Most of the advancements in the area have been made by scholars in the fields of social psychology, political science, and communication studies.
Questions related to perception, judgment, impression formation, and attitude change began to attract more researchers.
[2] First proposed by Fritz Heider in 1958, the Naïve scientist model[3] of cognition conceptualizes individuals as actors with limited information that want to derive an accurate understanding of the world.
This work served as the basis for the development of modern theories of attribution, advanced independently by Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner.
[7] Motivated reasoning is a cognitive phenomena that occurs when an individual changes a peripheral attitude that is inconsistent with a more central element of the self.
One of the most significant contributions of this area of research is the identification of cases in which voters adopt their preferred candidates' or party' policy positions.
In 1940, Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet carried out one of the earliest studies examining how individual-level factors influence political decisions.
Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet were interested in identifying what sources of information influence an individual's political attitudes during an electoral campaign.
They found that, among those who were less interested in politics, had not decided who to support, or change their voting intentions during the campaign, personal influences—such as the opinion of a friend or a family member—played a more significant role than the media.
In 1948, by Bernard Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N. McPhee carried out a similar study in Elmira, New York.
In the elections of 1944 and 1948, the Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan performed similar panel-data studies at the national level.
[15] In his 1957 book, An Economic Theory of Democracy, Anthony Downs argues that individuals are rational voters—i.e., they decide who to support by calculating which candidate will maximize the benefits they receive from the government, while minimizing the costs.
Specifically, most American voters are unable to think in ideological terms—i.e., to articulate their political positions using coherent belief systems.
[20][21] Drawing from social cognition theories, some scholars have argued voters might be still able to make rational decisions even if they are incapable of putting their perceptions, beliefs, and rationales into the formal language of political elites.
They propose that partisan biases motivate individuals to seek out and reject particular sets of information that then lead to candidate evaluations, and then voting.
Taken as a system, these [attitudinal] variables were seen to constitute a field of forces operating on the individual as he deliberates over his vote decision.
They conceptualize attitudes towards political objects as field forces that led an individual to decide who to support in an election.
According to Campbell and colleagues, the most significant of these forces is partisan identification, which the authors defined as a psychological attachment to a party.
Additionally, since most voters do not have the time to acquire and process all political information available, they use these partisan attachments as heuristics, or shortcuts, when deciding who to support.
Converse defined a belief system as a set of idea-elements that were interconnected by logical, psychological, or social constraints.
Zaller observes that this lack of political information is associated with the high level of attitude instability that is exhibited among voters.
According to Zaller, this instability is a sign of voters constructing their opinion statements on the spot based on relevant information that happens to be available in memory, rather than the complete in-existence of an attitude (as suggested by Converse) or measurement error.
[30] This work reported the results of a series experiments designed to assess the role of the media on political attitudes.
Dawson argues that racial issues override class-based differences which results in the political homogeneity of African Americans.
[40][41][42] Other researchers have advocated for the revision of the current linked fate measure, as it seems to be inconsistently associated with group identification and with political engagement.