PUBLIC OPINION AND SOCIAL COGNITION: DECOUPLED COGNITION AS THE LINK

Current evidence suggests that substantial aspects of human social cognition have evolved over the course of our biological evolution to help our ancestors solve recurring social problems relating to cooperation and conflict (Fowler and Schreiber Reference Fowler and Schreiber2008; Hatemi and McDermott Reference Hatemi and McDermott2011). For most of human evolutionary history, our ancestors lived in relatively small groups of perhaps between 30 and 250 individuals (Dunbar Reference Dunbar1998; Kelly Reference Kelly1995). Evolved parts of human social cognition such as heuristics and emotions would therefore be adapted to life in small groups and designed to take advantage of the cues available in intimate face-to-face interactions (Haley and Fessler Reference Haley and Fessler2005; Kurzban Reference Kurzban2001). In line with this argument, studies in social psychology have shown how social decisions and emotional reactions in everyday life are heavily influenced by the kinds of cues that are uniquely available in face-to-face interactions, such as the presence of bystanders (Haley and Fessler Reference Haley and Fessler2005), eye contact (Kurzban Reference Kurzban2001), facial expressions such as smiles (Scharlemann et al. Reference Scharlemann, Eckel, Kacelnik and Wilson2001), facial features such as attractiveness and masculinity (Sell, Tooby, and Cosmides Reference Sell, Tooby and Cosmides2009; Wilson and Eckel Reference Wilson and Eckel2006), and other kinds of nonverbal cues (Brown, Palameta, and Moore Reference Brown, Palameta and Moore2003).

In recent years, evidence has been provided that social cognition not only helps people navigate in small-scale everyday life but also helps citizens feel and reason about mass politics (Fowler and Schreiber Reference Fowler and Schreiber2008; Hatemi and McDermott Reference Hatemi and McDermott2011; Kuklinski and Quirk Reference Kuklinski, Quirk, Lupia, McCubbins and Popkin2000; Petersen Reference Petersen2012; Schreiber Reference Schreiber, Neuman, Marcus, Crigler and Mackuen2007). Yet, to the extent that mass political cognition emerges from more basic mechanisms for social decision making, these mechanisms are deployed in a radically less intimate context than the context in which they evolved (small groups) and in which they normally operate (everyday life): Modern politics is played out in mass societies consisting of millions of inhabitants, in which citizens will most often lack intimate, vivid knowledge of groups and events being debated (Lippmann Reference Lippmann1922, 43; Kuklinski and Quirk Reference Kuklinski, Quirk, Lupia, McCubbins and Popkin2000, 156–57; Zaller Reference Zaller1992, 6).

This informational deficit is far from trivial, and indeed current research suggests that a lack of vivid social cues normally inhibits social cognition. For example, studies using fMRI have shown how activity in brain regions related to emotional processing―a core element in social cognition (Haidt Reference Haidt, Davidson, Scherer and Goldsmith2003)―are downregulated when decision contexts resemble face-to-face interactions less (e.g., de Quervain et al. Reference de Quervain, Fischbacher, Treyer, Schellhammer, Schnyder, Buck and Fehr2004; Sanfey et al. Reference Sanfey, Rilling, Aronson, Nystrom and Cohen2003). Outside the laboratory, this effect has been validated by research on group efficiency showing that social and emotional forms of coordination in groups are inhibited when groups do not interact face to face (Baltes et al. Reference Baltes, Dickson, Sherman, Bauer and LaGanke2002).

How, then, do modern individuals in the course of political opinion formation compensate for the lack of vivid cues that ordinarily fuel social cognitive processes? In cognitive psychology, researchers are increasingly coming to understand the compensatory strategies that individuals use when making decisions in contexts with sparse information. These researchers point to the role played by internal psychological processes, often referred to as “decoupled cognition” (Buckner and Carroll Reference Buckner and Carroll2007; Cosmides and Tooby Reference Cosmides, Tooby and Sperber2000; Schacter and Addis Reference Schacter, Addis and Buckner2007). Their research suggests that, when cues are absent yet are required for decision making, people rely heavily on intense mental simulations of the absent cues as they “extract, recombine and reassemble” stored memory content “into imaginary events that never occurred” (Schacter and Addis Reference Schacter and Addis2007, 27). In short, in sparse information contexts, people engage in decoupled cognition to imagine what they cannot see and then feed these internally generated representations and beliefs into more basic cognitive and emotional mechanisms.

