Catherine Madden
Pronouns: she/her
Research Mentor(s): Clinton McKenna
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Psychology / LSA
Program: UROPF
Session: Session 2 (10:00am – 10:50am)
Authors:
Abstract
Although many people would consider themselves unbiased and fair, several psychological studies have confirmed that humans are in most cases unable to explain their behavior or reasoning. Our study aims to look into humans’ innate bias towards political events that they support and our general inability to reflect upon the motivational thinking surrounding our actions and how it specifically relates to our political and social biases. In order to gather our results we sought to adapt past psychological studies involving updating predictions about their beliefs related to political events. Our data was collected through online experiments, where participants were presented with information about the 2022 midterm election and prompted to make predictions about the outcomes. We tested the awareness of participant’s own political opinions on these predictions, as well as peer perceptions of political bias. We see a bias held among people towards their political party, and furthermore an inability to access their mental processes and fully explain their behavior, but these biases were generally detected by one’s peers. Politics is present in every society, and this research illustrates that we may lack awareness of our biases about politics when thinking about ourselves.
