Abstract
Past studies have found that people tend to distance themselves from outgroup partisans and from policies suggested by outgroup politicians. The current research demonstrates that people indirectly distance themselves even from completely neutral and apolitical consumer products that have been “contaminated” by being preferred by the political outgroup. Using representative samples of Swedish adults, we investigated how aesthetic judgments of clothes (Study 1), evaluations of chocolate bars (Study 2), and allocations to charitable organizations (Study 3) were influenced by the introduction of an irrelevant association between these products and the leader or supporters of the participants’ least- or most-liked party. Products liked by the least-liked party became less attractive in all three studies, and products liked by the most-liked party became more attractive in two studies, indicating that there were both outgroup and ingroup effects. Traditional measures of affective polarization predicted distancing of politically associated products. The ingroup effect was stronger among rightist than among leftist participants in Study 1, but there were no clear ideological asymmetries in the other studies.