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Conservatism and liberalism predict performance in two nonideological cognitive tasks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2017

Rodolpho Talaisys Bernabel  and
Amâncio Oliveira
Rodolpho Talaisys Bernabel*
Affiliation:
Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing
Amâncio Oliveira
Affiliation:
Universidade de São Paulo
*
Correspondence: Rodolpho Talaisys Bernabel, Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing, Rua Dr. Álvaro Alvim, 123, São Paulo, Brazil, 04018-010. Email: rodolpho.bernabel@espm.br
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Abstract

Intuitive thinking would argue that political or ideological orientation does not correlate with nonpolitical decisions, and certainly not with nonideological cognitive tasks. However, that is what happens in some cases. Previous neuropolitics studies have found that liberals are more adept at dealing with novel information than conservatives. This finding suggests that conservatives and liberals possess different cognitive skills. For the purposes of this article, two studies were executed to test whether this difference remained in alternative environmental settings. To this end, two novel cognitive tasks were designed in which one type of ideology or another was privileged according to the cognitive environment created by the tasks. Experimental findings indicate that liberals committed fewer errors than conservatives in one kind of cognitive environment, while conservatives scored higher in another.

Keywords

Conservatismliberalismideologycognitionpredispositionneuropoliticsexperimental methods
Type
Articles
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , Fall 2017 , pp. 49 - 59
Copyright
© Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 2017 

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