People who identify as liberal or conservative often appear worlds apart in how they think, but new research suggests they respond to political endorsements in much the same way. Although conservatives in the study tended to report more rigid thinking styles, liberals and conservatives were largely equally likely to shift their policy views to match the stated positions of their own party. The findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, indicate that at least one key psychological process behind partisan opinion operates similarly across the ideological spectrum.
The research was conducted at Michigan State University by Aymin Triki, then an undergraduate research assistant; Abigail L. Cassario, then a PhD candidate; and Mark J. Brandt, then an associate professor who ran the lab where Triki worked. Triki, the study’s lead author, is now a lab manager at the We-Search Lab at Harvard University, Cassario is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois Chicago, and Brandt is a professor of political psychology at Tilburg University.
“I’m proud of Aymin for leading this project and writing an excellent paper describing our work together,” Brandt told PsyPost.
The team aimed to explore the psychological mechanisms behind “party cues.” A party cue is a piece of information indicating whether a political party or its leaders support or oppose a specific policy. Learning that your own party supports a proposal generally makes you more likely to support it, while learning that the opposing party supports it makes you less likely to agree.
Psychologists have offered two main explanations for why party cues work. The first is that they act as a mental shortcut, allowing voters to skip the hard work of analyzing complex policies by simply trusting a group that generally shares their interests. The second explanation is that people are motivated to be good group members, and following a party endorsement is a way to express loyalty and protect their social identity.
“There is a long-running argument in political psychology about whether liberals and conservatives are characterized by different psychological processes,” Brandt explained. “That is, rather than just being different in terms of their values and policy positions, also being different in the psychological processes that drive their decisions and attitudes.”
The “asymmetry perspective” proposes that liberals and conservatives differ in deep-seated psychological ways, not just in their values. According to this view, conservative ideology tends to attract people with more rigid thinking styles, such as a stronger desire for firm, definite answers and less inclination to second-guess their first instincts. Some psychologists have argued that this profile, along with a greater emphasis on group loyalty and authority, should make conservatives more likely to rely on party cues.
Whether that rigidity shows up in how people actually handle political information is less settled. A study covered by PsyPost in 2025 found that more conservative people updated their beliefs slightly less in response to new factual evidence, though the difference was very small.
An opposing “symmetry perspective” argues that liberals and conservatives process political information using the same basic psychological tools, even if they apply them toward different goals. A 2018 meta-analysis, which pooled the results of 51 experiments, concluded that liberals and conservatives were equally likely to judge identical information more favorably when it supported their side. But the authors of a 2019 commentary argued that the experiments in that analysis often relied on a narrow, unrepresentative set of policy issues, which may have hidden real differences between the two groups.
Triki, Cassario, and Brandt set out to address that criticism by testing party cue effects across a wide range of contemporary issues while also measuring participants’ thinking styles. “Prior work has examined ideological differences in party cues, but we wanted to do a more comprehensive study,” Brandt said. “In particular, we wanted to test these effects across a wide range of issues currently important in American politics. This way we can be sure that our results are not due to the specifics of a given policy and instead we can be confident in understanding how ideology and party cues intersect across a wide range of policies.”
The researchers first re-analyzed data from two earlier experiments, conducted in 2018 and 2020, that together included more than 4,300 participants and more than 80 policy issues. Both samples were recruited with the aim of resembling the U.S. population demographically. Participants rated their support for policies such as raising the minimum wage or privatizing veterans’ health care on a 1-to-7 scale. For randomly selected issues, they first learned where the two parties, or Barack Obama and Donald Trump, stood.
These analyses pointed toward symmetry. Democrats and Republicans shifted toward their own party’s position and away from the opposing party’s to essentially the same degree. On individual issues, conservatives sometimes responded more strongly and liberals sometimes did, in roughly equal numbers. A measure of liberal-conservative self-identification in one dataset also showed no difference between the groups, though that result was less conclusive.
“The overall party cue effect was reliable, but small,” Brandt noted. “It was the equivalent to .3 scale points on a 1-7 scale. However, this is just the average.”
“For some policies, the effect is much smaller (nearer to zero) and for others the effect is much larger (an effect larger than 1 scale point on a 1-7 scale),” he continued. “These larger effects would represent very large effects in the experimental literature on attitude change.”
To test whether particular thinking styles might still make a difference, the researchers ran a third experiment in August 2024 with 1,659 participants recruited through Prolific, an online research platform. This was a convenience sample, meaning participants were not selected to mirror the national population, though the researchers recruited roughly equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats. The experiment used 37 real policy issues on which Joe Biden and Donald Trump took opposing positions. For some issues, participants were told where “Democratic leaders” and “Republican leaders” stood.
The researchers measured ideology in four ways: party identification, self-placement on a liberal-to-conservative scale, right-wing authoritarianism, and progressive values. Right-wing authoritarianism reflects a tendency to defer to established authorities, value tradition, and favor harsh treatment of people who break social norms, while the progressive values scale captures an identity-focused form of left-wing ideology.
