Political ideology, exploration of novel stimuli, and attitude formation

In this study, the relations among political ideology, exploratory behavior, and the formation of attitudes toward novel stimuli were explored. Participants played a computer game that required learning whether these stimuli produced positive or negative outcomes. Learning was dependent on participants’ decisions to sample novel stimuli and discover the associated valence. Political ideology correlated with exploration during the game, with conservatives sampling fewer targets than liberals. Moreover, more conservative individuals exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry, such that they learned negative stimuli better than positive. Mediational analyses revealed that the differences in learning were due to the extent of exploratory behavior during the game. Relative to liberals, politically conservative individuals pursued a more avoidant strategy to the game, which led to their development of a more pronounced valence asymmetry in learning and attitude formation. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Over the past 50 years, a substantial amount of research has focused on distinguishing conservatism or right-wing ideology from liberalism or left-wing ideology (see Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008, for a review). The goal of much of this work has been to identify personality traits, values, and motives that differentiate these political ideologies. Generally speaking, conservatives are viewed as relatively traditional, dogmatic, and conforming, whereas liberals are viewed as more unconventional and flexible. Measures of conservatism have been associated with self-reported intolerance of ambiguity (Sidanius, 1978), greater need for closure (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994), and greater perceptions of the world as dangerous (Altemeyer, 1998). Liberalism has been associated repeatedly with the Openness to Experience dimension of the Big Five (Carney, Jost, & Gosling, 2008; Jost, 2006). Liberals also score more highly on sensation-seeking scales (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003) and report being more egalitarian (Conover & Feldman, 1981). Relatedly, it has been proposed that political ideology may be associated with differences in cognitive style (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950). Conservatives may come to understand and organize their world in a more structured and rigid way, whereas liberals appear to be more open to complexity. To test this hypothesis, Tetlock (1983) coded 20 policy statements from US senators for the complexity of the arguments. Conservative senators exhibited less complex cognitive styles than liberal senators. That is, they were more ‘‘prone to rely on simple evaluative (good versus bad) rules in interpreting policy issues” (p. 123).