More formally, decoupled cognition involves representations that are (1) highly explicit in the sense of relying on thorough declarative memory searches, (2) imagined in the sense of operating without direct sensory input, and (3) vivid in the sense of being emotionally engaging.Footnote ¹ Importantly, these features mean that imaginative decoupled processes could help bridge the gap between the informational needs of our social cognition and the sparse supply of cues in modern mass politics. Imaginative decoupled processes could add vividness and flavor to the otherwise meager information often available during political opinion formation and, hence, help engage the more basic cognitive and emotional mechanisms comprising social cognition.

By emphasizing the role of internal psychological sources of cues, we expand the traditional emphasis of political scientists on the role of the media and social networks as external sources of cues (e.g., Beck et al. Reference Beck, Dalton, Greene and Huckfeldt2002; de Vreese and Boomgarten Reference de Vreese and Boomgaarden2006; Iyengar and Kinder Reference Iyengar and Kinder1987). Such extant lines of research have provided important evidence that external information, especially media stories containing vivid social cues (Iyengar Reference Iyengar1991), increase the effects of basic psychological processes―such as emotions―on public opinion (Aarøe Reference Aarøe2011; Gross Reference Gross2008). Importantly, however, these external sources of cues often cannot facilitate opinion formation if unaided by decoupled cognition. First, although the print media and social networks allow for dissemination of indirect verbal descriptions of political events and groups, research suggests that many verbal descriptions require mental simulation to engage people (Green & Brock Reference Green and Brock2000; see also the later discussion of validation Study A). Second, although television in particular can offer a source of vivid social cues, political attitude formation often takes place unaided by such technology (e.g., at the polls, over the dinner table, at political meetings, when answering an opinion survey, or when signing a petition or donating money to a cause). Thus in many contexts for political attitude formation, vivid social cues from the media are not immediately accessible, but need to be pieced together and simulated from memory searches. In these contexts the need for decoupled cognition is not relieved.

MEASURING DECOUPLED COGNITION: AN INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES PERSPECTIVE

Imaginative decoupled processes arguably play a key role in public opinion formation across individuals. Yet prior research has produced ample evidence that the cognitive capabilities of individuals differ quite substantially, in no small part due to genetic factors (e.g., Wainwright et al. Reference Wainwright, Wright, Luciano, Geffen and Martin2008). The literature on individual differences has often discussed this variation with reference to imagination (or, at times, fantasy), which constitutes an everyday denotation of the same set of processes that we refer to as decoupled cognition. Although a range of approaches to the assessment of such individual differences exist in the psychological literature, there is now widespread acceptance that the Big Five model is one of the strongest taxonomies of human personality variation (for applications in political science, see Gerber et al., Reference Gerber, Huber, Doherty and Dowling2011; Mondak et al. Reference Mondak, Hibbing, Canache, Seligson and Anderson2010). The Big Five model includes imagination as a subcomponent of the “openness to experience” factor (see, e.g., Goldberg Reference Goldberg, Mervielde, Deary, De Fruyt and Ostendorf1999; McCrae and Costa Reference McCrae, Costa and Wiggins1996). As McCrae (Reference McCrae1994, 258) argues, “open people are characterized by an active pursuit of novelty” as well as flexible cognitive processing, such as “divergent thinking, in which remote associations are easily made, and . . . synesthesia, in which the distinctions between different sensory modalities are blurred.” The latter components are closely related to decoupled cognition as defined here.

