Egotropic and sociotropic negativity bias in social policy reform preferences

Abstract Although negativity bias is widely documented in political psychology, evidence is far more mixed when it comes to voters' preferences for social policy reform, particularly when they are confronted with trade‐offs between personal and societal outcomes. Building on existing theories of political communication, this article examines how voters evaluate policy reforms when considering realistic information about potential losses and gains. Empirically, we analyze a simu‐survey experiment examining how voters update their reform preferences in response to information derived from microsimulation modeling about the predicted effects of policy reform on their pocketbook and on the poverty level. The results show that negative information weighs more heavily than positive information in shaping reform preferences at both the egotropic and sociotropic levels. In the case of competing information, the effects are asymmetric: Positive pocketbook information tends to be neutralized by negative poverty information, whereas negative pocketbook information outweighs positive poverty information. However, egotropic negativity bias is most pronounced for smaller pocketbook losses, which are more likely to violate voters' prior expectations than larger losses. Consistent with this pattern, expectation violations—rather than differences in recall of, or trust in, information—seems the primary mechanism underlying negativity bias in policy preferences.