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doi:10.1017/S0003055413000026

Politics in the Minds Eye: Imagination as a Link betweenSocial and Political CognitionMICHAEL BANG PETERSEN and LENE AARE Aarhus University

H

ow do modern individuals form a sense of the vast societies in which they live? Social cognitionhas evolved to make sense of small, intimate social groups, but in complex mass societies,

comparable vivid social cues are scarcer. Extant research on political attitudes and behavior hasemphasized media and interpersonal networks as key sources of cues. Extending a classical argument,we provide evidence for the importance of an alternative and internal source: imagination. With a focuson social welfare, we collected survey data from two very different democracies, the United States andDenmark, and conducted several studies using explicit, implicit, and behavioral measures. By analyzingthe effects of individual differences in imagination, we demonstrate that political cognition relies on vivid,mental simulations that engage evolved social and emotional decision-making mechanisms. It is in theminds eye that vividness and engagement are added to peoples sense of mass politics.

Modern society is a society of strangers. Livingin large-scale societies made up of millions,we continuously interact with people we do

not know, and our welfare is affected by people wenever meet. From the perspective of deep history,this is an unprecedented condition. As a species, weevolved in small groups (Dunbar 1998; Kelly 1995), andcorrespondingly, human social psychology most likelyevolved to operate on the basis of the intimate socialexperiences within such groups (Fowler & Schreiber2008; Kurzban 2001; Petersen 2012). Yet, despite ournature as small group social animals, mass society re-mains viable. How is this? The key, we suggest here,is that, although we cannot directly view most fellowcitizens, we see them in our minds eye. On the basis ofthese mental simulations, our rich, sophisticated social

psychology enables us to feel, reason, and judge aboutthe mass societies in which we live. This argument isan extension of a classical view running through a cen-tury of social science research. Anderson (1983), forexample, forcefully argued that the feeling of commu-nity underlying the modern nation-state only emergedbecause the print press allowed for the disseminationof information that enabled people to vividly imaginethose others living withinthe states territory. Similarly,Hunt (2007) argued that the sense of a shared human

Michael Bang Petersen is Associate Professor in the Departmentof Political Science and Government, Aarhus University, BartholinsAlle 7, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark (michael@ps.au.dk).

Lene Aare is Assistant Professor in the Department of PoliticalScience and Government,Aarhus University,Bartholins Alle 7, 8000Aarhus C, Denmark (leneaaroe@ps.au.dk).

The authors would like to acknowledge the helpful guidance andadvice received from Pascal Boyer, Jamie Druckman, Stanley Feld-man, Ann Giessing, Pete Hatemi, John Hibbing, Mathew Hibbing,Bryan Jones, Robert Klemmensen, Jeff Mondak, Dan Myers, JesperNielsen, Asbjrn Sonne Nrgaard, Rune Slothuus, and Claes deVreese, as well as participants in the Interacting Minds Seminarsat Aarhus University and at the Center for Evolutionary Psychol-ogy at the University of CaliforniaSanta Barbara, five anonymousreviewers, and APSR co-editors Jennifer Hochschild and Valerie J.Martinez-Ebers. The data collection for this article was financed bytwo research grants from the Danish Research Council to MichaelBang Petersen and Lene Aare, respectively. The authors have con-tributed equally to all parts of the research.

dignity underlying the politics of indissoluble humanrights was influenced by the invention of the novel.The novel allowed people to more vividly imagine the

inner life of others and, hence, see the shared human-ity through their minds eye. Finally, regarding publicopinion, Lippmann (1922, 43) noted how our opinionscover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greaternumber of things, than we can directly observe, andthus individuals are left to rely on the pictures intheir heads of policy-relevant events, places, and tar-get groups. Like Anderson (1983) and Hunt (2007),Lippmann (1922, 43) proposed that the cognitive featof mentally picturing the unseen emerges from the in-terplay of twodistinct processesand is pieced togetherout of what others have reported and what we canimagine.

Current research has made great progress in under-standing how the reporting of otherssocial networks,political elites, and news mediaprovides a basis forpolitical cognition in mass society (e.g., Druckman &Nelson 2003; Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Mutz 1998; Nel-son et al. 1997; Zaller 1992). In this article, we providethe first systematic test of the argument that a secondand inner process, imagination, plays an equally crucialrole in making mass political cognition possible.

