Asymmetries abound: Ideological differences in emotion, partisanship, motivated reasoning, social network structure, and political trust

This article is a response to Rao (2017), Krishna and Sokolova (2017), and Oyserman and Schwarz (2017), all of whom provided extremely thoughtful commentaries on a target article in which I summarized several lines of research in political psychology on liberal-conservative differences in personality, cognition, motivation, values, and neurological structures and functions (Jost, 2017a). I begin by correcting a possible misconception, namely that the theory of political ideology as motivated social cognition cannot explain dynamic shifts in ideological affinities; on the contrary, we have demonstrated that “top-down” situational-as well as “bottom-up” dispositional-processes work in conjunction to produce ideological outcomes, and this is why tailored forms of political persuasion can be highly effective in producing change. Next I describe additional evidence (including previously unpublished evidence) bearing on ideological symmetries and asymmetries with respect to emotion, partisanship, social identification, motivated reasoning, social network structure, and political trust. I end by asking consumer psychologists for their continued collaboration in addressing profound challenges associated with understanding and reconciling sources of ideological divergence-not only for the sake of research in behavioral science but also for the smooth functioning of democratic society.