Heroes and villains: motivated projection of political identities

2025/03/19 by Stuart J. Turnbull‐Dugarte, Markus Wagner · 2 voices · 7 citations
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Algorithm #Computer science #Epistemology #Law #Leadership, Courage, and Heroism Studies #Media Influence and Health #Philosophy #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Projection (relational algebra) #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Sociology

paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/psrm.2025.10

published in Political Science Research and Methods 14(1), 1-21 (Cambridge University Press)

openalex publication_date 2025/03/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/02

Abstract

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, so that projected beliefs and identities may matter as much as actual ones. 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 in two pre-registered experimental studies. In Study 1, we rely on a unique visual conjoint experiment in Britain and the USA that asks participants to assign partisanship and political ideology to heroes and villains from film and fiction. 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. This is largely driven by negative out-group counter-projection rather than positive in-group projection. As political projection can lead to the solidification of antagonistic political identities, our findings are relevant for understanding dynamics in group-based animosity and affective polarization.

Citations

• Negative Political Identities and Costly Political Action
• The Polarizing Effect of Partisan Echo Chambers
• Instrumentally Inclusive: The Political Psychology of Homonationalism
• The Way we Were: How Histories of Co-Governance Alleviate Partisan Hostility
• Divided by the Vote: Affective Polarization in the Wake of the Brexit Referendum
• ‘Fear and loathing across party lines’ (also) in Europe: Affective polarisation in European party systems
• The Home as a Political Fortress: Family Agreement in an Era of Polarization
• The Parties in Our Heads: Misperceptions about Party Composition and Their Consequences
• Americans, Not Partisans: Can Priming American National Identity Reduce Affective Polarization?
• Political Homophily in Social Relationships: Evidence from Online Dating Behavior
• Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization
• Social Categorization Moderates Social Projection

Cited by

• Selectively (il)liberal: theory and evidence on nativist disidentification
• The Dark Face of a Cultural Festival: Xenophobic Representations and Hate Discourse Against Catalans and Valencian Nationalists in Fallas
• Social projection and political behaviour in low-information environments

Discussions

• Who does Spiderman vote for? Who you vote for. In a new paper w/ @markuswagner.bsky.social we show that people engage in motivated projection of political identities. In the absence of explicit info [bsky, 254 points, 12 comments]
• Is Dr Doom a Republican or a Democrat? Does Spiderman vote for Labour or the Tories? The authors have such a clever experimental design, and it is so self-evident in retrospect that it is puzzling i [bsky, 3 points, 2 comments]

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• Seeing Red (And Blue): Partisan Identity, Emotions, and Selective Exposure
• Negative Political Identities and Costly Political Action
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• The role of moral identity in ideological obsession and violent extremism