Constraints: Trade-Off Reasoning

Tetlock, P. E. (2000). Coping with trade-offs: Psychological constraints and political implications. In A. Lupia, M. D. McCubbins, & S. Popkin (Eds.), Elements of reason: Cognition, choice, and the bounds of rationality (pp. 239–263). Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK. Retrieved from

Phillip Tetlock’s research has long explored trade-off reasoning. He has identified three major categories of constraints affecting trade-off reasoning:

Incommensurability: People have difficulty making a trade-off when the trade-off involves outcomes that are valued in qualitatively distinct ways. People don’t come with ready-made scales for comparing, for example, the opportunity to further their education versus the cost of paying off student loan debt. When asked to make these decisions, individual choices are influenced by the presentation of the decisions and do not display transitivity or consistent preferences.

Emotional responses: Emotion-laden trade-offs, where a highly valued outcomes is surrendered or a highly disvalued outcomes accepted, often lead people to “spread the alternatives” by emphasizing the worth of the outcomes that they chose and derogating the worth of the outcome that they surrendered. In part because losses can seem more important than gains, coping with losses can lead to a denial of losses.

It is not always possible to spread the alternatives. In this case, it may feel extremely uncomfortable, even disgusting, to acknowledge that one has made a trade-off. This “constitutive incommensurability” occurs when one would have to, for example, find a way to decide between two immoral outcomes. One may want to choose a crude metric by which to compare the immorality of these outcomes, the number of lives lost, for example, but feel extremely uncomfortable doing so.

Fear of criticism: We know that other people will be less motivated to “spread the alternatives” in a way that favors our decision than we are. In fact, if other people are aware that an individual is making moral trade-offs, they may judge him to be immoral or insane, feel anger, contempt, and disgust, and seek to punish or ostracize the individual.

It should be noted that people may happily make a trade-off when the fact of the trade-off is disguised, or when the trade off is between maintaining the status quo and pursuing a positive, but costly, outcome.

It should also be noted that people may sometimes admire an individual who is willing to make hard trade-offs. In America, for example, the “thoughtful statesman” script values a politician who is able to balance equally valid interests and make the best, albeit difficult, choice. In America, however, the “opportunistic vaccilator” script also exists, in which a politician is thought to “flip flop” on an issue just to win votes. Likewise, a leader who refused to compromise and displays a rigid mindset may be portrayed as either a demagogue or a principled leader (Tetlock, 2000). In this experiment by Tetlock et al., only participants who were primed with the “thoughtful statesman” script favored speeches that acknowledged trade-offs. Participants receiving neutral primes and participants receiving an anti-trade-off prime responded with similar negativity to speeches acknowledging trade-offs.

However, where a debate is highly polarized, acknowledging trade-offs may lead to negative responses regardless of the position taken. In a study on attitudes towards abortion, Tetlock et al. found that supporters of the fictional politician’s position were galled that he acknowledged the legitimacy of an alternate perspective and the opponents of his position were galled that he could acknowledge the legitimacy of their views and take an opposite stance.

For an application of this theory, consider responses to President Obama's speech seeking to detail common ground between proponents and opponents of abortion-access.

Worldview and Epistemic Motives

Golec and Van Bergh (2007) present evidence that the Need for Closure moderates political conservatism but that the relationship is mediated by adherence to a traditional or modern personal worldview. The authors argue that both types of worldview can satisfy needs for closure by presenting values “as absolute rather than relative . . . [and assuming] a definite rather than approximate nature of truth” (Golec & Van Bergh, 2007, p. 587). The traditional worldview, in this schema, “is based on a belief in a single, unshakeable truth of a transcendental, nonhuman character, not susceptible to rational verification or evaluation” (Golec & Van Bergh, 2007, p. 590).

