality of cognition, and political science is no exception. Grounded in an Enlightenment view of Rational Man, political science has been dominated by models of conscious control and deliberative democracy. Rational and intentional reasoning, in this conventional view, causes political behavior. This is a book about unconscious thinking and its influence on political attitudes and behavior. It is a book about powerful affective and cognitive forces that motivate and direct deliberation and political action outside of conscious awareness and control. It is a book about rationalizing, rather than rational, citizens. What people think, feel, say, and do is a direct function of the information that is momentarily accessible from memory – be it the recall of facts and feelings, the recollection of experiences, or the turning of goals into action. Political behavior and attitudes are very much a function of the unconscious mechanisms that govern memory accessibility. But we political scientists know very little about the processes that underwrite individual variation in beliefs and behavior. We know about variation in public opinion as indicated by verbal self reports. We routinely ask respondents for their party and candidate preferences, their approval of policy proposals, and how warmly they feel toward one or another group, and we are often able to relate these explicit measures through sophisticated multivariate analyses that we interpret as revealing