The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach

Evidence-based scientific thinking and decision-making in everyday life

In today's knowledge economy, it is critical to make decisions based on high-quality evidence. Science-related decision-making is thought to rely on a complex interplay of reasoning skills, cognitive styles, attitudes, and motivations toward information. By investigating the relationship between individual differences and behaviors related to evidence-based decision-making, our aim was to better understand how adults engage with scientific information in everyday life. First, we used a data-driven exploratory approach to identify four latent factors in a large set of measures related to cognitive skills and epistemic attitudes. The resulting structure suggests that key factors include curiosity and positive attitudes toward science, prosociality, cognitive skills, and openmindedness to new information. Second, we investigated whether these factors predicted behavior in a naturalistic decision-making task. In the task, participants were introduced to a real science-related petition and were asked to read six online articles related to the petition, which varied in scientific quality, while deciding how to vote. We demonstrate that curiosity and positive science attitudes, cognitive flexibility, prosociality and emotional states, were related to engaging with information and discernment of evidence reliability. We further found that that social authority is a powerful cue for source credibility, even above the actual quality and relevance of the sources. Our results highlight that individual motivating factors toward information engagement, like curiosity, and social factors such as social authority are important drivers of how adults judge the credibility of everyday sources of scientific information.

Individual differences in knowledge network navigation

With the rapid accumulation of online information, efficient web navigation has grown vital yet challenging. To create an easily navigable cyberspace catering to diverse demographics, understanding how people navigate differently is paramount. While previous research has unveiled individual differences in spatial navigation, such differences in knowledge space navigation remain sparse. To bridge this gap, we conducted an online experiment where participants played a navigation game on Wikipedia and completed personal information questionnaires. Our analysis shows that age negatively affects knowledge space navigation performance, while multilingualism enhances it. Under time pressure, participants' performance improves across trials and males outperform females, an effect not observed in games without time pressure. In our experiment, successful route-finding is usually not related to abilities of innovative exploration of routes. Our results underline the importance of age, multilingualism and time constraint in the knowledge space navigation.

"Consumed by creed": Obsessive-compulsive symptoms underpin ideological obsession and support for political violence

Radicalization is a process by which individuals are introduced to an ideological belief system that encourages political, religious, or social change through the use of violence. Here we formulate an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) model of radicalization that links obsessive passion (OP; one of the best predictors of radical intentions) to a larger body of clinical research. The model's central tenet is that individual differences in OCD symptom severity could shape radical intentions via their influence on OP. Across four ideological samples in the United States (Environmental activists, Republicans, Democrats, and Muslims, Ntotal  = 1114), we found direct effects between OCD symptom severity and radical intentions, as well as indirect effects of OCD on radical intentions via OP. Even after controlling for potential individual difference and clinical confounds (e.g., adverse childhood experiences, loss of significance, and substance abuse), these relationships remained robust, implying that OCD plays a significant role in the formation of violent ideological intentions and opening new avenues for the treatment and prevention of violent extremism. We discuss the implications of conceptualizing radicalization as an OCD-like disorder with compulsive violent tendencies and ideology-related concerns.

Rumors in Retweet: Ideological Asymmetry in the Failure to Correct Misinformation

We used supervised machine-learning techniques to examine ideological asymmetries in online rumor transmission. Although liberals were more likely than conservatives to communicate in general about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings (Study 1, N = 26,422) and 2020 death of the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (Study 2, N = 141,670), conservatives were more likely to share rumors. Rumor-spreading decreased among liberals following official correction, but it increased among conservatives. Marathon rumors were spread twice as often by conservatives pre-correction, and nearly 10 times more often post-correction. Epstein rumors were spread twice as often by conservatives pre-correction, and nearly, eight times more often post-correction. With respect to ideologically congenial rumors, conservatives circulated the rumor that the Clinton family was involved in Epstein's death 18.6 times more often than liberals circulated the rumor that the Trump family was involved. More than 96% of all fake news domains were shared by conservative Twitter users.

Cognitive ability and voting behaviour in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership

On June 23rd 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union. The period leading up to the referendum was characterized by a significant volume of misinformation and disinformation. Existing literature has established the importance of cognitive ability in processing and discounting (mis/dis) information in decision making. We use a dataset of couples within households from a nationally representative UK survey to investigate the relationship between cognitive ability and the propensity to vote Leave / Remain in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership. We find that a one standard deviation increase in cognitive ability, all else being equal, increases the likelihood of a Remain vote by 9.7%. Similarly, we find that an increase in partner's cognitive ability further increases the respondent's likelihood of a Remain vote (7.6%). In a final test, restricting our analysis to couples who voted in a conflicting manner, we find that having a cognitive ability advantage over one's partner increases the likelihood of voting Remain (10.9%). An important question then becomes how to improve individual and household decision making in the face of increasing amounts of (mis/dis) information.

