1. Aldrich J. , Frankel L. , Liu K. , Lu J. and Park J. (2012) U.S. perceptions and changing opinions of China: evaluations and psychological mechanisms. Paper delivered at the 70th Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL.
2. Consider two explanations about the relative lack of sophisticated capabilities in the public compared with political elites. One is that the public has a lesser stock of information in memory, so that new information is harder to process and make sense of. The other is simply that they are less interested in and involved in politics than the political elites and therefore pay less attention to political information. Our data are agnostic between the two.
3. The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) is an organization of nations from Latin America and the Caribbean, founded by then Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, including the nations of Antigua and Barbuda, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Venezuela.
4. We pooled two sets of subjects in the results reported here (because they did pool in the statistical sense). One is a small number of Duke undergraduates. Most were from the general public, opting in to a feature of Amazon called ‘mechanical Turk’, from which the set of subjects actually employed further opted in to participate in our experiment.