The results of the United Kingdom's 2016 referendum on European Union (EU) membership have highlighted deep societal divides. In six studies, we examined the role of personality traits, cognition and cognitive biases in relation to referendum voters' choices. A total of 11,225 participants completed questionnaires and controlled experiments, which assessed differences in personality traits, levels of authoritarianism, numeracy, thinking styles, and susceptibility to cognitive biases including ideologically motivated numeracy and reasoning, framing, and the Dunning-Kruger effect. Participants expressing an intent to vote to leave the EU reported significantly higher levels of authoritarianism and conscientiousness, and lower levels of openness and neuroticism than voters expressing an intent to vote to remain in the EU. When compared with Remain voters, Leave voters displayed significantly lower levels of numeracy and appeared more reliant on impulsive System 1 thinking. In the experimental studies, voters on both sides were found to be susceptible to the cognitive biases tested, but often, unexpectedly, to different degrees. These results raise important questions regarding the use and framing of numerical and non-numerical data for public consumption.Keywords: Authoritarianism, Brexit, Cognition, Numeracy, Personality.
PERSONALITY AND COGNITION IN THE EU REFERENDUM 3The Role of Personality, Authoritarianism, and Cognition in the United Kingdom's 2016
Referendum on European Union MembershipThe United Kingdom's 2016 referendum on European Union (EU) membership was one of the most divisive democratic choices presented to the UK electorate in a generation, with polls running almost neck-and-neck between February 2016 and June 2016 (NatCen Social Research, 2016) and resulting in a narrow majority of 51.9% in favor of leaving the EU. The referendum campaign and the months following the result have highlighted deep societal, regional, and generational divides over opinions on integration with and membership of the EU, which are unsurprising as the British have had highly conflicting opinions since the onset of the project (Inglehart, 1970). In seeking to better understand these divisions, scholars and political commentators have focused largely on age, education and "the left behind" (Dorling, 2016;Goodwin & Heath, 2016). However, the role of differing personalities, cognitive abilities and cognitive biases have been largely overlooked throughout pre-and post-referendum analysis.There is a long history of research in exploring links between personality and political orientation, attitudes, and beliefs. Of this research, scholars have consistently identified relationships between political orientation and personality (Carney, Jost, Gosling, & Potter, 2008;Sibley, Osborne, & Duckitt, 2012) and authoritarianism (Altemeyer, 1981;Hetherington & Weiler, 2009; John T. Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003). It is only in relatively recent years that we have witnessed the emergence of studies investigating the ...
