Liberals Think More Analytically (More 'Weird') than Conservatives

Abstract

Henrich and colleagues (2010) summarized cultural differences in psychology and argued that people from one particular culture are outliers: people from societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD). In this study, we show that liberals think WEIRDer than conservatives. In five studies with more than 3,000 participants, we found that liberals think more analytically (an element of WEIRD thought) than moderates and conservatives — even in China. We found that social liberals had more analytic perception in the framed-line task (Kitayama, Duffy, Kawamura, & Larsen, 2003) and categorized objects more analytically on the triad task, which asks participants to categorize a group of objects based on either abstract categories or intuitive relation (Ji, Zhang, & Nisbett, 2004). Social politics predicted thought style much better than economic and overall political identity. Studies 4 and 5 showed that briefly training people to think analytically made them form a more liberal opinion on welfare, whereas training them to think holistically made them form a more conservative opinion.

Keywords: politics, cognitive style, analytic, holistic, liberal, culture, categorization