Embodied Measurements of Ideological Positioning
- Brandon Batzloff, Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California Merced, Merced, California, United States
- Michael Spivey, Cognitive & Information Sciences, UC Merced, Merced, California, United States
AbstractPrior studies have shown tests for scales used to describe an individual’s ideological position are not replicable. We examined ideological positioning of individuals through two mouse tracking tasks. First, participants were asked to select from six ideologies, mixed with distractors, they believed described them. They were then shown ten defined traits of these ideologies. Next, participants were asked to choose between pairs of compared traits and assign them to a displayed ideology. The first task was to determine which ideologies participants were most closely associated with, while the second was used to determine how each individual defined ideologies. In this way, we were able to gain insight into how people define themselves when completing discrete tasks, such as answering political questionnaires. Results show differences in individual ideological definitions. We have begun grouping statistically similar responses. It is our hope that this data will help develop realistic scales of ideological positioning.