Political thinking: How social and cognitive factors shape stances across the life course.

Work on issues such as when political stances emerge, and the social and cognitive factors that influence their development or entrenchment with age, is ongoing across different disciplines. However, there is a need for integration and synthesis of these ideas to better understand the formation of political reasoning. The goal of this issue was to highlight the emerging work that addressed developmental origins and age-related changes in political thought. Answering these questions required psychological scientists to reach across disciplines-thus, each of these articles draws on ideas from fields such as political science, sociology, and education. Together, the set of articles featured in this December 2025 issue cover cognitions related to political thought and behavior, including fairness, leadership, activism, partisanship, voting, misinformation, conspiratorial, and social dominance orientations-from early childhood to late adulthood. We also discuss areas of research not reflected in the submissions we received and motivate our readership of experimental scholars to address those gaps in future work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Duke Scholars

Author Tamar Kushnir Psychology & Neuroscience