Quote (Thor123422 @ Jan 28 2024 01:29am)
That study actually adds to the body of evidence that liberals and leftists have a consistent worldview and conservatives don't.
This is in conjunction with the previous research that the more conservative you are the less you are bothered by cognitive dissonance.
From what I can see (key words: conservatives cognitive dissonance) research doesn't support that at all.
Meta-analysis: No evidence of any difference between how conservatives and liberals react to cognitive-dissonance inducing situations.
https://lskitka.people.uic.edu/FrimerSkitkaMotyl2017.pdfQuote
Ideologically committed people are similarly motivated to avoid ideologically crosscutting information.
Although some previous research has found that political conservatives may be more prone to selective
exposure than liberals are, we find similar selective exposure motives on the political left and right across a
variety of issues. The majority of people on both sides of the same-sex marriage debate willingly gave up a
chance to win money to avoid hearing from the other side (Study 1). When thinking back to the 2012 U.S.
Presidential election (Study 2), ahead to upcoming elections in the U.S. and Canada (Study 3), and about a range
of other Culture War issues (Study 4), liberals and conservatives reported similar aversion toward learning about
the views of their ideological opponents. Their lack of interest was not due to already being informed about the
other side or attributable election fatigue. Rather, people on both sides indicated that they anticipated that
hearing from the other side would induce cognitive dissonance (e.g., require effort, cause frustration) and
undermine a sense of shared reality with the person expressing disparate views (e.g., damage the relationship;
Study 5). A high-powered meta-analysis of our data sets (N = 2417) did not detect a difference in the intensity of
liberals' (d = 0.63) and conservatives' (d = 0.58) desires to remain in their respective ideological bubbles.
Study: Conservatives specifically make a greater effort to avoid cognitive dissonance, i.e. by writing a paper in support of something they know to be untrue.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3631191/Quote
People often avoid information and situations that have the potential to contradict previously held beliefs and attitudes (i.e., situations that arouse cognitive dissonance). According to the motivated social cognition model of political ideology, conservatives tend to have stronger epistemic needs to attain certainty and closure than liberals. This implies that there may be differences in how liberals and conservatives respond to dissonance-arousing situations. In two experiments, we investigated the possibility that conservatives would be more strongly motivated to avoid dissonance-arousing tasks than liberals. Indeed, U.S. residents who preferred more conservative presidents (George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan) complied less than Americans who preferred more liberal presidents (Barack Obama and Bill Clinton) with the request to write a counter-attitudinal essay about who made a “better president.” This difference was not observed under circumstances of low perceived choice or when the topic of the counter-attitudinal essay was non-political (i.e., when it pertained to computer or beverage preferences). The results of these experiments provide initial evidence of ideological differences in dissonance avoidance. Future work would do well to determine whether such differences are specific to political issues or topics that are personally important. Implications for political behavior are discussed.