Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Impact of Thought on Political Attitude and Preference Formation

这项提议旨在探讨思想对政治态度的影响。更准确地说，它建议表明，仅仅是思想就能帮助公民形成更符合他们潜在价值观和利益的态度。对于数据，我建议进行一项基于调查的实验，以检验思维对巴西联邦公共支出支持的影响。设计包括五个处理组和一个对照组，全部随机分配。每个小组都将被问及衡量联邦支出偏好和政治知识的问题，但在措辞、顺序和周围脚本方面存在差异，以操纵信息和思想。几十年的实证研究表明，大多数公民对政治知之甚少。该领域的最新工作集中在投票选择和政策偏好的后果上。重点是政治信息在态度和偏好形成方面所起的作用。然而，没有人单独关注思想的影响。这项提议旨在表明，政治信息很重要，但仅仅是思想也有助于公民形成与自己的价值观和利益更密切相关的态度。据我所知，还没有其他研究对这个问题进行过研究。政治和社会心理学之前的工作被批评为只在美国进行，或者充其量是在其他工业化国家进行。这个项目有了新的突破，提议在巴西测试它的假设。总而言之，这个项目提出研究一个政治学家几乎没有探索过的问题，并承诺为比较政治心理学这一新兴领域做出贡献。更广泛的影响政治学领域，最普遍的是社会科学，广泛利用调查研究来了解个人。态度、偏好和行为。在过去的几十年里，我们已经充分了解了这种方法对我们得到的答复的各种影响，以及如何改进它。然而，除了极少数例外，还没有其他研究关注思维对调查回答的影响。从这个意义上说，这个项目可能会提供新的方法来改进我们在调查中提出问题的方式，从而使所有使用这种研究方法的学科受益

This proposal aims at exploring the impact of thought on political attitudes. More precisely, it proposes to show that mere thought helps citizens form attitudes that are more in line with their underlying values and interests. For data, I propose a survey-based experiment to examine the impact of thought on support for federal public spending in Brazil. The design involves five treatment groups and a control group, all randomly assigned. Each group will be asked questions measuring both federal spending preferences and political knowledge, but with differences in wording, ordering, and surrounding script to manipulate information and thought. Several decades of empirical research have shown that most citizens know very little about politics. Most recent work in the area has focused on the consequences for vote choices and policy preferences. The emphasis has been on the role played by political information on attitude and preference formation. However, no attention has been given to the effect of thought alone. This proposal intends to show that political information matters, but that mere thought also helps citizens form attitudes that are more closely related to their own values and interests. To my knowledge, no other study has yet examined this question. Previous work in political and social psychology has been criticized for being conducted exclusively in the United States or at best in other industrialized countries. This project breaks new grounds by proposing to test for its hypotheses in Brazil. In sum, this project proposes to study a question left almost unexplored by political scientists, and also promises to contribute to the nascent field of comparative political psychology. Broader Impact The field of political science, and most generally the social sciences, makes extensive use of survey research to learn about individuals. attitudes, preferences, and behaviors. In the past decades, we have learned substantially about various effects of this methodology on the responses we get and on how to improve it. However, with a very few exceptions, no other studies have looked at the effects of thought on survey responses. In that sense, this project might provide new ways to improve how we ask questions during surveys, and, therefore, benefit all the disciplines that make use of this research method