My experiment is designed to analyze whether social cues will influence reported political values. I predict that this will be moderated by the self-monitoring trait, where those high in self-monitoring will be more influenced by the social cue those low in self-monitoring will. Given that some political values are engrained in our political culture, using already-established political values would threaten internal validity due to partisan pre-treatment (Druckman and Leeper 2012). That is, since people may know prior to entering the study that Democrats and Republicans endorse different sets of values, we can infer that they have already been “treated” with partisan cues in the real world. Thus, encountering a treatment in the context of the experiment would either be redundant (if congruent) or jarring enough to affect experimental validity (if incongruent). Both effects would undermine the experiment. Further, since the aim of this experiment is to capitalize on treatment randomization and maintain internal validity, this threat of pretreatment is especially worrisome. Thus, the only way to examine the social reinforcement of values is by using a political value that has similar criteria to our current political values but is relatively unaligned with political parties. So, for the purposes of the experiment, I identified a non-partisan political value.

Values

In order to directly test the effects of social cues, I considered political constructs that meet the qualities we associate with political values: a potential for a split in public support for the two ends of the value and a strong belief among participants that the value is, indeed, a political value—i.e., that it refers to a “preferable mode of conduct or desirable end-state” (Feldman 2013) or can “guide political decisions” (as it is worded to participants). Moreover, to avoid partisan pre-treatment effects, this new value must lack association with a political party. Following these standards, I identified a set of political concepts that could appear to experimental participants to be political values. Then, I conducted two pre-tests to consider individual perceptions of these political concepts. Both pre-tests used data from two samples recruited on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (Mturk; pre-test 1 N = 500; pre-test 2 N = 166).

In pre-test 1, participants were asked to consider 10 different political constructs (all listed in Online Appendix A). Specifically, they were asked how much they support the construct, if they associate it with a political party (and if so which party), if they believe the idea is a “value that can determine the types of political decisions that people make,” and if they believe the idea is a “value that can determine the types of decisions people make in their daily lives.” Full question wording can be found in Online Appendix A.2. In pre-test 2, a different group of participants was asked to consider the same 10 constructs, but this time each construct was paired with its logical opposite and participants were asked if they thought these values were in opposition to each other (i.e., “if you support one of the values, it makes it more difficult to support the other”) or if they were compatible (i.e., “that you can equally support and rely on both values”). The full question-wording and the full list of pairs participants considered can be found in Online Appendix A.4.

These pre-tests showed that the political constructs that appeared to participants to be most like political values were the opposing constructs of compromise versus standing your ground (from this point on, I call this value compromise, but it includes both ends—compromise versus standing your ground). The compromise value showed variance in opinion, had little association with a political party, and, most importantly, the majority of participants believed this was a fundamental political value.Footnote 4 Full results from these pre-tests can be found in Online Appendixes A.3 and A.5.

Methods

In order to consider the effect of social cues on reported values, I rely on participants recruited via Mturk (N = 400).Footnote 5 Of these participants, half were randomly assigned to take this study and the other half were randomized to take a different study. This randomization into two different studies left the study reported here with N = 192.

The study proceeded as follows. First, participants answered a set of questions about demographics, typical media usage, political interest, and the like. Among these questions were three self-monitoring questions (α = 0.66)—responses to these were then combined to create a 13-point self-monitoring scale (see Berinsky and Lavine 2012). Similar to its distribution in the population, self-monitoring was skewed towards low self-monitoring, with a mean of 7.11 on a scale from 3 to 15 (recoded from low to high self-monitoring). Again, self-monitoring was measured to better examine social influence—where I predict that social cues should influence the endorsement of values for high self-monitors (those whose goal it is to impress others) more than for low self-monitors (those who try to present their authentic selves). Finding this moderating effect would suggest that the social reinforcement of values is driven by self-presentation desires.

Following their responses to these preliminary questions, participants were told, “People vary greatly on which value they believe in: compromise (that is, compromising with the other side even on issues that are very important to you in order to ensure that there is no stalemate) or standing your ground (that is, refusing to compromise on issues that are very important to you, even if it means risking a stalemate).” Participants were then randomly assigned to either receive a social cue about these values (the treatment condition) or receive no such cue (the control condition). Since a key component of social influence is the desire to be like certain types of people—and avoid associations with other types of people—the social cue aimed to suggest to participants that a positively-viewed group supports compromise over standing your ground.

To ensure that the social cue functioned in this theorized way, I conducted a pre-test with a separate sample of Mturk participants (N = 500), in which respondents were asked to rate how much they want to have in common with 9 groups of people. Out of the 9 groups asked about, the group of “people who listen to news sources that support both political parties” was seen as the most positive—a 7.17 on a scale from 1 to 10 (negative to positive)—an outcome that follows from previous literature (Klar et al. 2018).Footnote 6 Thus, this group was selected to give the social cue in the treatment condition—their endorsement of compromise should increase participants’ (especially high self-monitors’) compromise endorsement.

