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

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.

[1]  Barry C. Burden,et al.  Affect and Cognition in Party Identification , 2005 .

[2]  R. Janoff-Bulman.  To Provide or Protect: Motivational Bases of Political Liberalism and Conservatism , 2009 .

[3]  J. Sidanius.  Political Interest, Political Information Search, and Ideological Homogeneity as a Function of Sociopolitical Ideology: A Tale of Three Theories , 1984 .

[4]  S. Cole.  Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care? , 2015 .

[5]  John R. Petrocik,et al.  The Changing Politics of American Men: Understanding the Sources of the Gender Gap , 1999 .

[6]  L. A. Pervin.  Handbook of Personality: Theory and Research , 1992 .

[7]  M. Morris,et al.  Culture and Cause: American and Chinese Attributions for Social and Physical Events , 1994 .

[8]  T. Talhelm,et al.  Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture , 2014, Science.

[9]  Shinobu Kitayama,et al.  Cultural differences are not always reducible to individual differences , 2010, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[10]  Thomas D. Griffin,et al.  Dispositions, scripts, or motivated correction? Understanding ideological differences in explanations for social problems. , 2002, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[11]  Y. Kashima,et al.  Culture and Self: Are There Within-Culture Differences in Self Between Metropolitan Areas and Regional Cities? , 2004, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[12]  C. B. Colby.  The weirdest people in the world , 1973 .

[13]  P. Tetlock,et al.  Stability and change in the complexity of senatorial debate: Testing the cognitive versus rhetorical style hypotheses. , 1984 .

[14]  Jaime L. Napier,et al.  Political ideology: its structure, functions, and elective affinities. , 2009, Annual review of psychology.

[15]  Matthew Levendusky.  The Partisan Sort: How Liberals Became Democrats and Conservatives Became Republicans , 2009 .

[16]  J. Jost.  The end of the end of ideology. , 2006, The American psychologist.

[17]  L. Chiu.  A CROSS‐CULTURAL COMPARISON OF COGNITIVE STYLES IN CHINESE AND AMERICAN CHILDREN , 1972 .

[18]  R. Nisbett,et al.  Is it culture or is it language? Examination of language effects in cross-cultural research on categorization. , 2004, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[19]  D. Oyserman,et al.  Does culture influence what and how we think? Effects of priming individualism and collectivism. , 2008, Psychological bulletin.

[20]  D. Trafimow,et al.  Some tests of the distinction between the private self and the collective self. , 1991 .

[21]  R. Nisbett,et al.  Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition. , 2001, Psychological review.

[22]  H. A. Witkin,et al.  Field dependence and interpersonal behavior. , 1976, Psychological bulletin.

[23]  J. Hunter.  Culture Wars: The Struggle To Define America , 1991 .

[24]  S. Levinson,et al.  WEIRD languages have misled us, too , 2010, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[25]  Jesse Graham,et al.  Understanding Libertarian Morality: The Psychological Dispositions of Self-Identified Libertarians , 2012, PloS one.

[26]  Arie W. Kruglanski,et al.  Exceptions that prove the rule: Using a theory of motivated social cognition to account for ideological incongruities and political anomalies , 2003 .

[27]  D. Murphey,et al.  The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion , 2013 .

[28]  E. Kelly.  Individualism and collectivism , 1901 .

[29]  E. Epel,et al.  Relationship of subjective and objective social status with psychological and physiological functioning: preliminary data in healthy white women. , 2000, Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association.

[30]  Michael E. W. Varnum,et al.  The Origin of Cultural Differences in Cognition , 2010 .

[31]  S. Srivastava,et al.  The Big Five Trait taxonomy: History, measurement, and theoretical perspectives. , 1999 .

[32]  Geoffrey L. Cohen,et al.  Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs. , 2003, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[33]  A. Van Hiel,et al.  The relationship between social-cultural attitudes and behavioral measures of cognitive style: a meta-analytic integration of studies. , 2010, Journal of personality.

[34]  Brian A. Nosek,et al.  Ideology Its Resurgence in Social , Personality , and Political Psychology , 2008 .

[35]  R. Nisbett,et al.  PERSONALITY PROCESSES AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES Attending Holistically Versus Analytically: Comparing the Context Sensitivity of Japanese and Americans , 2004 .

[36]  Brian A. Nosek,et al.  Motivated Independence? Implicit Party Identity Predicts Political Judgments Among Self-Proclaimed Independents , 2012, Personality & social psychology bulletin.

[37]  S. Frederick.  Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 19, Number 4—Fall 2005—Pages 25–42 Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making , 2022 .

[38]  D. Oyserman,et al.  Thinking about the self influences thinking in general: cognitive consequences of salient self-concept , 2002 .

[39]  R. Dalal,et al.  Culture and judgment of causal relevance. , 2003, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[40]  Jeff T. Larsen,et al.  Perceiving an Object and Its Context in Different Cultures , 2003, Psychological science.

[41]  P. Tetlock.  Cognitive Biases and Organizational Correctives: Do Both Disease and Cure Depend on the Politics of the Beholder? , 2000 .

[42]  P. Tetlock,et al.  Cognitive and Rhetorical Styles of Traditionalist and Reformist Soviet Politicians: A Content Analysis Study , 1989 .

[43]  Brian A. Nosek,et al.  Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. , 2009, Journal of personality and social psychology.