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The Unthinking or Confident Extremist? Political Extremists Are More Likely Than Moderates to Reject Experimenter-Generated Anchors
- Source :
- Psychological Science, 26(2), 189-202. Sage Publications, Inc.
- Publication Year :
- 2014
- Publisher :
- SAGE Publications, 2014.
-
Abstract
- People with extreme political opinions are alternatively characterized as being relatively unthinking or as confident consumers and practitioners of politics. In three studies, we tested these competing hypotheses using cognitive anchoring tasks (total N = 6,767). Using two different measures of political extremity, we found that extremists were less influenced than political moderates by two types of experimenter-generated anchors (Studies 1–3) and that this result was mediated by extremists’ belief superiority (Study 2). Extremists and moderates, however, were not differentially influenced by self-generated anchors (Study 2), which suggests that extremists differentiated between externally and internally generated anchors. These results are consistent with the confident-extremist perspective and contradict the unthinking-extremist perspective. The present studies demonstrate the utility of adopting a basic cognitive task to investigate the relationship between ideology and cognitive style and suggest that extremity does not necessarily beget irrationality.
- Subjects :
- Adult
Male
Social Identification
media_common.quotation_subject
Decision Making
Politics
Perspective (graphical)
Irrationality
Poison control
Human factors and ergonomics
Cognition
Models, Psychological
Humans
Female
Ideology
Cues
Psychology
Social psychology
General Psychology
media_common
Cognitive style
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14679280 and 09567976
- Volume :
- 26
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Psychological Science
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....9e55d8d15140876b4f62ce6435b7092b