The Illusion of Choice in Democratic Politics: The Unconscious Impact of Motivated Political Reasoning

Abstract

What are the fundamental causes of human behavior and to what degree is it intended, consciously controlled? We review the literature on automaticity in human behavior with an emphasis on our own theory of motivated political reasoning, John Q. Public, and the experimental evidence we have collected (Lodge & Taber, 2013). Our fundamental theoretical claim is that affective and cognitive reactions to external and internal events are triggered unconsciously, followed spontaneously by the spreading of activation through associative pathways that link thoughts to feelings to intentions to behavior, so that very early events, even those that are invisible to conscious awareness, set the direction for all subsequent processing. We find evidence in support of four hypotheses that are central to our theory: hot cognition, affect transfer, affect contagion, and motivated bias.