Sowohl Konservatismus als auch Extremismus gingen mit einer etwas geringeren Bereitschaft einher, angesichts von Beweisen seine Meinung zu ändern. Der Umfang dieser Beziehungen war jedoch durchweg sehr gering. Zentristen und Gemäßigte zeigten die größte Glaubensaktualisierung bzw. die geringste Starrheit.
Are conservatives more rigid thinkers? Rival scientists have come to a surprising conclusion
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I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/pops.70071
From the linked article:
A new pair of large-scale studies finds that while political conservatives and ideological extremists are slightly less likely to update their beliefs when presented with new evidence, these effects are very small. The research, published in the journal Political Psychology, suggests that broad, sweeping claims about a strong connection between a person’s political views and their cognitive rigidity are likely not justified.
By combining the data from both studies, the researchers created a large dataset of over 6,000 participants. This combined analysis confirmed the earlier findings. **Conservatism and extremism were both associated with slightly less willingness to change one’s mind in the face of evidence. But the size of these relationships was consistently very small**, suggesting that a person’s political ideology is a very poor predictor of how much they will update their beliefs in this kind of task.
The authors, representing all sides of the original debate, came to a shared conclusion. **Centrists and moderates showed the most belief updating, or the least rigidity**. When comparing groups, people on the political right, especially the far right, were slightly more rigid. However, the weakness and inconsistency of these effects across different measures of ideology mean that the practical importance of this connection is questionable.
What’s the difference between a centrist and a moderate? Isn’t that more or less the same?
I would expect people who have no real commitments to any values or truths to be less rigid in their values and truth, yeah.
Was this study conducted by The Weather Underground?
I’d like to see this kind of research expanded upon. The ideological categories they use here are some of the biggest and least defined, meaning there are likely a broad number of personality types and philosophical justifications falling under the umbrella terms.
Just taking “centrist” as an example, you are likely to have people who don’t believe much of anything and picked the response least likely to overly define them (and who probably have high belief malleability), people who believe the fallacy of the mean, who think the right answer is always between two defined points on a continuum (and who likely have median malleability dependent on definitions and stated positions), and people who are staunch technocrats who believe strongly in a series of hybrid approaches and specific technical policies who feel like neither mainstream party really “gets” them (and who likely have low malleability due to their specific wonkish approach).
I suspect there’s probably similar ideological fine-grainedness in other big tent positions, as well.
>Given these very small and semi-consistent effects, broad claims about strong associations between ideology and belief updating are likely unwarranted.
So there are people with strong convictions led from the inside on the one hand, those more externally controlled on the other.
I have been researching this topic for almost a decade. The gap was a lot larger in pre-2016 studies.
I think there is alot of merit (though its certainly far from perfect) in the **horseshoe hypothesis** – left/right political extremes circle around and meet at a form of totalitarianism. Of course passionate advocates of either stripe vehemently deny such a possibility.
The wording of the headline very interestingly excludes the group „liberals“. I feel like „extremism“ was used as a clever way to refer to the „far left“ while also grouping it with the word conservativism.
Centrists and Moderates obviously would be the least rigid in their beliefs as they are the only ones listed who will recognize the nuance of most situations.
I’m looking at the study. I am familiar with some of the authors. A decade earlier, they published a study on dogmatism with horrendous logic with a similar conclusion.
>Our results revealed very small and only semi-consistent support for the rigidity-of-the-right and rigidity-of-extremes hypotheses, calling into question the practical importance of ideological differences in rigidity in this context. Our key takeaway is that researchers (including us) may need to update our beliefs on the relationship between ideology and rigidity and move away from asking *who* is more rigid and toward examining *when* and *where* political ideology and extremism predict rigidity.
It’s probably unwise to make sweeping assumptions based on this.
It’d be interesting to know the extent to which pre-existing knowledge affected malleability. They’ve tested this by making claims and then presenting evidence to support those claims, but it might be that those people who are more entrenched in their positions are aware of more or better studies which contradict the evidence they’re presented with.
It could also demonstrate a difference in values – conservatives are less likely to consider egalitarian outcomes of importance, so they might consider „good economic performance“ to be growth disregarding distribution. Meanwhile left-wingers might contest the definition of „good economic performance“ in this case and reject the premise, favouring more equal distribution over faster growth.
Not to comment on the relationship between growth and distribution, just to say that people who strongly hold beliefs are likely less easily swayed on the base concept of what is a good outcome.
I don’t believe this no matter how much proof you show me