Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We outline a new method to explore di↵erences in se-mantic representations between groups and apply it toa novel domain where we might expect to find such dif-ferences: politics. We hypothesize and find confirma-tory evidence that individuals of opposite partisanship,as measured by party identification, have di↵erent se-mantic representations. We further evaluate whetherdi↵erences in representations are predictive of attitudejudgments as long suggested by constructivist theoriesof attitudes from social psychology. We find di↵erencesare indeed predictive of attitudes even after controllingfor other strongly predictive covariates (party identifica-tion and ideology). In discussing our results we sketchout a broader theory of the role of semantic memory inattitude judgments.