Preregistered Replication of “Feeling Superior Is a Bipartisan Issue: Extremity (Not Direction) of Political Views Predicts Perceived Belief Superiority”

Abstract

There is currently a debate in political psychology about whether dogmatism and belief superiority are symmetric or asymmetric across the ideological spectrum. Toner, Leary, Asher, and Jongman-Sereno (2013) found that dogmatism was higher among conservatives than liberals, but both conservatives and liberals with extreme attitudes reported higher perceived superiority of beliefs. In the current study, we conducted a preregistered direct and conceptual replication of this previous research using a large nationally representative sample. Consistent with Toner et al.’s findings, our results showed that conservatives had higher dogmatism scores than liberals, whereas both conservative and liberal extreme attitudes were associated with higher belief superiority compared with more moderate attitudes. As in their study, we also found that whether conservative or liberal attitudes were associated with higher belief superiority was topic dependent. Contrasting Toner et al.’s findings, our results also showed that ideologically extreme individuals had higher dogmatism. We discuss implications of these results for theoretical debates in political psychology.

The role of political devotion in sharing partisan misinformation

“…In fact, we believe we could find similar neural results in other groups exposed to misinformation relevant to their own sacred values. For instance, a recent nationally representative sample of Americans found that people on the extreme left score higher in dogmatism (albeit not as far as those on the far right) and they may therefore be resistant to information that challenges their beliefs (see Harris et al 46 ). Finally, our study was a controlled experiment with artificially designed social media posts.…”

Hedonism as a motive for information search: biased information-seeking leads to biased beliefs

“…Participants not only sampled positively-biased information more readily, but also held the beliefs they formed on the basis of the predictions yielded by positively-biased sources in higher confidence. Previous work has shown that individuals with extreme beliefs tend to have higher confidence in their beliefs 27 , 28 . Here, we showed that those with the highest confidence in their beliefs about the world-state were those who were biased towards information sources that were positively-biased, rather than those sampling from more objectively accurate sources.…”

“…The potential effects of the hedonic pursuit of desirable information on the beliefs we form are also poorly understood. Individuals with the most extreme beliefs have been shown to have the greatest confidence in their beliefs 27 , 28 . This may be driven by mental rigidity, which has been shown to co-occur both with extreme beliefs and the preference for congenial information 29 , 30 .…”

There is no generalizability crisis

“…Scientists can therefore select different issues to show, alternatively, that people on the left or right of the political spectrum are more prone to a sense of superiority about their beliefs. It is only when looking across multiple topics that the overall quadratic relationship emerges (Harris & Van Bavel, 2021), suggesting the people on both ends of the spectrum are similarly prone to feelings of superiority when their attitudes are extreme.…”