Thinking outside the ballot box

A deeply heterogeneous set of ideological cohorts have shaped the course of history. From anarchists and authoritarians to Zionists and Zapatistas, the expansive alphabet of politics demands an equally expansive psychological vocabulary to describe political belief systems. We propose that constructing such a vocabulary is best facilitated by decentering familiar models that emphasize psychological differences between leftists and rightists. Synthesizing recent developments in the fields of personality, political science, and psychopathology, we characterize individual variation in politics as high-dimensional, heterarchical, intrapersonally eclectic, and contextually shaped and activated. Developing a data-driven taxonomic model of political-psychological phenomena will help create a foundational base of knowledge within political psychology that is more rigorous, more replicable, and certainly richer to investigate.

Do Good Citizens Look to the Future? The Link Between National Identification and Future Time Perspective and Their Role in Explaining Citizens' Reactions to Conflicts Between Short-Term and Long-Term National Interests

When people consider what is good for their country, they might face a conflict between the country's short-term and long-term interests. We suggest that resolving this conflict depends on people's form of national identification and future time perspective. Across four studies (N = 4,274), we showed that constructive patriotism, but not conventional patriotism or glorification, was positively associated with future time perspective. Moreover, we showed that this further translated into people's responses to intertemporal conflicts. Specifically, constructive patriotism was indirectly linked to higher support for national policies with long-term advantages (despite short-term disadvantages) and lower support for national policies with long-term disadvantages (despite short-term advantages), and these links were mediated by future time perspective. Overall, our results demonstrate that distinct forms of national identification are differently linked to future time perspective. Likewise, this helps explain differences in how much people care about their country's present and future.

The psychological causes and societal consequences of authoritarianism

Over the past two decades, citizens’ political rights and civil liberties have declined globally. Psychological science can play an instrumental role in both explaining and combating the authoritarian impulses that underlie these attacks on personal autonomy. In this Review, we describe the psychological processes and situational factors that foster authoritarianism, as well as the societal consequences of its apparent resurgence within the general population. First, we summarize the dual process motivational model of ideology and prejudice, which suggests that viewing the world as a dangerous, but not necessarily competitive, place plants the psychological seeds of authoritarianism. Next, we discuss the evolutionary, genetic, personality and developmental antecedents to authoritarianism and explain how contextual threats to safety and security activate authoritarian predispositions. After examining the harmful consequences of authoritarianism for intergroup relations and broader societal attitudes, we discuss the need to expand the ideological boundaries of authoritarianism and encourage future research to investigate both right-wing and left-wing variants of authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism weakens democratic institutions and fosters societal divisions. In this Review, Osborne et al. describe the psychological processes and situational factors that give rise to authoritarianism, as well as the societal consequences of its apparent resurgence within the general population.

A dual-task approach to inform the taxonomy of inhibition-related processes

Response inhibition is key to controlled behavior and is commonly investigated with the stop-signal paradigm. The authors investigated how response inhibition is situated within a taxonomy of control processes by combining multiple forms of control within dual tasks. Response inhibition, as measured by stop-signal reaction time (SSRT), was impaired when combined with shape matching, but not the flanker task, and when combined with cued task switching, but not predictable task switching, suggesting that response inhibition may be weakly or variably impaired when combined with selective attention and set shifting demands, respectively. Response inhibition was also consistently impaired when combined with the N-back or directed forgetting tasks, putative measures of working memory. Impairments of response inhibition by other control demands appeared to be primarily driven by task context, as SSRT slowing was similar for trials where control demands were either high (e.g., task switch) or low (e.g., task stay). These results demonstrate that response inhibition processes are often impaired in the context of other control demands, even on trials where direct engagement of those other control processes is not required. This suggests a taxonomy of control in which response inhibition overlaps with related control processes, especially working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Creating Environmental Health Leaders When Educators Are Learning Too

The climate crisis is upon us, already exacting a health cost, with likely acceleration over our lifetimes. Our existing medical curricula do not adequately prepare medical students to deal with climate health nor to be leaders in the public health sphere. Current faculty have themselves not often been exposed to climate health training nor often to leadership training. This affords a unique opportunity for creative implementation of strategies to educate both faculty and students on how leadership skill building can complement the science and policy of climate health.

