Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Prior studies have shown tests for scales used to describe an individuals ideological position are not replicable. Weexamined ideological positioning of individuals through two mouse tracking tasks. First, participants were asked to selectfrom six ideologies, mixed with distractors, they believed described them. They were then shown ten defined traits ofthese ideologies. Next, participants were asked to choose between pairs of compared traits and assign them to a displayedideology. The first task was to determine which ideologies participants were most closely associated with, while the secondwas used to determine how each individual defined ideologies. In this way, we were able to gain insight into how peopledefine themselves when completing discrete tasks, such as answering political questionnaires. Results show differences inindividual ideological definitions. We have begun grouping statistically similar responses. It is our hope that this data willhelp develop realistic scales of ideological positioning.