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Although long privileged by scholarship in psychology, personality has only recently been considered as an influential factor for political orientations and actions. In this article, we consider personality's influence on another important tendency: the proclivity to engage in stereotyping and prejudicial thinking. Using a personality battery included for the first time on the 2012 American National Election Study (ANES), we examine the tendencies of particular personality types to stereotype. Results suggest that the two most politically relevant traits (Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness) are consistent predictors of authoritarian tendencies, which, in turn, produce indirect effects of personality on group-centric policy positions, over and above the effects through political predispositions such as partisanship. Our findings demonstrate the important role of group stereotyping in mediating the effects of personality on policy support.

Conventional wisdom suggests that partisanship is the "unmoved mover" in the minds of American voters. Revisionist theories hold that party updating is conditional on individual/contextual factors. By delimiting the scope conditions of the Michigan model, revisionist models do not fundamentally challenge the classic view. This paper proffers an unconditional model of party revision. We theorize that beliefs about government activism—operational ideology—are widely available and heuristically efficacious, and easily map onto party labels. Hence, operational ideology should drive party updating. Using data from seven panel studies covering 1990–2012, we demonstrate that (1) party shapes operational ideology, (2) operational ideology shapes party, (3) the ideology-to-party effects are as large as the party-to-ideology effects, and (4) neither sophistication nor education or elite polarization condition these relationships. These results push the revisionist model of party farther than it has gone before and suggest that operational ideology is a core predisposition in mass belief systems.

During the first wave of the pandemic, governments introduced public health measures in an attempt to slow the spread of the virus enough to "flatten the curve". These measures required behavioral changes among ordinary individuals for the collective good of many. We explore how personality might explain who complies with social distancing measures and who defies these directives. We also examine whether providing people with information about the expected second wave of the pandemic changes their intention to comply in the future. To do so, we draw upon a unique dataset with more than 1,700 respondents. We find honest rule-followers and careful and deliberate planners exhibit greater compliance whereas those who are entitled, callous, and antagonistic are less likely to engage in social distancing. Our experimental results show that even small differences in messaging can alter the effect of personality on compliance. For those who are more fearful and anxious, being confronted with more information about the severity of the second-wave resulted in higher levels of anticipated social distancing compliance. At the same time, we find that the same messages can have the unintended consequence of reducing social compliance among people higher in Machiavellianism.

AbstractWhat drives individuals toward a career in politics? Prior research on political ambition has often focused on socio-demographic variables while generally ignoring the importance of individual personality differences. Yet personality consistently predicts political knowledge, interest and participation, suggesting that individual differences may matter in addition to resources and the social environment. To this end, we assess the impact of both the HEXACO and Dark Triad models of personality in predicting nascent political ambition (that is, the initial desire to run for elected office) while controlling for well-established socio-demographic variables (for example, gender, income). Overall, we find considerable support for the predictive power of personality, especially the traits of honesty-humility, extraversion and narcissism. These results have important implications for understanding the kinds of people who are interested in a political career.

In an analysis of the 2012 presidential election, we sought to optimize two key desiderata in capturing campaign effects: establishing causality and measuring dynamic (i.e., intraindividual) change over time. We first report the results of three survey‐experiments embedded within a three‐wave survey panel design. Each experiment was focused on a substantive area of electoral concern. Our results suggest, among other findings, that retrospective evaluations exerted a stronger influence on vote choice in the referendum (vs. the choice) frame; that among White respondents, racial animosity strongly predicted economic evaluations for knowledgeable Republicans who were led to believe that positive economic developments were the result of actions taken by the Obama administration; and that information‐seeking bias is a contingent phenomenon, one depending jointly on the opportunity and motivation to selectively tune in to congenial information. Lastly, we demonstrate how the panel design also allowed us to (1) examine the reliability and stability of a variety of election‐related implicit attitudes, and to assess their impact on candidate evaluation; and (2) determine the causal impact of perceptions of candidates' traits and respondents' policy preferences on electoral preferences, and vice versa, an area of research long plagued by concerns about endogeneity.