Preface. This study was clever in predicting the political and religious outlook of people using abstract tests that were not political or emotional, such as memorizing visual shapes.

This study of worldviews was able to predict political preferences 4 to 15-fold better than demographic predictors. 

these findings could be used to spot people at risk from radicalization who might be willing to commit violence against innocent people.

So if people are hard-wired to perceive and react to reality in conservative or liberal ways, how do you go about teaching critical thinking skills and keeping people from believing fake news or becoming terrorists?  Especially when it is the conservative mind that is most vulnerable, yet these brains are the least able to do the complex thinking needed to make the best assessment of evidence. Or as the paper itself puts it:  “ideological worldviews may be reflective of low-level perceptual and cognitive functions”. How do you bring conservative brains to a higher level that are born with lower levels of functioning?

I personally think that there has to be a way to keep them from being exposed to ideas like QAnon, vaccine denial, FOX news and so on in the first place. Oh no, suppression of free speech, the horror! Well then first try bringing back the fairness doctrine Reagan abolished, making Rush Limbaugh and FOX possible. Select for less radical left or right candidates with the top-two primary. Yank FOX and similar channels out of the packages offered by Comcast, Disney, Verizon, and so on and make people pay more for them. Of course, since the economic conservatives have much to gain by deceiving conservative brains and the wealth to do so, the logical conclusion of all this are more buildings blown up and chaos while the rich hide behind protective gates and thousand-acre guarded estates as limits to growth makes all people more desperate and radicalized.

Below are bits and pieces of the paper I’ve extracted, read the full paper via the link.

Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com  author of “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”, April 2021, Springer, “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, 2015, Springer, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, and “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”. Podcasts: Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity , XX2 report

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Zmigrod L, Eisenberg IW, Bissett PG et al (2021) The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0424

Abstract

Researchers discovered that “ideological attitudes mirrored cognitive decision-making strategies. Conservatism and nationalism were related to greater caution in perceptual decision-making tasks and to reduced strategic information processing, while dogmatism was associated with slower evidence accumulation and impulsive tendencies. Extreme pro-group attitudes, including violence endorsement against outgroups, were linked to poorer working memory, slower perceptual strategies, and tendencies towards impulsivity and sensation-seeking—reflecting overlaps with the psychological profiles of conservatism and dogmatism. Cognitive and personality signatures were also generated for ideologies such as authoritarianism, system justification, social dominance orientation, patriotism and receptivity to evidence or alternative viewpoints; elucidating their underpinnings and highlighting avenues for future research. Together these findings suggest that ideological worldviews may be reflective of low-level perceptual and cognitive functions.”

What this means is that people with extremist views less able to do complex mental tasks, research suggests.

Those with extremist attitudes tended to perform poorly on complex mental tasks and tended to think about the world in black and white. They struggled with complex tasks that required intricate planning. Perhaps this is why they’re drawn to authoritarian ideologies that simplify the world.

They tend to be dogmatic, stuck in their ways and relatively resistant to credible evidence, showing a problem with processing evidence at a perceptual level. It took them longer to decide if dots were moving to the left or right on a screen for example.  When asked to respond as quickly and accurately the politically conservative were slow and steady, while political liberals were faster with a less precise approach. 

This is in line with conservatism being known as a synonym for caution. It appears from these tests that they simply treat every stimuli they encounter with caution. Yet they also tend to be impulsive and poor at regulating their emotions.

Introduction

One of the most powerful metaphors in political psychology has been that of elective affinities—the notion that there is a mutual attraction between ‘the structure and contents of belief systems and the underlying needs and motives of individuals and groups who subscribe to them’. With roots in Enlightenment philosophy and Max Weber’s sociology, this metaphor contends that certain ideologies resonate with the psychological predispositions of certain people. So, we can elucidate psycho-political processes by logically tracing these coherences, these elective affinities between ideas and interests. This analogy has inspired rich theories about the epistemic, relational and existential motivations that drive individuals to adhere to political ideologies (e.g. [2]), highlighting the role of needs for coherence, connectedness and certainty in structuring ideological attitudes.

Nonetheless, the methodologies employed to study these questions have been mostly of a social psychological nature, relying primarily on self-report measures of needs for order, cognitive closure, rigidity and others. This has skewed the academic conversation towards the needs and interests that ideologies satisfy, and obscured the role of cognitive dispositions that can promote (or suppress) ideological thinking. In fact, it is only recently that researchers have begun to employ neurocognitive tasks and analytic approaches from cognitive science in order to tackle the question: which cognitive traits shape an individual’s ideological worldviews? In this investigation, we sought to apply cognitive methodologies and analytic tools in order to identify the cognitive and personality correlates of ideological attitudes in a data-driven fashion. Borrowing methods from cognitive psychology, which have established sophisticated techniques to measure and analyse perceptual and cognitive processes in an objective and implicit way, and implementing these in the study of ideology can facilitate the construction of a more wholistic and rigorous cognitive science of ideology. This can push the analogy of ‘elective affinities’ into the realm of perception and cognition to allow us to tackle the question: are there parallels between individuals’ ideologies and their general perceptual or cognitive styles and strategies?