While one might quibble with their emphasis on a single “nonhuman character,” given the preponderance of polytheist. Agnostic, or atheist belief systems that assert absolute values and absolute truth “not susceptible to rational verification,” their distinction remains useful. They are able to delineate a “traditional” from a modern” worldview,” where truth is absolute but “verifiable and legitimized by rational, scientific means” (Golec & Van Bergh, 2007, p. 590), and from a “postmodern” worldview where “‘Truths’ are perceived as fragmentary and partial (p. 591).

In their study, Polish participants who adhered to a traditional worldview when experiencing a need for closure tended to be more conservative—as measured by questions used in a Polish public opinion pole, questions which the authors claim are highly reliable.  Those who adhered to a modern worldview tended to be less conservative. Golec and Van Bergh (2007) argue that the need for closure could lead to a preference for traditional and modern worldviews over postmodern ones. The Worldview Model argues that both traditional and modern worldviews could moderate need for closure.

Before the discussion continues, it should be noted that one need not claim that traditionalists are necessarily conservative in the modern political sense. Golec and Van Bergh’s Polish traditionalist participants were conservative, but some traditionalists may be radical in their social goals, seeking to establish a society based on values that include tolerance of religious differences and intolerance of inequality.  Even when this is the case, however, the Worldview Model suggests that a traditional worldview should increase the need for closure. 

Traditional worldviews could motivate a need for cognitive closure by suggesting that uncertainty is unreasonable, surprising, and must be quickly resolved, at least with regard to transcendental truths and social values. The traditional worldview provides many heuristics by which such closure could be achieved, including a simple surrendering of judgment to an authority with esoteric knowledge of transcendental truths. However, the Worldview Model predicts that traditional worldview would, under certain circumstances, provide more complex arguments that could lead to a resolution of uncertainty.

Some circumstances demand that closure be achieved through elaboration—the careful consideration of information in order to achieve stable understanding (Petty, Cacioppo, Strathman, & Priester, 2004). Elaboration occurs when people are able to grapple with new information and are motivated to do so. One source of motivation is ambivalence, explicit or implicit (Johnson, Petty, & Brinol 2011). Explicit ambivalence refers to a conflict between consciously held beliefs and implicit ambivalence refers to a conflict between automatic evaluations and consciously held beliefs. Implicit ambivalence can occur, for example, when an individual has many, automatic, prejudiced attitudes but explicitly endorses non-prejudiced ones. Despite the traditional worldview’s emphases on resolution and a transcendental order, implicit ambivalence may occur, for example, when implicit death anxiety (Jost et al., 2003a) conflicts with an explicit belief that death is merely an end to earthly life and a transition to eternal paradise. Implicit ambivalence could also occur when explicit sympathy for the victim of a crime conflicts with implicit needs to believe in a stable, moral universe (Furnham, 2003).

The last two examples of conflict could take the form of implicit ambivalence but they could also take the form of explicit ambivalence. In either case, they should motivate elaboration. Traditional worldviews may offer a transcendental truth, but the very fact of that truth can be in conflict with individual or even community experience. Disease, natural disasters, invasions by other cultural groups, and disagreements within the community, all may prove inherently threatening to the idea of a natural, ontologically-based, order.

In these cases, although closure needs are high (and need to avoid closure are very low), the task demands are such that integrative complexity should result. Integrative complexity can result from conflict between two equally strong values (Tetlock, 1986).  While liberals, in general, demonstrate greater integrative complexity than conservatives, they may show less integrative complexity on certain issues, such as gay marriage, where little value conflict is perceived (Critcher, Huber, Ho, & Koleva, 2009; Jost et al. 2003b; Joseph, Graham, & Haidt, 2009).

Integrative complexity could result from those situations in which traditionalists who are high in need for closure cannot find closure by relying on the first relevant set of values that comes to mind—for example when an automatic attitude conflicts with the traditional worldview. Depending on the strength of the need for closure, however, traditionalists may employ various strategies for avoiding having to produce complex responses—including categorizing issues in terms of single value dimensions whenever possible and automatically shifting their stated values in response to situational influences in a way that quickly resolves feelings of conflict and uncertainty (Critcher et al. 2009).