Individual differences in imagination are important because they provide a window into how decoupled cognition shapes mass political attitudes and behavior. If decoupled cognition is used during opinion formation in order for social cognition to operate, individual differences in the ability to imagine should track how and, in particular, how easily individuals form political attitudes. Indeed, the literature on how differences in openness to experience influence political behavior has provided important evidence that these differences predict a variety of measures of political engagement such that open people are more likely to be politically engaged (Gerber et al. Reference Gerber, Huber, Doherty and Dowling2011; Mondak and Halperin Reference Mondak and Halperin2008; Mondak et al. Reference Mondak, Hibbing, Canache, Seligson and Anderson2010). Although these findings are consistent with the argument advocated here, they nonetheless provide only indirect evidence. According to McCrae (Reference McCrae1994), imagination constitutes only one-half of the general openness to experience trait, which also includes the novelty-seeking component of adventurousness (Goldberg Reference Goldberg, Mervielde, Deary, De Fruyt and Ostendorf1999). To validate our account, we need tests focusing directly on the relationship between individual differences in the imagination subtrait and differences in dynamics during public opinion formation (for a similar approach, see Hirsch et al. Reference Hirsh, DeYoung, Xu and Peterson2010).

A first step in providing such validation is building a scale that allows us to measure differences in imagination. Our ambition was to create a short but reliable scale that could easily be included in future surveys and applied cross-nationally with satisfactory reliability (cf. Mondak et al. Reference Mondak, Hibbing, Canache, Seligson and Anderson2010). As our point of departure, we used the primary open-access inventory of personality scales, the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP), which includes measures for all traits included in the Big Five model (Goldberg Reference Goldberg, Mervielde, Deary, De Fruyt and Ostendorf1999). Consistent with our theoretical argument, we selected the three standard items from the IPIP imagination scale that focused most directly on the decoupled cognition aspect of imaginative processes: “I have a vivid imagination,” “I do not have a good imagination,” and “I have difficulty imagining things.” To these items we added a fourth self-formulated item: “I can easily imagine persons I hear or read about.” Thus, all four statements focused exclusively on the decoupled cognition aspect of imaginative processes. To obtain a scale, we asked participants how accurately each statement described them on a 7-point scale ranging from “very inaccurate” to “very accurate” and summarized the answers as appropriate (see Online Appendix A1 for further discussion).Footnote ²

Given that the short imagination (S-IM) scale relies predominantly on well-tested items from the psychometric literature, its validity should be ensured. Still, to investigate the properties of this short-form scale, we ran four validation studies (Studies A–D), each providing detailed tests of the predictive, convergent, and divergent validity of the S-IM scale.Footnote ³ Across all studies, the imagination scale had satisfactory reliability (Study A: α = 0.74; Study B: α = 0.77; Study C: α = 0.78; Study D: α = 0.79).

The aim of Study A was to provide a face valid demonstration that the S-IM scale does in fact gauge individual differences in imagination. Because we wanted to establish the predictive validity of our measure outside a political context, we focused on an everyday situation in which decoupled cognition is engaged: the reading of fiction. Participants read a short fairytale-like story. Afterward, they first answered nine items from the well-validated transportation scale (Green and Brock Reference Green and Brock2000), which measures the extent to which readers of a narrative become immersed into the story and “see the action of the story unfolding before them and respond emotionally to story events” (Mazzocco et al. Reference Mazzocco, Green, Sasota and Jones2010, 361; see also Green and Brock Reference Green and Brock2000). Second, they engaged in two free association tasks in which they were asked to list the words they would use to describe one of the main characters and the story as a whole to another person. Finally, they completed the S-IM scale and answered a range of other questions about their personality and cognitive abilities.

Analyses showed that subjects’ values on the S-IM scale significantly and strongly correlated with differences in the degree to which they felt mentally transported into the story (r = 0.43, p < 0.001) and with the number of associations they freely recollected to describe the human main character (r = 0.33, p < 0.001) and the overall story (r = 0.25, p = 0.001). As detailed analyses in the Online Appendix A5 reveal, all three effects were highly robust to the inclusion of a large range of control variables related to both closely related personality constructs (general openness to experience, adventurousness, need for closure, and political ideology) and variables tracking cognitive abilities (need for cognition and need to evaluate). Testifying to the criteria validity of the scale, these findings document that the S-IM scale uniquely tracks how vividly individuals experience descriptions of unseen people and events, as well as how vividly they recollect these descriptions.

