Reflective liberals and intuitive conservatives: A look at the Cognitive Reflection Test and ideology

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.

Hungarian, lazy, and biased: the role of analytic thinking and partisanship in fake news discernment on a Hungarian representative sample

“…According to Jost 22 , using the same cognitive reflection test we used in the present study to assess analytic thinking, prior studies consecutively showed a marked difference between conservatives and liberals: 11 studies showed liberals perform better on the test, and only one study showed no difference along partisanship. In our study, pro-government voters had significantly lower analytic thinking ( M = 0.44, SD = 0.30) than anti-government voters ( M = 0.50, SD = 0.30, t (989) = − 3.47, p = 0.001, d = − 0.23), so it appears that pro-government voters relied much less on reflective thinking than those who would vote for any of the opposition parties 22 , 44 , 45 . However, it is not related to individual differences in intelligence, but rather the lack of motivation to use intellectual capacities on the conservative side of the political spectrum.…”

Activating reflective thinking with decision justification and debiasing training

“…These methods can be easily implemented in future research on dual-process models, including experiments conducted online. Some of the commonly used reflection manipulations are recently shown to be ineffective (e.g., Deppe et al, 2015;Meyer et al, 2015), and earlier findings based on these manipulations often fail to replicate (e.g., Sanchez et al, 2017). Hence, previous results based on unreliable reflection manipulations should be tested using improved methods.…”

“…Studies using intuition and reflection manipulations often do not directly test whether cognitive processes were activated in the intended directions. While some have checked the direct effects of their manipulations on cognitive performance (e.g., Deppe et al, 2015;Lawson et al, 2020;Yilmaz & Saribay, 2016), subjective self-report questions and behavioral measures such as response times are frequently relied on as alternative manipulation checks Yilmaz & Isler, 2019). The lack of performance measures would be misleading if, rather than thinking reflectively about the problem at hand, participants were to rely on their own lay theories about reflection (Saribay, Yilmaz & Körpe, 2020) or if they were to respond in socially desirable ways (Grimm, 2010).…”

“…Some of these tasks, introduced in once-acceptable small-sample studies, are now known to be unreliable. For example, the perceptual disfluency method (e.g., the use of hard-to-read-fonts to promote reflection), the scrambled sentence task that primes participants with words such as "reason" and "rational", and the task that aims to prime reflection by showing participants a picture of Rodin's The Thinker (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012;Song & Schwarz, 2008) all failed to manipulate reflective thinking in recent large-sample replication attempts (Bakhti, 2018;Deppe et al, 2015;Meyer et al, 2015;Sanchez, Sundermeier, Gray & Calin-Jageman, 2017;Sirota, Theodoropoulou & Juanchich, 2020). In addition, researchers sometimes attempt to activate reflective thinking by having participants complete tasks (e.g., the CRT) that are originally designed to measure thinking style, but the effects of such unestablished approaches tend to be unreliable too (Yonker, Edman, Cresswell & Barrett, 2016).…”

Reflection increases belief in God through self-questioning among non-believers

“…These inconsistencies in the literature are likely to stem in part from the unreliability of the methods used to activate reflective (or intuitive) thinking. For example, three different methods of manipulation used by Gervais and Norenzayan (2012) to prime reflective thinking (e.g., viewing pictures of Rodin's The Thinker or completing a sentence scramble task) failed manipulation checks in studies by Deppe et al (2015). Another technique -cognitive disfluency -used by Gervais and Norenzayan (2012) has been shown to be ineffective in activating reflective thinking in a high-powered study (Meyer et al, 2015), and in a Turkish sample (Yilmaz & Saribay, 2016).…”