Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. Citizens are very sensitive to environmental contextual factors such as the title 'President' preceding 'Obama' in a newspaper head[...]
This book proposes and tests a theory of motivated political reasoning: when citizens think about political leaders, groups, and issues, their prior feelings spontaneously bias how information is encoded, retrieved, evaluated, and acted upon.[...]