EFFECT OF POLITICAL POSITION ON GROUP PERCEPTION

The question of how political ideology influences the perception of ot hers is central for an understanding of relations between political gr oups. To characterize how political positions shape social perception, 106 students were selected according to political affinity and asked to describe political groups using either psychological or sociologica l qualifiers. Right-wing subjects were more likely to use psychologica l terms to describe political groups, whereas left-wing ones preferred sociological descriptors. Students with a right-wing position reporte d greatest satisfaction with psychological descriptors, while those wi th a left-wing position were more concerned with the relevance of qual ifiers for constructing an 'objective' perception of reality. These ob servations confirm the existence of differing inclinations in the perc eption of social facts and social groups. Such perceptive/cognitive pr ocesses, linked to ideological patterns, seem to be inseparable from t he contents to which they apply, and express the social positioning an d the ideological orientations of their authors.