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.