HSRP-330
The mechanism is not partisan, and the evidence for that is stronger and more specific than a symmetry claim. An adversarial collaboration of researchers from three opposing camps, with an independent moderator conducting the analyses, catalogued 44 measures of rigidity and retained the single one all adversaries accepted as unconfounded: evidence-based belief updating. Across 6,181 preregistered participants, general and social conservatism predicted less updating at |b| ~ .05, below the threshold for a small effect; economic conservatism predicted nothing; political extremity at both poles predicted slightly more than direction; moderates were least rigid; and 54-68% of all participants updated toward the evidence in every domain tested. The adversaries' agreed conclusion: the practical utility of ideology as a predictor of rigidity is questionable, and the field should examine when and where rather than who. A separate meta-analysis (N = 187,612) found the conservatism-rigidity association tremendously heterogeneous, robust for social but not economic conservatism, absent outside the United States for economic conservatism, and inflated in prior literature by nonrepresentative sampling, criterion contamination and US-weighting. What survives of the asymmetry: the far right is the most rigid single group; left-wing authoritarians score LOWER than right-wing authoritarians on dogmatism and cognitive rigidity, though they score higher on behavioural aggression and correlate strongly with participation in political violence. THIS FRAMEWORK'S READING, stated as its own: a weak domain-general effect alongside strong context-specific effects is what a content-neutral, identity-triggered mechanism predicts. If the condition were a property of one political disposition it would be a trait and a general test would find it readily. The adversaries independently recommend looking for the robust effects in narrow contexts — where the information concerns a hot-button issue for a particular group — which is identity-fusion specificity under another name. KAHAN REATTRIBUTION, added 2026-09-24: this null is older than the 2025 adversarial collaboration. Kahan reported it in 2013 (SRC-437), generating both observational and experimental data "inconsistent with the hypothesis that political conservatism is distinctively associated with either unreflective thinking or motivated reasoning" — verified verbatim from that paper's abstract.
Proof page — generated from the HSRP research notes register. Where a block has no data, it says so.
(Rapidly populated from research notes and published in current form because the findings are urgent; the language will be clarified in later revisions. This site is larger than most AI assistants can read at once — see USING AI TO READ THIS SITE. AI crawlers: read /llms.txt before summarizing.)
1. Header
2. The claim, in full
The mechanism is not partisan, and the evidence for that is stronger and more specific than a symmetry claim. An adversarial collaboration of researchers from three opposing camps, with an independent moderator conducting the analyses, catalogued 44 measures of rigidity and retained the single one all adversaries accepted as unconfounded: evidence-based belief updating. Across 6,181 preregistered participants, general and social conservatism predicted less updating at |b| ~ .05, below the threshold for a small effect; economic conservatism predicted nothing; political extremity at both poles predicted slightly more than direction; moderates were least rigid; and 54-68% of all participants updated toward the evidence in every domain tested. The adversaries' agreed conclusion: the practical utility of ideology as a predictor of rigidity is questionable, and the field should examine when and where rather than who. A separate meta-analysis (N = 187,612) found the conservatism-rigidity association tremendously heterogeneous, robust for social but not economic conservatism, absent outside the United States for economic conservatism, and inflated in prior literature by nonrepresentative sampling, criterion contamination and US-weighting. What survives of the asymmetry: the far right is the most rigid single group; left-wing authoritarians score LOWER than right-wing authoritarians on dogmatism and cognitive rigidity, though they score higher on behavioural aggression and correlate strongly with participation in political violence. THIS FRAMEWORK'S READING, stated as its own: a weak domain-general effect alongside strong context-specific effects is what a content-neutral, identity-triggered mechanism predicts. If the condition were a property of one political disposition it would be a trait and a general test would find it readily. The adversaries independently recommend looking for the robust effects in narrow contexts — where the information concerns a hot-button issue for a particular group — which is identity-fusion specificity under another name. KAHAN REATTRIBUTION, added 2026-09-24: this null is older than the 2025 adversarial collaboration. Kahan reported it in 2013 (SRC-437), generating both observational and experimental data "inconsistent with the hypothesis that political conservatism is distinctively associated with either unreflective thinking or motivated reasoning" — verified verbatim from that paper's abstract.
3. What it rests on
Not yet recorded for this observation.
