Angry? You Are Not My Co-partisan: The Consequences of Political Categorization

• In Event: Anger and Fear in Populist Politics

Abstract

Partisan identities strongly shape how people treat others (Huddy and Bankert 2017; Huddy et al. 2015). How people interact with strangers is influenced by the stranger’s perceived partisanship (Carlin and Love 2018), and these perceptions can lead to partisan animosity (Iyengar and Westwood 2015) and even spill over to prejudices in non-political areas (Engelhardt and Utych 2020). However, we do not always accurately know the politics of strangers when we meet them, and so we sometimes make assumptions about the political identity of people we encounter based on the limited information that we do have. These perceptions inform our understanding of our societal and political environment.

One process by which we infer partisan identity is by our ability to judge how similar others are to us, thereby guiding how we treat them (Fiske and Neuberg 1990). Tajfel (1969) refers to this process of social categorization, “a network of intergroup categorizations omnipresent in the social environment,” which leads to differing treatment of strangers based on our categorization of their social identities. Inevitably, social categorization leads to discrimination (Locksley, Ortiz, and Hepburn 1980).

In western democracies, policymakers and scholars have observed a relatively recent increase in polarization and prejudice based on partisanship (Gidron et al. 2020; Iyengar et al. 2019; Merkley 2021; Merkley 2022). Druckman et al. (2022) shows how partisans often misperceive out-party members as extremists fueling polarization (Moore-Berg et al. 2020), eroding inter-group relationships (Olcaysoy Okten and Saribay 2019), and democracy more generally (Pasek et al. 2022).

Considering that partisans assign political identities to strangers, leading to social categorization and, thereby, discrimination, it is essential to understand how these perceptions are formed. Put simply, how do partisans sort strangers politically? What are the outcomes associated with this sorting process? Drawing from findings in psychology which show how people infer information only from seeing someone (Hugenberg and Sczesny 2006; Willis and Todorov 2006), even predicting the political competence of politicians (Todorov et al. 2005), we argue that people politically categorize strangers by linking partisan identity to physical attributes, such as a person’s face. To test this theory, we conduct three experiments with 1,199 respondents in Canada using faces randomly drawn from the Chicago face database (Lakshmi et al. 2021). We also intend to replicate these studies in the United States in the spring of 2024.

In Study 1, we find that faces which display negative emotions are more likely to be categorized as out-partisan, and faces with positive emotions as in-party. Study 2 replicates these results but asks respondents to assign faces as supporters of Canadian party leaders rather than Canadian parties. Study 3 demonstrates that these biases also influence the categorization of fictional political candidates into Canadian political parties. Our findings shed light on the processes through which individuals form political perceptions of strangers and the intricate ways in which partisan identity influences social interactions.

Authors

• Thomas Bergeron

• Blake Lee-Whiting, University of Toronto

• Natasha Goel, University of Toronto