The Shape and Color of Politics: How Citizens Process Political Information and Its Consequences

By: Damon C Roberts

Abstract:Ìý

Do colors shape the political attitudes and behaviors of citizens in the United States? In this project, I argue that they do. Existing research in political psychology has considered how substantive information about policy stances and partisanship activates motivated reasoning to shape political attitudes and behaviors. Developing the color cognition model, I argue that colors act as pre-conscious information conveying partisan attachments and occurs before the processing of this substantive political information. I apply this model to a number of common experiences for Americans: how we learn about candidates with their yard signs, how we decide whether to talk about politics with a stranger, and how we might even decide where to live. Across these applications, I find that the colors red and blue convey partisan attachments across context. The degree to which this information influences one’s political attitudes and behavior is more mixed, however. These colors appear to be important in low-information settings and have the potential to shape how we process subsequent information about others’ politics.