Reflective liberals and intuitive conservatives: A look at the Cognitive Reflection Test and ideology
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2015, Vol 10, Issue 2
Abstract
Prior research finds that liberals and conservatives process information differently. Predispositions toward intuitive versus reflective thinking may help explain this individual level variation. There have been few direct tests of this hypothesis and the results from the handful of studies that do exist are contradictory. Here we report the results of a series of studies using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) to investigate inclinations to be reflective and political orientation. We find a relationship between thinking style and political orientation and that these effects are particularly concentrated on social attitudes. We also find it harder to manipulate intuitive and reflective thinking than a number of prominent studies suggest. Priming manipulations used to induce reflection and intuition in published articles repeatedly fail in our studies. We conclude that conservatives—more specifically, social conservatives—tend to be dispositionally less reflective, social liberals tend to be dispositionally more reflective, and that the relationship between reflection and intuition and political attitudes may be more resistant to easy manipulation than existing research would suggest.
Authors and Affiliations
Kristen D. Deppe, Frank J. Gonzalez, Jayme L. Neiman, Carly Jacobs, Jackson Pahlke, Kevin B. Smith and John R. Hibbing
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678185
- DOI -
- Views 115
- Downloads 0
Biases in choices about fairness: Psychology and economic inequality
This paper investigates choices about “distributional fairness” (sometimes called “distributive justice”), i.e., selection of the proper way for resources to be distributed in group. The study finds evidence that several...
Normative arguments from experts and peers reduce delay discounting
When making decisions that involve tradeoffs between the quality and timing of desirable outcomes, people consistently discount the value of future outcomes. A puzzling finding regarding such decisions is the extremely h...
Predicting biases in very highly educated samples: Numeracy and metacognition
We investigated the relations between numeracy and superior judgment and decision making in two large community outreach studies in Holland (n=5408). In these very highly educated samples (e.g., 30–50% held graduate degr...
A note on determining the number of cues used in judgment analysis studies: The issue of type II error
Many judgment analysis studies employ multiple regression procedures to estimate the importance of cues. Some studies test the significance of regression coefficients in order to decide whether or not specific cues are a...
Debiasing context effects in strategic decisions: Playing against a consistent opponent can correct perceptual but not reinforcement biases
Vlaev and Chater (2006) demonstrated that the cooperativeness of previously seen prisoner’s dilemma games biases choices and predictions in the current game. These effects were: a) assimilation to the mean cooperativenes...