Proof of ideologically motivated reasoning-strong vs. weak - Cultural Cognition of Health

A couple of weeks ago I posted the abstract & link to Nam, Jost & Van Bavel’s “Not for All the Tea in China!” Political Ideology and the Avoidance of Dissonance, and asked readers to comment on whether they thought the article made a good case for the “asymmetry thesis.”

The “asymmetry thesis”—a matter I’ve actually commented on about a billion times on this blog (e.g., here , here , here, here , here . . .)—is the claim that individuals who subscribe to a conservative or “right-wing” political orientation are uniquely or disproportionately vulnerable to closed-minded resistance to evidence that challenges their existing beliefs.

The readers’ responses were great.

Well, I thought I’d offer my own view at this point.

I like the study. It’s really interesting.

Nevertheless, I don’t think it supplies much if any additional evidence for treating the asymmetry thesis as true than one would have had before the study. Consequently, if one didn’t find the thesis convincing before (I didn’t), then NJV-B doesn’t furnish much basis for reconsidering.

One reason the study isn’t very strong is that NJV-B relied on a Mechanical Turk sample.  I just posted a two-part set of blog entries explaining why I think MT samples do not support valid inferences relating to cultural cognition and like forms of motivated reasoning .

But even leaving that aside, the NJV-B study, in my view, rests on a weak design, one that defeats confident inferences that any ideological “asymmetries” observed in the study correspond to how citizens engage real-world evidence on climate change, gun control, the death penalty, health care, or other policies that turn on contested empirical claims.

NJV-B purported to examine whether “conservatives” are more averse to “cognitive dissonance” than “liberals” with respect to their respective political positions—a characteristic that would, if true, suggest that the former are less likely to expose themselves to or credit challenging evidence.

They tested this proposition by asking subjects to write “counterattitudinal essays”—ones that conflicted with the positions associated with subjects’ self-reported ideologies—on the relative effectiveness of Democratic and Republican Presidents.  Democrats were requested to write essays comparing Bush favorably to Obama, and Reagan favorably to Clinton; Republicans to write ones comparing Obama favorably to Bush, and Clinton favorably to Reagan.

They found that a greater proportion of Democrats complied with these requests. On that basis, they concluded that Republicans have a lower tolerance for actively engaging evidence that disappoints their political predispositions.

Well, sure, I guess.  If the two groups had demonstrated an equal likelihood to resist writing such essays, then I suppose that would count as evidence of “symmetry,” so their unwillingness to do so by the same token is evidence the other way.

The problem is that it’s not clear that the intensity of the threat that the respective tasks posed to Republicans’ and Democrats’ predispositions was genuinely equal.  As a result, it’s not clear whether the “asymmetry” NJV-B observed in the willingness of the subjects to perform the requested tasks connotes a comparable differential in the disposition of Democrats and Republicans to engage open-mindedly with evidence that challenges their views in real-world political conflicts.

By analogy, imagine I hypothesized that Southerners were lazier than Northerners. To test this proposition, I asked Southerners to run 5 miles and Northerners to do 50 sit-ups. Observing that a greater proportion of Northerners agreed to my request, I conclude that indeed Southerners are lazier—more averse to physical and likely all other manner of exertion—than Northerners are.

This is obviously bogus.  One could reasonably suspect that doing 50 sit-ups is less taxing than running 5 miles. If so, then we’d expect agreement from fewer members of a group of people asked to do the former than from members of a group asked to do the latter—even if the two groups’ members are equally disposed to exert themselves.

Well, is it as “dissonant” for a Democrat to compare Bush favorably to Obama, and Reagan favorably to Clinton, as it is for a Republican to compare Obama favorably to Bush and Clinton favorably to Reagan?

I think we could come up with lots of stories—but the truth is, who the hell knows ? We don’t have any obvious metric by which to compare how threatening or dissonant or “ideologically noncongruent” such tasks are for the respective groups, and hence no clear way to assess the probative significance of differences in the willingness of each to engage in the respective tasks they were requested to perform.

So, sure, we have evidence consistent with “asymmetry” in NJV-B—but since we have no idea what weight or strength to assign it, only someone motivated to credit the “asymmetry” thesis could expect a person who started out unconvinced of it to view this study as supplying much reason to change his or her mind, given all the evidence out there that is contrary to the asymmetry thesis.

The evidence contrary to the asymmetry thesis rests on study designs that don’t have the sort of deficiency that NJV-B displays.  Specifically, the studies I have in mind use designs that measure how individuals of diverse ideologies assess one and the same item of evidence , and show that they are uniformly disposed to credit or discredit it selectively , depending on whether the researcher has induced the study subjects to believe that the piece of evidence in question supports or challenges, affirms or threatens, a position congenial to their respective group commitments.

One example involved the CCP study featured in the paper They Saw a Protest. There, subjects, acting as jurors in a hypothetical trial, were instructed to view a videotape of a political protest and determine whether the demonstrators physically threatened bystanders. Half the subjects were told that the demonstrators were anti-abortion activists protesting outside of an abortion clinic, and half that they were pro-gay/lesbian activists protesting “don’t ask, don’t tell” outside of a military recruitment center.