Despite the abundant use of assumptions regarding state reputation in international relations research, few scholars have assessed the cognitive processes underlying reputational inferences. Deterrence theorists and political psychologists alike assume that decision-makers make unitary reputational attributions about other states, without regard for factors within states. I hypothesize that not all decision-makers make exclusively unitary-state attributions, and that the cognitive processes underlying reputations vary across individuals. Three cognitive factors relevant to reputational attributions--cognitive complexity, the need for closure, and out-group bias--have been shown to be correlated with political ideology. Therefore, I expect political ideology to be a systematic determinant of the location and dispersion of reputational attributions. Using an automated content analytic technique, I find that conservative decision-makers target and concentrate reputational attributions toward unitary states, while liberal decision-makers are more diffuse in their attributions.