Voter Stereotypes

The present study explores the relation between voter demographics and personal values to the values held by political candidates who may not promote the same values as a voter's in-group. More specifically, we're looking at Christians' internal responses to voting for a candidate that does not hold Christian values. We hypothesize that Christians will change which values are important for a candidate to have when the candidate does not hold the same values as Christians, but does hold the same political party as the participant. We expect there not to be a value change when a candidate does not hold the same values as Christians and does not hold the same political party as the participant. After running a MANOVA, we found that our hypothesis was not supported. However, there was a significant difference between political parties on religious values, such that Republicans held higher religious values than Democrats. This research is beneficial because it helps us to understand voting behaviors. Value Changes as Justification for Opinions of Political Candidates

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Liberals have been found to value fairness and conservatives have been found to value loyalty and patriotism. When researchers presented participants with an article on pro-conservation intentions- a typical liberal stance, conservatives held the same conservation values and intentions as liberals when the article framed pro-conservation intentions as being a matter of loyalty and patriotism (Wolsko et al., 2016). If you view this study through the lens of cognitive dissonance theory, you can see that the conservative participant may have experienced dissonance when were given a paragraph that said pro-conservation intentions and loyalty/ patriotism are synonymous and they did not value conservation intentions, but valued loyalty and patriotism. In order to relieve this dissonance, they needed to value both loyalty/ patriotism and conservation