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Political Behavior

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23.05.2022 | Original Paper

The Role of Political Ideology and Open-Minded Thinking Style in the (in)Accuracy of Factual Beliefs

verfasst von: Małgorzata Kossowska, Paulina Szwed, Gabriela Czarnek

Erschienen in: Political Behavior | Ausgabe 4/2023

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Abstract

The paper investigates the role of political ideology and an open-minded thinking style (i.e., the tendency to reason based on rules of inference rather than intuitive heuristics) with respect to the accuracy of factual beliefs. In line with political asymmetry theory, we assumed that right-wing beliefs, in contrast to left-wing beliefs, are associated with more inaccurate factual beliefs. We also expected that the open-minded thinking style acts as a buffer against inaccurate factual beliefs among people with right-wing (but not left-wing) political affinities. To test these hypotheses, we conducted three studies (total N = 1120) in which participants holding right- and left-wing beliefs, and displaying differing degrees of the open-minded thinking style (as measured by the Active Open-minded Thinking Style questionnaire), assessed policy-relevant facts congenial to left- as well as right-wing beliefs. The results of the study confirm the hypotheses proposed. The paper’s findings contribute to the ongoing discussion around the ideological underpinnings of (un)biased cognition and the controversies concerning the role of cognitive factors in ideological polarization.

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Although the differentiation between the two strands of political beliefs (cultural and economic) seems to better explain ideology in modern societies (e.g., Feldman & Johnston, 2014; Malka et al., 2014), in this paper, we focus solely on the cultural dimension of political beliefs. This is because they seem to be the primary dimension of political ideology, and are also more predictive of value conflicts and attitudes toward various groups than economic beliefs (e.g., Crawford et al., 2017); another reason for this is because, importantly, in the Polish context, the ‘culture war’ seems to be focused around issues related to cultural or moral issues (e.g., abortion, LGBTQ + rights) rather than economic ones (Czarnek et al., 2019). Since we do actually acknowledge the importance both of these dimensions, we control for economic beliefs in all our analyses. However, for the sake of simplicity and comprehensibility, across the manuscript, we use the term “ideology” when refer to cultural political beliefs.

Kahan also showed that AOT magnifies ideological polarization in gun control views (Kahan, 2017).

We also ran another study, but the sample was heavily unbalanced. The details are in Supplementary Materials (Sect. 9).

Although this paper focuses on factual beliefs, we also investigate how participants respond when requested to estimate undetermined facts (see results in Supplementary Materials Section S6). All items are presented in Supplementary Materials (Sect. 1).

This scale comprises also of Economic Beliefs subscales. The correlations between Cultural and Economic Beliefs in all studies were small and negative (rs = − 0.25; − 0.24; − 0.29 for Study, 1, 2, 3 respectively).

Because there were only three studies, we could not add study number random effects (Stegmueller, 2013). Apart from model describe in text we fit more complicated one which had worse fit (see Supplementary Materials Section S8). We used R (R Core Team, 2017) and RStudio (RStudio, 2016) with the lmer (Bates et al., 2015), lmerTest (Kuznetsova et al., 2017), tidyverse (Wickham, 2017), emmeans (Lenth, 2019), effects (Fox & Weisberg, 2018), multcomp (Hothorn et al., 2008), ggeffects (Lüdecke, 2018a), and sjPlot (Lüdecke, 2018b) packages to clean, analyze, and present the data.

We also checked the models with economic beliefs as a predictor (controlling for ideological beliefs); it transpired that economic beliefs fail to produce the main effects (see the main effect reported in Table 2). Furthermore, adding random slope of economic beliefs, the models did not converge. Nevertheless, we control for the economic beliefs (fixed effect) across all the reported models.

The distribution of the accuracy scores proved to be rather skewed (with the majority of the responses being somewhat close to the truth, and a smaller percentage deviating very much from the actual facts). Thus, we repeated the analysis using log-transformed scores and found that the effects were similar across the models. One exception worth noting was that the interaction between ideology and AOT was p = 0.07 (however, it was significant in the model that also took into consideration the difference in time periods i.e. pre vs. during the pandemic). The details are presented in Supplementary Section S8.

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https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0424

Titel: The Role of Political Ideology and Open-Minded Thinking Style in the (in)Accuracy of Factual Beliefs
verfasst von: Małgorzata Kossowska
Paulina Szwed
Gabriela Czarnek
Publikationsdatum: 23.05.2022
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Political Behavior / Ausgabe 4/2023
Print ISSN: 0190-9320
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-6687
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09789-z

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