ABSTRACT
This chapter explores three competing explanations for the ideo-attribution effect, that is, the dispositional, ideological script, and motivated reasoning hypotheses; and examines that political psychologists need to resist the tendency to assume that ideological differences always or even often arise from dispositionally different cognitive wiring of liberals and conservations. The ideological script hypothesis is consistent with the common image of citizens as cognitive misers, with little or no political knowledge. The College Bowl and essay attribution studies tested whether the ideo-attribution effect only emerges in political behaviors or if it also emerges when people make attributions for apoliticized phenomena. The 1987 pilot of the American National Election Study (ANES) survey included a number of open-ended items that used multiple probes that allowed for the possibility for people to make different inferences as they reflected on key question. The goal of this study was to see if cognitive load would attenuate previously observed ideological differences in willingness to help personally responsible.