The extent to which these strategies would be effective would vary with the situation. Of the previously considered scenarios that could encourage elaboration and integrative complexity, conflict within the community may be both the most common and the most likely to produce a response higher in integrative complexity. People who are high in need for closure tend to seek conformity and adhere to cultural norms, but only when they are uncertain, as Fu, Morris, Lee, and Hong demonstrated with American and Chinese participants (2007). Otherwise, they tend to fall back on preexisting beliefs, especially beliefs made more accessible through priming (Fu et al., 2007, Kruglanski, Webster, & Klem, 1993).

Where community conflicts are generated by fundamental disagreement, resolving resultant conflicts would require either the repression of dissent or novel thinking. Agreeing to disagree would not be an option for traditionalists who are members of the same community, although communities might divide into different sects. Once conflicts are resolved, however, the new perspective should become standard and used to resolve or avoid future conflicts.  This perspective may even the basis of the next generation of closure-granting automatic-associations and heuristics.

Last, it is possible that traditionalists could conflict in practice but not in philosophy.

While some worldviews may suggest that there is only one right way of doing anything, others may allow for variation as long as it does not challenge a fundamental order. Traditionalists, then, should vary depending on their culture in the extent to which their absolute truth moderates a nonspecific need for closure—leading to a general resistance to change and uncertainty—and the extent to which it only moderates a specific needs for closure on what the absolute truth is and what absolute values should be held. The latter traditionalists may have the same level of integrative complexity as modernists when it comes to justifying their particular actions.  The Worldview Model would predict revolutionary traditionalists, traditionalists who seek to change the social order, to come from cultures that tolerate political uncertainty while being intolerant, for example, of religious uncertainty.

Interestingly, when high in need for closure, Critcher et al’s (2009) conservative participants were more likely to change their self-reported attitudes towards abortion in response to an issue-relevant explicit prime—writing an essay either on the value of life or the value of choice. Self-reported liberal participants were less responsive to priming when high in need for closure. This suggests that worldview differences between liberals and conservatives influence how individuals respond to need for closure. One source of these differences could be variation between the traditional and modern worldviews, if we assume that liberalism and modernism and traditionalism and conservatism are both correlated in this sample. 

Relative to the modern worldview the traditional worldview tolerates more mystery. Truths are transcendental and an individual does not expect to have specific answers to all of life’s perplexities. In the modernist’s world, each individual expects to be able to achieve closure only after an examination of the evidence—a process that could be cognitively intensive. While closure is desired, it is not, necessarily, expected. Where it is demanded, the modernist must study her environment, elaborating information until stable understanding can be reached. Alternatively, the modernist might rely on experts—individuals who share the same goals but are better able to achieve them. In that case, however, she must still take responsibility for choosing her experts wisely. The liberal participants in Critcher et al.’s (2009) study were just as high in need for closure but were less susceptible to automatic, primed evaluations, perhaps because they habitually regulate against resolving uncertainty based on a gut instinct.

An alternate explanation could be that these liberal participants held on to previously established beliefs in the face of new evidence because those beliefs were the result of a more elaborative process and, perhaps, were higher in integrative complexity. Not only is the modern world inherently more uncertain, with that uncertainty being an obstacle rather than a necessity, it is also amoral. Moral judgments are supposed to be the products of deliberate reasoning and not, at least in Critcher et al.’s (2009) American sample, based on gut-instinct.. 

At the same time, the modernist’s behavior may not always conform to his ideal. For example, he may act on instincts, which he expects to be perfectible and thus potentially imperfect, when he is under cognitive load. Employing moral foundations theory, Joseph et al. discussed a study by Skitka, Mullen, Griffin, Hutchinson, and Chamberlin (2002), in which liberals were asked to decide whether to allocate funds to subsidize the medical treatment of AIDS patients who were believed to be responsible for their illness. Skitka et al (2002) found that liberals tended to deny funding when under cognitive load.

