Department of Political Science
Howard Lavine
Associate Professor of Political Science and Psychology
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, N.Y. 11794-4392
(631) 632-4304 (office)
(631) 632-4116 (fax)
howard.lavine@stonybrook.edu
- Curriculum Vitae [pdf ]
Course Offerings and Syllabi
Type of Class |
Course Number |
Course Name |
| Undergraduate | POL 348 | Political Beliefs |
| Undergraduate | POL 349 | Social Psychology of Politics |
| Doctoral | POL 610 | Foundation: Experimental Methods |
| Doctoral | POL 632 | Mass Communication and Attitude Change |
| Doctoral | POL 678 | Mass Belief Systems |
Research Interests
Among the most important insights in the psychology of decision making is that preference judgments are reached through a diverse and flexible set of cognitive strategies. In my recent work, I have proposed a general psychological framework of political choice, one that considers how decision strategies are contingent on variation in political engagement and attitude strength, key aspects of the political environment (e.g., the degree to which an electoral context subsidizes the voter’s information costs), and most important, on the nature of voters’ goals as they seek to learn about and appraise political candidates, issues, and events.
The core argument is that political reasoning involves a tension between strivings for three generally conflicting motivations: efficiency, accuracy, and belief perseverance. Ideally, citizens would like to make “correct” judgments that reflect reality and their substantive values, while at the same time making frugal use of cognitive resources and leaving current beliefs intact. In many instances, voters can manage to maximize these goals by relying on the simple but powerful cue of party identification. However, we find that many citizens experience internalized conflict toward the party labels (quite apart from levels of partisan strength and political sophistication), rendering partisan cues unreliable judgment guides. While this ambivalence may occur for a variety of reasons, the most politically potent manifestation stems from a disjuncture between voters’ long-term identification with a political party and their short-term evaluations of the party’s capacity to govern and to deliver benefits to the public.
In a series of papers (and a book in progress), my colleagues and I show that partisan ambivalence is a fundamental aspect of mass belief systems and a principal determinant of the way voters “decide how to decide” across a variety of political judgment contexts. By degrading the heuristic value of partisan identity as a political cue, partisan ambivalence motivates voters to step up their information processing; in particular, to think more deeply (i.e., “systematically) and objectively about their political choices, leading ultimately to normatively better political decisions. For example, in electoral contexts, ambivalent voters pay greater attention to the policy content of campaigns and rely on a larger and more diverse set of factors in reaching their decisions. In judging economic performance, ambivalence virtually eliminates partisan bias and sharply heightens responsiveness to real economic signals. More broadly, ambivalent voters are more sensitive to the political environment, more willing to acquire new information, and more likely to update their political preferences and beliefs in accord with rational models.
I also have a longstanding interest in the psychological nature, origins and political dynamics of authoritarianism. In several articles published over the last decade, I have explored the hypothesis that authoritarians are especially sensitive to various forms of implicit and explicit situational threat. From automatic priming experiments to studies of message-based persuasion, selective perception, voting, and policy reasoning, my colleagues and I find that threat magnifies the cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral effects of authoritarianism. In my current work, I show that the influence of racial diversity on policy attitudes is conditioned by levels of authoritarianism but rarely by economic markers (e.g., income). The pattern of findings indicates that the political consequences of racial conflict more likely stem from cultural and symbolic rather than instrumental (i.e., realistic group conflict) motives.