Study A relied on self-reports and quasi-behavioral measures of returned associations. The goal of Study B was, therefore, to provide evidence that the S-IM scale tracked individual differences in the abilities to engage in decoupled cognition using a genuinely behavioral task. The best validated behavioral tasks of visual imagery (a key component of decoupled cognition) in psychology are “mental rotation tasks” (see Shepard and Metzler Reference Shepard and Metzler1971). Mental rotation ability, as measured by these tasks, is the ability of people to “rotate figures in their minds’ eye” (Peters and Battista Reference Peters and Battista2008, 261); that is, to mentally visualize rotating complex figures of blocks in three-dimensional space. Specifically, we relied on the redrawn Vandenberg & Kuse Mental Rotation Task (Peters et al. Reference Peters, Laeng, Latham, Jackson, Zaiyouna and Richardson1995).Footnote ⁴ To investigate whether our imagination scale predicted success on the mental rotation task, participants completed the task and our scale online (see Online Appendix A2 for study details). Testifying to the validity of the S-IM scale, subjects’ values on the scale had a nontrivial and highly significant effect on the success rate on the mental rotation task (r = 0.35, p = 0.001).

Third, our argument hinges on the capacity of imaginative processes to engage more basic psychological and emotional processes. To verify that the S-IM scale tracks relevant individual differences in this regard, Study C provided a test of the effect of imagination on the responses of subjects to positive and negative still images. To obtain an unobtrusive and direct measure of the engagement of basic emotional mechanisms, we relied on a physiological reaction measure in the form of skin conductance response (SCR) during image presentation (see Oxley et al. Reference Oxley, Smith, Alford, Hibbing, Miller, Scalora, Hatemi and Hibbing2008). SCR provides a valid measurement of the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which is a key circuit in the generation of emotional arousal (Figner and Murphy Reference Figner, Murphy, Schulte-Mecklenbeck, Kuehberger and Ranyard2011). All of the images of interest were strictly nonpolitical: a bright flower, a happy baby, a foot with an infected wound, and a large spider.

In the study, subjects were placed in front of a computer screen and asked simply to sit and look at the images. The analysis found that subjects’ score on the imagination scale was positively and significantly related to their SCR during the presentation of images (r = 0.27, p = 0.037).Footnote ⁵ Hence, people high in imagination, as measured by the S-IM scale, exhibit stronger physiological reactions to emotional images. These findings support that the scale reliably tracks individual differences in the ability to engage basic psychological mechanisms in the face of limited information.

Finally, we checked the extent to which the imagination scale overlapped with answers to other well-used cognitive ability measures in the political science literature, as well as to closely related personality constructs. To this end, we measured a range of prominent measures across the studies: general openness to experience (cf. Mondak et al. Reference Mondak, Hibbing, Canache, Seligson and Anderson2010), adventurousness (Goldberg Reference Goldberg, Mervielde, Deary, De Fruyt and Ostendorf1999), political ideology (related to openness; cf. Gerber et al. Reference Gerber, Huber, Doherty, Dowling and Ha2010), need for closure (cf. Webster and Kruglanski Reference Webster and Kruglanski1994), political awareness (Zaller Reference Zaller1992), need for cognition (Cacioppo and Petty Reference Cacioppo and Petty1982), need to evaluate (Jarvis and Petty Reference Jarvis and Petty1996), and grade point average as a measure of general cognitive abilities (cf. Frey and Detterman Reference Frey and Detterman2004, 376). Across the studies in this article, imagination as measured by the S-IM scale naturally correlated with adventurousness (average r = 0.30) and general openness (average r = 0.17). We also found correlations with the need for cognition (average r = 0.18) and need for closure (average r = −0.21). Importantly, however, the strength of all these correlations was relatively modest. The rest of the constructs did not seem to overlap with values on the S-IM scale. Together with the results from Study A, which showed that the S-IM scale uniquely tracks abilities to mentally simulate fictional descriptions, this finding suggests that the scale tracks individual differences left untapped by other available measures. We return to this finding in Studies 6 and 7.

STUDIES 1 AND 2: IMAGINATION AND VIVID REPRESENTATIONS OF POLITICS

Having established our key independent variable (i.e., the S-IM scale) and our individual differences approach to studying how decoupled cognition shapes public opinion, we then investigated how these differences influence the use of social cognition during political opinion formation. Our first two studies were oriented toward establishing a key premise of our argument: that imaginative people generate vivid mental representations of relevant target groups or events when forming opinions about mass politics.

