A Negativity Bias in Reframing Shapes Political Preferences Even in Partisan Contexts

Abstract

Humans evolved to attend to valence and group membership when learning about their environment. The political domain offers a unique opportunity to study the simultaneous influence of these two broad, domain-general features of human experience. We examined whether the pervasive tendency for negatively valenced frames to “stick” in the mind applies to both intergroup and intragroup political contexts. In a preregistered experiment, we tested the effects of negative-to-positive (vs. positive-to-negative) reframing on people’s candidate preferences, first in the absence of party cue information and then in two partisan contexts: an intergroup context (analogous to a U.S. general election between opposing political parties) and an intragroup context (analogous to a U.S. primary election between candidates of the same party). We observed a persistent negativity bias in reframing effects, even in the presence of party cues. The results pave the way for future research at the intersection of psychology and political science.