Are Conservatives More Likely Than Liberals to Avoid Cognitive Dissonance?

[Ahso!]

I found this article interesting in thinking about my attitudes back when I was a conservative and now with more liberal attitudes. I think volunteering to write a positive essay on Mondale would have been difficult for me in 1979 though I couldn't help realizing he appeared to be a descent and honest person during the debates.

When Bush ran against Gore, I preferred Gore but I also examined Bush and found some positives in him, though admittedly that didn't last very long after Bush took office.

But do liberals and conservatives differ in their tendency to avoid cognitive dissonance? Suggestive evidence from past research suggests they might. For instance, a study of voters in the 2000 election by Stanford public opinion specialist Shanto Iyengar and his colleagues found that although Republicans and conservatives were more interested in learning information about George W. Bush than about Al Gore, Democratic and liberal voters had no such political preference.

....

Sure enough, the results yielded a significant partisan difference in the willingness to write the essay—but only when the essay was political (not about Macs vs. PCs) and only when writing it was presented a choice, not an assignment. In that context, the results were rather stunning: Not a single Bush supporter was willing to write a pro-Obama essay. That's 0 out of 28 Bush supporters overall. Obama supporters didn't like writing pro Bush essays much either, but they were a lot more willing in general: 20 out of 71 did so, or 28 percent overall. (The study sample, obtained through Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk, contained more liberals than conservatives.)


http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06 ... dissonance