Description
How do liberals and conservatives differ? Existing evidence suggests clear divergences on cognitive style and sociopolitical attitudes. However, theories such as the rigidity of the right hypothesis (Adorno et al., 1950; Tetlock, 1983) and the ideologue hypothesis (Rokeach, 1956) make incompatible predictions. The present research aims to reconcile these incongruities by employing measures that assess (a) cognitive style/open-mindedness, (b) perspective-taking, and (c) relationships between characteristics of procedural justice. Study 1 employed real-world arguments on highly politicized issues to examine rhetorical features that influence an article’s persuasiveness. We found evidence for the rigidity of the right hypothesis. In Study 2, participants listened to and summarized arguments we constructed of varying integrative complexity for and against race-based affirmative action in the context of a fictitious court case. Liberals tended to score higher on the Cognitive Reflection Task and summarized the arguments at a higher quality with greater integrative complexity. Conservatives tended to score higher on the actively open-minded thinking scale and exhibited greater attitudinal shifts than liberals. Liberals appeared to view integrative complexity as mere window dressing while conservatives were highly influenced by experimental manipulations of this measure. These nuanced findings suggest context and ideological spectrum-dependent factors that influence attitudes toward politically polarizing issues.
Political Attitudes, Cognitive Style, and Political Persuasion
How do liberals and conservatives differ? Existing evidence suggests clear divergences on cognitive style and sociopolitical attitudes. However, theories such as the rigidity of the right hypothesis (Adorno et al., 1950; Tetlock, 1983) and the ideologue hypothesis (Rokeach, 1956) make incompatible predictions. The present research aims to reconcile these incongruities by employing measures that assess (a) cognitive style/open-mindedness, (b) perspective-taking, and (c) relationships between characteristics of procedural justice. Study 1 employed real-world arguments on highly politicized issues to examine rhetorical features that influence an article’s persuasiveness. We found evidence for the rigidity of the right hypothesis. In Study 2, participants listened to and summarized arguments we constructed of varying integrative complexity for and against race-based affirmative action in the context of a fictitious court case. Liberals tended to score higher on the Cognitive Reflection Task and summarized the arguments at a higher quality with greater integrative complexity. Conservatives tended to score higher on the actively open-minded thinking scale and exhibited greater attitudinal shifts than liberals. Liberals appeared to view integrative complexity as mere window dressing while conservatives were highly influenced by experimental manipulations of this measure. These nuanced findings suggest context and ideological spectrum-dependent factors that influence attitudes toward politically polarizing issues.