The Interdependence of Attitudes
Toward Social Groups

Popular wisdom holds that Americans are deeply divided — but is that true, and if so, how? This project takes that question seriously, focusing not on policy disagreements but on something more fundamental: how people feel about the social groups that make up American society. It investigates whether those feelings are connected — whether how you feel about one group predicts how you feel about others, and what underlies those patterns. Drawing on national survey data and computational methods, it identifies three distinct ways Americans organize their social attitudes: along partisan lines, along racial lines, and with relative neutrality toward social groups overall. The project shows that people’s social positions — particularly the strength of their partisanship, their race, and their experience of racial discrimination — shape which of these logics they follow.