More religion & CRT--where's ideology & CRT?!
Dan Kahan Posted on Friday, April 27, 2012 at 9:16AM Science this week published an article that finds low CRT predicts religiosity & that backs this finding up w/ experimental data:
It's a really excellent study. The experiments were ingenious. It should be pointed out, though, that this finding corroborates another excellent one, Shenhav, A., Rand, D.G. & Greene, J.D. Divine intuition: Cognitive style influences belief in God. Journal of Experimental Psychology (2011), advance online doi:10.1037/a0025391.
I'm waiting, patiently, for someone to publish some data on correlation between CRT & liberal-conservative ideology. As I've noted before, data that CCP has collected suggests that there is virtually none -- or that there are weak offsetting correlations between different cultural dimensions of conservatism (hierarchy & individualism).
The reason I'm waiting is that such data would contribute a lot to the increasing interest in the relationship between ideology & quality/style of cognitive processing (the Republic Brain hypothesis or "RBH," let's call it). Shane Frederick's CRT scale & Numeracy (which incorporates CRT) are the only validated indicators of the disposition to use systematic or System 2 reasoning as opposed to heuristic or system 1. So it would, of course, be super useful to see what the CTR verdict is on whether conservatives & liberals differ in processing.
Being patient while waiting is becoming more difficult. I've got to believe that such evidence is already in hand; given the interest in the RB hypothesis, surely someone (likely multiple people) have thought to try to test it w/ the CRT measure. It would be sad to discover that the reason the data haven't been reported is that they don't fit the hypothesis -- that is, don't show that liberals are more "systematic" or System-2 disposed in their thinking.
Actually, I suppose I have data in hand, but at least I've blogged on them!
Oh-- if I'm wrong to think that this is a matter on which no one has yet presented data, please tell me and I'll happily acknowledge my error & share the relevant references w/ other curious people.
Dan Kahan
Okay-- so someone has sent me an article that reports a CRT-conservativism correlation: Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J.A., Seli, P., Koehler, D.J. & Fugelsang, J.A. Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief. Cognition 123, 335-346 (2012), reports a negative correlation of -0.16 (p < 0.05). (Uses a mechanical-turk sample but I still think it is worth taking note of.)
Interestingly, this article too is about the impact of heuristic reasoning on religious belief! (Apparently it escaped notice of Science authors).
On first glance, looks like another great study, although I will need to think more systematically about it.