For most political issues, people tend to hold relatively weak attitudes, constructing their attitudes when needed by drawing on accessible information about the topic when they need it. And according to the rational choice perspective, citizens are often viewed as being cognitive misers. They ask themselves what do others think about this matter, and use this information to form preferences of their own. Hence, there is a potential self-reinforcing mechanism at play when individuals form their political preferences, where the aggregate level of support and opposition becomes an influence of its own. In this paper we present an experiment where the respondents are informed about what previous respondents have answered. Does this knowledge about other people’s preferences change the responses? If so, how? The survey experiment is conducted on 3000 respondents in a general population web panel of Norwegian residents.
