The project will investigate a central question for democratic government: how citizens learn and form opinions about political choices. The convergence of low-information models of rationality and recent work in cognitive neuroscience indicates that the relationship between emotion and cognition is central to political information processing. Judgmental heuristics are often used by individuals to reason about choices when, as is usually the case, they possess incomplete information and limited ability to consider it. Emotions function as timesaving cues, or short cuts, in the cognitive process of integrating old and new information. Because emotions often operate pre-consciously, research into their role demands experimental conditions under which the investigator has greater control of the informational environment than can typically be achieved in survey-based research. In this work, experimental research will test the relative importance of these factors in political choice. The experiment will assess whether emotional and cognitive reactions are distinct and salient factors in the process of attitude formation. The experiment will also test previous survey-based evidence that anxiety can affect political learning by inhibiting prior attitudes and focusing attention on new information.