Results

The first prediction to be investigated in the U.S. and Danish studies is whether individuals high in imagination have stronger opinions (H1). Table 1 shows the effect of imagination on the strength of respondents’ opinions on the social welfare issue (M1 and M5).

TABLE 1.

Effect of Imagination on Attitude Strength, Response Latency, Number of Associations, and Association Consistency

Notes: Entries are unstandardized OLS regression coefficients. Standard errors are reported in parentheses. To investigate the potential existence of national differences in the reported effects of imagination, we tested for the significance of two-way interactions between imagination and nationality on all dependent variables using a pooled dataset. None of the interactions are significant (p values are between .26 and .41).

¹Number of associations is measured on a scale ranging from 0 to 20 associations.

²Association consistency is measured on a scale ranging from 0 to 20, with higher scores indicating a higher consistency of either deserving or undeserving associations.

All other variables range from 0 to 1 except for age, which is measured in years.

* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001. All p values are two-tailed.

Consistent with H1, we found a substantial and statistically significant effect of imagination on attitude strength in both the United States and Denmark (b_US = 0.20, p < 0.001; b_DK = 0.13, p = 0.017). In both countries, imaginative respondents tended to hold stronger attitudes on social welfare issues than did unimaginative respondents.Footnote ⁶

The second prediction holds that people high in imagination engage more in memory-based processing when forming opinions. To test this, we relied on response latencies and, as revealed in models M2 and M6 in Table 1, imaginative people did have longer response latencies than unimaginative individuals in both the United States and Denmark (b_US = 0.23, p < 0.001; b_DK = 0.14, p = 0.007). These observations support H2 and indicate that imagination tracks how people process information and that highly imaginative individuals conduct a more thorough memory search than unimaginative individuals.

Finally, according to H3, one consequence of these thorough memory searches is that individuals high in imagination are able to piece together more vivid and elaborate mental representations during opinion formation. To investigate this hypothesis, the total number of the respondents’ associations about welfare recipients (M3 and M7) and the internal consistency of these associations (M4 and M8) were regressed on imagination in Table 1. The number of associations ranged from 0 to 20, and association consistency ranged from 0 to 20, with higher values indicating stronger consistency. Consistent with H3, we found that both imaginative Americans and imaginative Danes generated a higher number of associations about welfare recipients than their unimaginative counterparts (b_US = 1.83, p < 0.001; b_DK = 1.42, p < 0.001). Furthermore, as can be seen from the findings in M4 and M8, high levels of imagination increased not only the number of associations but also their internal consistency. This response pattern was robust across the U.S. and Danish studies (b_US = 0.81, p = 0.010; b_DK = 1.17, p < 0.001). These observations support that, during opinion formation, highly imaginative individuals have more vivid―in the sense of more information-dense and unambiguous―mental representations available regarding the target group of primary relevance to the issue.

STUDIES 3 AND 4: IMAGINATION AND SOCIAL COGNITION

Studies 1 and 2 show that individual differences in imagination are related to people's tendency to piece together vivid mental representations of welfare recipients’ deservingness when forming opinions about social welfare. In this way, these studies focus on the input side of the deservingness heuristic. Although demonstrating that imaginative people had stronger opinions regarding welfare, the studies did not provide direct evidence that this effect occurred because the imagined, vivid representations were subsequently fed through social cognition in the form of the deservingness heuristic. Studies 3 and 4 were therefore designed to provide direct evidence that imaginative individuals specifically engage the deservingness heuristic to a greater extent than unimaginative individuals.

Results

The deservingness heuristic takes stereotypes about effort as input and, as output, produces and regulates feelings of anger and compassion. As demonstrated in Studies 1 and 2, perceptions are embedded in richer sets of associations among the imaginative. On that basis, Table 2 tests whether imagination magnifies the relationship between holding the perception that welfare recipients are lazy and feelings of anger and compassion toward them. In statistical terms, the prediction entails the existence of a two-way interaction effect between imagination and the laziness stereotype on feelings of anger and compassion. Importantly, such interaction effects should not be observed in relation to neither stereotypes that are not processed by the deservingness heuristic (stereotypes about unintelligence) nor emotions that are not regulated by the heuristic (feelings of concern).

