Northwestern University
Big differences in the ways conservatives and liberals think about solving the nation's most pressing problems couldn't be more apparent during this presidential election cycle. But political ideas aside, people who hold conservative versus liberal perspectives appear to differ in everyday thinking processes and problem solving, according to new research.
Big differences in the ways conservatives and liberals think
about solving the nation's most pressing problems couldn't be more apparent
during this presidential election cycle.
But political ideas aside, people who hold conservative versus
liberal perspectives appear to differ in everyday thinking processes and
problem solving, according to research from Northwestern University and the
Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC).
When solving short (non-political) verbal problems in an experiment, liberals were more likely than conservatives to achieve solutions with a sudden insight or "Aha!" In contrast, both groups achieved roughly an equal number of solutions through gradual, analytical processing.
Different from instinctive or gut reactions, insight problem
solving occurs when after working on a problem for awhile and maybe feeling
stuck, a solution unexpectedly emerges into consciousness in an 'Aha!' moment.
The problem is suddenly seen in a new light, often surprising the solvers who
are typically unaware of how the reorganization of their thought processes
occurred.
Insight solutions contrast with methodical and analytical
problem solving, which involve a gradual approach toward the solution and
awareness of the steps involved.
"This view is consistent with similar results from other
labs across behavioral, neuroscientific and genetic studies, which converge in
showing that conservatives have more structured and persistent cognitive styles,"
said Carola Salvi, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral fellow in
cognitive psychology at Northwestern and RIC.
"Liberals have a less structured and more flexible
cognitive style, according to those studies. Our research indicates that cognitive
differences in people with different political orientations also are apparent
in a task that some consider to be convergent thinking: finding a single
solution to a problem," Salvi said.
Given previous findings relating political orientation with cognitive
styles, the researchers hypothesized that liberals and conservatives would
preferentially employ different processes when tackling problems that could be
solved using either an analytical or insight approach.
"It's not that there's a different capacity to solve
problems," stressed Mark Beeman, senior author of the study and professor
and chair of psychology at Northwestern. "It's more about which processes
people end up engaging in to solve the problem."
And it's not about preferences, said Jordan Grafman, co-author
of the study and professor in physical medicine and rehabilitation at
Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine and director of brain injury
research at RIC.
"People may default automatically to a particular approach
out of habit or predisposition, but they are not consciously choosing to solve
a problem one way or the other," Grafman said.
Approximately 130 Northwestern students were randomly assigned
to the study. Those whose survey responses demonstrated a particular political
ideology were ultimately divided into either a liberal or conservative group
and balanced for age and ethnicity. A third group of students who scored
"neutral" were excluded from the analysis.
To test their hypothesis, the researchers used a well-known task
in the problem-solving literature -- the Compound Remote Associate (CRA)
problems. These problems can be solved through either insight or analytic
processes with participants reporting how they solved each problem.
Each
problem consisted of the simultaneous presentation of three words, each of
which could form a compound word or phrase with the solution word. For example:
pine/crab/sauce -- the solution word is APPLE.
Past research has demonstrated that different mental processes
and distinct brain regions are involved when people report solving these
problems with insight, versus when solving analytically.
"Liberals tended more than conservatives to use insight to
solve verbal problems in which you have to 'think outside the box,'" Salvi
said.
In life you often use both approaches, Salvi noted.
"Everyday life presents us with a variety of scenarios
where we are asked to solve problems analytically, others only with a spark of
insight, most of them can be solved either way," Salvi said.
"In this
last case, liberals are more likely to achieve the solution with an 'Aha!'
moment, whereas conservatives' problem solving approach does not prefer one
style or the other."
"The Politics of Insight" is published online in
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. In addition to
Salvi, Grafman and Beeman, Irene Cristofori of RIC and the department of
Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Feinberg School of Medicine, also is a
co-author of the study.