Cognitive load should, as discussed previously, contribute to closure needs (Kruglanski, 2004, p. 74). In this case, Skitka et al. (2009) argue that their participants were more likely to demonstrate the fundamental attribution error when under cognitive load. Western participants have been shown to make more individual-based attributions (and Eastern participants more situation-based attributions) when experiencing an elevated need for closure (Kruglanski, 2004, p. 73). Haidt et al. (2009) argue that liberals who were not under cognitive load sought a resolution between implicit concerns for purity and explicit concerns for harm, elaborating in the face of implicit ambivalence. Under cognitive load, automatic concerns for purity dominated may have decision-making.

In this case, a modernist participant may act similarly to a traditionalist participant, but with different justifications.  The traditionalist may be more motivated to incorporate automatic reactions into her worldview and not to see conflict between automatic and deliberate judgments than the modernist, but the modernist may also decide to rationalize his judgments in order to think of himself as a rational person. The traditionalist may, alternatively, reject her judgment, considering it to be morally flawed. The modernist may reject his judgment, considering it to be irrational.

The Worldview Model cannot predict the exact conditions under which a modernist participant would reject her automatic evaluation and a traditionalist participant accept his automatic evaluation are unknown. The modernist’s realization that she is automatically stereotyping, for example, can trigger self-regulatory effort if she does not explicitly endorse these stereotypes (Richeson & Trawalter, 2005). Over time, automatic activation of stereotyping can be inhibited by the automatic activation of competing goals (Moskowitz & Li, 2011) and her automatic attitudes can grow closer to her explicitly endorsed ones. She can, in other words, reject her automatic reaction and seek to become more “perfect.” Under high need for closure, she may be more likely to stereotype (Kruglanski, 2004, p. 83). However, this failure to adhere to explicit norms may later motivate self-regulation.

Beyond stereotyping, modernists may also have to experience automatically-activated traditional beliefs, beliefs which are common in most societies for historical and, potentially, social cognitive reasons. Work by Kay and colleagues suggest that traditionalists and modernists will both deny randomness and assert control. His research, as well as that of Landau and colleagues (2010), suggests that in more modernist societies individuals may prefer to believe that the world is structured and non-random even if they do not have specific evidence for these beliefs.

Two strong sources of perceptions of order or randomness in the world are beliefs in supernatural forces and beliefs in the government. In one experiment, Kay, Shepherd, Blatz, Chua, and Galinsky (2010) looked at changes in perceptions of the stability of government in both Malaysian and Canadian participants and saw a subsequent increase in belief in a controlling God. Affirming government decreased belief in a controlling God among Canadian participants but did not affect whether participants reported that the concept of God helped them to find meaning in their own lives. Using a representative sample recruited online, Kay and colleagues then presented articles suggesting that cutting edge physics indicated that either science could explain all events or that there were some events that might be influenced by a supernatural force. Participants in the first condition showed relatively more support for the political system than participants in the second condition.

It would be more remarkable if belief in God was manipulated among those participants who were absolutely did not or absolutely did believe. However, many of the participants in Kay et al.’s study (2010) could probably draw on both more traditionalist and more modernist beliefs. Some participants may have endorsed modernist beliefs more strongly, but beliefs in God may have been both accessible and considered potentially viable. The modern worldview, after all, does not necessarily deny God, it only claims that the existence of God can be rationally evaluated. Many people may take tentative stances that are responsive to situational motivations, at least in the short-term.

A modernist who absolutely did not believe in God may have responded to the need to perceive nonrandomness and stability in his world by supporting the government. It should be noted that, in another study by Kay (Kay, Moskovitch, & Laurin, 2010), participants who were able to misattribute the arousal caused by being primed with reminders of randomness to an herbal supplement showed no significant change in their belief in supernatural sources of control. This is further evidence that the motive to perceive randomness must be interpreted by the individual before it affects worldview. Both a traditional and modern worldview may equally well satisfy the motivation to perceive non-randomness, depending on situational information of the sort that Kay and colleagues provided their participants. 

