RIGHT-WING AND LEFT-WING POSITIONS AND PO RTRAITS OF POLITICAL GROUPS

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, 95 subjects-French students-were asked to describe and evaluate four political groups, differentiated as to their proximity and their valor ization. A Descending Hierarchical Analysis was applied to the data. W e validated the hypothesis of a link between the subject's political p ositioning and the way they used either ''dispositional'' or ''situati onal'' descriptors of political groups. Right-wing subjects used more psychological descriptive categories, while left-wing participants wer e more Likely to use sociological and political categories. Such perce ptivo-cognitive processes, linked to ideological patterns, seem to be inseparable from the contents to which they apply, and express the soc ial positioning and the ideological orientations of their authors.