An attempt to clarify the link between cognitive style and political ideology: A non-western replication and extension

Abstract

Previous studies relating low-effort or intuitive thinking to political conservatism are limited to Western cultures. Using Turkish and predominantly Muslim samples, Study 1 found that analytic cognitive style (ACS) is negatively correlated with political conservatism. Study 2 found that ACS correlates negatively with political orientation and with social and personal conservatism, but not with economic conservatism. It also examined other variables that might help to explain this correlation. Study 3 tried to manipulate ACS via two different standard priming procedures in two different samples, but our manipulation checks failed. Study 4 manipulated intuitive thinking style via cognitive load manipulation to see whether it enhances conservatism for contextualized political attitudes but we did not find a significant effect. Overall, the results indicate that social liberals tend to think more analytically than conservatives and people’s long term political attitudes may be resistant to experimental manipulations.

1 Introduction

Have you ever thought about the processes activated in your mind when you are moving toward the source of a sudden incoming sound? Or when focusing on a specific person’s voice in a crowded and noisy room? When these processes are at work, two separate mental systems are activated according to the dual process model of mind (Evans, 2003; Kahneman, 2011). Respectively, Type 1 processes are mostly evolutionarily older and characteristically produce automatic and intuitive responses whereas Type 2 corresponds to analytic and controlled processes which developed later in our evolutionary history and typically require considerable working memory resources (Evans & Stanovich, 2013). Differential reliance on these two systems and concomitant cognitive styles may shape our social and political responses.

Researchers have recently argued that religious belief depends more on Type 1 thinking (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Norenzayan, 2013; Pennycook, Cheyne, Seli, Koehler & Fugelsang, 2012; Shenhav, Rand & Greene, 2012; Yilmaz, Karadöller & Sofuoglu, 2016; but see Piazza & Sousa, 2014). Social conservatism, which is positively correlated with religiosity, can also vary depending on the cognitive or thinking styles. For example, the need for cognitive closure is higher in conservative people than in liberals (Kruglanski, 2004). In addition, conservative people exhibit more negativity bias than liberals (Hibbing, Smith & Alford, 2014). Liberals also show higher levels of integrative complexity — the tendency to consider and link multiple perspectives — than conservatives (Tetlock, 1983). Moreover, one of the core elements underlying conservative ideology — acceptance of hierarchy — is also related to cognitive style. For example, Zitek and Tiedens (2012) showed that social hierarchies are remembered and processed more easily and liked better than less hierarchical stimuli, thereby showing the intuitive, low-effort nature of the processing and acceptance of hierarchy. These findings from diverse research streams imply that social conservatism is associated with Type 1 or intuitive thinking, much as religious belief is (see also Pacini & Epstein, 1999; Shook & Fazio, 2009; Sidanius, 1985; Van Berkel, Crandall, Eidelman & Blanchar, 2015). Although all of these characteristics differentiating liberals and conservatives are not directly connected to cognitive style in the same way, we suggest that most, if not all, of them are parsimoniously explained by the distinction between intuitive and analytic thinking styles.

In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of studies investigating cognitive style differences between liberals and conservatives (Eidelman, Crandall, Goodman & Blanchar, 2012; Brandt, Evans & Crawford, 2015; Talhelm et al., 2015). For example, Talhelm et al. (2015) demonstrated that thinking analytically led both American and Chinese participants to favor more liberal social attitudes whereas thinking holistically led them to favor more conservative social attitudes. Some studies have found that liberals show higher scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT; Deppe et al., 2015; Pennycook et al., 2012; Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto & Haidt, 2012), a test used to measure the dispositional tendency to think analytically (Frederick, 2005). However, Kahan (2013), using a different sampling procedure that attempted to sample the American population in a more representative way, found that conservatives are in fact slightly (but not significantly) more likely to correct their intuitive responses than liberals on the CRT. There is also hardly any evidence on this issue outside of Western cultures.

