EXTREMISTS ARE WORSE AT COGNITIVE TASKS
dozens of cognitive tasks & questionnaires given to hundreds of people in online tests revealed strong relationships between cognitive performance & political, religious, & ethical views. how this relates to actual extremism is unknown
original article: Zmigrod et al., 2021 (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B: Biological Sciences), reported in: The Guardian by Natalie Grover on 22nd February 2021
this story was in episode 4 #personality #extremism #conservatism
the error bar says
the occasionally-extremist Guardian newspaper reported on a study that measured more than 500 hundred people's personalities and cognitive task performance, then later measured a subset of nearly 400 on their political views
the very large dataset from multiple tasks and multiple questionnaires was analysed to create much smaller, more consistent sets of measurements. these measurements were then compared to each other to see if any of the cognitive task performance was related to the political views
they were! people with more conservative, dogmatic, or religious views tended to be more 'cautious' (i.e., slower), less strategic, and less forward-thinking in decision making tasks
are extremists worse at cognitive tasks?
no
this was not a study of extremists. the guardian seems to be making a little too much political capital out of this one
the study is, however, this episode's good one - a large, comprehensive dataset, very well analysed, displayed & reported. just listen to some of these stats terms: "out-of-sample cross-validation", "Bayesian model averaging" oooh, that hits the spot
what the study does show is that, across the entire sample of people studied, there are strong statistical relationships between measures of conservatism and cognitive task performance
but it's not justified to claim that extremists can't do puzzles, or that these tests would necessarily help prevent radicalisation, as claimed