A safe and just operating space for human identity: a systems perspective

A safe and just operating space for socioecological systems is a powerful bridging concept in sustainability science. It integrates biophysical earth-system tipping points (ie, thresholds at which small changes can lead to amplifying effects) with social science considerations of distributional equity and justice. Often neglected, however, are the multiple feedback loops between self-identity and planetary boundaries. Environmental degradation can reduce self-identification with nature, leading to decreased pro-environmental behaviours and decreased cooperation with out-groups, further increasing the likelihood of transgressing planetary boundaries. This vicious cycle competes with a virtuous one, where improving environmental quality enhances the integration of nature into self-identity and improves health, thereby facilitating prosocial and pro-environmental behaviour. These behavioural changes can also cascade up to influence social and economic institutions. Given a possible minimum degree of individual self-care to maintain health and prosperity, there would seem to exist an analogous safe and just operating space for self-identity, for which system stewardship for planetary health is crucial.

Grievance-fueled violence can be better understood using an enactive approach

Understanding lone actor grievance-fueled violence remains a challenge. We believe that the concept of grievance provides an opportunity to add an engaged, first-person perspective to the assessment of lone actor extreme violence. We propose an enactivist philosophical approach that can help to understand the why and how of the pathway from grievance to violent extremism. Enactivism sees grievance as a dynamic, interpersonal, and context-sensitive construct that indicates how (potential) offenders make sense of the world they live in and how under certain circumstances it fuels violent behavior. Hence, grievance should not be understood as a given thing, but as an unfolding experience that involves sense-making through (regulation of one’s) interaction with the (social) environment. This (self-)relational and ecological understanding requires another approach than looking at demographic factors or life histories, only from an outsider’s perspective. Enactivism invites us to look at such risk factors as external indices of an ongoing process of active self-regulation and sense-making, and in some cases spiraling toward extreme violence. To understand the mindset of the offender we need to look more in depth at the processes that shape this mindset: why does this person, with this history, in this context, and at this point in time, proceed to use violence? The enactivist approach to the mind offers a complementary framework that may help us to understand the dynamics of grievance as a possible precursor to violent extremism. It also helps to appreciate why the relative unpredictability of the pathway toward lone actor extreme violence is not necessarily a sign of empirical weakness but a matter of principle due to the non-linearity of the processes involved. We end by summarizing how enactivism could contribute to the prevention of extremist violence and research and how it can help to avoid reinforcing stigmas and re-establishing a confirmation bias.

Does social intolerance vary according to cognitive styles, genetic cognitive capacity, or education?

BACKGROUND

Low education, low cognitive abilities, and certain cognitive styles are suggested to predispose to social intolerance and prejudices. Evidence is, however, restricted by comparatively small samples, neglect of confounding variables and genetic factors, and a narrow focus on a single sort of prejudice. We investigated the relationships of education, polygenic cognitive potential, cognitive performance, and cognitive styles with social intolerance in adulthood over a 15-year follow-up.

METHODS

We used data from the prospective population-based Young Finns Study (n = 960-1679). Social intolerance was evaluated with the Social Intolerance Scale in 1997, 2001, and 2011; cognitive performance with the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery in 2011; cognitive styles in 1997; and socioeconomic factors in 1980 (childhood) and 2011 (adulthood); and polygenic cognitive potential was calculated based on genome-wide association studies.

RESULTS

We found that nonrational thinking, polygenic cognitive potential, cognitive performance, or socioeconomic factors were not related to social intolerance. Regarding cognitive styles, low flexibility (B = -0.759, p < .001), high perseverance (B = 1.245, p < .001), and low persistence (B = -0.329, p < .001) predicted higher social intolerance consistently in the analyses.

DISCUSSION

When developing prejudice-reduction interventions, it should be considered that educational level or cognitive performance may not be crucial for development of social intolerance. Adopting certain cognitive styles may play more important roles in development of social intolerance.