We report data collected in Turkey, a non-western and predominantly Muslim country whose political system has more than two major political parties. Turkey presents interesting challenges to political psychologists. For instance, it is difficult to apply the traditional left-right or liberal-conservative distinctions, since European style social democracy is not prevalent (see Onis, 2007, 2009, for a detailed discussion). Although few researchers have studied the nature of the left-right distinction in Turkey, a recent set of studies found that participants’ self-placement on the left-right continuum predicts their moral foundations (Yilmaz, Harma, Bahçekapili & Cesur, 2016; Yilmaz, Saribay, Bahçekapili & Harma, invited revision) in parallel with the U.S. findings (Graham et al., 2011).

Here we investigate the relationship between analytic cognitive style (ACS) and political ideology in Turkey, while measuring several other variables. Study 1 examined the relationship between ACS and political orientation in a Turkish sample, as an extension of this topic of investigation to non-Western cultures (see Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan, 2010). In Study 2, we investigated the relationship between ACS and different aspects of political ideology while measuring other potential causal factors such as personality traits, need for cognitive closure, and religiosity. In Study 3, we tried to manipulate ACS in two different samples in order to investigate its causal role on political ideology. In Study 4, we attempted a conceptual replication of Eidelman et al.’s (2012) results to investigate the causal influence of intuitive thinking style on political ideology.

2 Study 1

2.1 Method

Participants

With an estimated correlation coefficient of .15, an 85% power for detecting an effect required a sample of at least 314 participants. We therefore collected data from 356 participants (mean age = 25.83, SD = 9.37, 203 females, 142 males, 11 unreported). Two hundred and thirty-two of them were enrolled in an introductory psychology course at Doğuş University (Istanbul) in return for extra course credit. The remaining sample was non-student, with ages ranging from 25 to 76, collected via snowball sampling. All participants were native Turkish speakers.

Materials and Procedure

All materials in the current set of studies were administered in Turkish. The CRT consists of three different questions designed to measure a dispositional tendency to think analytically (Frederick, 2005) and is a widely used measure of cognitive style (Toplak, West & Stanovich, 2011). Each question has one correct, reflective (Type 2) and an incorrect, intuitive/spontaneous answer (Type 1). ACS score was operationalized as the total number of correct answers given to the three CRT questions.

Political orientation was measured by the traditional one item self-placement question from 0 (“left”) to 10 (“right”). Participants were first asked to respond to the CRT, then a demographic form (age, sex, SES, hometown size, ethnicity, religious and political affiliations, preference for political party, and identification with political party were obtained), and finally the political orientation question.

2.2 Results and discussion

As predicted, ACS (here just the 0–3 score on the CRT test) was negatively correlated with political orientation [r (348) = –.163, p = .002], replicating past research (Deppe et al., 2015; Pennycook et al., 2012; Iyer et al., 2012). Table 1 shows the correlations of each of the other variables with ACS and political orientation. It is apparent that, of these, only Age can help to explain the observed negative correlation, because older subjects get lower scores on ACS and they are more conservative; but it does not fully explain the ACS-politics correlation; the relationship is still significant (standardized β = −0.138, p=.013) when ACS is regressed on Age and political orientation.

Table 1: Correlations of each variable with ACS and political orientation (POL, high scores are right wing)

Note: a correlation of 0.095 is significant at p <. 05, 0.134 at p <. 01, two tailed.

In the next study, we used an additional measure of ACS (see Baron, 2015; Baron, Scott, Fincher & Metz, 2015, for a justification of using measures in addition to CRT), and differentiated between separate components of political ideology.

3 Study 2

3.1 Method

Participants

With an estimated correlation coefficient of .15, a 95% power for detecting an effect required a sample of at least 476 participants. We collected data from as many participants as possible and exceeded the minimum sample requirement, since participants were readily available. As a result, we collected data from 750 participants (mean age = 20.63, SD = 2.13, 452 females, 256 males, 22 no answer), who were enrolled in an introductory psychology course at Boğaziçi University (Istanbul) and participated in return for extra course credit.¹ All students were native Turkish speakers.

3.1.1 Measures

Analytic Cognitive Style. In addition to the CRT (see Study 1), we employed three different base-rate conflict (BRC) problems as used by Penncycook et al. (2012). BRC problems consist of a salient stereotype with probabilistic information such as the following:

In a study 1000 people were tested. Among the participants there were 4 kindergarten teachers and 996 executive managers. Lilly is a randomly chosen participant of this study. Lilly is 37 years old. She is married and has 3 kids. Her husband is a veterinarian. She is committed to her family and always watches the daily cartoon shows with her kids.