To assess thinking styles, participants completed a short reasoning test built around questions where the intuitive answer is wrong. They also completed questionnaires measuring need for closure, which is a desire for firm answers and a dislike of ambiguity, and dogmatism, which is the tendency to treat one’s own beliefs as unquestionably true.
In this sample, conservatives showed the profile that the asymmetry perspective predicts. Compared with liberals, they did worse on the reasoning test and reported a higher need for closure and more dogmatism. Conservatives, whether identified by party or self-placement, were also more responsive to party cues than liberals, as were people high in right-wing authoritarianism, while the progressive values measure showed no difference. Participants with a higher need for closure or more dogmatism also followed cues more closely, though results for the reasoning test were inconclusive.
This result conflicted with the first two analyses. When the researchers limited the analysis to nine issues that also appeared in the 2020 experiment, the difference persisted, suggesting the choice of issues did not explain it. Instead, they suspected the online convenience sample might not reflect the broader population, or that conservatives had become more responsive to party cues since the earlier data were collected.
To find out, the team ran a fourth experiment with 1,389 participants recruited using quotas to match the U.S. population on age, gender, race and ethnicity, and region. It used the same 37 issues and the same psychological measures as the third experiment, with additional attention checks.
Once again, conservatives did worse on the reasoning test and reported a higher need for closure and more dogmatism than liberals. However, the difference in how the two groups responded to party cues disappeared: whether ideology was measured by party or by liberal-conservative self-placement, liberals and conservatives were equally swayed by party endorsements. Reasoning test scores showed no link to how strongly people followed cues, and there was no evidence that need for closure or dogmatism made a difference, although those estimates were less precise. The progressive values measure gave inconclusive results.
“Notably, our core finding is that liberals and conservatives do not differ substantially,” Brandt emphasized. “In other words, the strength of party cue effects does not differ between liberals and conservatives. We do not think there is a practical difference in the size of the effect of party cues between liberals and conservatives.”
The finding that conservatives reported more rigid thinking styles is in line with a study covered by PsyPost in 2022, which found greater cognitive rigidity among Trump supporters than among supporters of liberal candidates, though that study looked at support for specific 2020 presidential candidates rather than general ideology. The overall symmetry in responses to party cues is also in line with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, in which liberals and conservatives alike rated political opponents as less moral than members of their own party, even after being treated fairly by them in an economic game. That study examined moral judgments rather than responses to party endorsements.
“We found ideological similarities in a specific psychological process. This is not an argument that all ideologies are the same,” Brandt cautioned.
“The liberals and conservatives in our samples differ from each other in other ways,” he said. “They support different policies. They follow different political leaders. And they cared more about different types of policies.”
The exception was right-wing authoritarianism. In both the third and fourth experiments, people scoring high on this measure followed party cues more strongly than those scoring low. The researchers considered whether this reflects a tendency to obey authority figures, but the part of the scale measuring submission to authority did not stand out from the others.
“This measure captures a type of conservatism that is particularly obedient to conservative authorities and aggressive in response to people who violate conservative norms,” Brandt observed. “Although we do not have an explanation for why this measure differed from the other measures of conservative ideology, it may be the case that there are particular types of conservatism that are more susceptible to party cues than others.”
Because the study covered so many issues, the researchers could also explore why differences between liberals and conservatives showed up on some topics but not others. “An advantage to looking at many different issues is that we can see if there are some issues with ideological differences and others without such differences,” Brandt said.
In these exploratory analyses, differences tended to emerge on issues where one group already held stronger views before seeing any cue. On those issues, the group with stronger initial views shifted less, either because they were more committed to their position or because they had little room left to move. In one dataset that also measured how aware people were of each policy, the group that was more aware of a given policy tended to shift less. The authors note that these analyses were not planned in advance and need to be replicated.
“One thing we found is that when an ideological group has a strong opinion on the issue, then they are less likely to be affected by party cues,” Brandt added. “This gives us insight into where we might expect people to be more or less likely to be affected by party cues.”
There are a few other things to keep in mind. The experiments measured how people’s stated attitudes shifted in response to party cues, but not whether those shifts translate into behaviors such as voting or protesting, where liberals and conservatives could still differ. The researchers also used accurate, real-world party positions, so the cues may often have matched what participants already believed. Future studies might examine how people respond to cues that run against their prior views, or to false information about where their party stands.
The conclusions also rest most heavily on three of the four experiments. The authors gave less weight to the third experiment because further analyses suggested that conservatives recruited through Prolific responded unusually strongly to party cues compared with liberals in that sample and with both groups in the other samples. The study also did not include every possible measure of ideology, such as left-wing authoritarianism, and all of the samples were from the United States.
“The goal of my lab is to understand how belief systems work,” said Brandt, who directs The Belief System Lab. “Major ongoing projects in the lab aim to map the structure of belief systems and to use that information to predict and understand the dynamics of political attitudes.”
The study, “American liberals and conservatives have different cognitive styles, but (mostly) respond the same to party cues,” was authored by Aymin Triki, Abigail L. Cassario, and Mark J. Brandt.