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SWPS University - Main page

Positive/negative differentiation and voting behavior

How do people make choices? How do they perceive gradation in the evaluation of positive and negative characteristics? Using a case of a fictitious election, researchers from SWPS University’s Institute of Psychology, including Magdalena Jabłońska, Ph.D. / Assistant Professor, Professor Andrzej Falkowski, and Robert Mackiewicz, Ph.D. / Assistant Professor, studied the perception of difference in the evaluations of positive and negative options.

#positive-negative asymmetry #positive-negative asymmetry in social discrimination #similarity judgments #object differentiation #candidate evaluation #negativity effect

What we researched:

  • The researchers analyzed the perceived differences among the sets of favorable and unfavorable options. The aim of the project was to investigate how people see the difference between good and bad political candidates. The assumption was that people would vote for the good politicians and not vote for the bad ones, but the researchers were interested in how people compare a good candidate to a better one, and a bad politician to a worse one?

How we did it:

  • The researchers investigated the perception of difference between fictitious political candidates, hypothesizing greater differences among the evaluations of favorable candidates. They analyzed how positive and negative information affects candidate evaluation, predicting further asymmetries. In three experiments, participants evaluated various candidate profiles presented in a numeric and narrative manner. The evaluation tasks were designed as individual or joint assessments.

What have we discovered?

  • The study suggests that after exceeding a certain, relatively small level of negativity, people do not see any further increase in negativity. The increase in positivity, on the other hand, is more gradual, with greater differentiation among positive options.

Why is it important:

  • Because it provides valuable insight into positive-negative asymmetry with regard to a less-explored area of a differentiation between positive and negative options in the political setting. Contrary to the findings on the better differentiation between negative options, the researchers have found evidence for the opposite effect, showing that the evaluations of a few favorable objects are actually more nuanced.

After rejecting all negative alternatives, people put in much effort to decide which of the remaining options is the best or at least acceptable—although the extent of this effort is moderated by decision importance and individual differences (e.g., a distinction into maximizers and satisfices. Thus, if the structure of positive entities is denser, it is likely that people use finer combs to disentangle it.