Liberals Think More Analytically (More “WEIRD”) Than Conservatives

Abstract

Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan summarized cultural differences in psychology and argued that people from one particular culture are outliers: people from societies that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD). This study shows that liberals think WEIRDer than conservatives. In five studies with more than 5,000 participants, we found that liberals think more analytically (an element of WEIRD thought) than moderates and conservatives. Study 3 replicates this finding in the very different political culture of China, although it held only for people in more modernized urban centers. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives in the same country think as if they were from different cultures. Studies 4 to 5 show that briefly training people to think analytically causes them to form more liberal opinions, whereas training them to think holistically causes shifts to more conservative opinions.

Validation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire in Turkey and its relation to cultural schemas of individualism and collectivism

“…It is known that analytic/holistic culture thought primes in the US and China can modify people's less stable current political preferences but not the relatively more stable political attitudes (Talhelm et al, 2015). Thus, the experimental modifiability of moral intuitions demonstrated in Study 2 needs to be studied more systematically by replication attempts in, for example, European countries where moral/political intuitions are presumably more stable, and also in traditional Middle Eastern countries where such intuitions are presumably less stable.…”

“…Just as an analytic thinking prime can change the presumably stable religious beliefs (see Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012;Shenhav, Rand, & Greene, 2012;Yilmaz, Karadöller & Sofuoglu, 2016), a contextual prime can change the presumably stable moral beliefs (see also Talhelm et al, 2015). The fact that the collectivism prime changed attitudes regarding loyalty might be seen as unsurprising since the prime specifically asks the participants to think about the groups they belong to and presumably directly activates thoughts of group loyalty.…”

Why People “Don’t Trust the Evidence”

“…On the other hand, one could also argue that the observed discrepancies in deference to science between liberals and conservatives can be attributed to differences in fundamental psychological and cognitive mechanisms. To give but some examples, growing literature suggests that liberals and conservatives differ in their openness to experience and new information (McRae 1996;Onraet et al 2011;De Neve 2014), their attention to negative stimuli (carraro, castelli, and Macchiella 2011), and their reliance on low-effort thought (Eidelman et al 2012; see also Talhelm et al 2012). …”

Authoritarianism and Cognitive Political Involvement

“…This line of reasoning emphasizes the importance not of the content of one's beliefs, but of the cognitive structure -the biased acquisition, selection, and interpretation of information. This view is supported by empirical evidence that shows that more authoritarian/ conservative individuals are less politically sophisticated (Tetlock, 1983), think less analytically (Talhelm et al, 2015) and show low cognitive complexity (Hinze, Doster, & Joe, 1997). Likewise, recent research on conservatism as motivated social cognition (Jost & Amodio, 2012;Jost, Kruglanski, Glaser, & Sulloway, 2003) also points in the direction of authoritarian political views being associated with the biased processing of political information.…”