The relationship between the need for closure and Kay and colleagues other, potentially related, need to perceive non-randomness is not absolutely clear. However, it is possible that the motivation to perceive non-randomness constitutes a distinct source of the need for closure.  The need for closure scale, which is divided into five facets, each of which is defined as a potential source of need for closure, includes three facets that could relate to the motivation to perceive non-randomness—preference for order, preference for predictability, and discomfort with ambiguity (Kruglanski, Atash, DeGrada, Mannetti, Pierro, & Webster, 1997).

Under high need for closure that originates from cognitive load, participants who are motivated to perceive non-randomness may increase their belief in a controlling God or their belief in a strong government, whichever was more accessible. This interaction of needs could explain why some conservatives come to accept the status quo, even when that status quo includes beliefs with modernist origins (Jost et al., 2009). Conservatives who are relatively higher in nonspecific needs for closure may accept any belief that satisfies their need to perceive non-randomness.

The Need for Closure and Political Ideology

The Need for Closure Scale’s need for cognitive closure:

• Has been extensively researched, in both political and non-political contexts (Kruglanski, 2004).
• Is moderated by the environment (Kruglanski, 2004; Orehek, Fishman, Dechesne, Doosje, Kruglanski, Cole, Saddler, & Jackson, 2010).
• Moderates politically-relevant beliefs and behaviors with this moderation being mediated by cultural context (Jost, Napier, Thorisdottir, Gosling, Palfair, and Ostafin, 2007; Orehek et al., 2010; Chirumbolo & Leone, 2007; Jost, Krochik, Gaucher, Hennes, 2009; Schoel, Bluemke, Mueller, & Stahliberg, 2011; Peterson, Smith, Tannebaum, & Shaw, 2009; Kossowska & van Hiel, 2003; Stalder, 2007; Ho-ying, Fu, Morris, Lee, Chao, Chiu, & Hong; 2007; De Zavala, Cislak, & Wesolowska, 2010)

The need for cognitive closure can fulfill these multiple roles because it is fundamental to task achievement, allowing the need for closure to permeate both individual and political life. 

Webster and Kruglanski’s Need for Closure scale measures two epistemic motives using a bipolar scale.  These motives are the need for cognitive closure and the need to avoid cognitive closure. The need to avoid cognitive closure can be described as a motivation to believe that that the world is ambiguous and complex. Ambiguity and complexity are desired because they provide further opportunities for thought and reflection. People who are high in a need to avoid closure may find certainty constraining or generally aversive and may prefer to stop thought processes before they reach any definite conclusions (Kruglanski, 2004, p. 6-13).

The need for closure, in contrast, is a need to live in a world that is unambiguous and more easily understood. People who are high in a need for cognitive closure typically attend to information that can easily be incorporated into existing schemas. They typically seek to confirm existing beliefs and may continue their analysis until they have supported these beliefs. Under the right conditions, then, a person who is high in need for cognitive closure may process more information than a person who is low in need for cognitive closure. However, conclusions will tend to be biased in favor of the status quo. Over time, people who are habitually motivated to seek cognitive closure may come to rely on more general, less individuated schemas to which more information can be easily assimilated.  Also, a person who is high in need for closure may sometimes reject weakly held attitudes more quickly if those attitudes hinder their sense-making process (Kruglanski, 2004, p. 14-20).

Both the need to avoid closure and the feeds for closure may occur as specific, goal-directed needs.

These needs, however, can be somewhat difficult to pinpoint. For example, if a self-identified liberal reads the 2006 Pew Research Center report “Are We Happy Yet?” and learns that Republicans tend to report being happier than Democrats, that person may experience a range of specific responses that represent motives at both ends of the Need for Closure scale. For example, she may wish to affirm the methodology employed by the researchers (a need for cognitive closure with regards to the methodology) but argue that reality is more complicated than data can capture (a need to avoid closure because of the aversive implications of the results). If another self-identified liberal was to read that study and wished to challenge the results, he might begin analyzing the report in search of methodological flaws. Because this search has a specific goal—a belief that the methodology is flawed and that the results can be rejected—this search would be in response to a specific need for closure.