TABLE 2.

Effect of Imagination on the Impact of Laziness and Unintelligence Stereotypes on Anger, Compassion, and Concern

Notes: Entries are unstandardized OLS regression coefficients. Standard errors are reported in parentheses. To investigate the potential existence of national differences in the reported interactions between imagination and stereotypes, we tested for the significance of three-way interactions between imagination, stereotypes (laziness and unintelligence, respectively), and nationality on anger and compassion using a pooled dataset. None of the interactions are significant (p values are between .12 and .65). All variables range from 0 to 1 except age, which is reported in years. † p = 0.074, * p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001. All p values are two-tailed.

APPENDIX 1.

Overview of Studies

Note. ¹OA: Online Appendix. The table provides an overview of the studies included in the article by purpose, method, and main results. It also indicates where the study description and findings are reported.

As can be observed from the findings in Table 2, the predictions were generally supported in both the United States and Denmark. In the United States, feelings of anger toward welfare recipients were driven by a highly significant two-way interaction between individual differences in imagination and the stereotype that welfare recipients are lazy (b = 0.56, p = 0.001). As imagination increases, perceiving welfare recipients as lazy (equaling a high score on the stereotype measure) generates higher levels of anger. The same interaction was observed in Denmark, although there the interaction term was only marginally significant (b = 0.36, p = 0.074). In the case of compassion, the prediction was supported at conventional levels of significance in both the United States (b = −0.34, p = 0.023) and Denmark (b = −0.47, p = 0.023). Thus, among people high in imagination, the stereotype that welfare recipients are making an effort (equaling a low score on the stereotype measure) leads to greater levels of compassion in both the United States and Denmark. Across all models, there are no significant interaction effects with the alternative unintelligence stereotype, nor are there any interaction effects on the alternative emotion of concern. These observations are consistent with H5–6.

STUDY 5: IMAGINATION, SOCIAL COGNITION, AND IMPLICIT MEMORY CONTENT

Studies 3 and 4's reliance on self-reported measures of memory content raises concerns about endogeneity. Study 5 therefore sought to replicate the basic finding—that imaginative people form political opinions more easily by using stored memory content—by using the implicit association test (IAT). The IAT is a highly validated psychological measure of implicit rather than explicit, more endogenous stereotypes.

Study 6: Imagination in the Face of Vivid Social Cues

Studies 1–5 suggest that imagination serves as a bridge between public opinion formation and social cognition across highly different political systems. Specifically, they suggest that imagination facilitates opinion formation on social welfare because imaginative processes help individuals activate implicit and explicit memory content to build vivid perceptions of welfare recipients; these perceptions are then fed through the deservingness heuristic, resulting in intense emotional reactions. In Study 6, we investigated the boundary conditions of the role of imagination. As argued earlier, imagination is of particular importance in linking social and political cognition, because political views are often formed in the absence of vivid social cues. If valid, this claim implies that imagination should play less of a role when vivid social information is externally provided during opinion formation. Using an experimental design to manipulate the vividness of the available information, Study 6 provided compelling evidence for this key assertion. Furthermore, in Study 6, we increased statistical control and directly controlled for the other component of openness, adventurousness, to demonstrate that the predicted effects are specific to the imagination trait.

Results

According to H8, the opinions of imaginative people toward specific members of stereotyped categories should be more heavily influenced by stereotypes than unimaginative people's opinions. To support H8, we should thus observe that opinions toward the specific welfare recipient are driven by a two-way interaction between imagination and the prior stereotypes, such that the effect of stereotypes increases as imagination increases. According to H9, however, this cognitive advantage of imaginative people should be conditioned by the vividness of the descriptions of the specific welfare recipient. In the face of very vivid social cues, neither imaginative nor unimaginative individuals should then feel a need to filter in their prior stereotypes.

