Americans' Perceptions of Presidential Candidates: A Test of the Projection Hypothesis

Abstract

According to psychological theories of cognitive consistency, voters are likely to overestimate the degree to which political candidates they like agree with their own policy preferences, and to overestimate the degree to which political candidates they oppose disagree with their own policy preferences. This paper reviews and critiques the literature evaluating these hypotheses, referred to as positive and negative projection. Then it reports results of a new empirical investigation that applied improved analytic methods to survey data on three issues collected during the 1984 American presidential election. Analyses using traditional methods replicated previous findings of both positive and negative projection, but improved analyses indicated that neither positive nor negative projection occurred. The vast majority of voters were accurate in their candidate perceptions, especially political experts and citizens to whom an issue was personally important. These findings provide further evidence of the generally high accuracy of social perception, particularly among individuals who are especially attentive to a stimulus.

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