These needs, then, can shift as information processing continues. The first liberal might later be dissatisfied with her avoidance of closure and instead want to be able to specifically challenge the results. The latter liberal may find his need for closure satisfied by the discovery that the researchers employed an outdated or less precise statistical measure but then later require even stronger evidence against the results. If the results turn out to be well-supported, he may wish to avoid closure on the issue the same way that the first liberal initially did, arguing that methodology is sound but the results fail to capture the big picture. Alternatively, he may become ambivalent, wishing to reject the results but, for the time being, being unable to do so. 

While specific needs may vary considerably over the course of a thought-process, nonspecific needs to avoid closure and nonspecific needs for closure may vary as well. These general epistemic styles do not target the ambiguity or lack of ambiguity in specific situations but represent the approach or avoidance of ambiguity in general. If a person is under cognitive load, for example, she may be high in a nonspecific need for closure, seeking to draw rapid conclusions and make quick decisions about her environment with little need to reach specific conclusions or decisions (Kruglanski, 2004, p. 74).

Some people may habitually experience a high need for nonspecific closure. For example, following a traumatic event, such as a terrorist attack, a medium-term elevation in need for closure may be correlated with other psychological changes, both more general and more topical, including “enhanc[ed] ingroup identification; interdependence with others; outgroup derogation; and support for tough and decisive counterterrorism policies and for leaders likely to carry out such policies” (Orehek et al., 2010). 

This last example, with its mix of more general and more specific psychological outcomes of an elevated need for closure, draws attention to the difficulty of distinguishing specific from non-specific closure needs. The best evidence of non-specific closure needs would be evidence for the need to avoid or approach closure across a variety of domains. For example, if a person experiencing an elevated need for closure due to trauma became less tolerant of disorganization in his home and became less tolerant of his boss’s confusing instructions one could infer that his need for closure was nonspecific. Even if all of the evidence for need for closure comes from a single domain, the need to understand a situation, regardless of whether that situation is understood to be attractive or aversive, would also be evidence for a nonspecific need for closure.

The needs (whether specific or nonspecific) to approach or avoid closure are correlated to a variety of measures of political orientation, including measures of cultural conservatism, economic conservatism, party loyalty, and attitudes towards specific policies (Jost et al. 2003a). Both specific and non-specific needs for closure may interact with cultural context (Fu et al., 2007) and with salient, task-relevant, primes (Golec et al., 2007). Culture, potentially, can moderate need for closure, although there is limited experimental evidence to date.

Cognitive Constraints: Consistency Motives

Nisbett and Wilson, in their 1977 article, explore the discrepancy between the explanations that psychologists give for participant behavior and the explanations that participants themselves give.  For example, in a standard cognitive dissonance experiment participants adjust their attitudes in line with their recent behaviors but tend to be unaware that they have done so.  I don’t know to what degree this effect would vary depending on attitude strength.   In any case, the standard psychological explanation, based on a program of research involving multiple researchers and myriad experiments, is that participants, faced with behavior that is discordant with their previous attitudes, change their attitudes.  By changing their attitudes participants resolve this discord.  If participants can attribute their behavior to an experimental manipulation—i.e. the experimenter makes them do it—they will tend not to experience attitude change.  Attitude change, in other words, seems to arise as a self-focused process, a way of squaring the sense of self with the actions of that self. 

Unfortunately, as Nisbett and Wilson illustrate using Goethals and Reckman’s conceptually-related 1973 experiment on attitudes towards bussing in pursuit of school integration, participants rarely report being aware of this change.  Reviewing the original article, the pro- and anti-bussing participants were, on average, equally confident in their attitudes.  Both groups of participants changed their attitudes in the direction of the opposite position and, when asked, both groups of participants tended to underestimate the extremity of their previous support or opposition.  All of the participants were high school students and the article supplies no data on the personal relevancy of this issue to these students.  Whatever the initial strength of these attitudes, this experiment, among many others, is interesting because the recall of past attitudes is biased by present attitudes. What could explain this bias?

