Political polarization is a barrier to enacting policy solutions to global issues. Social
psychology has a rich history of studying polarization, and there is an important opportunity …

A key debate in the psychology of ideology is whether leftists and rightists are
psychologically similar or different. A long-standing view holds that left-wing and right-wing …

A sizable literature tracing back to Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style (1964) argues
that Republicans and conservatives are more likely to believe conspiracy theories than …

The highly influential theory of “Motivated System 2 Reasoning” argues that analytical,
deliberative (“System 2”) reasoning is hijacked by identity when considering ideologically …

Actively open-minded thinking (AOT) is measured by items that tap the willingness to
consider alternative opinions, sensitivity to evidence contradictory to current beliefs, the …

Partisan disagreement over policy-relevant facts is a salient feature of contemporary
American politics. Perhaps surprisingly, such disagreements are often the greatest among …

Social scientists are frequently interested in who is most responsive to a treatment. By
necessity, such moderation experiments often rely on observed moderators, such as …

Despite decades of research, it has been difficult to resolve debates about the existence and
nature of partisan bias—the tendency to evaluate information more positively when it …

Motivated numeracy refers to the idea that people with high reasoning capacity will use that
capacity selectively to process information in a manner that protects their own valued beliefs …

A substantial literature shows that public polarization over climate change in the US is most
pronounced among the science literate. A dominant explanation for this phenomenon is that …