| Summary: | Prior research finds
that liberals and conservatives process information differently.
Predispositions toward intuitive versus reflective thinking may help explain
this individual level variation. There have been few direct tests of this
hypothesis and the results from the handful of studies that do exist are
contradictory. Here we report the results of a series of studies using the
Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) to investigate inclinations to be reflective
and political orientation. We find a relationship between thinking style and
political orientation and that these effects are particularly concentrated on
social attitudes. We also find it harder to manipulate intuitive and reflective
thinking than a number of prominent studies suggest. Priming manipulations used
to induce reflection and intuition in published articles repeatedly fail in our
studies. We conclude that conservatives---more specifically, social
conservatives---tend to be dispositionally less reflective, social liberals
tend to be dispositionally more reflective, and that the relationship between
reflection and intuition and political attitudes may be more resistant to easy
manipulation than existing research would suggest.
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