What is most likely?

1. a) Lilly is an executive manager (correct answer)

2. b) Lilly is a kindergarten teacher

In this kind of question, people generally ignore the base-rate probability (99.6 % chance that Lilly is an executive manager) and select the intuitive, wrong answer (De Neys & Glumicic, 2008). This mistake can be prevented by thinking analytically.² For the six questions, coefficient α (for the number of correct answers) was .66.

Big Five Personality. Since personality has been found to be related to political orientation (Carney, Jost, Gosling, & Potter, 2008), we measured it using the Big Five Personality Inventory (BFI; Benet-Martinez & John, 1998). BFI was translated and adapted to Turkish by Sümer, Lajunen, and Özkan (2005). The inventory has five subscales: Neuroticism (α = .80), Extraversion (α = .88), Openness (α = .79), Agreeableness (α = .69), and Conscientiousness (α = .78). Forty-four personality descriptors are presented and the participant is asked to indicate the extent to which each of these is self-descriptive (e.g., “I see myself as a talkative person”), ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

Social/Political Conservatism. We used two different scales to measure social conservatism. The first — Social/Political Conservatism scale — was developed by Olcaysoy and Saribay (2014) by compiling items from the Social Dominance Orientation scale (Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth & Malle, 1994), Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale (Altemeyer & Hunsberger, 1992), F-scale (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson & Sanford, 1950), Social and Cultural Attitudes scale (Küçüker, 2007), Egalitarianism-Inegalitarianism scale (Kluegel & Smith, 1983), and items measuring resistance to change used by Jost et al. (2007). The scale (Appendix B, Table A1) measures the two dimensions of conservatism as theorized by Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski & Sulloway (2003): resistance to change (two different samples’ Cronbach’s α = 0.80, 0.83) and opposition to equality (α = 0.90, 0.88). The response scale ranged from 1 (totally disagree) to 7 (totally agree). Scores on resistance to change (α = .88 for this study) and opposition to equality (α = .75 for this study) are summed and averaged for each participant in order to form a composite conservatism score in which higher scores indicate more conservative attitudes (one factor solution α = .88 for this study).

The second measure we used — Revised Version of Scale of Social Conservatism — was developed by Henningham (1996) over almost two decades in the Australian culture and adapted to the current American political system by Piazza and Landy (2013). In the original scale participants respond dichotomously on each social issue by choosing “opposed to it” or “not opposed to it”. We revised the scale in accordance with Turkish politics removing some items (e.g., “Outlawing the buying and selling of firearms”) and adding new ones, resulting in 15 items (Appendix B, Table A2). In addition, we changed the response format to an 11-point scale ranging from –5 (strongly disagree) to +5 (strongly agree). The items had good reliability (α = .89). Two items with low (below .20) item-total correlations were excluded. Higher scores indicated greater social conservatism.

Personal Conservatism Scale. This scale was also developed by Olcaysoy and Saribay (2014) in order to measure personal (as opposed to political) conservatism on the same two dimensions: resistance to change and opposition to equality. The items (Appendix B, Table A4) were devoid of political content and focused instead on the individual’s personal preferences and lifestyle. It was developed by compiling items from Resistance to Change scale (Oreg, 2003), Need for Cognitive Closure scale (Kruglanski, Webster & Klem, 1993) and 14 new items. The response scale ranged from 1 (totally disagree) to 7 (totally agree) and scores on resistance to change (α = .86 for this study) and opposition to equality (α = .80 for this study) were summed and averaged for each participant in order to form a composite personal conservatism score in which higher scores indicate more personal conservatism (one factor solution α = .86 for this study).

Economic Conservatism Scale. In Turkish, to the best of our knowledge, there is no scale measuring economic political attitudes. We composed 16 items suitable for Turkish participants (Appendix B, Table A3). Since these 16 items had good reliability (α = .73), we averaged them into a single score of economic conservatism.

Religiosity. We used the Turkish adaptation of the intuitive religious belief scale (IRS; see Yilmaz & Bahçekapili, 2015) developed by Gervais and Norenzayan (2012). It has 5 items with responses given on a scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) (e.g., “When I am troubled, I feel the need to seek help from God”).

