The psychological traits that shape your political beliefs

In Irony and Outrage, Young advances her psychological theory to account for the distinct political genre preferences of liberals and conservatives. Rooted in research from political psychology, Young explains how ironic satire embodies the political messaging aesthetic most likely to be created and consumed by social and cultural liberals while political opinion programming (also known as "outrage programming") is the political messaging aesthetic most likely to be created and consumed by social and cultural conservatives. This distinction in aesthetic preferences can be explained in terms of the psychological traits that correlate with political ideology, with liberals more tolerant of ambiguity and higher in need for cognition, and conservatives higher in need for closure and more prone to efficient heuristic judgments.

In 1948, sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton proposed that mass media technologies in the United States would be unlikely to facilitate widespread mass propaganda. In this Washington Post "Made by History" editorial, communication and media scholars Young and McGregor chronicle how the very features that made broadcast mass media unlikely to facilitate mass persuasion in the 1940s-50s have been upended through digital media and social media platforms in ways that create the very conditions destined to fuel successful propaganda campaigns.

Political psychologists, Hibbing, Smith and Alford provide a thorough and accessible account of how and why distinct biological and physiological systems — systems that relate to threat-monitoring and threat-responses — manifest as psychological traits and needs that then shape our political values and ideologies. They convincingly argue that these different orientations to the world, which shape our political, artistic, occupational and avocational preferences, likely stem from primal biological and even genetic predispositions.

As our media environment became more fragmented at the end of the twentieth century, with more programming opportunities made available by cable and internet, media executives explored new programming models, and landed upon one that has been especially lucrative: political outrage programming. Aided by the FCC’s elimination of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and inspired by the success of conservative shock jock Rush Limbaugh, network executives began scheduling explicitly partisan "outrage" programming on cable news stations like Fox and MSNBC. According to Berry and Sobieraj, outrage programming identifies threats through negative emotional language, often employing hyperbole and slippery-slope rhetoric to evoke feelings of anger and fear in its partisan audience. They explore the content and economics of this popular genre and how it negatively affects democratic health.

Through extensive survey and experimental work, Jamie Settle advances a nuanced theory to account for the ways in which Facebook fuels psychological polarization. She illustrates how, in a hyper-personalized space where political expression, news and discussion intersect, Facebook amplifies our social identities and reframes them in terms of politics and partisanship, thereby pulling us towards political extremes. By putting Social Identity Theory at the center of her line of inquiry, she encourages us to think about Facebook not as an "informational source" or "technology platform" but as a mechanism that contributes to how we understand and think about ourselves in relation to others.

For the last fifty years, America's political parties have been growing farther apart in terms of their policy positions and in their tolerance of one another. Mason empirically illustrates how these forms of polarization are accompanied by another startling trend – a process of "social sorting" by which each political party has become increasingly homogenous racially, culturally and even geographically. She demonstrates how social sorting facilitates primal group identities such that our political party identity becomes deeply embedded with symbolic and emotional meaning, making it more difficult for the parties to work together and more difficult for democracy to function.

Did Russian propaganda affect the outcome of the 2016 election? Without a time machine or an alternate universe to serve as a control group, this question may seem impossible to answer. But Kathleen Hall Jamieson advances a compelling, theoretically and empirically detailed account of how Russia exploited the decentralized control and logic of social media to feed into the very dynamics most likely to prime and reframe certain issues and events, polarize opinions and mobilize and demobilize targeted groups of Americans.

McKay Coppins investigates how Trump's campaign, under the leadership of Brad Parscale, strategically employs Facebook ad microtargeting to deliver divisive — fear- and anger-inducing — messages to individuals most likely to be threatened and mobilized by them.