Are neoliberals more susceptible to bullshit?
By Joanna Sterling, John T. Jost, Gordon Pennycook. Judgment and Decision Making, 2016
86 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We conducted additional analyses of Pennycook et al.’s (2015, Study 2) data to investigate the possibility that there would be ideological differences in “bullshit receptivity” that would be explained by individual differences in cognitive style and ability. As hypothesized, we observed that endorsement of neoliberal, free market ideology was significantly but modestly associated with bullshit receptivity. In addition, we observed a quadratic association, which indicated that ideological moderates were more susceptible to bullshit than ideological extremists. These relationships were explained, in part, by heuristic processing tendencies, faith in intuition, and lower verbal ability. Results are inconsistent with approaches suggesting that (a) there are no meaningful ideological differences in cognitive style or reasoning ability, (b) simplistic, certainty-oriented cognitive styles are generally associated with leftist (vs. rightist) economic preferences, or (c) simplistic, certainty-oriented cognitive styles are generally associated with extremist (vs. moderate) preferences. Theoretical and practical implications are briefly addressed.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/af3e513e86dc0893e1c2a1d9f6d57f05de7120b9
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In Applied Psychology
In Clinical Psychology
In Sociology and Political Science
- Jay J. Van Bavel
- Elizabeth Harris
- Andrea Pereira
- John T. Jost
- Aaron C. Kay
- H. Thórisdóttir
- D. Bar-Tal
- Eran Halperin
Citations in the corpus
- Identity concerns drive belief: The impact of partisan identity on the belief and dissemination of true and false news (2018, background): “Although there are reasons to believe that conservatives are more credulous than liberals (Pennycook & Rand, 2018b; Sterling et al., 2016) because they usually have higher levels of need for closure (Jost et al., 2017), other work has found that liberals and conservatives can be equally biased…”
- Ideological Asymmetries and the Essence of Political Psychology (2017, background): “Our review of the literature revealed that in many cases dogmatism, personal needs for structure, heuristic thinking, and low need for cognition were associated with economic (as well as social) conservatism and with ideological self-placement and issue-based conservatism as well as right-wing autho”
- Two Lines: A Valid Alternative to the Invalid Testing of U-Shaped Relationships With Quadratic Regressions (2018, unknown): “Panels A&B revisit the analyses by Sterling, Jost, and Pennycook (2016) who wrote (in their secondary analyses section), that “those who were moderate in terms of their support for the free market appeared to be more susceptible to bullshit than extremists in either direction.”
- The marketplace of ideology: “Elective affinities” in political psychology and their implications for consumer behavior (2017, background): “2 Sterling, Jost, and Pennycook (2016) found that individuals who endorsed neoliberal, free market ideology (i.e., economic conservatism)—demonstrated a stronger reliance on intuitive, heuristic-based cognitive processing and were more receptive to bullshit.”