The ideologically objectionable premise model: Predicting biased political judgments on the left and right

This paper introduces the ideologically objectionable premise model (IOPM), which predicts that biased political judgments will emerge on both the political left and right, but only when the premise of a judgment is not ideologically objectionable to the perceiver. The IOPM generates three hypothesized patterns of bias: biases among both those on the left and right, bias only among those on the right, and bias only among those on the left. These hypotheses were tested within the context of the dual process motivational model of ideological attitudes (DPM; Duckitt, 2001), which posits that right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) and social dominance orientation (SDO) are related but distinct ideological attitudes. Across two studies, all three IOPM hypotheses were tested and supported on the RWA ideological attitude dimension, and two of the three IOPM hypotheses were tested and supported on the SDO dimension. These findings indicate that the context of the judgment is an important determinant of whether biases emerge in political judgment.