How evolutionary science can help us understand vaccine refusal in the COVID-19 pandemic

Unvaccinated people have a mortality rate from COVID-19 that is 32-fold that of fully vaccinated people. Yet, in the UK, more than 4% of adults have not accepted a vaccine to protect them against COVID-19 and at the time of writing only 73% of people were fully vaccinated. Psychological and societal factors underlying vaccine hesitation or refusal are complex. In this paper, we use evolutionary science to help explain how vaccine refusal can be the result of an historic adaptation to protect against the repetition of past trauma, including, for many, that of systemic racism and/or deprivation, and misguided attempt to preserve fertility. We discuss some resulting cognitive biases and conclude with recommendations for practice.

Relating psychiatric symptoms and self-regulation during the COVID-19 crisis

Disruptions of self-regulation are a hallmark of numerous psychiatric disorders. Here, we examine the relationship between transdiagnostic dimensions of psychopathology and changes in self-regulation in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. We used a data-driven approach on a large number of cognitive tasks and self-reported surveys in training datasets. Then, we derived measures of self-regulation and psychiatric functioning in an independent population sample (N = 102) tested both before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the restrictions in place represented a threat to mental health and forced people to flexibly adjust to modifications of daily routines. We found independent relationships between transdiagnostic dimensions of psychopathology and longitudinal alterations in specific domains of self-regulation defined using a diffusion decision model. Compared to the period preceding the onset of the pandemic, a symptom dimension related to anxiety and depression was characterized by a more cautious behavior, indexed by the need to accumulate more evidence before making a decision. Instead, social withdrawal related to faster non-decision processes. Self-reported measures of self-regulation predicted variance in psychiatric symptoms both concurrently and prospectively, revealing the psychological dimensions relevant for separate transdiagnostic dimensions of psychiatry, but tasks did not. Taken together, our results are suggestive of potential cognitive vulnerabilities in the domain of self-regulation in people with underlying psychiatric difficulties in face of real-life stressors. More generally, they also suggest that the study of cognition needs to take into account the dynamic nature of real-world events as well as within-subject variability over time.

A Psychology of Ideology: Unpacking the Psychological Structure of Ideological Thinking

The psychological study of ideology has traditionally emphasized the content of ideological beliefs, guided by questions about what people believe, such as why people believe in omniscient gods or fascist worldviews. This theoretical focus has led to siloed subdisciplines separately dealing with political, religious, moral, and prejudiced attitudes. The fractionation has fostered a neglect of the cognitive structure of ideological worldviews and associated questions about why ideologies-in all their forms-are so compelling to the human mind. Here I argue that it is essential to consider the nature of ideological cognition across a multitude of ideologies. I offer a multidimensional, empirically tractable framework of ideological thinking, suggesting it can be conceptualized as a style of thinking that is rigid in its adherence to a doctrine and resistance to evidence-based belief-updating and favorably oriented toward an in-group and antagonistic to out-groups. The article identifies the subcomponents of ideological thinking and highlights that ideological thinking constitutes a meaningful psychological phenomenon that merits direct scholarly investigation and analysis. By emphasizing conceptual precision, methodological directions, and interdisciplinary integration across the political and cognitive sciences, the article illustrates the potential of this framework as a catalyst for developing a rigorous domain-general psychology of ideology.

Functional connectivity signatures of political ideology

Emerging research has begun investigating the neural underpinnings of the biological and psychological differences that drive political ideology, attitudes, and actions. Here, we explore the neurological roots of politics through conducting a large sample, whole-brain analysis of functional connectivity (FC) across common fMRI tasks. Using convolutional neural networks, we develop predictive models of ideology using FC from fMRI scans for nine standard task-based settings in a novel cohort of healthy adults (n = 174, age range: 18 to 40, mean = 21.43) from the Ohio State University Wellbeing Project. Our analyses suggest that liberals and conservatives have noticeable and discriminative differences in FC that can be identified with high accuracy using contemporary artificial intelligence methods and that such analyses complement contemporary models relying on socio-economic and survey-based responses. FC signatures from retrieval, empathy, and monetary reward tasks are identified as important and powerful predictors of conservatism, and activations of the amygdala, inferior frontal gyrus, and hippocampus are most strongly associated with political affiliation. Although the direction of causality is unclear, this study suggests that the biological and neurological roots of political behavior run much deeper than previously thought.