Thus, as a first test of these expectations, we ran separate two-way interaction models for the low-vividness condition and for the two high-vividness conditions and plotted the predicted marginal effect of the stereotypes on opinion across the levels of imagination for each condition (see Figure 1). As can be observed in the low-vividness condition (panel A), when vivid social cues were lacking, we found a strong tendency for imaginative people to filter in their own stereotypes to a greater extent than did unimaginative people. That is, as imagination increases, the predicted marginal effect of prior stereotypes on support for tougher means-testing increases as well (as indicated by the positively sloped line), and as the associated confidence intervals cease to include zero, this increase becomes significant. These observations are consistent with H8. Importantly, as can be observed in the two high-vividness conditions (panels B and C), when very vivid social cues are provided, there are no discernible effects of stereotypes on opinions among the imaginative and the unimaginative alike. The flat lines indicate that the effects of prior stereotypes do not change as a function of imagination, and as revealed by the associated confidence intervals, the effect is insignificant across the entire span of differences in imagination. This pattern of findings is consistent with H9.

FIGURE 1.

Predicted Marginal Effect of Stereotypes on Support for Tougher Means-Testing by Vividness Condition and Imagination.

Notes: Graphs are created from separate OLS regressions for each experimental condition with imagination, laziness stereotype, and their two-way interaction. Marginal effects are shown for the interquartile range of values on the imagination scale. F and p values for the interaction terms: Panel A: F = 10.45, p = 0.002; Panel B: F = 0.10, p = 0.76; Panel C: F = 0.04, p = 0.84.

To further test the robustness of these conclusions, we estimated full three-way interactions between imagination, stereotypes, and the experimental manipulations of vividness in the externally provided descriptions (see Online Appendix A12, Table A11, M1–2). The findings corroborated the substantial nature of the difference in the effect of imagination that can be observed in Figure 1. Hence, when comparing the low-vividness condition to both high-vividness conditions, we found significant three-way interaction terms between imagination, stereotypes, and the experimental condition (comparison with High I: F = 7.07, p = 0.009; comparison with High II: F = 5.70, p = 0.019). This lends support to the notion that imagination facilitates the use of stereotypes significantly less when vivid social cues are externally provided.Footnote ⁸ In sum, these analyses show that when judging vaguely described welfare recipients, imaginative people are better able than unimaginative people at filtering in their prior stereotypes. Hence, when facing unvivid descriptions of specific welfare recipients, imaginative people who believe that most welfare recipients are lazy are highly supportive of tougher means-testing, whereas imaginative people who believe that most welfare recipients are unlucky are strictly against tougher means-testing. This stands in contrast to judgments in the face of vivid descriptions of specific welfare recipients. In such situations, all individuals—independently of stereotypes and imaginative capacity—follow the information given. In the present case, where the recipient is described as being low in effort, everybody supports tougher means-testing.

As argued in the theory section, imagination constitutes one component of the more general personality trait of openness to experience. Study 6 included a measure of the other component of openness: adventurousness. As analyzed in detail in Online Appendix A12, the effects of imagination stayed robust to control for adventurousness and were not replicable using adventurousness. These results support that the effects we predict and observe are specific for the imagination subtrait, which we address further in Study 7.

Study 7: Imagination, Social Welfare Attitudes, and Charity Donations

In Studies A–D and 1–6, we relied on a combination of physiological, behavioral, implicit, and self-report measures to show how individual differences in imagination help people link social and political cognition. In this final study, we extended our account to show how imagination is engaged during actual incentivized behavioral decisions. Furthermore, because the demonstrated effects of imagination are argued to be specific for imagination rather than related psychological constructs (as also shown in Study A and, to some extent, in Study 6), Study 7 included a large battery of cognitive and personality measures that can be included as control variables. The study showed that not only are more imaginative people more likely to follow the behavioral implications of their political attitudes but that this effect is also robust to controls for a very large range of closely related personality constructs (need for closure, ideology, general openness to experience, and adventurousness) and cognitive ability measures (need for cognition, need to evaluate, and political knowledge).