This main manipulation (the social cue) was embedded in the value question, where participants in the treatment group then read, “Interestingly, though, researchers have shown that those who listen to news sources that support both political parties tend to value compromise over standing your ground.” As a reminder, those in the control group read the same previous statement as those in the treatment group—that, “People vary greatly on which value they believe in compromise (that is, compromising with the other side even on issues that are very important to you in order to ensure that there is no stalemate) or standing your ground (that is, refusing to compromise on issues that are very important to you, even if it means risking a stalemate)”—but did not receive the follow-up social cue statement that the treatment group received.

Notably, this method of testing social influence is a conservative one. There are a number of ways to test social influence (see Huckfeldt et al. 2013), including possibly stronger treatments such as conducting a discussion with a confederate (e.g., Klar 2014) or using partisan cues (e.g., Cohen 2003). Notably, however, research on social cues is ambivalent about the possibility that using a confederate is a better operationalization of social influence (Meyer 1994). Further, although a study with a confederate may have a stronger effect, in this test I prioritize control over strength of treatment. If this is indeed a weaker treatment, then I have presented a more conservative test.

At the end of the experiment, participants in both conditions were then asked which end of the compromise value they support more—this was a zero-sum choice in that participants could not indicate support for both ends of the scale, and instead had to make a choice between compromise and standing your ground or say, “don’t know.”Footnote 7 To be clear, the experiment varies whether or not participants received a social cue endorsing compromise or received no such cue. I predict that this socially desirable group’s endorsement of compromise will increase the number of participants who endorse compromise, and that this will be moderated by the self-monitoring trait. These findings will indicate that, driven by self-presentation desires, values are socially reinforced.

Results

The prediction for this experiment is that the social cue will influence the endorsement of political values and that this effect will be moderated by the self-monitoring trait. Specifically, following theoretic expectations, participants should follow the social cue and increasingly endorse compromise: the endorsement of compromise should be higher in the treatment than in the control condition. Once participants are split into low and high self-monitors, we should see that the social cue is effective for high self-monitors—those who want to be associated with positively-perceived groups—but not for low self-monitors, who care less about impressing others.

First, I examine the main effect of the social cue on value endorsement. This is shown in the first row of Table 1. Here we see that the social cue increases the endorsement of compromise at a marginally significant (p = 0.091) level. That is, when given the social cue that a positively-perceived group endorses compromise, more participants report valuing compromise over standing your ground (as compared to those given no social cue). Among all the participants, the treatment increases the mean endorsement of compromise by 12 percentage points.

Table 1 Compromise endorsement by treatment, self-monitoring Full size table

Next, I examine the hypothesized moderating effect of self-monitoring. The self-monitoring scale can be considered in two ways: the scale can be split into two groups (Berinsky and Lavine 2012) or the scale can be used in its full form. I rely on both of these approaches—the former (the median split and two statistical tests) is represented in Table 1 (rows 2 and 3) and Fig. 1, and the latter (the continuous variable with marginal effects) can be found in Online Appendix A.7. These results support my theoretic expectations: when given the social cue, more high self-monitors report endorsing compromise as compared to standing your ground than when that cue is not present. In fact, for this group, the treatment increases the mean endorsement of compromise by 29 percentage points (p = 0.0048). Low self-monitors, on the other hand, endorse compromise 1 percentage point less, although this is far from significant (p = 0.8530).

Fig. 1 Compromise endorsement by treatment, self-monitoring. Median split of high and low self-monitors; confidence intervals at 95%; full scale (0–1) shown Full size image

Further, the effect of the social cue for high self-monitors is statistically different from the effect of the social cue for low self-monitors (p = 0.026; see Online Appendix A.9). To examine the robustness of these results—since self-monitoring is measured rather than manipulated—I see if adding controls alters the findings, which it does not (see Kam and Trussler 2017 for use of controls in experiments).Footnote 8 Finally, to ensure that partisanship is not confounding the results, I not only add partisanship as a control to the above model, but also examine if Republicans and Democrats reacted differently to the treatment. Although this latter check limits the sample size, we observe the same trend for both Democrats and Republicans (see Online Appendix A.10).

Discussion

These results speak to an integral part of the theory—that people alter their political values because it is socially desirable to do—or, because it looks good to others. The effect of the social cue on high self-monitors’ compromise endorsement supports this part of the theory. Again, when high self-monitors were told that a positively-viewed group endorses compromise, they endorsed compromise as well. Low self-monitors did not do so, as they prioritize showing their authentic selves above impressing others. Overall, these findings give us both: (1) causal evidence that social cues can influence people’s endorsements of political values, and (2) insight into the mechanism driving the social reinforcement of values—self-presentation desires. As explained previously, that we can observe results even with a potentially weaker treatment is a testament to the important role of social cues in determining values.

The experimental evidence, though, is potentially narrow in that while it addresses internal validity questions, it cannot necessarily speak to external validity concerns (Shadish et al. 2002). To supplement the experiment, then, I turn to observational, nationally-representative data, and rely on already-established political values (i.e., equality and morality). This next analysis can speak to external validity questions about the subject population. Further, and perhaps more importantly, this set of analyses can confront the construct validity question about the particular political values used in the experiment. The experiment—to avoid pretreatment—used a non-salient political value and in doing so increased internal validity but naturally sacrificed some construct validity.Footnote 9 This is also where the observational analysis complements the experiment.