The Role of Political Ideology and Open-Minded Thinking Style in the (in)Accuracy of Factual Beliefs

The paper investigates the role of political ideology and an open-minded thinking style (i.e., the tendency to reason based on rules of inference rather than intuitive heuristics) with respect to the accuracy of factual beliefs. In line with political asymmetry theory, we assumed that right-wing beliefs, in contrast to left-wing beliefs, are associated with more inaccurate factual beliefs. We also expected that the open-minded thinking style acts as a buffer against inaccurate factual beliefs among people with right-wing (but not left-wing) political affinities. To test these hypotheses, we conducted three studies (total N = 1120) in which participants holding right- and left-wing beliefs, and displaying differing degrees of the open-minded thinking style (as measured by the Active Open-minded Thinking Style questionnaire), assessed policy-relevant facts congenial to left- as well as right-wing beliefs. The results of the study confirm the hypotheses proposed. The paper's findings contribute to the ongoing discussion around the ideological underpinnings of (un)biased cognition and the controversies concerning the role of cognitive factors in ideological polarization.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-022-09789-z.

Leadership in Education, Medical Education and Health

We observe the impact of quality of leadership in our daily lives [...].

Rational inference strategies and the genesis of polarization and extremism

Polarization and extremism are often viewed as the product of psychological biases or social influences, yet they still occur in the absence of any bias or irrational thinking. We show that individual decision-makers implementing optimal dynamic decision strategies will become polarized, forming extreme views relative to the true information in their environment by virtue of how they sample new information. Extreme evidence enables decision makers to stop considering new information, whereas weak or moderate evidence is unlikely to trigger a decision and is thus under-sampled. We show that this information polarization effect arises empirically across choice domains including politically-charged, affect-rich and affect-poor, and simple perceptual decisions. However, this effect can be disincentivized by asking participants to make a judgment about the difference between two options (estimation) rather than deciding. We experimentally test this intervention by manipulating participants' inference goals (decision vs inference) in an information sampling task. We show that participants in the estimation condition collect more information, hold less extreme views, and are less polarized than those in the decision condition. Estimation goals therefore offer a theoretically-motivated intervention that could be used to alleviate polarization and extremism in situations where people traditionally intend to decide.

Individual Differences in Personality Moderate the Effects of Perceived Group Deprivation on Violent Extremism: Evidence From a United Kingdom Nationally Representative Survey

Numerous studies argue that perceived group deprivation is a risk factor for radicalization and violent extremism. Yet, the vast majority of individuals, who experience such circumstances do not become radicalized. By utilizing models with several interacting risk and protective factors, the present analysis specifies this relationship more concretely. In a large United Kingdom nationally representative survey (n = 1,500), we examine the effects of group-based relative deprivation on violent extremist attitudes and violent extremist intentions, and we test whether this relationship is contingent upon several individual differences in personality. The results show that stronger group-based injustices lead to increased support for and intentions to engage in violent extremism. However, some of the effects are much stronger for individuals who exhibit a stronger need for uniqueness and for status and who demonstrate higher levels of trait entitlement. Conversely, several effects are lessened for those individuals high in trait forgiveness, demonstrating a strong capacity for self-control and for those who are exerting critical as well as open-minded thinking styles, thus constituting buffering protective factors, which dampen the adverse effects of perceived group injustice on violent extremism. The results highlight the importance of considering (a) the interaction between individual dispositions and perceptions of contextual factors (b) the conditional and cumulative effects of various risk and protective factors and (c) the functional role of protective factors when risk factors are present. Collectively, these findings bring us one step closer to understanding who might be more vulnerable to violent extremism as well as how. Overall, the study suggests that preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) programs must take account of the constellation of multiple factors that interact with (and sometimes enable or disable) one another and which can be targeted in preventions strategies.

Right-Wing Psychedelia: Case Studies in Cultural Plasticity and Political Pluripotency

Recent media advocacy for the nascent psychedelic medicine industry has emphasized the potential for psychedelics to improve society, pointing to research studies that have linked psychedelics to increased environmental concern and liberal politics. However, research supporting the hypothesis that psychedelics induce a shift in political beliefs must address the many historical and contemporary cases of psychedelic users who remained authoritarian in their views after taking psychedelics or became radicalized after extensive experience with them. We propose that the common anecdotal accounts of psychedelics precipitating radical shifts in political or religious beliefs result from the contextual factors of set and setting, and have no particular directional basis on the axes of conservatism-liberalism or authoritarianism-egalitarianism. Instead, we argue that any experience which challenges a person's fundamental worldview-including a psychedelic experience-can precipitate shifts in any direction of political belief. We suggest that the historical record supports the concept of psychedelics as "politically pluripotent," non-specific amplifiers of the political set and setting. Contrary to recent assertions, we show that conservative, hierarchy-based ideologies are able to assimilate psychedelic experiences of interconnection, as expressed by thought leaders like Jordan Peterson, corporadelic actors, and members of several neo-Nazi organizations.