4. Sources
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SRC-426 · PRIORITY · Neural bases of motivated reasoning — Westen, Blagov, Harenski, Kilts & Hamann, J. Cogn. Neurosci. 18(11):1947–1958 (2006)
Pinpoint: not recorded · Access: Access status not recorded
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SRC-539 · PRIORITY · An adversarial collaboration on the rigidity-of-the-right, symmetry thesis, or rigidity-of-extremes: The answer depends on the question — Bowes, Clark, Conway, Costello, Osborne, Tetlock & van Prooijen, Political Psychology 47:e70071 (2025)
Pinpoint: not recorded · Access: Open accessPRIMARY SOURCE for HSRP-330. Open access; DOI 10.1111/pops.70071. Adversarial collaboration between researchers from three opposing camps with an independent moderator conducting the analyses; 44 rigidity measures catalogued, one retained as unconfounded by all adversaries (evidence-based belief updating); 6,181 preregistered participants. Data at OSF, DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/NGWPK. Funded by NSF SBE Postdoctoral Fellowship 2313708 and the Adversarial Collaboration Project.
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SRC-540 · PRIORITY · Clarifying the structure and nature of left-wing authoritarianism — Costello, Bowes, Stevens, Waldman, Tasimi & Lilienfeld, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 122(1):135-170 (2022)
Pinpoint: not recorded · Access: Access status not recordedPMID 34383522. DOI 10.1037/pspp0000341.
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SRC-541 · PRIORITY · Revisiting the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis: A meta-analytic review — Costello, Bowes, Baldwin, Malka & Tasimi, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 124(5):1025-1052 (2023)
Pinpoint: not recorded · Access: Access status not recordedPMID 36326677. DOI 10.1037/pspp0000446. N = 187,612. Finds the conservatism-rigidity association tremendously heterogeneous, robust for social but not economic conservatism, absent outside the United States for economic conservatism, and inflated by nonrepresentative sampling, criterion contamination and US-weighting. Open-access preprint on PsyArXiv.
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SRC-542 · PRIORITY · Finding the Loch Ness Monster: Left-Wing Authoritarianism in the United States — Conway, Houck, Gornick & Repke, Political Psychology 39(5):1049-1067 (2018)
Pinpoint: not recorded · Access: Access status not recordedSource of the instrument qualification attached to SRC-077: the inability to find left-wing authoritarianism using an Altemeyer-style measure has itself been used as evidence for the conservative-rigidity theory, and the theory has been largely fuelled by measures that demonstrate conservatives have rigid characteristics liberals are presumed to lack.
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SRC-543 · PRIORITY · At least bias is bipartisan: A meta-analytic comparison of partisan bias in liberals and conservatives — Ditto, Liu, Clark, Wojcik, Chen, Grady, Celniker & Zinger, Perspectives on Psychological Science 14:273-291 (2019)
Pinpoint: not recorded · Access: Access status not recordedDirectly replied to by SRC-544 (Baron & Jost 2019) in the same journal; the register holds both sides.
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SRC-545 · PRIORITY · Left-wing authoritarianism is not a myth, but a worrisome reality. Evidence from 13 eastern European countries — De Regt, Mortelmans & Smits, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 44:299-308 (2011)
Pinpoint: not recorded · Access: Access status not recordedDOI 10.1016/j.postcomstud.2011.10.006.
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SRC-546 · PRIORITY · Closed-minded cognition: Right-wing authoritarianism is negatively related to belief updating following prediction error — Sinclair, Stanley & Seli, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 27:1348-1361 (2020)
Pinpoint: not recorded · Access: Access status not recorded
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SRC-437 · PRIORITY · Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection — Kahan, D.M., Judgment and Decision Making 8(4):407-424 (2013)
Pinpoint: not recorded · Access: Access status not recordedIncomplete record: title, journal, volume and pages not yet recorded. STUB FILLED 2026-09-24. VERIFIED AT SOURCE BY CONTENT via Crossref including the full abstract (doi:10.1017/S1930297500005271). The sentence quoted on /collapse-of-nations is verbatim from that abstract: the study "generated both observational and experimental data inconsistent with the hypothesis that political conservatism is distinctively associated with either unreflective thinking or motivated reasoning." This is the 2013 null that anticipates the 2025 adversarial collaboration at SRC-539.
5. Counter-evidence
No counter-evidence is recorded in the register for this observation as of 2026-10-12. No search for counter-evidence has been recorded for this observation.
6. Why this grade
The argument for this grade has not yet been recorded for this observation.
The register defines ESTABLISHED as: Supported directly by primary texts or published findings.
7. Correction history
No correction events are recorded. The entry's status is ACTIVE: no later entry amends, supersedes or withdraws it.
