OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Join Zoom Meeting: zoom.us/j/97156099278?pwd=bE1DNElhVmRRWkl1Q1lVSEI3UlRLdz09
Meeting ID: 971 5609 9278 Passcode: 324627
Abstract: Most research on political identities studies how individuals react to knowing others’ political allegiances. However, in most contexts political views and identities are hidden and only inferred, which implies that projected identities may matter as much as actual ones. In this paper, we argue that individuals engage in motivated political projection: the identities people project onto target individuals are strongly conditional on the valence of that target. We test this theoretical proposition via two original pre-registered experimental studies. In Study 1, we rely on a unique visual conjoint experiment in Britain and the US that asks participants to assign partisanship and political ideology to fictional heroes and villains. In Study 2, we present British voters with a vignette that manipulates a subject’s valence and solicits (false) recall information related to the subject’s political identity. We find strong support for motivated political projection in both studies, especially among strong identifiers. Our findings hold both good and bad news for democratic stability: political projection provides grounds to fear further solidification of antagonistic political identities but also suggests potential paths towards reducing partisan hostility.
