A new pair of large-scale studies finds that while political conservatives and ideological extremists are slightly less likely to update their beliefs when presented with new evidence, these effects are very small. The research, published in the journal Political Psychology, suggests that broad, sweeping claims about a strong connection between a person’s political views and their cognitive rigidity are likely not justified.
The study was conducted as an “adversarial collaboration,” a unique scientific approach where researchers with opposing viewpoints team up to design a study they all agree is a fair test of their competing ideas. This method is intended to reduce the biases that can arise when scientists design studies that might favor their own pre-existing theories. The goal was to find a definitive answer to a long-debated question: Is a rigid way of thinking associated with a particular political ideology?
“There is a rich and longstanding history of examining the relations between political ideology and rigidity,” said corresponding author Shauan Bowes, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. “Much of this research has been rife with debate, and it is a vast and complex literature. An adversarial collaboration brings together disagreeing scholars to examine a research question, affording the opportunity for more accurate and nuanced research. Here, the adversaries were hoping to provide additional clarity on the nature of the relations between political ideology and rigidity, testing three different primary hypotheses.”
For decades, psychologists have explored the underpinnings of political beliefs. One prominent idea has been the “rigidity-of-the-right” hypothesis. This perspective suggests that conservative ideology is rooted in a less flexible thinking style and a greater need for certainty. According to this view, these traits make conservatives less open to changing their minds.
A second perspective offers a different explanation, known as the symmetry model. Proponents of this view argue that psychological motivations to fit in with a group and avoid social punishment can lead to rigid thinking in people of any political persuasion. They propose that there is no inherent reason to believe one side of the political spectrum would be more or less flexible than the other; any differences would depend on the specific topic being discussed.
A third idea is the “rigidity-of-extremes” hypothesis. This theory posits that inflexibility is not about being left or right, but about being at the ideological fringes. People with extreme political views, whether on the far left or the far right, may be more rigid in their thinking than political moderates. Extreme ideologies often provide simple, clear-cut answers to complex societal problems, which can foster a high degree of certainty and a reluctance to consider alternative viewpoints.
A major challenge in this area of research has been defining and measuring “rigidity.” The term has been used in many different ways, and many popular measures have been criticized for containing questions that are already biased toward a certain political ideology.
To overcome this, the collaborating researchers first reviewed dozens of ways rigidity has been measured. After a thorough process of elimination, they unanimously agreed on one operationalization they all considered valid and unbiased: evidence-based belief updating. This simply means measuring how much a person changes their belief about a statement after being shown evidence that supports it. A person who shows less belief change is considered more rigid.
Before launching their main studies, the team conducted a pretest with over 2,000 participants. Their aim was to find pairs of political statements that were ideologically balanced. They generated statements that made arguments friendly to both liberal and conservative viewpoints on the same topic. For example, one statement suggested that people who are liberal on social issues score higher on intelligence tests, while its counterpart suggested people who are fiscally conservative score higher. By analyzing how people with different ideologies rated these statements, the researchers selected pairs that showed no overall bias, ensuring the main studies would be a fair test.
In the first study, nearly 2,500 American participants were asked to rate their agreement with several political statements. After giving an initial rating, they were shown a short piece of information from a credible source, like a university, that supported the statement. For example, a statement might read, “The U.S. economy performs better under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents,” followed by evidence from a research institution supporting that claim. Participants then rated the same statement a second time. The researchers measured the change between the first and second ratings to calculate a belief updating score.
The results of this first study showed a weak but statistically significant relationship. People who identified as socially or generally conservative updated their beliefs slightly less than liberals did. The analysis also found that general political extremism was associated with less belief updating. However, the size of these effects was very small. For instance, a one standard deviation increase in conservatism or extremism resulted in a change of less than 1.5 points on a 200-point scale of belief updating.
“I was surprised by how the results were consistently quite small,” Bowes told PsyPost. “Previous studies may have conflated ideology and rigidity measures, which can artificially inflate effect sizes. Because the adversaries intentionally designed an ideology-neutral measure of rigidity, the results were small. And, from my perspective, they were smaller than I would have initially presumed.”
The second study aimed to replicate and build upon the first. This time, the research team recruited more than 3,700 U.S. participants, making a special effort to include more people from the extreme ends of the political spectrum. They also made the evidence presented to participants more engaging, designing it to look like a blog post from a research institution. The fundamental procedure remained the same: participants rated a statement before and after seeing evidence for it.
The findings from the second study mirrored those of the first. Once again, general and social conservatism were weakly associated with less belief updating. In this larger sample with more extremists, all measures of extremism were also significantly linked to less belief updating. People on the far right tended to be slightly more rigid than people on the far left. Despite these consistent patterns, the effects remained tiny and, from a practical standpoint, negligible.
By combining the data from both studies, the researchers created a large dataset of over 6,000 participants. This combined analysis confirmed the earlier findings. Conservatism and extremism were both associated with slightly less willingness to change one’s mind in the face of evidence. But the size of these relationships was consistently very small, suggesting that a person’s political ideology is a very poor predictor of how much they will update their beliefs in this kind of task.
The authors, representing all sides of the original debate, came to a shared conclusion. Centrists and moderates showed the most belief updating, or the least rigidity. When comparing groups, people on the political right, especially the far right, were slightly more rigid. However, the weakness and inconsistency of these effects across different measures of ideology mean that the practical importance of this connection is questionable.
“The relations between political ideology and rigidity, which in this context was belief rigidity (i.e., less willing to update one’s views after being presented with evidence), are generally small, which calls into question the practical importance of ideological differences in rigidity in this context,” Bowes explained. “There was semi-consistent support for the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis (conservatives are more rigid than liberals) and rigidity-of-extremes (political extremes are more extreme than political moderates) hypothesis.”
“That said, the adversaries acknowledge that because the results are quite small and only semi-consistent, one could reasonably interpret the results as lending support to symmetry perspectives (the left and right are equally rigid but about different topics). ”
The team suggests that instead of asking the broad question of who is more rigid, researchers should focus on identifying the specific contexts and issues that might cause rigidity to appear more strongly in certain groups.
The study did have some limitations. The research was conducted with American participants at a specific point in time, and the findings might not apply to other countries or different political eras. It also focused on only one type of rigidity, belief updating, and did not examine other forms, such as personality traits associated with inflexibility. Future studies could explore these relationships over time or in different cultural contexts to see if the patterns hold.
“We only studied belief rigidity, which is one form of rigidity,” Bowes noted. “We do not want to make sweeping claims about rigidity writ large and encourage others to examine whether our results do or do not held when examining other manifestations of rigidity.”
“I think it would be immensely beneficial to examine additional forms of rigidity in relation to political ideology and consider boundary conditions. That is, there are likely contexts where the relationship is much stronger, and we should be focusing on that question rather than ‘overall, who is more rigid in general?'”
The study, “An adversarial collaboration on the rigidity-of-the-right, symmetry thesis, or rigidity-of-extremes: The answer depends on the question,” was authored by Shauna M. Bowes, Cory J. Clark, Lucian Gideon Conway III, Thomas Costello, Danny Osborne, Philip E. Tetlock, and Jan-Willem van Prooijen.
