Professors’ study disputes long-standing claim conservatives are more rigid thinkers

A group of professors from several universities recently published a study challenging the long-standing claim in psychology that conservatives are less likely to change their beliefs.

The study, titled “An adversarial collaboration on the rigidity-of-the-right” and published in the journal Political Psychology, argues that much of the previous scientific literature on the subject is “discordant.”

It found that “broad claims about strong associations between ideology and belief updating are likely unwarranted.”

The “rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis” states that “conservatism stems from rigid, inflexible thinking and needs for certainty that coalesce to form an authoritarian ‘syndrome’ that exists predominantly among conservatives,” according to the study’s introduction.

This “influential framework” has formed “decades of scholarship examining the psychological characteristics underlying political ideology,” the authors wrote.

As recently as June of this year, professors from University of Massachusetts published an article claiming that people who prefer well-behaved children hold more authoritarian political views.

The Fix emailed the authors of the UMass article for comments on the new study, but did not receive a response.

Cory Clark, a professor of psychology at New College of Florida and co-author of the study, told The College Fix via email that “[f]or decades” the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis has been “treated almost as an established fact.”

“Over the past 10-15 years, as more scholars have acknowledged that the social/behavioral sciences are politically lopsided, researchers have started revisiting many old assumptions about conservatives having uniquely undesirable traits,” she said.

The research shows that progressives and conservatives are often much more alike psychologically than previously thought, the professor said.

Clark also told The Fix that the project “was motivated by the ongoing divide within the field, with one camp still seeing conservatives as clearly more rigid, while another believes rigidity exists across the spectrum in roughly equal measure.”

“Our goal was to bring both camps together to develop new, mutually agreed-upon methods that everyone viewed as fair and unbiased tests of the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis,” she said.

She said that their findings concluded “that conservatives were more rigid only some of the time and even then, only to a very small degree.”

Further, Clark noted that the social sciences’ lack of ideological diversity has likely influenced how researchers approach such topics, including how key concepts are defined and studied.

Shauna Bowes, psychology professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the study’s lead author, told The Fix via email that she was “eager to participate in an adversarial collaboration about such an important topic.”

“[T]he debates surrounding the nature of the relations between rigidity and political ideology are fascinating, complex, and longstanding. I was glad to have an opportunity to rigorously examine these debates,” she said.

When asked if she believed the lack of right-leaning scholars in the social sciences has affected how this topic has been researched, Bowes said she did “not want to overly speculate on this topic without sufficient data to back up [her] claims.”

She did say, however, that research shows academic psychology lacks political diversity, and there are concerns that expressing certain political views could lead to censorship.

“I think it is quite likely that these issues do affect how we study political ideology and likely not even in a conscious, pernicious way. If most or all authors on a paper on political ideology share the same worldview, sneaky biases can come into play,” she said.

“That’s where an adversarial collaboration can be especially helpful.”

Bowes told The Fix that, for adversarial collaborations, “disagreeing scholars mutually agreed upon optimal methods to test competing hypotheses.”

“The adversaries agreed that evidence-based belief updating was an optimal metric of cognitive rigidity in the present investigation,” she said.

She said that, as the neutral moderator, her role was limited to conducting the analyses and writing up the results. She did not take part in planning meetings or debates over how to interpret the findings to maintain impartiality.

Further, Bowes added that “political extremity at both ends of the political spectrum was related to less evidence-based belief updating, lending support to the rigidity-of-extremes hypothesis.”

Danny Osborne, a psychology professor at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and a contributor to the study, told The College Fix via email that he felt “both honored and humbled” to be invited to participate.

“As a political psychologist, individual differences in political beliefs are a central area of research,” he said.

In 2024, Osborne co-authored a study that concluded that “Openness to Experience is by far the strongest (negative) correlate of conservatism but that there is little evidence that this association is causal.” Thereofore, he identified himself as “the adversary in this adversarial collaboration.”

“The biggest—and perhaps most shocking—difference was the effect sizes we identified in this manuscript,” he said. “Specifically, the effects were a bit smaller than I was expecting.”

“I’ve been a part of a few meta-analyses over the years examining the relationship between Openness to Experience … and ideology and found that Openness to Experience is a rather robust negative correlate of conservatism.”

He said he has participated in several meta-analyses over the years, looking at the link between Openness to Experience and political ideology. He has found that greater openness is consistently associated with lower levels of conservatism.

Osborne clarified that Openness to Experience is “one of the Big Five personality traits that captures individual differences in people’s interest in, and willingness to pursue, novel experiences.”

“Although the results of this adversarial collaboration focused on a different type of measure of quest for epistemic certainty/rigid thinking style (namely, belief updating), I was surprised that the association wasn’t as strong as I had expected,” he said.

Osborne explained that his previous study and the new one used somewhat different methods, though.

He said that although low Openness to Experience can serve as an indicator of high cognitive rigidity, the adversarial study focused on belief updating. This refers to how much individuals adjust their beliefs when presented with new information.

“In the adversarial collaboration paper, we used a belief updating paradigm as our measure of cognitive rigidity. So, people who failed to update their beliefs when presented when with new information would be considered high on cognitive rigidity,” Osborne said.

“This is different than Openness to Experience, which is a personality trait that is assessed via a set of self-report items,” he said.

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