How Bad is Bad? Dispositional Negativity in Political Judgment

When citizens approach political decision-making tasks, they carry with them differing values and preferences, yielding heterogeneity in their assessments. This study explores one source of variation, the negativity bias, a response tendency in which individuals characteristically react more strongly to highly-salient negative information than to comparable positive information. In political science, most prior research on the negativity bias has been of two forms, either treating the bias as a universal, or seeking to identify correlates of individual-level variation. We advance a third track, one in which the individual-level negativity bias is viewed as a source of heterogeneity in the outcome of judgmental processes. If individual-level variation, labeled here as dispositional negativity, manifests itself in political decision-making, then variation in dispositional negativity may prompt otherwise similar citizens exposed to identical information to produce disparate responses. To explore this, we present a conceptual framework that clarifies the potential role of dispositional negativity in political judgment. Expectations arising from this framework are tested with data from vignette experiments included on two surveys: one with a national sample of Costa Ricans, and a second with respondents from three U.S. states.