Need for Cognitive Closure. Need for Cognitive Closure scale (NFCC) was developed by Webster and Kruglanski (1994) and revised by Roets and Van Hiel (2007). Subsequently, Roets and Van Hiel (2011) validated an abridged version of the scale. This scale consists of 15-items and the response scale ranged from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). NFCC has five subscales: order, predictability, decisiveness, ambiguity, and closed-mindedness. Every subscale is represented by 3 items (e.g., “I find that a well ordered life with regular hours suits my temperament”). We combined all the subscales into a single need for cognitive closure score (α =.84).

Demographic Questions. Information about participants’ demographic background including age, sex, SES, hometown size, ethnicity, religious and political affiliations, preference for and identification with political party was obtained.

3.1.2 Procedure

At the beginning of the Spring 2015 semester, students taking Introduction to Psychology course at Boğaziçi University received an e-mail invitation to complete an online battery of measures for extra-course credit. Students were given two weeks to complete the battery and they were free to complete it at their own pace but were asked to complete it in only one session. The battery contained all the measures listed above and its completion took approximately 45 minutes. We counterbalanced the order of the analytic thinking and political conservatism measures.

3.2 Results and discussion

Table 2 shows the main correlations of interest. As predicted and consistent with Study 1, ACS is negatively correlated with Political Orientation, Social Conservatism (both forms), Personal Conservatism, and NFCC, but did not significantly correlate with Economic Conservatism. In addition, ACS is negatively correlated with Religiosity, replicating previous research (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Pennycook et al., 2012; Shenhav et al., 2012; Yilmaz et al., 2016). Appendix B shows the main correlations by item, along with the text of the items.

Table 2: Correlations of measures with Political Orientation (POL), Personal Conservatism (PER), Economic Conservatism (ECO), Social Conservatism (SC, and SCR, revised), and Analytic Cognitive Style (ACS)

Note: Correlations greater than .140 are significant at p < .0001, .117 at p < .001, .088 at p < .01, and .062 at p < .05, two tailed and uncorrected for multiple tests.

Among the other measures, possible variables that could help to explain the correlation between ACS and social conservatism are those that correlated positively with ACS and negatively with a measure of social conservatism, or the opposite. These include Age, NFCC, Conscientiousness, and especially Religiosity. Note that, unlike Study 1, Age correlates slightly positively with ACS, surely a result of the different sampling procedure. For Political Orientation, the variables that could play a similar role are NFCC, Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, and Religiosity.

Overall, these results demonstrated that ACS is correlated with social conservatism, personal conservatism, and political orientation, but not economic conservatism. In Study 3 and 4, we aimed to go beyond these promising correlational findings and investigate the causal relation between cognitive style and political ideology.

4 Study 3

In this study, we aimed to investigate the causal role of ACS on political ideology. Before conducting the main study, we conducted two studies to replicate, in a Turkish sample, the effectiveness of analytic primes previously used in some published research (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Shenhav et al., 2012) in order to find a way of manipulating ACS.

4.1 Study 3A

We first tried to replicate the thought prime technique, originally used by Shenhav et al. (2012), with a total of 145 (105 females, 39 males, 1 unreported; mean age = 21.45, SD = 1.77) undergraduates in Doğuş University. They participated in this study for extra course credit. They were randomly assigned to the Intuitive-positive condition (n = 39), the Intuitive-negative condition (n = 35), the Analytic-positive condition (n = 37), or the Analytic-negative condition (n = 34) and then they were asked to respond to the standard three-item CRT and BRC (base rate) problems used in Study 2. We computed CRT and BRC scores and combined them into a single ACS score.

In the Intuitive-negative condition, participants were asked to “write a paragraph (approximately 8–10 sentences) describing a time your intuition/first instinct led you in the wrong direction and resulted in a bad outcome” (The italics represent the parts that differed between the four conditions). In the Intuitive-positive condition, participants were asked to “write a paragraph (approximately 8–10 sentences) describing a time your intuition/first instinct led you in the right direction and resulted in a good outcome”. In the Analytic-positive condition, participants were asked to “write a paragraph (approximately 8–10 sentences) describing a time carefully reasoning through a situation led you in the right direction and resulted in a good outcome. Lastly, in the Analytic-negative condition, they were asked to “write a paragraph (approximately 8–10 sentences) describing a time carefully reasoning through a situation led you in the wrong direction and resulted in a bad outcome”.

