A multi‑part study from the United States suggests that liberals and conservatives respond to party endorsements in surprisingly similar ways, even as conservatives tend to report more rigid thinking. The researchers conclude that the key psychological process driving open or closed attitudes toward policy is broadly the same across the ideological spectrum when people are exposed to party cues.
The work, conducted at Michigan State University, examined how people react to cues from political parties. The team, led by Aymin Triki, then an undergraduate research assistant, with Abigail L. Cassario and Mark J. Brandt, sought to understand how party endorsements shape policy support. Brandt, then an associate professor who ran the lab, described the project as a step toward unpacking the mechanics of party cues.
A party cue is information indicating whether a party or its leaders support or oppose a policy. When people learn their own party backs a proposal, they are more likely to support it; when the opposing party backs it, they become less likely to agree. The researchers framed party cues as a mental shortcut or as a signal of group loyalty, offering two explanations for why party endorsements steer opinion.
There is an ongoing debate in political psychology about whether liberals and conservatives are guided by different psychological processes. Brandt framed the discussion: “There is a long-running argument in political psychology about whether liberals and conservatives are characterized by different psychological processes. 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 holds that conservatives are drawn to more rigid thinking and stronger deference to authority, which should make them more likely to rely on party cues. By contrast, the symmetry perspective argues that liberals and conservatives use the same basic tools, simply directed toward different goals. These hypotheses framed a substantial portion of the study’s design and the interpretation of its results.
Earlier work had hinted at asymmetries, including a 2025 PsyPost‑covered study that found conservatives updated their beliefs slightly less in response to new facts, albeit with a small effect. The new MSU project aimed to test party cue effects across a broad set of issues, while also measuring thinking styles to see if any such differences would emerge.
Brandt explained the team’s ambition: to test these effects across a wide range of contemporary issues and avoid results being driven by the specifics of any single policy. “Prior work has examined ideological differences in party cues, but we wanted to do a more comprehensive study,” he 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 began by re‑analyzing two earlier experiments, from 2018 and 2020, covering more than 4,300 participants and over 80 policy issues. Participants rated support for policies such as raising the minimum wage or privatising veterans’ health care, with policy positions presented as either the Democrats’ or the Republicans’ stance. The re‑analysis pointed to symmetry: Democrats and Republicans shifted toward their own side’s position by essentially the same amount.
Brandt described the overall effect as small but reliable: “The overall party cue effect was reliable, but small. It was the equivalent to .3 scale points on a 1‑7 scale. However, this is just the average.” He cautioned that certain policies produced larger shifts, while others were nearly zero, noting that some effects could be substantial in other experimental contexts.
A third experiment in August 2024, conducted with 1,659 participants recruited through Prolific, produced results that initially diverged from the earlier analyses. This phase used 37 real policy issues on which Biden and Trump took opposing positions, with some participants told where Democratic or Republican leaders stood. The study assessed ideology along four dimensions: party identification, liberal–conservative self‑placement, right‑wing authoritarianism, and progressive values.
In this sample, conservatives fared worse on a reasoning test and reported higher needs for closure and more dogmatism. They were also more responsive to party cues, along with those scoring high on right‑wing authoritarianism, while the progressive values measure showed no difference. However, this pattern clashed with the earlier analyses, prompting further scrutiny of whether the online convenience sample distorted the results or whether conservatives had become more cue‑driven over time.
A fourth experiment, employing quota sampling to mirror the U.S. population on age, gender, race and ethnicity, and region, involved 1,389 participants and used the same 37 issues and measures as the third study. Conservatism remained associated with poorer performance on the reasoning task and higher need for closure and dogmatism, but the cue‑response gap between liberals and conservatives disappeared, with both groups following party endorsements to a similar degree. The researchers found no consistent link between reasoning scores and cue following, and while need for closure and dogmatism appeared to have less precise effects, they did not establish a clear causal relationship. The progressive values measure again yielded inconclusive results.
Brandt emphasised the central conclusion: “Notably, our core finding is that liberals and conservatives do not differ substantially. 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.” He added that while conservatives reported more rigid thinking in some measures, the practical similarity in cue responsiveness across ideology held.
The researchers noted an exception in right‑wing authoritarianism. In both the third and fourth experiments, individuals scoring high on this measure followed party cues more closely than those scoring low. Brandt suggested this may reflect a particular form of conservatism that tolerates conservative authorities and reacts aggressively to norm violations, though he cautioned that the exact reason for the deviation remains unexplained.
Exploratory analyses across issues found that differences between liberals and conservatives tended to appear where a group held stronger pre‑existing views. When people already cared more about a policy, they shifted less after a cue. Those more aware of a policy also tended to shift less. The authors stressed that these analyses were exploratory and require replication.
The study’s authors noted that the experiments measured shifts in stated attitudes rather than concrete behaviours like voting or protesting, and that the real‑world cues often aligned with participants’ prior beliefs. They also pointed out that three of the four experiments underpinning the conclusions carry more weight, while the Prolific sample’s findings are treated with caution. The team acknowledged that the research leaves open questions about responses to misleading cues or to policies where party positions diverge from voters’ beliefs.
Brandt, who directs The Belief System Lab, underscored the broader aim: to understand how belief systems work and how to map their structure to predict political attitudes. The study, titled 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.