Results

We expect that individuals who support social welfare are more likely to provide money to charity organizations and directly to fellow individuals. Furthermore, we expect this attitude–behavior link to be facilitated by mental simulation processes, such that imaginative people's political behavior is more strongly guided by their political attitudes. In tandem, these expectations entail the existence of a two-way interaction between social welfare attitudes and imagination on the monetary donation tasks used in the study. For donations both in the dictator game and to the charity organization, F-tests revealed that the interaction between attitudes and imagination effect was significant (dictator game: F = 7.08, p = 0.010; charity donation: χ² = 6.49; p = 0.011). In Figure 2, we graphically display these interaction effects (with the full models available in Online Appendix A13, Table A12). Panel A shows the marginal effects of social welfare attitudes on donation behavior in the dictator game, and Panel B shows the same in relation to the charity organization. As can be seen, imagination significantly increases the effect of people's political principles on incentivized behavior such that the imaginative are more likely to stick to their principles (i.e., donate if they are supportive of welfare) in the face of short-term temptations to sacrifice their principles for money. This supports H10.

FIGURE 2.

Predicted Marginal Effect of Social Welfare Attitudes on Monetary Donations by Imagination

Notes: Marginal effects are shown for the interquartile range of values on the imagination scale. Test statistics and p values for the interaction terms: Panel A: F = 7.08, p = 0.010; Panel B: χ² = 6.49; p = 0.011. Marginal effects in Panel A have been calculated on the basis of the OLS regression in Table A12, Model 1, reported in Online Appendix A13. Marginal effects in Panel B are changes in predicted probabilities (denoted Pr) calculated on the basis of the binary logistic regression in Table A12, Model 5, reported in Online Appendix A13.

Individual differences in imagination are, of course, just one part of the larger set of psychological differences existing between individuals. This leaves open the question of whether the effects we are reporting are specifically driven by differences in imagination or whether they are confounded by some of the other psychological variables to which imagination is related (cf. Studies A‒D). Because imagination forms part of a larger Big Five trait—openness to experience—other subparts of openness or indeed the general openness trait itself could be responsible for the effect. In addition, because a strong imagination allows for a deeper cognitive processing of information, the effects of imagination could be confounded by other measures of cognitive ability. In Study A, we showed that imagination has a unique effect on the ability to vividly experience and recollect fiction. Here, we followed the same strategy and controlled the effects of imagination for these potential confounds. All of the details for these analyses are found in Online Appendix A13.

First, we tried replicating the reported interaction effect on donation behavior using a general measure of openness to experience (cf. Mondak et al. Reference Mondak, Hibbing, Canache, Seligson and Anderson2010). For both donation tasks, the interaction effect between social welfare attitudes and openness was insignificant (p = 0.278 and p = 0.857 for the dictator and charity decisions, respectively). That the more refined measurement at the subtrait level of imagination is required to obtain the effect suggests that the demonstrated effects are specifically tied to this component of openness. Second, we examined a set of key personality measures that previous research in psychology and political science has found to be related to openness to experience and, therefore, potentially to imagination: adventurousness (Goldberg Reference Goldberg, Mervielde, Deary, De Fruyt and Ostendorf1999), political ideology (cf. Gerber et al. Reference Gerber, Huber, Doherty, Dowling and Ha2010), and need for closure (Webster and Kruglanski Reference Webster and Kruglanski1994). For each of these variables, we constructed two-way interaction terms with social welfare attitudes and regressed donation behavior on them. Importantly, the interactive effect of imagination was robust to the inclusion of these other personality measures in both donation tasks (after control: p = 0.077 and p = 0.028 with two-tailed tests for dictator and charity decisions, respectively). None of the alternative personality constructs had any consistent significant effects on behavior across the two decisions. Third, we controlled for measures of cognitive ability. In political science, three measures of cognitive ability are widely used: need for cognition (Cacioppo and Petty Reference Cacioppo and Petty1982), need to evaluate (Jarvis and Petty Reference Jarvis and Petty1996), and political knowledge (cf. Zaller Reference Zaller1992). Again, however, the effect of imagination remained robust to the inclusion of interaction terms with these cognitive variables (after control: p = 0.067 and p = 0.033 with two-tailed tests for dictator and charity decisions, respectively). Furthermore, neither the alternative personality constructs nor the measures of cognitive ability had any consistently significant effects on behavior across the two decisions. In sum, these analyses suggest that the effects we report are specifically tied to individual differences in imagination and, consistent with theoretical arguments, that decoupled cognition plays a unique role in facilitating attitude–behavior consistency in the face of short-term economic incentives to forgo one's political principles.