Exploring the role of social identities in presidential candidate evaluation Taylor Michals Committee members: Dr. Crystal Hoyt, Dr. Al Goethals, Dr. Jennifer Erkulwater This research demonstrates how the social identities of race and gender can influence presidential candidate evaluation. Specifically, it emphasizes that political ideology and gender attitudes can play a significant role in ho...

Although skeptics continue to doubt that most people are “ideological,” evidence suggests that meaningful left-right differences do exist and that they may be rooted in basic personality dispositions, that is, relatively stable individual differences in psychological needs, motives, and orientations toward the world. Seventy-five years of theory and research on personality and political orienta...

How does economic inequality affect political support in democracies? Recent research shows that high levels of inequality are associated with low levels of support for and satisfaction with democracy, yet our understanding of this relationship remains incomplete. I argue that people become politically dissatisfied when they view inequality through a lens of distributive unfairness— i.e., unfai...

This study attempts to explain why the Supreme Court responds to public mood by analyzing individual justice liberalism and comparing it to public liberalism between the years of1970 and 2001. Three theories suggesting why the Court may respond to public opinion are discussed, including the replacement, political adjustment, and the attitude change hypotheses. The method of using Court reversal...

Contact with the dominant group can increase opposition, among the disadvantaged, to social policies that would benefit their group. This effect can be explained in terms of contact promoting support for an ideology of meritocracy, which privileges the distribution of societal resources based on individual merit, rather than group-level disadvantage. We tested this ideological mechanism in a la...

Previous research has shown that perceivers can accurately extract information about perceptually ambiguous group memberships from facial information alone. For example, people demonstrate above-chance accuracy in categorizing political ideology from faces. Further, they ascribe particular personality traits to faces according to political party (e.g., Republicans are dominant and mature, Democ...

Pedestrian injuries are a leading cause of childhood mortality. In this paper a case study of a child pedestrian death is presented in order to examine the apportionment of responsibility for child pedestrian injuries. The case presented illustrates how responsibility is located with the child, whilst structural contributors, in particular aspects of the transport system, are ignored. The stren...