In contrast to Shenhav et al.’s (2012) results, a one-way ANOVA revealed no significant main effect of thought-priming on ACS, F(3, 123) = 0.18, p= .912, η p² = .004.

4.2 Study 3B

As part of our attempt to discover a suitable procedure that primes analytic thinking, we also tried to replicate the cognitive disfluency paradigm (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012) on a Turkish sample. We estimated a medium effect (f) of .3, which required a total sample of 90 with 80% power of detecting any effect. Three participants (one in the Analytic, two in the Neutral condition) were excluded from the analyses because they did not respond to any manipulation check questions. Eighty seven (73 females, 13 males, 1 unreported; mean age = 22.22, SD = 3.67) undergraduates in Doğuş University participated in this study for extra course credit and they were randomly assigned to either the Analytic (n = 44) or the Neutral (n = 43) conditions and then they were asked to respond to the standard three-item CRT used in Study 1. In the Analytic group, participants were given the materials in a difficult to read font to prod analytic thinking whereas in the Neutral condition, the materials were given in a standard font. However, as in Study 3A, the results revealed no significant effect of our manipulation on analytic thinking tendency, F(1, 85) = 1.18, p= .281, η p² = .014.

After these failures of replication (see Deppe et al., 2015 for similar replication failures), we decided to manipulate intuitive, instead of analytic, thinking style in the next study.

5 Study 4

Eidelman et al. (2012) found that people under cognitive load reported more conservative opinions in long-term attitudes. However, Talhelm et al. (2015) primed analytic versus holistic thinking and found that the latter increased conservatism in contextualized, less stable opinions, but unlike Eidelman et al., they did not find an effect of priming on long-term stable opinions. Thus, we decided to do a conceptual replication of Eidelman et al.’s basic results in order to test whether the activation of intuitive thinking will lead people to adopt more conservative political attitudes on contextualized opinions.

5.1 Method

Participants. We estimated a medium effect (f) of .3, which required a total sample of at least 90 with 80% power of detecting any effect. We considered potential attritions and collected data from 104 participants. Participants were selected from those who participated in the online survey (see Study 2). They participated in this study for extra course credit. All students were native Turkish speakers. They were randomly assigned to either the Cognitive load (n = 56) or the No-load (n = 48) condition. However, in the cognitive load condition, we excluded participants if they responded incorrectly in more than half of the 12 different load trials. This resulted in seven participants being excluded from the analyses.

5.1.1 Materials and measures

Manipulation. We used a cognitive load method which includes memorization of random sequences of numbers and letters presented in a random order (e.g., “ig4j6sf”)³. In the cognitive load condition, in each of 12 trials, participants saw a sequence of numbers and letters, always consisting of a total of 6 or 7 characters, before engaging in the primary task (e.g., responding to an item of the conservatism scale). They were asked to keep this alphanumeric sequence in memory for an uncertain period of time while continuing to engage in the primary task and to report the sequence back when asked. The first sequence appeared at the beginning of the first questionnaire. The remaining 11 sequences were interspersed among items of the various questionnaires used in this study. For each sequence, memory recall was requested after a few items of the questionnaire that the participant was working on, followed by provision of the next load sequence. In each trial, if an alphanumeric sequence reported by the participant had more than half of the same characters (at least 4 correct characters out of 7) of the original sequence, it was considered a correct recall. In the no load condition, participants did not see any load items nor were they given any of these instructions.

Conservatism Measures. The Scale of Social Conservatism (α for this experiment = .90) and Economic Conservatism Scale (α for this experiment= .74) were used in this study.

Contextualized Political Opinions. In Talhelm et al.’s (2015) study, training people to think analytically or holistically led to a change in a contextualized political opinion (responses to a news article) but did not lead to a change in stable political attitudes such as having the opinion that “flag burning should be illegal.” Thus, we exposed participants to two semi-fabricated news articles that included contextualized political opinions and were also each related to a particular policy (Appendix A). We predicted that the cognitive style manipulation would not influence stable political opinions but would influence political opinions which are actively being processed by the participants.