It is likely that these attitude-behavior consistency and, perhaps, self-concept consistency motives operate implicitly.  The existence of implicit goals is well-established.  They can be primed (Bargh & Chartrand, 2000) and they can shield a participant from undesirable conscious experiences, such as being or acting prejudiced (Moskowitz & Li, 2011).  It is also likely that these implicit processes could operate independently of lay theories of the self and motivation, unless a conscious effort is made to act in accordance with these theories.   Given that teasing apart these implicit processes has taken thousands of man-hours of controlled-laboratory experiments on the part of psychologists, it is not surprising that lay theories do not always incorporate specific analogs to what we, as psychologists, believe is really going on. 

Beyond this distinction, however, as Cohen discussed in his 2003 article, citing among others Pronin, Lin, and Ross’s research on bias blindspots, people are more consistent and more objective when judging others than when judging themselves.   Even if psychologists were to introduce implicit processes into lay epistemology, as has, of course, occurred to a certain degree, those very processes may disrupt the accurate application of the epistemology when a person is judging himself.   

However, it is still, to my knowledge, an open empirical question as to whether these implicit motives could be manipulated in the laboratory, through self-regulation, or through larger, natural-experiment-type patterns of cultural regulation.  

Epistemic Motives

Post tagged with the "Epistemic Motives" label concern state and trait motivations that influence cognition.

Belief in a Just World as Cognitive Constraint

Lerner and Miller (1978) discuss Belief in a Just World (BJW) in terms of

• The belief that one lives “in a world where people generally get what they deserve.” 
• The belief that the “physical and social environment . . . [are] stable and orderly.” (pp. 1030–1031). 

Here, some people may have beliefs about causality that make them feel, generally, that they can influence their personal and social environment (Rotter’s Locus of Control Scale). Other people perceive greater randomness in this psychosocial environment. Unfortunately, the Locus of Control scale seems to conflate perceiving randomness in the environment with perceiving the difficulty of attaining positive actions and avoiding negative ones, rather than being a simple measure of perceived environmental uncertainty. If it emphasized the possibility of good luck to what degree would its correlation with BJW be reduced (Furnham, 2003)? Luck is mentioned in the scale but the scale consistently discusses luck in terms of lack of control over whether valued outcomes are achieved rather than their spontaneous attainment: “Without the right breaks, one cannot be an effective leader” and “Getting a good job depends mainly on being in the right place at the right time,” for example.

Scales measuring Belief in a Just World examine beliefs that life, in some domains, is generally just or unjust. Justice and injustice can be immanent (present events are just or unjust) and ultimate (justice or injustice is an ultimate outcome of world events). Measured domains include the personal, interpersonal, and sociopolitical and beliefs in a just or unjust world can vary across each domain. Many of the benefits of belief in a just world are within the personal and interpersonal domain.

Belief in a Just World is correlated with greater long-term goal striving, a decreased sense of personal risk, and greater subjective and objective well-being. It seems that believing that one’s actions will generally be rewarded increases one’s willingness to commit resources. Or, alternatively, believing that one’s actions will sometimes go without reward decreases willingness to invest resources. I haven’t yet read research distinguishing between these perspectives. It also seems that those who are high in Belief in a Just World tend to have a decreased sense of environmental threat (moderated, I assume, by personal evaluations of virtue). This decreased threat could encourage a promotion focus, encouraging greater risk-taking. Risk-taking can be beneficial, maximizing outcomes, at least in environments that have a certain degree of safety. Last, personal well-being could be influenced not only by the greater rewards that come from greater resource commitment, but by a worldview that decreases the likelihood of ruminating on those negative outcomes that one cannot control and that encourages seeing these negative outcomes as in some way less negative or more positive.

