Faculty Publications

Reflective Liberals And Intuitive Conservatives: A Look At The Cognitive Reflection Test And Ideology

Document Type

Article

Keywords

Cognitive reflection test, Ideology, Political attitudes

Journal/Book/Conference Title

Judgment and Decision Making

Volume

10

Issue

4

First Page

314

Last Page

331

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.

Department

Department of Political Science

Original Publication Date

1-1-2015

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