Does the heart rule the mind?: Affective and cognitive influences on political attitude formation

This dissertation investigates the influences of affect and need for cognition on political attitudes. While certain variations in individual characteristics (interpersonal heterogeneity) are commonly recognized, such as level of political knowledge and the ability to manipulate it, the differences across issues themselves (what can be termed interissue heterogeneity) are not. Affect holds potential as a major systematic influence on attitude formation that varies by issue and is independent of individual informational and cognitive variation. Also not commonly recognized is the notion of a varying disposition among individuals in their tendency to engage in and enjoy thinking, or their need for cognition.;A new explanatory framework developed herein, the Affect-Cognition-Knowledge (ACK) model of political attitude formation, bridges the gap between these affective and cognitive impacts on judgments via the elaboration likelihood model, which is widely used in research on attitude formation in social psychology. It incorporates these concepts and informational variation in that it posits that individuals' issue-mediated affective state, need for cognition, and political knowledge determine the manner in which they process considerations attendant to that issue, with resulting implications for core phenomena of public opinion that scholars have long wrestled with: attitude consistency, stability, and abstraction. For practical purposes, this research focuses on attitude consistency as the main dependent variable of interest.;To test the ACK model, approximately 600 undergraduate students were surveyed and the results analyzed using various statistical techniques. There exists moderate support for the theoretical claim that affectivity is inherent to and varies by issue, at least more so than by individual. Not only does this in turn substantiate the concept of interissue heterogeneity, but also the role of issue affectivity as an independent variable in the model. In addition, political knowledge, need for cognition, and issue affectivity each independently increase attitude consistency, substantiating the general thrust of the ACK model. Taken as a whole, the results support the model's basic premise that more so than political knowledge, need for cognition and issue affectivity each independently affect attitude consistency.