Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-30-2025
Abstract
This study proposes a novel, certainty-weighted account of the process by which political beliefs shape political attitudes. Building upon expectancy-value frameworks, this paper introduces belief certainty as a moderator of belief impact. A Bayesian partial-pooling approach is used to test a model positing how beliefs about what the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act does and does not do relate to overall attitudes toward the law. This analytic method manages the complexity of multiple potentially correlated beliefs and evaluations by imposing a structural constraint to avoid multicollinearity and enable accurate estimation of parameters. Data from a nationally representative sample survey of American adults support the model's core propositions. Counterfactual simulations further reveal that belief certainty substantially amplifies the weight of both accurate and inaccurate beliefs, thereby intensifying attitudes and amplifying polarization. These findings highlight the role of belief certainty in shaping political judgments and offer a methodological pathway for researchers to model the interplay of multiple correlated political beliefs in an era of abundant—sometimes erroneous—information.
Recommended Citation
Li, G. M., Pasek, J., & Krosnick, J. A. (2025). A certainty-weighted, belief-based model of political attitudes: A Bayesian analysis of American public attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act. Political Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.70095
Data S1: Supporting Information.
Copyright
The authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Included in
American Politics Commons, Health Communication Commons, Other Communication Commons, Other Political Science Commons, Social Influence and Political Communication Commons
Comments
This article was originally published in Political Psychology in 2025. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.70095