On the basis of recent advances in the cognitivesciences, we argue that citizens use imaginationoftenreferred to as decoupled cognitionto generate vividmental simulations of relevant events and groups inmass politics (Boyer 2008; Buckner and Carroll 2007;

Cosmides and Tooby 2000; Schacter and Addis 2007).With these vivid mental representations as input, psy-chological mechanisms of social cognition facilitate cit-izens reasoning about mass political issues. By relyingon their minds eye, average citizens can reason asthough mass political issues resemble the small-scalesocial problems they evolved to navigate, and thus theyare able to form coherent political attitudes despitetheir lack of substantive political knowledge.

In testing this argument empirically, we rely on therecent observation from personality research in bothpsychology and political science that genetic and en-vironmental differences create stable individual-level

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variation in traits such as imaginative capacity (Gerberet al. 2011; Mondak et al. 2010). If decoupled cognitionis a key ingredient in the formation of political atti-tudes and behavior, individual differences in imagina-tion should track important differences in how citizensthink, feel, and act in the domain of mass politics.

In the following section we develop the theoreticalargument for decoupled cognition as the link between

social and political cognition. Next, we show how weacross four measurement studies developed and val-idated a scale for measuring individual differences inimaginationthe short imagination or S-IM scaleandpresent our set of empirical predictions on how imagi-nation is expected to facilitate the use of social cogni-tion by helping individuals simulate vivid social cues. Inour tests, we focused on the issue of social welfare. Tomaximize cross-cultural leverage, we tested our predic-tions using comparable, nationally representative websurveys collected in the United States and Denmark.We conducted further tests with students in lab settingsas well as in a survey experiment among a sample ofthe general Danish population. In total, we conducted

seven main studies (in five separate samples) based onanalysis of both opinion and behavioral measures. Ourfindings support that imagination facilitates the use ofsocial cognition in public opinion formation by allow-ing people to feed vivid mental simulations of unseenevents, groups, and individuals into basic mechanismsfor social cognition. For a more detailed overview ofthe studies see Appendix 1.

PUBLIC OPINION AND SOCIAL COGNITION:DECOUPLED COGNITION AS THE LINK

Current evidence suggests that substantial aspects ofhuman social cognition have evolved over the courseof our biological evolution to help our ancestorssolve recurring social problems relating to cooperationand conflict (Fowler and Schreiber 2008; Hatemi andMcDermott 2011). For most of human evolutionaryhistory, our ancestors lived in relatively small groupsof perhaps between 30 and 250 individuals (Dunbar1998; Kelly 1995). Evolved parts of human social cog-nition such as heuristics and emotions would thereforebe adapted to life in small groups and designed to takeadvantage of the cues available in intimate face-to-faceinteractions (Haley and Fessler 2005; Kurzban 2001).In line with this argument, studies in social psychol-

ogy have shown how social decisions and emotionalreactions in everyday life are heavily influenced by thekinds of cues that are uniquely available in face-to-face interactions, such as the presence of bystanders(Haley and Fessler 2005), eye contact (Kurzban 2001),facial expressions such as smiles (Scharlemann et al.2001), facial features such as attractiveness and mas-culinity (Sell, Tooby, and Cosmides 2009; Wilson andEckel 2006),and other kinds of nonverbal cues (Brown,Palameta, and Moore 2003).

In recent years, evidence has been provided that so-cial cognition not only helps people navigate in small-scale everyday life but also helps citizens feel and rea-

son about mass politics (Fowler and Schreiber 2008;Hatemi and McDermott 2011; Kuklinski and Quirk2000; Petersen 2012; Schreiber 2007). Yet, to the extentthat mass political cognition emerges from more basicmechanisms for social decision making, these mecha-nisms are deployed in a radically less intimate contextthan the context in which they evolved (small groups)and in which they normally operate (everyday life):

Modern politics is played out in mass societies consist-ing of millions of inhabitants, in which citizens will mostoften lack intimate, vivid knowledge of groups andevents being debated (Lippmann 1922, 43; Kuklinskiand Quirk 2000, 15657; Zaller 1992, 6).

