System justification and electrophysiological responses to feedback: support for a positivity bias

Abstract

Conservatives, compared to liberals, are consistently found to exhibit physiological sensitivity to aversive stimuli. However, it remains unknown whether conservatives are also sensitive to salient positively valenced stimuli. We therefore used event-related potentials to determine the relationship between system justification (SJ), a fundamental component of conservative political ideology, and neural processing of negative and positive feedback. Participants (N = 29) filled out questionnaire assessments of SJ. Feedback-related negativity (FRN), an event-related potential component thought to index activity in neural regions associated with reward processing, was assessed in response to positive and negative feedback on a time estimation task. A significant interaction was noted between SJ and feedback type in predicting FRN. Simple effects tests suggested that SJ predicted greater FRN in response to positive but not to negative feedback. Conservatives may experience salient positive information with a heightened intensity.