In an increasingly polarized world, we often find ourselves motivated to make choices influenced by politics. When considering the types of decisions impacted by politics, we naturally think of things like the neighborhoods we choose to live in, the movies and television we watch, and the company we keep. However, new research suggests that politically motivated decision-making extends to other choices as well. It finds that people tend to distance themselves from “politically-contaminated” consumer goods, products and services that are used by politicians or supporters of their less-liked political party.
A set of studies explored this phenomenon. The first used clothes as the focal product, the second chocolates, and the third used support for specific charities. Across all three studies, researchers found that people were more likely to negatively evaluate products preferred by their least-favored politician/political party, and were more likely to positively evaluate products preferred by their most-favored political party.
This research offers a novel view of how relatively apolitical products may still be assigned political value. Indeed, these results can have wide implications. For instance, how neutral products and services are marketed to different demographic groups, or how we as individual consumers should employ our critical consciousness in how we evaluate what we buy based on quality and utility as opposed to making arbitrary and politically charged associations.
Beyond this, it is worth noting that this set of studies was conducted in a country with a heterogeneous political system with more than simply two political parties to choose from, which was reflected in the product choices and their associated politicians from each study. However, in a relatively bipartisan political system, such as in the United States that also experiences higher levels of affective polarization, there might be an increased desire to distance oneself from less-liked political parties and their choices. This in turn suggests a more pronounced desire for individuals in more bipartisan systems to self-select into like-minded groups based not only on their political affiliations, but their product choices as well, therefore creating more barriers to effective bridge-building.
Erlandsson, A., Nilsson, A., Persson, R., Rosander, J., & Van Boven, L. (2023). Politically Contaminated Clothes, Chocolates, and Charities: Social Distancing of Neutral Products Liked by Outgroup or Ingroup Partisans (SSRN Scholarly Paper 4457721). https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4457721