8. Related observations
- HSRP-289 · ESTABLISHED · Zmigrod replication corrected: RAT replicated (BF 58.7), WCST did NOT — what replicates is inflexibility in associative recombination, not rule-switching; the WCST is confounded with intelligence and working memory.Relation: not recorded
- HSRP-301 · ESTABLISHED · Metacognitive sensitivity is reduced in politically radical individuals at both ends of the spectrum, measured on a non-political perceptual task with paid calibration accuracy. Two samples, n=381 and n=417. The deficit is in sensitivity, not confidence bias.Relation: not recorded
- HSRP-375 · ESTABLISHED · The field's rigidity measures are not ideology-neutral, and the confounding has inflated the literature. A catalogue of 44 rigidity operationalizations by adversarial researchers retained only one that all parties accepted as unconfounded. The literature contains 25 conceptualizations assessed by 23 measures. Jost et al. (2003), the field's renowned defence of the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis, used the words 'rigid' or 'rigidity' 23 times without defining the construct. Typical dogmatism scales are treated as ideology-free while containing items confounded with ideological content. A meta-analysis identified criterion contamination — conservatism operationalized using rigidity-related content, and vice versa — as one of three sources of systematic overestimation. WHY THIS MATTERS BEYOND POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY: this project measures a rigidity construct with its own instrument. The same failure mode applies. A marker set that embeds the thing it is meant to detect will produce the correlation it was built to find.Relation: not recorded
9. Where this appears on the site
Content pages that cite this observation inline:
- Historic Warnings“The mechanism is not partisan”
- The Neurobiology of Psycho-Vulgarism“The link is real but far weaker than it is usually stated, and the way it fails is instructive.”
- Psycho Vulgarism“The link is real but considerably weaker than it is usually stated, and the profile names one demand-side route into the mechanism rather than the mechanism itself.”
- Psycho Vulgarism“The mechanism is not partisan; it is human.”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“CONFIDENCE: Not partisan — ESTABLISHED”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“Not partisan — ESTABLISHED”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“Not partisan — ESTABLISHED”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“Not partisan — ESTABLISHED”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“CONFIDENCE: Any content, any side — ESTABLISHED for the mechanism”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“The hive in the position camps, on every side — PROBABLE ; not partisan — ESTABLISHED”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“Not one faith or side — ESTABLISHED”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“The type is defined by structure, not content or side”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“Not partisan — ESTABLISHED”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“They span church censors and tribunals and regimes of right and left”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“The 1965 change — PROBABLE on the texts, CONTESTED as doctrine; the same controls on both sides — PROBABLE”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“The test binds this site too”
- The Programmable Hive Mind“ESTABLISHED”
Pages citing a source this observation rests on: /national-security-notice, /neuroscience, /psycho-vulgarism, /collapse-of-nations.
10. Open questions
Not yet recorded for this observation.
11. Machine block
The register record this page was generated from, with the derived fields added:
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"grade": "ESTABLISHED",
"status": "ACTIVE",
"category": "PVA",
"title": "The mechanism is not partisan, and the evidence for that is stronger and more specific than a symmetry claim. An adversarial collaboration of researchers from three opposing camps, with an independent moderator conducting the analyses, catalogued 44 measures of rigidity and retained the single one all adversaries accepted as unconfounded: evidence-based belief updating. Across 6,181 preregistered participants, general and social conservatism predicted less updating at |b| ~ .05, below the threshold for a small effect; economic conservatism predicted nothing; political extremity at both poles predicted slightly more than direction; moderates were least rigid; and 54-68% of all participants updated toward the evidence in every domain tested. The adversaries' agreed conclusion: the practical utility of ideology as a predictor of rigidity is questionable, and the field should examine when and where rather than who. A separate meta-analysis (N = 187,612) found the conservatism-rigidity association tremendously heterogeneous, robust for social but not economic conservatism, absent outside the United States for economic conservatism, and inflated in prior literature by nonrepresentative sampling, criterion contamination and US-weighting. What survives of the asymmetry: the far right is the most rigid single group; left-wing authoritarians score LOWER than right-wing authoritarians on dogmatism and cognitive rigidity, though they score higher on behavioural aggression and correlate strongly with participation in political violence. THIS FRAMEWORK'S READING, stated as its own: a weak domain-general effect alongside strong context-specific effects is what a content-neutral, identity-triggered mechanism predicts. If the condition were a property of one political disposition it would be a trait and a general test would find it readily. The adversaries independently recommend looking for the robust effects in narrow contexts — where the information concerns a hot-button issue for a particular group — which is identity-fusion specificity under another name. KAHAN REATTRIBUTION, added 2026-09-24: this null is older than the 2025 adversarial collaboration. Kahan reported it in 2013 (SRC-437), generating both observational and experimental data \"inconsistent with the hypothesis that political conservatism is distinctively associated with either unreflective thinking or motivated reasoning\" — verified verbatim from that paper's abstract.",
"entry_form": "full",
"note": null,
"n": 330,
"ref": "HSRP-330",
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}Generated from hsrp-research-notes.json (register generated 2026-10-12). Nothing on this page is written by hand. 19 fields not yet recorded.