Collectively, the articles presented two different disputes between rightist and leftist positions in the Turkish political system: One of the disputes was related to a conservative policy and included a conservative anchor (a new internet law which enables government to totally ban internet sites in only 4 hours after a complaint). The other dispute was related to a liberal policy and included a liberal anchor (an argument that the primary function of the prison system is rehabilitation of the prisoners).

Participants were asked to carefully read the article. Once finished, they answered a single question measuring their attitude on the presented issue. The 7-point response scale had conservative (e.g., “I am strongly supportive of the internet law.”) and liberal (e.g., “I am strongly against the internet law.”) anchors at the extremes and a neutral (“I do not have an opinion”) option in the middle. Higher scores in the first article represent higher conservative values whereas higher scores in the latter article represent higher liberal values. We used responses to these two news articles as two subscales: liberalism (score of rehabilitation article) and conservatism (score of internet law article) scores. Additionally, we also treated liberalism score as a reverse-coded item, and combined it with the conservatism score to get a total conservatism score.

Positive and Negative Affect Scale. This scale was developed by Watson, Clark and Tellegen (1988) and was adapted into Turkish by Gençöz (2000). It measures participants’ current moods on two dimensions separately: positive and negative affect.

Design and Procedure. The study was conducted in two sessions. The first session was identical to Study 2. In the second session, at least five weeks later, participants were individually invited to the social psychology lab at Boğaziçi University and were randomly assigned to either the Cognitive-load or the No-load condition. After the manipulation phase, participants were asked to read the two semi-fabricated news articles and indicate their opinions regarding the disputes presented in them (as in Talhelm et al., 2015). Finally, they completed the Social Conservatism and Economic Conservatism scales. We counterbalanced the order of these two scales and we individually randomized the order of items within each scale. We implemented the experiment using Medialab (Jarvis, 2012).

5.2 Results and discussion

Contextualized political opinions. Contrary to our prediction, a one-way ANOVA did not reveal a significant effect of the manipulation on either the liberal-anchored article, or the conservative-anchored one (both Fs < 1).

In the liberal-anchored article (rehabilitation), participants in the load condition (M = 5.63, SD = 0.96; 95% CI [5.35, 5.90]) reported more liberal attitudes than no-load condition (M = 5.44, SD = 1.07; 95% CI [5.13, 5.75]), a non-significant difference, F(1, 94) = 0.82, p = .368, η p²= .009.

In the conservative-anchored article (Internet law), participants in the load condition (M = 2.51, SD = 1.45; 95% CI [2.10, 2.93]) reported less conservative attitudes than no-load condition (M = 2.69, SD = 1.43; 95% CI [2.27, 3.10]), but this difference was also not statistically significant, F(1, 95) = 0.37, p = .545, η p²= .004.

When we controlled for baseline political orientation, gender, SES, age, and the current mood of the participants, the results remained constant (all ps > .05).

When we treated the liberalism score as a reverse-coded conservatism item, and combined them as a total conservatism score, a one-way ANOVA revealed no significant differences among groups, F(1, 94) = 0.86, p = .355, η p²= .009.

Stable political attitudes. As expected, we did not find a significant effect of our manipulation on the social and economic conservatism scales (both ps > 21). The results remained constant when controlling for baseline political orientation, gender, SES, age, and the current mood of the participants (all ps > .05). We also used the pre-experimental Social and Economic Conservatism scores of the participants collected in the online survey and compared them with their post-experimental scores to test whether our manipulation had an effect. To assess differences between pretest and posttest, we subtracted the pretest value from the posttest and computed a single difference score. A one-way ANOVA failed to yield any significant terms (all ps > .17).

Overall, in this study, we predicted that a cognitive load manipulation would activate intuitive thinking, which in turn would lead people to adopt more conservative attitudes on the issues they are actively processing (i.e., the news articles), but would not lead to a change in people’s stable attitudes. In contrast to the previous finding that low-effort thinking enhances political conservatism (Eidelman et al., 2012), our manipulation did not influence people’s long-term stable political attitudes, nor political opinions that they were actively processing.