This informational deficit is far from trivial, andindeed current research suggests that a lack of vividsocial cues normally inhibits social cognition. For ex-ample, studies using fMRI have shown how activity inbrain regions related to emotional processinga coreelement in social cognition (Haidt 2003)are downreg-ulated when decision contexts resemble face-to-faceinteractions less (e.g., de Quervain et al. 2004; Sanfeyet al. 2003). Outside the laboratory, this effect has been

validated by research on group efficiency showing thatsocial and emotional forms of coordination in groupsare inhibited when groups do not interact face to face(Baltes et al. 2002).

How, then, do modern individuals in the course ofpolitical opinion formation compensate for the lackof vivid cues that ordinarily fuel social cognitive pro-cesses? In cognitive psychology, researchers are in-creasingly coming to understand the compensatorystrategies that individuals use when making decisionsin contexts with sparse information. These researcherspoint to the role played by internal psychologicalprocesses, often referred to as decoupled cognition

(Buckner and Carroll 2007; Cosmides and Tooby 2000;Schacter and Addis 2007). Their research suggests that,when cues are absentyetarerequired for decision mak-ing, people rely heavily on intense mental simulationsof the absent cues as they extract, recombine andreassemble stored memory content into imaginaryevents that never occurred (Schacter and Addis 2007,27). In short, in sparse information contexts, peopleengage in decoupled cognition to imagine what theycannot see and then feed these internally generatedrepresentations and beliefs into more basic cognitiveand emotional mechanisms.

More formally, decoupled cognition involves repre-sentations that are (1) highly explicit in the sense of

relying on thorough declarative memory searches, (2)imagined in the sense of operating without direct sen-sory input, and (3) vivid in the sense of being emotion-ally engaging.1 Importantly, these features mean thatimaginative decoupled processes could help bridge the

1 These features are critical, because decoupled cognition presum-ably evolved to help us re-experience the past and experience thefuture (Boyer 2008, 219) in order for us to plan ahead, avoid pastmistakes, and prepare ourselves. To plan beyond the present, weneed imagined, decoupled representations that are vivid enough tohelp us simulate our reactions given the possible outcomes (Boyer2008; Cosmides and Tooby 2000).

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gap between the informational needs of our social cog-nition and the sparse supply of cues in modern masspolitics. Imaginative decoupled processes could addvividness and flavor to the otherwise meager informa-tion often available during political opinion formationand, hence, help engage the more basic cognitive andemotional mechanisms comprising social cognition.

By emphasizing the role of internalpsychological

sources of cues, we expand the traditional emphasis ofpolitical scientists on the role of the media and socialnetworks asexternalsources of cues (e.g., Beck et al.2002; de Vreese and Boomgarten 2006; Iyengar andKinder 1987). Such extant lines of research have pro-vided important evidence that external information,especially media stories containing vivid social cues(Iyengar 1991), increase the effects of basic psycho-logical processessuch as emotionson public opinion(Aare 2011; Gross 2008). Importantly, however, theseexternal sources of cues often cannot facilitate opinionformation if unaided by decoupled cognition. First, al-though the print media and social networks allow fordissemination of indirect verbal descriptions of politi-

cal events and groups, research suggests that many ver-bal descriptions require mental simulation to engagepeople (Green & Brock 2000; see also the later discus-sion of validation Study A). Second, although televi-sion in particular can offer a source of vivid social cues,political attitude formation often takes place unaidedby such technology (e.g., at the polls, over the dinnertable, at political meetings, when answering an opinionsurvey, or when signing a petition or donating moneyto a cause). Thus in many contexts for political attitudeformation, vivid social cues from the media are notimmediately accessible, but need to be pieced togetherand simulatedfrom memory searches. In these contexts

the need for decoupled cognition is not relieved.

MEASURING DECOUPLED COGNITION: ANINDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES PERSPECTIVE

Imaginative decoupled processes arguably play a keyrole in public opinion formation across individuals. Yetprior research has produced ample evidence that thecognitive capabilities of individuals differ quite sub-stantially, in no small part due to genetic factors (e.g.,Wainwright et al. 2008). The literature on individualdifferences has often discussed this variation with ref-erence to imagination (or, at times, fantasy), which

constitutes an everyday denotation of the same setof processes that we refer to as decoupled cognition.Although a range of approaches to the assessment ofsuch individual differences exist in the psychologicalliterature, there is now widespread acceptance that theBig Five model is one of the strongest taxonomies ofhuman personality variation (for applications in politi-cal science, see Gerber et al., 2011; Mondak et al. 2010).The Big Five model includes imagination as a subcom-ponentof theopennessto experience factor(see, e.g.,Goldberg 1999; McCrae and Costa 1996). As McCrae(1994, 258) argues, open people are characterized byan active pursuit of novelty as well as flexible cogni-

tive processing, such as divergent thinking, in whichremote associations are easily made, and . . .synesthe-sia, in which the distinctions between different sensorymodalities are blurred. The latter components areclosely related to decoupled cognition as defined here.

