Partisans Hear, but They Don’t Listen: Testing the Limits of Partisanship in Risky Decision Making

Date01 July 2022
Published date01 July 2022
DOI10.1177/1532673X221081252
Subject MatterArticles
Article
American Politics Research
2022, Vol. 50(4) 464478
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1532673X221081252
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Partisans Hear, but They Dont Listen:
Testing the Limits of Partisanship in Risky
Decision Making
Nathaniel Swigger
1
, Melissa Buelow
1
, James Wirth
1
and Bradley Okdie
1
Abstract
Political partisanship stems from the fundamental process of categorizing ones social world and inf‌luences important behavioral
outcomes, such information processing. The present study examines the role of political partisanship in risky decision making as
assessed with the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a common ecologically valid behavioral task. Participant s (N= 881) were randomly
assigned to modif‌ied IGT conditions: one in which the advantageous card decks were labeled with the same political aff‌iliation as
the participant and one in which the advantageous card decks were labeled with the opposite political aff‌iliation. We
demonstrate that partisan heuristics can enhance or inhibit good decision making. We found parti san heuristics enhanced
decision making if a partisansidentity was congruent with clearly advantageous options. However , when the options are more
ambiguous, partisan bias interferes with partisansability to make advantageous decisions. Partisan bias has limits though, as
partisans reject unambiguously bad options, even if those options carry their party label.
Keywords
partisanship, decision making, information processing
Political behavior in the United States is dominated by
partisanship, a strong social identity that comes with deep
emotional attachment (Green et al., 2003). Partisanship is
increasingly important in American politics as other social
identities have aligned with party identity (Mason, 2018).
This reduced complexity in social identity can lead to de-
creased tolerance and harsher judgments of outgroups
(Brewer & Pierce, 2005;Roccas & Brewer, 2002). Parti-
sanship inf‌luences perception, belief updating (Gaines et al.,
2007), affect (Achen & Bartels, 2017), and ones willingness
to interact with opposing political groups (Hetherington &
Rudolph, 2015;Iyengar et al., 2012;Iyengar & Westwood,
2015;Lelkes & Westwood, 2017), all of which can affect
decision making. Despite the far reaching psychological and
behavioral effects of partisanship, little research has inves-
tigated the limits of partisanship on decision making using
well-validated, common behavioral decision making tasks.
Partisan bias may be so strong that it acts as a barrier to
advantageous decision making by not allowing the individual
to evaluate all pertinent information.
In this paper, we examine the limits of partisanship bias on
decision making using the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a
behavioral decision making task commonly used in both
research and clinical settings (Bechara et al., 1994). By doing
so, we measure the effect of partisan bias on decision making
on a task that is a benchmark for evaluating cognitive
impairments. We f‌ind that partisans rely on partisan heuristics
and interpret information in ways that align with their party
identity. We also identify clear boundary conditions of this
bias. In situations where their party identity was attached to an
obviously and clearly harmful option (i.e., losing money),
partisans rejected their own party. When the information was
less clear, however, partisan bias resulted in poor decision
making. Partisans were willing to sample from the opposi-
tion, but consistently misinterpreted that signal and believed
their own party to be more advantageous.
Decision Making
Good citizen decision making requires the ability to acquire,
interpret, and apply information while simultaneously up-
dating decision making processes as new information is re-
ceived, but citizens often struggle to do this in complex
political contexts. For example, Lau and Redlawsk (2001) put
1
Department of Political Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH,
USA
Corresponding Author:
Nathaniel Swigger, Department of Political Science, The Ohio State
University, 146 Adena Hall, Newark, OH 43055, USA.
Email: swigger.1@osu.edu

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