Of deadly beans and risky stocks: Political ideology and attitude formation via exploration depend on the nature of the attitude stimuli

Abstract

An attitude formation task examined how conservatives and liberals explore information about novel stimuli and form attitudes towards them. When framed as the BeanFest game, conservatives sampled fewer beans and exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry (i.e., better learning for negative than positive beans) than liberals. This has been taken as strong evidence that conservatives are more sensitive to negative stimuli than liberals. We argue that the learning asymmetry and sampling bias by conservatives is due to framing of the game. In addition to the BeanFest, we framed the game as StockFest (i.e., a stock market game) where participants learned about novel stocks. We replicated the pronounced learning asymmetry for conservatives in the BeanFest game, but found a pronounced learning asymmetry for liberals in the StockFest game. We suggest that conservatives and liberals are equally sensitive to negative stimuli but in different domains.