Individual differences in imagination are importantbecause they provide a window into how decoupledcognition shapes mass political attitudes and behavior.

If decoupled cognition is used during opinion forma-tion in order for social cognition to operate, individualdifferences in the ability to imagine should track howand, in particular, how easily individuals form politi-cal attitudes. Indeed, the literature on how differencesin openness to experience influence political behaviorhas provided important evidence that these differencespredict a variety of measures of political engagementsuch that open people are more likely to be politicallyengaged (Gerber et al. 2011; Mondak and Halperin2008; Mondak et al. 2010). Although these findingsare consistent with the argument advocated here, theynonetheless provide only indirect evidence. Accordingto McCrae (1994), imagination constitutes only one-

half of the general openness to experience trait, whichalso includes the novelty-seeking component of adven-turousness (Goldberg 1999). To validate our account,we need tests focusing directly on the relationship be-tweenindividual differencesin the imaginationsubtraitand differences in dynamics during public opinion for-mation (for a similar approach, see Hirsch et al. 2010).

A first step in providing such validation is buildinga scale that allows us to measure differences in imagi-nation. Our ambition was to create a short but reliablescale that could easily be included in future surveys andapplied cross-nationally with satisfactory reliability (cf.Mondak et al. 2010). As our point of departure, we

used the primary open-access inventory of personalityscales, the International Personality Item Pool (IPIP),which includes measures for all traits included in theBig Five model (Goldberg 1999). Consistent with ourtheoretical argument, we selected the three standarditems from the IPIP imagination scale that focusedmost directly on the decoupled cognition aspect ofimaginative processes: I have a vivid imagination,I do not have a good imagination, and I have dif-ficulty imagining things. To these items we addeda fourth self-formulated item: I can easily imaginepersons I hear or read about. Thus, all four state-ments focused exclusively on the decoupled cognitionaspect of imaginative processes. To obtain a scale, we

asked participants how accurately each statement de-scribed them on a 7-point scale ranging from veryinaccurate to very accurate and summarized theanswers as appropriate (see Online Appendix A1 forfurther discussion).2

Given that the short imagination (S-IM) scale reliespredominantly on well-tested items from the psycho-metric literature, its validity should be ensured. Still,to investigate the properties of this short-form scale,we ran four validation studies (Studies AD), each

2 The online appendices can be accessed at http://www.journals.cambridge.org/psr2013010.

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providing detailed tests of the predictive, convergent,and divergent validity of the S-IM scale.3 Across allstudies, the imagination scale had satisfactory reliabil-ity (Study A: = 0.74; Study B: = 0.77; Study C: =0.78; Study D: = 0.79).

The aim of Study A was to provide a face validdemonstration that the S-IM scale does in fact gaugeindividual differences in imagination. Because we

wanted to establish the predictive validity of our mea-sure outside a political context, we focused on an ev-eryday situation in which decoupled cognition is en-gaged: the reading of fiction. Participants read a shortfairytale-like story. Afterward, they first answerednine items from the well-validated transportation scale(Green and Brock 2000), which measures the extentto which readers of a narrative become immersed intothe story and see the action of the story unfoldingbefore them and respond emotionally to story events(Mazzocco et al. 2010, 361; see also Green and Brock2000). Second, they engaged in two free associationtasks in which they were asked to list the words theywould use to describe one of the main characters and

the story as a whole to another person. Finally, theycompleted the S-IM scale and answered a range ofother questions about their personality and cognitiveabilities.

Analyses showed that subjects values on the S-IMscale significantly and strongly correlated with differ-ences in the degree to which they felt mentally trans-ported into the story (r = 0.43, p < 0.001) and withthe number of associations they freely recollected todescribe the human main character (r = 0.33, p