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Canonical rational choice models of voter preferences assume that voters select candidates whose policy positions most closely match their own. Yet, much of the electorate often appears to prioritize identity variables (e.g., social categories, group membership) over policy considerations. Here, we report an empirical test of policy-identity interactions using surveys of likely voters conducted in the 24 hours before the 2016 United States presidential election and the 2018 United States senatorial elections. Each respondent indicated not only their policy preferences but also key social group identities and how those identities would be reinforced by voting. We observed striking evidence for a competition between policy and social group identification: For voters who exhibited the maximal effects of identity, policy positions were essentially irrelevant to their candidate preferences. These results account for dissociations between voters' stated policy preferences and their voting behavior, while linking empirical observations of political behavior to new models derived from psychology and neuroscience.

Voter choice is one of the most important problems in political science. The most common models assume that voting is a rational choice based on policy positions (e.g., key issues) and non-policy information (e.g., social identity, personality). Though such models explain macroscopic features of elections, they also reveal important anomalies that have been resistant to explanation. We argue for a new approach that builds upon recent research in cognitive science and neuroscience; specifically, we contend that policy positions and social identities do not combine in merely an additive manner, but compete to determine voter preferences. This model not only explains several key anomalies in voter choice, but also suggests new directions for research in both political science and cognitive science.

Young infants are sensitive to support relations between objects. However, the types of contact perceived to be sufficient for object support change over development. At 4.5 months of age, infants expect an object to be adequately supported when in contact with another object. By 6.5 months, this simple contact/no‐contact distinction is refined to account for proportion of contact: an object is perceived to be supported when 70% of its bottom surface is in contact with another object, but it is not perceived to be supported when 15% is contacted. Here, we employ an object segregation paradigm to investigate whether 8‐month‐old infants' judgments of support relations are mediated by assessments both of the proportion of contact and of the position of contact.Infants in the current experiments viewed test displays consisting of two objects, a long thin object (a box) and a smaller roughly cubic object (a box in Experiment 1, a cylinder in Experiments 2 and 3). Two basic positions of contact were used, such that either the centers or the lateral edges of the two objects were aligned. The proportion of contact was manipulated across experiments by having the smaller object support the larger or the larger object support the smaller. There was a significant effect of position of contact when only a small proportion of the upper object was contacted by the lower object. However, position of contact was found not to matter when all of the upper object was in contact with the lower object.We conclude that 8‐month‐old infants' judgments of support relations are influenced by both proportion and position of supporting contact. We integrate the findings from the current experiments into the general developmental framework proposed by Baillargeon and colleagues.

Group divisions are a continual feature of human history, with biases toward people's own groups shown in both experimental and natural settings. Using a within-subject design, this paper deconstructs group biases to find significant and robust individual differences; some individuals consistently respond to group divisions, while others do not. We examined individual behavior in two treatments in which subjects make pairwise decisions that determine own and others' incomes. In a political treatment, which divided subjects into groups based on their political leanings, political party members showed more in-group bias than Independents who professed the same political opinions. However, this greater bias was also present in a minimal group treatment, showing that stronger group identification was not the driver of higher favoritism in the political setting. Analyzing individual choices across the experiment, we categorize participants as "groupy" or "not groupy," such that groupy participants have social preferences that change for in-group and out-group recipients, while not-groupy participants' preferences do not change across group context. Demonstrating further that the group identity of the recipient mattered less to their choices, strongly not-groupy subjects made allocation decisions faster. We conclude that observed in-group biases build on a foundation of heterogeneity in individual groupiness.

Abstract Neural systems related to cognitive and emotional processing were examined in adolescents using event‐related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Ten healthy adolescents performed an emotional oddball task. Subjects detected infrequent circles (targets) within a continual stream of phase‐scrambled images (standards). Sad and neutral images were intermittently presented as task‐irrelevant distracters (novels). As previously shown for adults, when the adolescents responded to the task‐relevant targets, activation increased in the dorsal attention‐executive system including the anterior middle frontal gyrus (aMFG), dorsal anterior cingulate (ACG), posterior cingulate (PCG), insula, and supramarginal gyrus (SMG). Unlike adults, however, the adolescents exhibited strong activation to the emotional distracter images not only in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VmPFC), but also in the posterior middle frontal gyrus (pMFG) and in the parietal cortex. Those subjects who had stronger VmPFC activation to emotional distraction also had reduced activation in the aMFG during target detection, suggesting that emotional information may interfere with executive processing in these adolescents. In contrast, pMFG and PCG activation to emotional distracters was positively correlated with aMFG activation to targets, indicating a different role of these regions from the VmPFC. The pattern of activation to task‐irrelevant emotional distraction suggests a possible immaturity of brain function in cognitive control over emotional distraction in adolescents.

Many fMRI studies have examined the neural mechanisms supporting emotional memory for stimuli that generate emotion rather automatically (e.g., a picture of a dangerous animal or of appetizing food). However, far fewer studies have examined how memory is influenced by emotion related to social and political issues (e.g., a proposal for large changes in taxation policy), which clearly vary across individuals. In order to investigate the neural substrates of affective and mnemonic processes associated with personal opinions, we employed an fMRI task wherein participants rated the intensity of agreement/disagreement to socio-political belief statements paired with neural face pictures. Following the rating phase, participants performed an associative recognition test in which they distinguished identical vs. recombined face-statement pairs. The study yielded three main findings: behaviorally, the intensity of agreement ratings was linked to greater subjective emotional arousal, as well as enhanced high-confidence subsequent memory. Neurally, statements that elicited strong (vs. weak) agreement or disagreement were associated with greater activation of the amygdala. Finally, a subsequent memory analysis showed that the behavioral memory advantage for statements generating stronger ratings was dependent on the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Together, these results both underscore consistencies in neural systems supporting emotional arousal and suggest a modulation of arousal-related encoding mechanisms when emotion is contingent on referencing personal beliefs.