Dopamine, Cognitive Flexibility, and IQ: Epistatic Catechol-O-MethylTransferase:DRD2 Gene-Gene Interactions Modulate Mental Rigidity

Cognitive flexibility has been hypothesized to be neurochemically rooted in dopamine neurotransmission. Nonetheless, underpowered sample sizes and contradictory meta-analytic findings have obscured the role of dopamine genes in cognitive flexibility and neglected potential gene-gene interactions. In this largest neurocognitive-genetic study to date (n = 1400), single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with elevated prefrontal dopamine levels (catechol-O-methyltransferase; rs4680) and diminished striatal dopamine (C957T; rs6277) were both implicated in Wisconsin Card Sorting Test performance. Crucially, however, these genetic effects were only evident in low-IQ participants, suggesting high intelligence compensates for, and eliminates, the effect of dispositional dopamine functioning on flexibility. This interaction between cognitive systems may explain and resolve previous empirical inconsistencies in highly educated participant samples. Moreover, compensatory gene-gene interactions were discovered between catechol-O-methyltransferase and DRD2, such that genotypes conferring either elevated prefrontal dopamine or diminished striatal dopamine-via heightened striatally concentrated D2 dopamine receptor availability-are sufficient for cognitive flexibility, but neither is necessary. The study has therefore revealed a form of epistatic redundancy or substitutability among dopamine systems in shaping adaptable thought and action, thus defining boundary conditions for dopaminergic effects on flexible behavior. These results inform theories of clinical disorders and psychopharmacological interventions and uncover complex fronto-striatal synergies in human flexible cognition.

A neurocognitive model of ideological thinking

Ideological behavior has traditionally been viewed as a product of social forces. Nonetheless, an emerging science suggests that ideological worldviews can also be understood in terms of neural and cognitive principles. The article proposes a neurocognitive model of ideological thinking, arguing that ideological worldviews may be manifestations of individuals' perceptual and cognitive systems. This model makes two claims. First, there are neurocognitive antecedents to ideological thinking: the brain's low-level neurocognitive dispositions influence its receptivity to ideological doctrines. Second, there are neurocognitive consequences to ideological engagement: strong exposure and adherence to ideological doctrines can shape perceptual and cognitive systems. This article details the neurocognitive model of ideological thinking and synthesizes the empirical evidence in support of its claims. The model postulates that there are bidirectional processes between the brain and the ideological environment, and so it can address the roles of situational and motivational factors in ideologically motivated action. This endeavor highlights that an interdisciplinary neurocognitive approach to ideologies can facilitate biologically informed accounts of the ideological brain and thus reveal who is most susceptible to extreme and authoritarian ideologies. By investigating the relationships between low-level perceptual processes and high-level ideological attitudes, we can develop a better grasp of our collective history as well as the mechanisms that may structure our political futures.

Discerning Mouse Trajectory Features With the Drift Diffusion Model

Mouse tracking, a new action-based measure of behavior, has advanced theories of decision making with the notion that cognitive and social decision making is fundamentally dynamic. Implicit in this theory is that people's decision strategies, such as discounting delayed rewards, are stable over task design and that mouse trajectory features correspond to specific segments of decision making. By applying the hierarchical drift diffusion model and the Bayesian delay discounting model, we tested these assumptions. Specifically, we investigated the extent to which the "mouse-tracking" design of decision-making tasks (delay discounting task, DDT and stop-signal task, SST) deviate from the standard "keypress" design of decision making tasks. We found remarkable agreement in delay discounting rates (intertemporal impatience) obtained in the keypress and mouse-tracking versions of DDT (ρ = 0.90) even though these tasks were given about 1 week apart. Rates of evidence accumulation converged well in the two versions (DDT, ρ = .86; SST, ρ = .55). Omission/commission error in SST showed high agreement (ρ = .42, ρ = .53). Mouse-motion features such as maximum velocity and AUC (area under the curve) correlated well with nondecision time (ρ = -.42) and boundary separation (ρ = .44)-the amount of information needed to accumulate prior to making a response. These results indicate that the response time (RT) and motion-based decision tasks converge well at a fundamental level, and that mouse-tracking features such as AUC and maximum velocity do indicate the degree of decision conflict and impulsivity.

