The Role of Personality, Authoritarianism and Cognition in the United Kingdom’s 2016 Referendum on European Union Membership

Abstract

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 ...

Rethinking the link between cognitive sophistication and politically motivated reasoning

“…Our results imply that existing key evidence for the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning is not particularly diagnostic. Specifically, our argument and results suggest that previous empirical studies supporting the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning (Kahan, 2013;Kahan, Peters, et al, 2017;Kuru et al, 2017;Nurse & Grant, 2019;Sumner et al, 2018;Taber et al, 2009;Taber & Lodge, 2006) likely do not demonstrate that cognitive sophistication magnifies a direct effect of political group motivation on reasoning (Causal Path #1, Figure 1); but, rather, that it magnifies a direct effect of specific prior beliefs (Causal Path #2). It is thus difficult to evaluate the extent to which the results therein offer support for the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning-because, as we have discussed at length, Causal Path #2 provides only ambiguous evidence of politically motivated reasoning per se (we refer to section 1.2 in the introduction for the full discussion).…”

“…The results of numerous recent studies are offered as evidence that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically motivated reasoning (Kahan, 2013;Kahan, Peters, et al, 2017;Kuru et al, 2017;Nurse & Grant, 2019;Sumner et al, 2018;Taber et al, 2009;Taber & Lodge, 2006). In one study (Kahan, 2013), for example, U.S. partisans were asked to evaluate the validity of the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), a behavioral measure of the propensity and ability to think analytically (Frederick, 2005;Pennycook et al, 2016).…”

Politicized climate science: No evidence for science literacy driving motivated reasoning, or polarized belief-updating in a US national experiment

“…This correlational finding was later attributed to "the power of motivated reasoning" . Similar interactions between measures of knowledge or skill, and political leaning were found in several large, national surveys (Drummond & Fischhoff, 2017;Hamilton, 2011;Hamilton et al, 2015;Malka et al, 2009; McCright & Dunlap, 2011), as well as experimental studies on topics of worldview, such as gun control, immigration or Brexit (Guay & Johnston, 2020;Kuru et al, 2017;Sumner et al, 2018;Taber & Lodge, 2006).…”

Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating

“…In other words, the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans tended to disagree most strongly in their evaluations of the information, consistent with the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing. Other studies using the same type of design have recorded a similar result: cognitive sophistication appears to magnify the correlation between subjects' political identities or worldviews and their evaluations of the validity of new information, where the information is manipulated to either favor or impugn their political identities or worldviews (Kahan, Peters, et al, 2017;Kuru et al, 2017;Nurse & Grant, 2019;Sumner et al, 2018;Taber et al, 2009;Taber & Lodge, 2006) (but see Lind et al, 2018).…”

“…Most tests of this hypothesis have used a particular type of study design, in which subjects are asked to interpret and evaluate new information provided by the experimenter (Kahan, 2013;Kahan, Peters, et al, 2017;Kuru et al, 2017;Lind et al, 2018;Nurse & Grant, 2019;Sumner et al, 2018;Taber et al, 2009;Taber & Lodge, 2006). A key feature of this design is that the new information is manipulated to either favor or impugn subjects' political identities or general worldview, but is otherwise held the same across treatment groups.…”