Okay, the first portion of my presentation is entitled "Open-minded Cognition As a Chronic Predisposition." Here the focus is on a relatively enduring characteristic of the individual. People high on this dimension are open-minded whereas people low on this dimension are dogmatic or closed-minded in terms of their style of thinking. So first let me say something about the relation between intellectual humility and open-minded cognition. Intellectual humility can be defined as an awareness of one's own knowledge limitations coupled with openness to information, even information that contradicts one's pre-existing opinions or expectations. And so, you can see that open-minded cognition is an important component of intellectual humility. Open-minded cognition can be regarded as a cognitive style ranging from closed-minded to open-minded cognition. Closed-minded cognition is directionally biased. That is it's a tendency to select, in other words pay attention to, interpret and elaborate upon information in a manner that reinforces the individual's preexisting opinions or expectations. Open-minded cognition, on the other hand, is directionally unbiased. It's a tendency to select, interpret, and elaborate upon information in a manner that is not biased toward or against the individual's prior opinion or expectation. One reason to study open-minded cognition is that it addresses important, practical social problems. Closed-minded cognition engenders political and religious polarization. We see some examples of political polarization perhaps linked to the closed-minded cognition in the present U.S. presidential campaign. And polarization, unfortunately, can engender political gridlock, conflict, and violence within and between states. Political gridlock has actually tremendous costs which can even be financially estimated. It impedes legislation and produces economic damage due to government shutdown which can lead to huge losses. Another reason to study open-minded cognition is more theoretical. Directional bias is a core theoretical concern in the social psychology of persuasion, stereotyping and prejudice and impression formation. For example, stereotypes can elicit negative directionally biased distortions of out group members, an example of closed-minded cognition. Finally, existing measures of cognitive style, those that already exist, often focus on the amount or extent of thinking. For example, you might be familiar with the distinction between systematic and heuristic processing or the distinction between high versus low need for cognition or system one versus system two cognitive systems. These all have to do with amount or extent of thinking. In contrast open-minded cognition focuses on the degree to which thinking is directionally biased. So, as I've said, open-minded cognition is not the same as a high amount of thinking. Now sometimes open-minded cognition can entail a high amount of thinking. However, it's also true that open-minded cognition can occur when individuals use cognitive shortcuts that require minimal thought. For example, when deriving a political opinion I might follow the advice of someone who I know is neutral and an unbiased political expert. Also closed-minded cognition can occur even when individuals think extensively. For example, when considering a political proposal an individual might perform a very detailed cognitive analysis but exclusively focused, let's say, on the disadvantages of the proposal. So we developed a new measure of open-minded cognition and why did we do so? There are some measures that already exist that appear to measure a similar construct but as you can see these previous measures often include items that do not specifically focus on what I'm calling directional bias in cognitive processing in this style of thinking. So if you look at, for example, the closed-minded subscale of need for closure, it sounds like it would measure the same thing, but you can see here that it contains items that do not really focus specifically on directional bias in thinking. Openness to experience, one of the big five dimensions, and also political dogmatism as you can see all of these measures possess specific items that do not specifically tap into directional bias in cognitive processing. So we actually created initially three measures. We created a measure of general open-minded cognition but also two measures of domain specific open-minded cognition. One is the political open-minded cognition measure and the other in the religious domain, religious open-minded cognition. So we started out with 79 items that we drew and sometimes altered from pre-existing measures or we created many of these items from scratch. Then using statistics, those of you who are familiar with statistics, an iterative factor analysis procedure, we windmilled down this pool of items to just six items and then again, using a more formal statistic called confirmatory factor analysis that controls for acquiescence, the six item scale was formally validated on a separate sample. So here you see the items that we generated throughout this procedure. We developed corresponding items for the general political and religious scale. So you can see the first item states, 'I have no patience for arguments I disagree with.' To create the political version of this we simply inserted the word 'political' where you see it there. And to create the religious version we simply inserted the word 'religious' where you see it there. Otherwise, the three versions of this item are virtually identical. The second item, 'I often tune out messages I disagree with.' 'I believe it is a waste of time to pay attention to certain ideas,' was the third item. 'I try to reserve judgment until I have a chance to hear arguments from both sides of an issue,' was the fourth item. 'I am open to considering other viewpoints,' was the fifth item and the sixth item is, 'When thinking about an issue I consider as many different opinions as possible.' People expressed their agreement with these items, the extent to which they agree versus disagree with each of these six items. We simply reverse scored their agreement with the first three items and then averaged the agreement with the six items in order to come up with an open-minded cognition score for each individual participant or respondent. We did the same thing for the political and religious scales as well. So, in concluding this little introductory portion of my material, open-minded cognition can be defined as a cognitive style involving the manner in which individuals select, that is pay attention to, interpret and elaborate upon information. Our analyses suggest that it is structured as a single bipolar dimension, that is open-mindedness is the opposite from closed-mindedness. If you're high in open-mindedness, you're low on closed-mindedness and vice versa, so it ranges from these two extremes. And we developed three correspondent scales: a general, political, and religious open-minded cognition scale.