The psychological and socio-political consequences of infectious diseases: Authoritarianism, governance, and nonzoonotic (human-to-human) infection transmission

What are the socio-political consequences of infectious diseases? Humans have evolved to avoid disease and infection, resulting in a set of psychological mechanisms that promote disease-avoidance, referred to as the behavioral immune system (BIS). One manifestation of the BIS is the cautious avoidance of unfamiliar, foreign, or potentially contaminating stimuli. Specifically, when disease infection risk is salient or prevalent, authoritarian attitudes can emerge that seek to avoid and reject foreign outgroups while favoring homogenous, familiar ingroups. In the largest study conducted on the topic to date (N > 240,000), elevated regional levels of infectious pathogens were related to more authoritarian attitudes on three geographical levels: across U.S. metropolitan regions, U.S. states, and cross-culturally across 47 countries. The link between pathogen prevalence and authoritarian psychological dispositions predicted conservative voting behavior in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election and more authoritarian governance and state laws, in which one group of people imposes asymmetrical laws on others in a hierarchical structure. Furthermore, cross-cultural analysis illustrated that the relationship between infectious diseases and authoritarianism was pronounced for infectious diseases that can be acquired from other humans (nonzoonotic), and does not generalize to other infectious diseases that can only be acquired from non-human species (zoonotic diseases). At a time of heightened awareness of infectious diseases, the current findings are important reminders that public health and ecology can have ramifications for socio-political attitudes by shaping how citizens vote and are governed.

Pandora's Box

We humans thrive on social contact, and conversation is our main means of interaction. Many of us can recall long conversations and having difficulty putting an end to these, but also other times when we may feel aggrieved that the conversation has come to a premature end. We think we can read others' facial expressions and body language, but perhaps we're not so good at this as we think.

Cognition and Emotion in Extreme Political Action: Individual Differences and Dynamic Interactions

Who is most likely to join and engage in extreme political action? Although traditional theories have focused on situational factors or group identity, an emerging science illustrates that tendencies for extreme political action may also be rooted in individuals’ idiosyncratic cognitive and affective dispositions. This article synthesizes cutting-edge evidence demonstrating that individuals’ cognitive and affective architecture shapes their willingness to support ideological violence. In the cognitive domain, traits such as cognitive rigidity, slow perceptual strategies, and poor executive functions are linked to heightened endorsement for ideological violence. In the emotion domain, characteristics associated with emotional reactivity and impaired emotional regulation, such as sensation seeking and impulsivity, can facilitate readiness for extreme political action. The review homes in on the roles of cognitive rigidity and sensation seeking as traits heightening proclivities for extreme pro-group behavior and recommends that future research should assess cognition-emotion interactions to reveal different subprofiles of political actors. A theoretical framework focused on cognitive and affective information-processing traits—and their interactions—opens up tractable empirical questions and a future research agenda. Identifying subsets of ideologues is an endeavor with potential to inform the design of evidence-based interventions aimed at reducing ideological extremism and fostering social understanding.

Computational and neurocognitive approaches to the political brain: key insights and future avenues for political neuroscience

Although the study of political behaviour has been traditionally restricted to the social sciences, new advances in political neuroscience and computational cognitive science highlight that the biological sciences can offer crucial insights into the roots of ideological thought and action. Echoing the dazzling diversity of human ideologies, this theme issue seeks to reflect the multiplicity of theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the nature of the political brain. Cutting-edge research along three thematic strands is presented, including (i) computational approaches that zoom in on fine-grained mechanisms underlying political behaviour, (ii) neurocognitive perspectives that harness neuroimaging and psychophysiological techniques to study ideological processes, and (iii) behavioural studies and policy-minded analyses of such understandings across cultures and across ideological domains. Synthesizing these findings together, the issue elucidates core questions regarding the nature of uncertainty in political cognition, the mechanisms of social influence and the cognitive structure of ideological beliefs. This offers key directions for future biologically grounded research as well as a guiding map for citizens, psychologists and policymakers traversing the uneven landscape of modern polarization, misinformation, intolerance and dogmatism.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

Political games of attack and defence

Political conflicts often revolve around changing versus defending a status quo. We propose to capture the dynamics between proponents and opponents of political change in terms of an asymmetric game of attack and defence with its equilibrium in mixed strategies. Formal analyses generate predictions about effort expended on revising and protecting the status quo, the form and function of false signalling and cheap talk, how power differences impact conflict intensity and the likelihood of status quo revision. Laboratory experiments on the neurocognitive and hormonal foundations of attack and defence reveal that out-of-equilibrium investments in attack emerge because of non-selfish preferences, limited capacity to compute costs and benefits and optimistic beliefs about the chances of winning from one's rival. We conclude with implications for the likelihood of political change and inertia, and discuss the role of ideology in political games of attack and defence.

