Role of political ideology in information monitoring and opinion change

Abstract

Political Ideology (PI) is a system of representations that can serve as an anchor at the cognitive (individual) level to evaluate relevant information in Complex Decision Making (CDM (1)), but also as a political (social) map on which to identify options (2). This can be understood as a cognitive shortcut (heuristic) of information to make decisions with minimum cognitive effort (3) (more automatically).
Two online experiments were conducted through the Neuron.AR platform during the Argentinean elections (general and ballotage) of 2023 to evaluate how PI modulates the valuation of semantic content and induces a change of opinion. In both, personal information (age, gender, residence, social status, etc) of the subjects was recorded. The political and ideological orientation of the participants was characterized through their self-perception, and operationally on a scale of progressivism and conservatism (based on the response to conservative or progressive items (4)), the closeness to the candidates and the political (symbolic) perception of candidates. Then, the change in the valuation of the items of the conservatism or progressivism scale was evaluated, but this time associated with a right-wing or left-wing candidate.
The first experiment was carried out by 2839 people and the second by 1294. The symbolic and operational PI scales correlated consistently. From left to right, the candidates were ranked in the following order: Bregman, Massa, Schiaretti, Bullrich and Milei. Participants who identified more to the left or to the right showed greater change in ratings of both conservative and progressive items, regardless of whether these items were associated with a right- or left-wing candidate. The results support the hypothesis that ideology may function as a heuristic anchor, rather than a social map, in the process of monitoring information relevant to BDT