Modeling Exposure, Stereotyping and Rationalization Effects on the Evaluation of Political Candidates

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The theory and research design for this research represents an effort to uncover the psychological underpinnings of candidate evaluations. The goal of the research is to integrate previous findings on candidate evaluation into a new theoretical framework which treats candidate evaluation as information processing. The research occurs in two, inter-related waves: First, a series of three studies will be undertaken to discover regularities in the content of information about political candidates. These initial, base-line findings will then serve as the basis for the second part of the study - - an attempt at constructing, by way of specific psychological and political frameworks, evaluations and images of political candidates designed for the investigation. The first step of the research project requires an indepth study of what political information means to individuals. In particular, the researchers will investigate various facets of information about specific political issues, as well as that for personal characteristics of the candidate and relevant political groups. To what extent is certain information about a candidate "salient," or important to people? Would they be very much interested in knowing one particular thing about a candidate, but not another? Next, the researchers will ascertain whether this information has certain connotations, implications, or interpretations that reach beyond the simple, surface meaning of the information. For example, does one particular type of information lead people to believe that the candidate has other relevant characteristics? Having thus obtained data about what information tends to be important and "meaningfully rich," the second part of the study deals with how information, which differs in terms of its importance and interpretation, is combined into a candidate evaluation. A crucial factor at this stage of the study is the order in which the candidate information is presented. Results will indicate how different orders of information is integrated into an evaluation, as well as how "on- going" evaluations of the candidate alters the extent to which subsequent information influences a final evaluation. Altogether, this study will disentangle three influences of information upon candidate evaluation: salience, interpretation, and order. The design of the research project requires two related studies; the first to ascertain the importance and interpretations of candidate information, the second to systematically manipulate the order in which individuals receive the pre-tested information. The study will not only indicate how information salience, interpretation and order jointly influence the impact of one another upon candidate evaluations, but also how importance and interpretation can be altered to "fit" a person's prior evaluation of the candidate.