“Negativity Bias, Personality and Political Ideology”, 2022-05-09 ():
Research suggests that right-wing ideology is associated with negativity bias: a tendency to pay more attention and give more weight to negative versus positive stimuli. This work typically relies on either self-reported traits related to negativity bias in large, often-representative, samples or physiological and behavioral indicators of negativity bias in small convenience samples.
We extend this literature and examine the relationship of negativity bias to political ideology using 5 distinct behavioral measures of negativity bias in 4 national samples of US residents with a total analytical sample size of about 4,000 respondents. We also examine the association of these behavioral measures to 4 of the most common self-report measures of personality in the literature on ideology.
Across a wide range of tests, we find no consistent evidence for a relationship of negativity bias to either ideology or self-reported personality.