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Unit 3 Lesson 2: Political & Behavioral Psychology
AIM: What are the sources of
political and social attitudes?

\Do Now: When you want to learn

more about a political or social

issue, where do you turn first for

information?

● In our last lesson in Unit 5 we talked about the

impact of attitudes on social and political behavior.

● For example, people may

○ vote for or against a candidate,
○ engage in protests or
○ advocate a specific opinion

● Question: What are the sources of these

attitudes?

Class Question 1

● Many sources come from everyday experience.

For example: your family.

● Work together as a group to come up with at

least one or two more sources, and let’s make a
class list.

● Copy down the ones that you hear during our

debrief that you didn’t already discuss as a
group.

Common sources

Identify one important attitude you hold about a social or political
issue from at least two of these sources:
● Family
● School
● Friends (including peer pressure)
● Social media
● Internet influencers, memes
● News media
● Religious texts
● Formative experiences (major life events, historical events)

Common sources - some

ideas, some attitudes?

The impact

of

formative

ex-

periences
on voting
patterns:
what

are the

most

importa

nt

years?
Why?

● Based on the previous chart, “Formative Experience Theory”

explains socio-political attitude formation as a function of
“flashbulb” experiences (think of events like “The Great
Recession” or “the COVID Pandemic Shutdown).”

● Social identity theory OTOH argues it is not experiences but

group membership that determines attitudes, basically a
“System 1” decision that is made without our conscious control.

● Let’s use the Pew “National Public Opinion Reference Survey” (NOPRS)

to explore these theories. (Open the NOPRS SPSS file in SPSS)

The impact of experiences,

how strong is it?

1. Create frequency for the following variables:

a. PARTY, CRIMESAFE and GUNSTRICT

2. Copy and paste images of the tables into your presentation
3. Write one hypothesis based on “Formative Experience

Theory” about the expected relationship between
CRIMESAFE as an IV and GUNSTRICT as a DV.

4. Write one hypothesis based on Social Identity Theory about

the expected relationship between PARTY as an IV and
GUNSTRICT as a DV.

Group presentation: From

theory to hypothesis

What is Crosstabs
1. One of the most important and analytically powerful (useful)

functions in all of SPSS

2. Crosstabs = creating a table with two variables or

“crosstabulating” them.

3. Allows you to see how one variable changes across the

categories of another variable.

4. Limited to CATEGORY VARIABLES (includes ordinal though).
5. Not useful for continuous variables (interval and scale)

A new function in SPSS and
Data Analysis: Crosstabs!

1. Working along with me as the demonstrator, create the

Crosstabs in order

2. Paste the crosstabs output into your presentation.
3. Let’s work together to complete the “five steps” [see next page].
4. As pairs or in threes, create slides that “accept/reject” the

hypotheses, and discuss why.

Analyzing evidence for our

hypotheses (group)

5 Points to Discuss when
Analyzing results, assessing hypotheses

1. What are the results?
2. Does the “direction” of the results support the

hypothesis? For categorical variables, are the “Counts” +/-
the “Expected?” as hypothesized?

3. How big is the “effect”: How many Adjusted Residuals are

<= -2 or >= 2? How big is the chi-square?

4. Is the result “statistically significant?” What is the

p-value of the chi-square?

5. Should the hypothesis be accepted or rejected? Justify

why based on the previous evidence.