An Adversarial Collaboration on the Rigidity-of-the-Right, Rigidity-of-Extremes, or Symmetry: The Answer Depends on the Question
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In an adversarial collaboration, two preregistered U.S.-based studies (total N = 6,181) tested three hypotheses regarding the relationship between political ideology and cognitive rigidity (i.e., less evidence-based belief updating): rigidity-of-the-right, symmetry, and rigidity-of-extremes. Across both studies, general conservatism and social conservatism were associated with rigidity (|b|~.05), and Republicans were more rigid than Democrats (Cohen’s d~.05). Rigidity had null associations with economic ideology, social political attitudes, and economic political attitudes. In Study 1, general extremism (but not social and economic extremism) predicted rigidity, but all three extremism measures were significant in Study 2 (overall |rs|~.07), and extreme rightists were more rigid than extreme leftists (60% of quadratic relationships). Given these weak and semi-consistent results, broad claims about strong associations between ideology and cognitive rigidity are likely unwarranted. Rather, psychologists may wish to turn their focus to examining the contexts where ideologies correlate with rigidity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".