Actively open-minded thinking and liberal ideology: associations and dissociations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The thinking disposition of actively open-minded thinking (AOT) has long been known to correlate with liberal ideology. In this study, we demonstrate that AOT is not just a proxy for a liberal worldview. We find that it is AOT—and not liberal ideology—that is more optimally associated with adaptive epistemic attitudes. In a study of 682 subjects, we found that AOT and liberal ideology moderately correlated but, nonetheless, AOT dissociated from liberalism in several respects. Political liberalism was positively associated with several aspects of left-wing authoritarianism, but AOT scores were significantly negatively correlated. Variables associated with non-adaptive psychological states and beliefs (e.g., belief in the paranormal, the Dark Triad, paranoia) were negatively correlated with AOT scores, but uncorrelated with liberal ideology. Political liberalism was positively correlated with the ability to discriminate between mature conspiratorial beliefs that actually occurred and those which did not, but AOT scores displayed a significantly higher correlation. AOT seems to associate exclusively with the parts of political liberalism that lead to positive epistemic consequences and to dissociate from any aspects of liberal ideology that lead to unwarranted belief and non-adaptive action.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".