As I said before when assessing open-minded cognition we have three measures of it: general, political and religious open-minded cognition and when assessing relations with other constructs we will look at all three of these measures. Before I look at relations however, I wanted you to see mean levels of open-minded cognition for each of these three measures. As you can see on the left which shows the mean levels of general open-minded cognition, in the middle, political open-minded cognition and on the right religious open-minded cognition. We have evidence of what we call slippage. That is participant's individuals tend to endorse open-minded cognition in the general or in abstract terms. But when it comes to more specific domains such as politics and especially religion, average levels of open-minded cognition are somewhat lower or somewhat more closed-minded. Now I'd like also to look at the inter-correlation between general, political and religious open-minded cognition. By the way when I present correlations in my presentations, if a correlation has no star next to it, it means it's non-significant which basically means it's essentially zero. If a correlation does have a star next to it it means it's significant and meaningful. So you can see that the three forms of open-minded cognition are all positively correlated as we would expect. If you look at the first column in this particular data display, you'll see that political open-minded cognition was more strongly correlated with general open-minded cognition than is religious open-minded cognition. You'll also see in the second column that 0.492 correlation indicates that people high in political open-minded cognition tend to be higher in religious open-minded cognition. But that correlation is not too high. What that means is since it's not a perfect correlation, some people can be high in political open-minded cognition, but low in religious open-minded cognition or vice versa. In other words, they're not measuring exactly the same thing which is why it's important to have separate measures of these constructs. Interestingly, open-minded cognition is uncorrelated, unrelated to most demographic measures. OK. So in contrast to popular stereotypes. For example if you look at age, old people are not more dogmatic than young people. Gender also, we do not see a tendency for example, for females to be more open-minded than males. Virtually zero effect here although in some of our other data we do occasionally get a small effect in the direction I just mentioned. Education, notice, is not really correlated with open-minded cognition. Being educated does not necessarily make a person more open-minded at least in our sample. I should mention that our samples are a United States of America samples. They are not necessarily fully representative of the entire country but they are reasonably variable in terms of age, religion, political affiliation and so on. The only demographic correlation we see here is with place of residence. Urban and rural residents differ. People who live in cities tend to be slightly more open-minded than people live in the country at least within our U.S. sample. Now, I will then look at open-minded cognition. How does it correlate with these other measures of similar constructs? You want to show that these correlations aren't too high because if they're extremely high it suggests you're really measuring the same thing that's already been measured. Well, you can see that it is correlated with similar constructs as we would expect. It's positively correlated with need for closure, positively correlated with a measure called actively open-minded thinking. It's negatively correlated with dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity which you would all expect in terms of the directions of these correlations. But none of these correlations are too high, suggesting that we are in fact measuring something a little different than these other similar measures. As predicted, open-minded cognition was completely uncorrelated with need for cognition. We were in fact delighted to see that this correlation was essentially zero because need for cognition essentially measures amount of thinking and as I've said before, open-minded cognition does not really tap amount of thinking, it taps the directional bias in thinking. This slide shows correlations between open-minded cognition and the big five personality measures for those of you who are familiar with personality theory. And you do see some correlations here, we see that open-minded cognition is positively associated with conscientiousness, emotional stability-- the more stable a person is the more open-minded they are and vice versa. Openness to experience is positively correlated with and agreeableness it's positively correlated with. We then looked at the correlation between open-minded cognition and various political measures. As you can see open-minded cognition is associated with support for democratic values and consistent with some work by Jost, Kruglanski, and others, at least within the United States, open-minded cognition is negatively associated with conservatism and Republican party identification. Interestingly, you see there that political expertise is unrelated to open-minded cognition. So being a political expert does not make you immune from dogmatism, they're uncorrelated with each other. Another interesting thing is the zero correlation between political tolerance and open-minded cognition. People who are high on political tolerance are very strong advocates of freedom of speech. For example, even though they may hate the KKK within the U.S. which is an extremely racist organization, they may argue that they should be provided with the right to speak freely in public for reasons of freedom of speech. What this zero correlation means is that you can strongly value freedom of speech, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to openly listen to the KKK and openly consider their remarks when they do speak. So these are two separate constructs. Open-minded cognition and endorsement of freedom of speech and other political tolerance sorts of items. Here's some other interesting political correlations, but you see here, when we focus on the extent to which people pay close attention to politics, let's say in the media, their interest in politics, the extent to which they engage in a lot of discussion with politics. We see correlations with open-minded cognition but it's predominantly just with our measure of political open-minded cognition in the middle column of this data set. But the directions of those correlations make sense. The more you pay attention, the more interested you are in politics, the more you discuss politics. You tend also to be somewhat more open-minded. Interestingly, when we look at the relationship between open-minded cognition and various religious measures we pretty much obtained nothing. These are as I said since these have no stars against them essentially zero correlations. This is interesting in fact. This may be related to our particular sample and we might be able to find correlations in other samples but at least in our particular sample, we had for example, anticipated that we would get a negative correlation between open-minded cognition and religious fundamentalism. We had anticipated that we would get a positive correlation between open-minded cognition and quest as well as spiritual openness because both of these tie into a tendency to be kind of open to new spiritual approaches and belief systems and so on. But we get nothing. It is not associated with fundamentalism, quest or spiritual openness and even just general religiosity is not correlated. What does this mean? This means that religious people when you compare them to non-religious people are no more or less open-minded. So there really is no huge, there are no huge differences here. Open-minded cognition does predict some interesting outcomes. Specifically, empathic concern for others and more favorable attitudes towards minority outgroup members. So open-minded cognition is a measure of cognitive style but it predicts empathic concern which is an the emotional component of empathy, which makes sense. The more open-minded you are—willing to consider another person's viewpoints even if they differ from your own— the more likely you are to empathize with them. And the causality could probably go either way on that. We also see that open-minded cognition is associated with more favorable attitudes towards minority group members. These correlations emerge even when controlling for some of those other measures that are similar to open-minded cognition. So in summary, open-minded cognition is largely unrelated to most demographic variables. It's simply a little bit higher for people who live in the city than people who live in the country. When we looked at how open-minded cognition correlates with measures of similar constructs, we found that they were related and correlated as expected but that the correlations were not too high. And so therefore our measure of open-minded cognition while correlated with these other constructs such as dogmatism, need for closure, intolerance for ambiguity, is measuring something a little different. Open-minded cognition was unrelated to need for cognition as we predicted because it's not really assessing amount of thinking. It is positively related to conscientiousness, emotional stability, agreeableness and openness to experience for those of you interested in personality measures. Open-minded cognition is positively related to empathic concern for others which is the emotional component of empathy even when controlling for other variables and also is positively related to more favorable attitudes towards outgroup members, even when controlling for similar constructs. Within the domain of politics, open-minded cognition has to be positively related to democratic values, news consumption, political discussion, but negatively related to conservatism and Republicanism, at least in the United States that is. And then when we look at the relation between open-minded cognition and various religious variables, not a lot there. Not very many strong correlations. For example, religious people compared to non-religious people are no more or less open-minded than each other. So in conclusion, we can regard general, political, and religious open-minded cognition as distinct yet correlated constructs. And open-minded cognition is related to a variety of variables in a theoretically meaningful manner.
