About: When confronted with information that challenges our beliefs, we must often learn from error in order to successfully navigate the world. Past studies in reinforcement learning and educational psychology have linked prediction error, a measure of surprise, to successful learning from feedback. However, there are substantial individual differences in belief-updating success, and the psychological factors that influence belief updating remain unclear. Here, we identify a novel factor that may predict belief updating: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), which is characterized by a desire for order, structure, and preservation of social norms. We hypothesized that because people who score high on RWA are motivated to preserve entrenched beliefs, they may often fail to successfully update their beliefs when confronted with new information. Using a novel paradigm, we challenged participants’ false beliefs and misconceptions to elicit prediction error. In two studies, we found consistent evidence that high-RWA individuals were less successful at correcting their false beliefs. Relative to low-RWA individuals, high-RWA individuals were less likely to revise beliefs in response to prediction error. We argue that RWA is associated with a relatively closed-minded cognitive style that negatively influences belief updating. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.3758/s13423-020-01767-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.   Goto Sponge  NotDistinct  Permalink

An Entity of Type : fabio:Abstract, within Data Space : wasabi.inria.fr associated with source document(s)

AttributesValues
type
value
  • When confronted with information that challenges our beliefs, we must often learn from error in order to successfully navigate the world. Past studies in reinforcement learning and educational psychology have linked prediction error, a measure of surprise, to successful learning from feedback. However, there are substantial individual differences in belief-updating success, and the psychological factors that influence belief updating remain unclear. Here, we identify a novel factor that may predict belief updating: right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), which is characterized by a desire for order, structure, and preservation of social norms. We hypothesized that because people who score high on RWA are motivated to preserve entrenched beliefs, they may often fail to successfully update their beliefs when confronted with new information. Using a novel paradigm, we challenged participants’ false beliefs and misconceptions to elicit prediction error. In two studies, we found consistent evidence that high-RWA individuals were less successful at correcting their false beliefs. Relative to low-RWA individuals, high-RWA individuals were less likely to revise beliefs in response to prediction error. We argue that RWA is associated with a relatively closed-minded cognitive style that negatively influences belief updating. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.3758/s13423-020-01767-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Subject
  • Conformity
  • Behavioural sciences
  • Personality traits
  • Control (social and political)
  • Social psychology
  • Authoritarianism
  • Concepts in the philosophy of mind
  • Moral psychology
  • Political psychology
  • Right-wing politics
part of
is abstract of
is hasSource of
Faceted Search & Find service v1.13.91 as of Mar 24 2020


Alternative Linked Data Documents: Sponger | ODE     Content Formats:       RDF       ODATA       Microdata      About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data]
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3229 as of Jul 10 2020, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), Single-Server Edition (94 GB total memory)
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2024 OpenLink Software