THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OF CONTEXTUAL EFFECTS

How do the attributes BE a particular geographic location, such as the class composition of a community, affect the political orientation of individuals? My study addresses this question by developing and testing a micro-level explanation for how people learn about their social environment. Unlike existing explanations which rely on social interaction as a mechanism, my model sets out an explicitly psychological process by which contextual influences are transmitted. The empirical evidence supports the central tenets of the model that the social environment can influence individual partisan cognition and, in turn, partisan cognition facilitates learning about the partisan nature of the social environment.