Furthermore, owing to limited resources and siloed research disciplines, many studies in social psychology frequently focus on a single ideological domain (e.g. political conservatism) or a single psychological domain (e.g. analytical thinking). While an in-depth focus on a specific domain is essential for theoretical development, the selection of hypotheses and methodologies can at times suffer from problems of bias and a lack of conceptual integration across different ideological and psychological domains. Indeed, a growing concern has emerged among researchers that psychologists of politics, nationalism and religion generate hypotheses and develop study designs that confirm their prior beliefs about the origins of social discord [7–12]. It is, therefore, valuable to complement theory-driven research with data-driven approaches, which can help to overcome these methodological challenges, as well as offer a wholistic view of these complex relationships by ‘letting the data speak’. Perhaps most importantly, data-driven research can help validate or challenge theory-driven findings and consequently offer directions for future research.

Discussion

Dogmatic participants were slower to accumulate evidence in speeded decision-making tasks but were also more impulsive and willing to take ethical risks. This combination of traits—impulsivity in conjunction with slow and impaired accumulation of evidence from the decision environment—may result in the dogmatic tendency to discard evidence prematurely and to resist belief updating in light of new information.

Political conservatism was best explained by reduced strategic information processing, heightened response caution in perceptual decision-making paradigms, and an aversion to social risk-taking. These three predictors were consistently implicated in the general political conservatism factor, as well as the specific political-ideological orientations studied, such as nationalism, authoritarianism and social conservatism

the finding that political and nationalistic conservatism is associated with reduced strategic information processing (reflecting variables associated with working memory capacity, planning, cognitive flexibility and other higher-order strategies) is consistent with a large body of literature indicating that right-wing ideologies are frequently associated with reduced analytical thinking and cognitive flexibility 

Additionally, conservative political ideology was characterized by a diminished tendency to take social risks such as disagreeing with authority, starting a new career mid-life and speaking publicly about a controversial topic. This corroborates research showing that political conservatives tend to emphasize values of conformity, ingroup loyalty and traditionalism

Specifically, the caution with which individuals process and respond to politically neutral information was related to the conservatism with which they evaluate socio-political information (figures 4 and 5). It, therefore, appears that caution may be a time-scale independent decision strategy: individuals who are politically conservative may be perceptually cautious as well. This finding supports the idea of ‘elective affinities’ between cognitive dispositions and ideological inclinations and is compatible with the perspective that political conservatism is associated with heightened motivations to satisfy dispositional needs for certainty and security. Nonetheless, to the best of our knowledge, ideological attitudes have never before been investigated in relation to caution as measured with cognitive tasks and drift-diffusion parameters. The present results, therefore, offer a novel addition to this literature by suggesting that political conservatism may be a manifestation of a cautious strategy in processing and responding to information that is both time-invariant and ideologically neutral, and can be manifest even in rapid perceptual decision-making processes. This is relevant to the wealth of novel research on the role of uncertainty in the neural underpinnings of political processes

Social and economic conservatism are not the same though: although social and economic conservatism possessed many overlapping correlates (such as heightened goal-directedness and caution), economic conservatism was associated with enhanced sensation-seeking, whereas social conservatism was not, and in turn, social conservatism was related to heightened agreeableness and risk perception, while economic conservatism was not.

The psychological signature of religiosity consisted of heightened caution and reduced strategic information processing in the cognitive domain (similarly to conservatism), and enhanced agreeableness, risk perception and aversion to social risk-taking, in the personality domain. The finding that religious participants exhibited elevated caution and risk perception is particularly informative to researchers investigating the theory that threat, risk and disgust sensitivity are linked to moral and religious convictions, and that these cognitive and emotional biases may have played a role in the cultural origins of large-scale organized religions. The results support the notion that experiencing risks as more salient and probable may facilitate devotion to religious ideologies that offer explanations of these risks (by supernatural accounts) and ways to mitigate them (via religious devotion and communities).

The present data-driven analysis reveals the ways in which perceptual decision-making strategies can percolate into high-level ideological beliefs, suggesting that a dissection of the cognitive anatomy of ideologies is a productive and illuminating endeavor. It elucidates both the cognitive vulnerabilities to toxic ideologies as well as the traits that make individuals more intellectually humble, receptive to evidence and ultimately resilient to extremist rhetoric. Interestingly, the psychological profile of individuals who endorsed extreme pro-group actions, such as ideologically motivated violence against outgroups, was a mix of the political conservatism signature and the dogmatism signature. This may offer key insights for nuanced educational programs aimed at fostering humility and social understanding