Affect toward social groups stays more stable than policy beliefs in mass publics

Evidence

We observed much earlier that the centrality of a specific belief in a larger belief system and the relative stability of that belief over time should be highly related. From our other propositions about the role of groups as central objects in the belief systems of the mass public, we can therefore arrive at two further predictions. The first is simply that pure affect toward visible population groupings should be highly stable over time, even in a mass public, much more so in fact than beliefs on policy matters that more or less explicitly bear on the fortunes of these groupings. Second, policy items that do bear more rather than less explicitly upon their group interest should show less stability than affect towards the group qua group but more than those items for which contextual information is required. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1936