This article is part of the theme issue ‘The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms’.

Ideology, communication and polarization

Ideologically committed minds form the basis of political polarization, but ideologically guided communication can further entrench and exacerbate polarization depending on the structures of ideologies and social network dynamics on which cognition and communication operate. Combining a well-established connectionist model of cognition and a well-validated computational model of social influence dynamics on social networks, we develop a new model of ideological cognition and communication on dynamic social networks and explore its implications for ideological political discourse. In particular, we explicitly model ideologically filtered interpretation of social information, ideological commitment to initial opinion, and communication on dynamically evolving social networks, and examine how these factors combine to generate ideologically divergent and polarized political discourse. The results show that ideological interpretation and commitment tend towards polarized discourse. Nonetheless, communication and social network dynamics accelerate and amplify polarization. Furthermore, when agents sever social ties with those that disagree with them (i.e. structure their social networks by homophily), even non-ideological agents may form an echo chamber and form a cluster of opinions that resemble an ideological group. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

Corrections of political misinformation: no evidence for an effect of partisan worldview in a US convenience sample

Misinformation often has a continuing effect on people's reasoning despite clear correction. One factor assumed to affect post-correction reliance on misinformation is worldview-driven motivated reasoning. For example, a recent study with an Australian undergraduate sample found that when politically situated misinformation was retracted, political partisanship influenced the effectiveness of the retraction. This worldview effect was asymmetrical, that is, particularly pronounced in politically conservative participants. However, the evidence regarding such worldview effects (and their symmetry) has been inconsistent. Thus, the present study aimed to extend previous findings by examining a sample of 429 pre-screened US participants supporting either the Democratic or Republican Party. Participants received misinformation suggesting that politicians of either party were more likely to commit embezzlement; this was or was not subsequently retracted, and participants' inferential reasoning was measured. While political worldview (i.e. partisanship) influenced the extent to which participants relied on the misinformation overall, retractions were equally effective across all conditions. There was no impact of political worldview on retraction effectiveness, let alone evidence of a backfire effect, and thus we did not replicate the asymmetry observed in the Australian-based study. This pattern emerged despite some evidence that Republicans showed a stronger emotional response than Democrats to worldview-incongruent misinformation. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

Political ideology, cooperation and national parochialism across 42 nations

Political ideology has been hypothesized to be associated with cooperation and national parochialism (i.e. greater cooperation with members of one's nation), with liberals thought to have more cooperation with strangers and less national parochialism, compared to conservatives. However, previous findings are limited to few-and predominantly western-nations. Here, we present a large-scale cross-societal experiment that can test hypotheses on the relation between political ideology, cooperation and national parochialism around the globe. To do so, we recruited 18 411 participants from 42 nations. Participants made decisions in a prisoner's dilemma game, and we manipulated the nationality of their interaction partner (national ingroup member, national outgroup member or unidentified stranger). We found that liberals, compared to conservatives, displayed slightly greater cooperation, trust in others and greater identification with the world as a whole. Conservatives, however, identified more strongly with their own nation and displayed slightly greater national parochialism in cooperation. Importantly, the association between political ideology and behaviour was significant in nations characterized by higher wealth, stronger rule of law and better government effectiveness. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the association between political ideology and cooperation. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

Visceral politics: a theoretical and empirical proof of concept

While the study of affect and emotion has a long history in psychological sciences and neuroscience, the very question of how visceral states have come to the forefront of politics remains poorly understood. The concept of visceral politics captures how the physiological nature of our engagement with the social world influences how we make decisions, just as socio-political forces recruit our physiology to influence our socio-political behaviour. This line of research attempts to bridge the psychophysiological mechanisms that are responsible for our affective states with the historical socio-cultural context in which such states are experienced. We review findings and hypotheses at the intersections of life sciences, social sciences and humanities to shed light on how and why people come to experience such emotions in politics and what if any are their behavioural consequences. To answer these questions, we provide insights from predictive coding accounts of interoception and emotion and a proof of concept experiment to highlight the role of visceral states in political behaviour. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.