title: Physiological responses and partisan bias: beyond self-reported measures of party identification.
abstract: People are biased partisans: they tend to agree with policies from political parties they identify with, independent of policy content. Here, we investigate how physiological reactions to political parties shape bias. Using changes in galvanic skin conductance responses to the visual presentation of party logos, we obtained an implicit and physiological measure of the affective arousal associated with political parties. Subsequently, we exposed subjects to classical party cue experiments where the party sponsors of specific policies were experimentally varied. We found that partisan bias only obtains among those exhibiting a strong physiological reaction to the party source; being a self-reported party identifier is not sufficient on its own. This suggests that partisan bias is rooted in implicit, affective reactions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
authors.forename: Michael Bang
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Petersen
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
authors.forename: Ann
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Giessing
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
authors.forename: Jesper
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Nielsen
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D015982:Bias; D003071:Cognition; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D005260:Female; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011057:Politics; D057566:Self Report; D055815:Young Adult