Sunday, February 2, 2020

False equivalence: Are liberals and conservatives in the US equally biased?

A recent article from Baron and Jost (2019) in Perspectives in Psychological Science 14(2):

"A large number of other studies have revealed significant ideological asymmetries with respect to subjective and objective measures of (domain-general) cognitive style variables. As illustrated in Figure 1, liberals generally score higher than conservatives on measures of integrative complexity, cognitive reflection, need for cognition, and uncertainty tolerance, whereas conservatives score higher than liberals on measures of personal needs for order and structure, cognitive closure, intolerance of ambiguity, cognitive or perceptual rigidity, and dogmatism. A study by Zmigrod, Rentfrow, and Robbins (2018) demonstrated, furthermore, that conservatives performed worse than liberals on two objective (and entirely non-political) tests of cognitive flexibility: the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and the Remote Associates Test.There is also a good deal of evidence that liberals perform better than conservatives on objective tests of cognitive ability and intelligence. Conservatives, on the other hand, appear to be more gullible and less interested in scientific ways of knowing. They also score higher than liberals on measures of self-deception. Social scientists are increasingly finding that conservatives are more likely than liberals to spread “fake news,” political misinformation, and conspiracy theories throughout their online social networks."

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