Belief in a Just World is alternatively praised as a being correlated with subjective measures of personal well-being criticized for being associated with victim blaming and derogation. Both of these practices are moderated by several variables, both in the short and longer terms, and the relationship between BJW and political orientation has proved subtle (Furnham, 2003).

Cognitive Constraints: Worldview

Research on one epistemic motive, the need for cognitive closure (and the related need to avoid cognitive closure), suggests that Jost et al. (2003a) are remiss in ignoring the potential influence of culture on epistemic and other motives. It should be noted that Jost et al. (2003a) do not claim to have a complete model. It should also be noted that the coauthors themselves have presented variations on this model (Jost, Frederico, & Napier, 2009; Kruglanski 2004). I argue that a more complete model would take as its starting point personal worldview—as defined by Golec and Van Bergh (2007). The authors divide personal worldviews into three categories—the traditionalist, the modernist, and the postmodernist.

The traditionalist should believe in an absolute, transcendental truth that cannot be known through rational inquiry. The modernist should believe in an absolute truth that can only be known through rational inquiry. The postmodernist should believe that no absolute truth can be known, even in theory.

One assumption of the Worldview Model is that cultures and individuals will have a strong orientation towards a single worldview. This assumption has not been empirically tested but appears to be logical. Each worldview is fundamentally contradictory with each other worldview. However, this model also suggests that individuals may actively choose between the structuring logics of each worldview when defending existing beliefs or originating new beliefs. When making these choices, individuals may defend beliefs using a worldview that is different from the worldview that they generally prefer. They should be especially likely to ignore the conflict between worldviews when their need for closure is elevated.

Finally, the Worldview model predicts that worldview will be inherited and that participating in any particular culture will socialize individuals into a particular, dominant, worldview.

The Worldview Model predicts a moderating effect of worldview on the need for cognitive closure:

• Individuals in traditionalist cultures should have higher needs for closure when considering information that could challenge their transcendental, absolute truth.
• Individual cultures should vary as to what kinds of information could challenge this truth.
• Individuals in modernist cultures should have higher closure needs across a variety of tasks, with modernist individuals believing that they have a personal responsibility to discover the truth.  Modernist individuals may, however, when faced with individual uncertainty, have elevated needs to avoid closure. 
• In societies where individuals may have traditionalist or modernist orientations, both traditionalists and modernists will offer alternate interpretations of events in a variety of domains, challenging each other’s worldviews and elevating each other’s needs for specific closure.
• Individuals may temporarily shift from traditionalist to modernist orientations when doing so fulfills strong epistemic needs.  If these epistemic needs are consistently elevated, longer-term changes in worldview-orientation could result.
• Some beliefs may be so widely held in society that individuals refuse to challenge them, even if they are based in a rejected worldview.  Traditionalists, for examples, may embrace the concept of free will as a transcendental truth while modernists accept the concept without examining it too closely, or examining it closely, rejecting it, but choosing to act as if they believe in it. Both modernists and traditionalists should have elevated needs for closure about such foundational beliefs.  Modernists should seek to avoid closure when presented with arguments against free will that, based in the modern worldview, would normally be highly acceptable. 
• Individuals in a postmodernist society should have an elevated need to avoid closure, accept when defending themselves against modernist or traditionalist authorities.

Empirical tests of this model have not been conducted.  

Cognitive Constraints: Moral Convictions

Moral convictions may be correlated to particularly rigid mindsets which give the individual who holds them a sense of objectivity. Tetlock et al. (2000), for example, “found that people resisted consideration of counterfactual reasoning with respect to their moral beliefs but were willing to engage in this kind of reasoning in amoral contexts” (Skitka et al., 2005).

Cognitive Constraints: The Unthinkable and the Undesirable

The following entries, and any future entries tagged with the phrase “cognitive constraints,” concern beliefs that make certain thoughts so undesirable or so nonsensical as to be unthinkable.