Strategies for Promoting Strong Inferences in Political Psychology Research

The goals of this chapter are to first describe two common pitfalls of social psychological approaches to the study of ideological differences, specifically, a pre-occupation with explaining conservatives to the neglect of liberals and an over-reliance on positive test strategies. As guards against these potential pit falls, we recommend that researchers shift their orientation toward negative test strategies, something that can be facilitated by using a “grid” approach to hypothesis generation. The grid approach to hypothesis generation forces researchers to consider a set of competing explanations for liberal and conservative thoughts, feelings, and behavior, that vary in possible normative spin, which helps protect against possible researcher bias.