Blog #2: Ideological motivation biases

With the presidential campaign in full-swing, partisan platforms dominate the media. It never ceases to amaze me how passionately some people, including some of my closest friends, cling to their identity as a member of one political party. Although an obvious approach to discovering someone's political affiliation would be to simply ask them how they identify, this approach seems extremely lacking in accuracy. Often, it seems, people identify with labels of which they know relatively little about. However, I have found hope for deciphering more accurate representations of political beliefs in the concept of the impact of motivational biases on behavioral attributions.

When people encounter events and behaviors in their social world that they do not understand, specifically events that are perceived as unusual or negative, they try to make sense of them by explaining their causes. These causal explanations of behavior and events are known as attributions (Heider, 1958). Sometimes our attributions are biased by different factors. A motivational bias occurs when our attributions are influenced by our individual preferences, desires, and necessities in order to protect things like self-esteem (Dunning, 2005) or ideologies (Skitka et al., 2002). When ideologically motivated, our attributions are adjusted to fit our political beliefs. Skitka et al. (2002) made a list of different events and asked political conservatives and liberals to make attributions for the events. In Western cultures, people tend to make personal attributions by explaining behaviors and events in terms of internal characteristics, such as effort or personality (Heider, 1958). Situational attributions, explanations that focus on external factors like other people or luck (Heider, 1958), are much less likely to be made in Western cultures (Markus et al., 2006). Interestingly, when motivated by ideology, people exchange their personal attributions for situational attributions (Skitka et al., 2002).

Upon learning this, I was immediately struck by all the instances in which people around me have made personal and situational attributions of political events. I interrupted each of my roommates and friends who were at my house that night individually and asked them to explain three commonly discussed events: job-loss, homelessness, and death penalty execution. In every explanation they made, my friends made attributions that reflected their political beliefs, sometimes making personal attributions (the homeless person was lazy) or situational attributions (the executed person was unfortunate enough to live in Texas). I was surprised to see how accurately these explanations reflected their ideologies.

Later that night, a friend showed me this video clip from a recent episode of Saturday Night Live:

This parody of two leading political figures, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, offers both humorous but telling explanations of, among other things, Palin and Clinton's respective campaigns to reach the White House. As evident in Clinton's rant, she explains her desire to become President not as a desire to hold a historically gendered role (situational), but as a personal desire (personal). Clinton attributes her path to the White House as a result of her personality traits and hard work and implies that Palin's path is merely a case of situational good fortune. While Clinton personally attributes her former proximity to the Presidency and situationally attributes her failure to reach that goal, Palin situationally attributes her presidential aspirations ("Just one heartbeat away from being President of the United States"). Palin attributes a rise to the presidency as an issue of desire and Clinton mocks her personal attribution in order to protect her ideologies and self-esteem (thus implying a situational attribution, i.e., the Democratic National Convention's endorsement of a different candidate as the reason she can no longer be President).

It's amazing what you can learn by simply listening to people offer explanations.



Dunning, D. (2005). Self-insight: Roadblocks and detours on the path to knowing thyself. New York: Psychology Press.

Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.

Markus, H. R., Uchida, Y., Omoregie, H., Townsend, S. M., & Kitayama, S. (2006). Going for the gold: Models of agency in Japanese and American contexts. Psychological Science, 17, 103-112.

Skitka, L. J., Mullen, E., Griffin, T., Hutchinson, S., & Chamberlin, B. (2002). Dispositions, scripts, or motivated correction? Understanding ideological differences in explanations for social problems. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83, 470-487.