Opening the Closed Mind?

This chapter illustrates how political campaigns increase group-centric partisanship in part by making the public more politically attentive. The chapter incorporates recent research within political psychology on the importance of political attention as a moderator of the link between personality and politics. It also emphasizes how closure would increase expressions of partisan group-centrism more among the politically interested than among the detached. The chapter conceptualizes partisan group-centrism as a social identity and uses Henri Tajfel's definition of social identity as composed of cognitive self-categorization, emotions, and values to identify measures of the group-centric partisanship construct. It suggests that there should be a reconsideration of the relationship between closed minds and the partisan divide in US society.