New research indicates social rigidity is a key predictor of cognitive rigidity | Hacker News Reader

New research indicates social rigidity is a key predictor of cognitive rigidity

psypost.org

24 pointslgvln26 comments

It looks like another one of those sincere efforts to prove that people who have different worldviews from the authors are just stupid.

And people love to vote up those papers because they assume that it scientifically proves their belief system is the correct one and the other guys are just dumb.

I'm an atheist and my twin brother is very religious. Worldviews come from the information streams you are subject to and also from the groups you are in.

Just because it was published doesn't mean it's not absolute nonsense.

== It looks like another one of those sincere efforts to prove that people who have different worldviews from the authors are just stupid.==

Your comment reads as the same, just in the opposite direction.

== And people love to vote up those papers because they assume that it scientifically proves their belief system is the correct one and the other guys are just dumb.==

Or maybe they find the results useful/insightful. I don’t think being cynical about other people’s motives really helps us understand human behavior.

> Just because it was published doesn't mean it's not absolute nonsense.

Strong words. Would you be so kind and you point out what in the article is "absolute nonsense" and invalidates the conclusions?

From the abstract (emphasis added):

> Thus, we hypothesized a relation between forms of social rigidity, including Socio-cognitive polarization (i.e., a factor capturing conservative political ideology, absolutism/intolerance of ambiguity, and xenophobia)

Did they seriously classify "conservative political ideology" in general as an aspect of socio-cognitive polarization, and casually toss it into the same bin as xenophobia?

This reeks of bias from a mile away.

Given that this is a behavioral (soft) science study, and given what we know about that branch of social studies and its replication issues, I would expect this to be casually tossed into the bin " does not replicate" when under the microscope

I just love the label "soft science". It's genius marketing. Basically, it means that they get to call themselves a science, with all the hard-earned trust and authority that comes attached to that term, but without actually having to follow the rules and conventions of hard sciences in their work.

So, like economics?

I feel like economics is glorified philosophy with historical analysis as an afterthought.

I finished my Econ undergrad 15 years ago and even then it was effectively applied statistics for finance plus some policy and a dash of philosophy.

I should've qualified that I meant "in political contexts".

Although, people develop ideas of the world based on their own experiences and beliefs. People developing economic theories aren't exempt. It's especially not strange that economic models are biased because economics affects and is affected by society and politics. It would be just dandy if people were more cohesive.

We use "science" to prove "they" are inferior.

It's not to the credit of the journal Psychological Research that they published the abstract in this form. A sentence like this one should have raised red flags during peer review, and at minimum they should have demanded clarification. The fact that they didn't suggests that the problem is systemic.

The results of our craniometer on the rigid test subjects is further evidence. We also notice 3 dimples on the backside of their skulls further suggesting underdeveloped…

Looking at their data, it appears that they did not toss them into the same bin; they measured each separately. They found positive correlations among the 3, with conservatism strongly correlated (~70%) to xenophobia and more weakly (36%) to absolutism.

What constitutes "conservatism" for the purpose of this study was based on self-assessment of participants, who were exclusively Americans and Italians.

In both the US and Italy, conservative ideas are strongly associated with the religious right (Evangelical in the US, and Catholic in Italy). This at minimum means that the results of this study do not necessarily transfer to other societies, but more likely suggests that those two nationalities were deliberately chosen to arrive at a predetermined conclusion.

I agree, the study did not attempt to define conservatism in a universal context devoid of societal context, but instead sampled from two countries with somewhat similar notions of conservativism.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest the choice to select participants from Italy and the United States might be influenced considerably more by the author holding research positions at Italian and US universities than the nature of hypothesis they were testing...

The authors should at least note caveats such as that. It doesn't seem like they did in the "Limitations and future directions" section. The article seems to just take the conclusion as given.

The initial description of conservatism in the study:

  According to the ‘rigidity of the right’ perspective, politically conservative beliefs are paired with cognitive and even perceptual rigidity (e.g., Jost et al., 2003; Tetlock et al., 1985).

In the US, perhaps things were more straightforward at the time of those references, but it seems disingenuous to not consider the recent political climate.

> ...sociologists and psychologists have postulated that right-wing attitudes are associated with a ‘strict’ cognitive style,” Salvi explained. “However, most of the research in cognitive and social psychology...

They really do try to slip political bias into this "paper" wherever possible. Bizarre and untrustworthy authorship.

Everybody be queering gender all the time.

But try queering a political binary and all of a sudden everybody's staring at you.

Reminds me of this study about how liberals were smarter than conservatives because they could recognize W better in obscure patterns. At the time George W. Bush was president. W being a a huge trigger for many liberals.

Of course now we have TDS.

> This reeks of bias from a mile away.

What is your opinion on the section of the paper where they discuss the link between conservative ideology (and political extremism in general, including liberal) and perceptual rigidity, referencing 28 other studies?

Historians know how this eventually ends as an ever-growing group is "othered" by the dominate societal power structure. Doubt those chuckling at their cleverness at finding new ways to turn up the heat on divisiveness will fare very well, just like they didn't fare very well in other societies that collapsed from internal strife.

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