The relationship between cognitive style and political orientation depends on the measures used
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2017, Vol 12, Issue 2
Abstract
The present research investigated the reason for mixed evidence concerning the relationship between analytic cognitive style (ACS) and political orientation in previous research. Most past research operationalized ACS with the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), which has been criticized as relying heavily on numeracy skills, and operationalized political orientation with the single-item self-placement measure, which has been criticized as masking the distinction between social and economic conservatism. The present research recruited an Amazon Mechanical Turk sample and, for the first time, simultaneously employed three separate ACS measures (CRT, CRT2, Baserate conflict problems), a measure of attitudes toward self-critical and reflective thinking (the Actively Open-Minded Thinking Scale; AOT), and separate measures of social and economic conservatism, as well the standard measure of political orientation. As expected, the total ACS score (combination of the separate measures) was negatively related to social, but not economic, conservatism. However, the CRT by itself was not related to conservatism, in parallel with some past findings, while the two other measures of ACS showed the same pattern as the combined score. Trait reflectiveness (AOT) was related negatively to all measures of political conservatism (social, economic, and general). Results clearly suggest that the conclusion reached regarding the ACS-political orientation relationship depends on the measure(s) used, with the measure most commonly employed in past research (CRT) behaving differently than other measures. Future research must further pursue the implications of the known differences (e.g., reliance on numeracy vs. verbal skills) of ACS measures and distinguish different senses of reflectiveness.
Authors and Affiliations
Onurcan Yilmaz and S. Adil Saribay
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678283
- DOI -
- Views 158
- Downloads 0
Searching for coherence in a correspondence world
In this paper, I trace the evolution of the aircraft cockpit as an example of the transformation of a probabilistic environment into an ecological hybrid, that is, an environment characterized by both probabilistic and d...
Process dynamics in delay discounting decisions: An attractor dynamics approach
How do people make decisions between an immediate but small reward and a delayed but large one? The outcome of such decisions indicates that people discount rewards by their delay and hence these outcomes are well descri...
Facing expectations: Those that we prefer to fulfil and those that we disregard.
We argue that people choosing prosocial distribution of goods (e.g., in dictator games) make this choice because they do not want to disappoint their partner rather than because of a direct preference for the chosen pros...
Who lies? A large-scale reanalysis linking basic personality traits to unethical decision making
Previous research has established that higher levels of trait Honesty-Humility (HH) are associated with less dishonest behavior in cheating paradigms. However, only imprecise effect size estimates of this HH-cheating lin...
Imagine being a nice guy: A note on hypothetical vs. incentivized social preferences
We conducted an experimental study on social preferences using dictator games similar to Fehr et al. (2008). Our results show that social preferences differ between subjects who receive low-stakes monetary rewards for th...