One potential limitation of this study concerns the manipulation technique used. We did not do a real manipulation check, therefore we cannot know with certainty whether our cognitive load manipulation really influenced people’s cognitive styles. Moreover, the load conditions may have been too difficult for the participants, because of the length and complexity of the alphanumeric strings, thus we may have encountered a floor effect in this manipulation. The finding that almost no one was able to memorize the load items exactly supports this argument. On the other hand, one alternative interpretation of the current results is that the original findings (i.e., those of Eidelman et al., 2012) are spurious because our sample size is higher than 2.5 times (n = 104) the number that Eidelman et al. (2012) used (n = 38, see Simonsohn, Nelson & Simmons, 2014). In other words, our results may imply that since political attitudes are formed over a long number of years in a person’s life, they might be less prone to experimental manipulations.

6 General discussion

The present study aimed at clarifying the relation between cognitive style and political ideology, which our data revealed to be more complex than one might initially assume. Study 1 demonstrated a correlation between cognitive style and conservative political ideology, and Study 2 replicated and extended this result to other measures of political ideology, but not economic conservatism. In Study 3, we tried to manipulate ACS to examine its causal role on political ideology, but we could not succeed (our manipulation checks failed). In Study 4, we attempted to direct participants’ cognitive style toward intuitive thinking by a cognitive load manipulation to see whether they would become more conservative as a result, but we found no significant effect.

The original contribution of the current set of studies rests primarily on the following conclusions from our findings: (1) When merely measured, there is some evidence that ACS is associated with political ideology in Turkey. (2) Standard procedures commonly used in the literature to prime analytic thinking may not work as expected (see also Deppe et al., 2015). (3) Manipulations of intuitive thinking do not seem to affect conservative attitudes. These results are in line with some previous research findings showing the relationship between cognitive style and political ideology (Brandt et al., 2015; partially Eidelman et al., 2012; Deppe et al., 2015; Iyer et al., 2012; Jost et al., 2003; Pennycook et al., 2012; Talhelm et al., 2015; Van Berkel et al., 2015; but see Kahan, 2013).

The current research was also motivated by Henrich et al.’s (2010) account of WEIRDness according to which only 15% of people live in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies and the remaining 85% are generally out of the scope of psychological research. Thus, it is important to differentiate the characteristics of the minority (15% of the world population mostly represented by Western people) and the majority (85% of the world population mostly represented by Eastern and Southern people). Talhelm et al. (2015) suggested a sixth characteristic of Westerners: their liberal tendency. On this basis, they offer a new concept: WILDER (Western, industrialized, liberal, democratic, educated, and rich). Perhaps, a seventh letter — “A” for “analytic” — is necessary to add to this list. Like the WEIRD samples that most psychological research employs, our sample was also highly educated (most of them were university students). However, unlike the literature we refer to, our samples were all Turkish and predominantly Muslim. Furthermore, Turkey (compared to the U.S.) is unique in terms of the complexity of its political structure and its multi-party political system (see Onis, 2007, 2009). These facts increase the value of our replications (cf. Henrich et al., 2010).

6.1 Conclusion

The current results are in line with the general view of conservatism as motivated social cognition (Jost et al., 2003). Some core characteristics of conservatism such as preference for hierarchy and uncertainty avoidance are seen to be a product of intuitive thinking, whereas being more tolerant and egalitarian may require more effortful thinking (Van Berkel et al., 2015). Thus, the main difference between conservative and liberal people may stem from the general cognitive thinking style as characterized in the present research in terms of intuitive and analytic thinking styles.

Our findings also suggest the presence of boundary conditions surrounding the effect of cognitive styles on political orientation. For instance, changing stable political opinions with contextual primes may not be that easy, as shown in the current research and some previous non-significant results investigating the effect of cognitive style on political attitudes (e.g., Deppe et al., 2015, see also Yilmaz, 2015). All in all, the findings are compatible with the view that liberals are dispositionally more analytic and conservatives are more intuitive, but it is experimentally difficult to manipulate these long-term political attitudes. Therefore, in today’s culture wars between leftist (liberal) and rightist (conservative) ideological views, being more tolerant, rather than attempting to persuade the opposite parties using analytic arguments, might be a more effective tool for agreement because convincing people of certain ideologies or manipulating their long-term political attitudes may be more difficult than initially assumed.