Personifying the State: Consequences for Attitude Formation

摘要: Because states are abstract entities, they often require embodiment for mass publics and elites to understand them. This occurs as personification, where the state is associated with most salient figure in political system, but can also occur through institutions social groups. Surprisingly, there virtually no systematic empirical work on psychological consequences of or other forms embodiment. In this experiment, we investigate how various ways embodying influence attitude formation processes. Drawing on-line/memory-based processing entitativity literatures, hypothesize that personification should facilitate on-line stronger attitudes, whereas a parliamentary institution produce weaker attitudes formed memory-based fashion. The results support these hypotheses. Embodiment group produced inconsistent results. study provides first evidence widespread practice has robust potentially far-reaching attitudinal have meaningful implications strategic interaction, perception learning, change international realm.