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THE PSYCHOLOGYOF CLOSED ANDOPEN MINDEDNESS,RATIONALITY, ANDDEMOCRACYArie W. Kruglanski & Lauren M. BoyatziPublished online: 20 Sep 2012.

To cite this article: Arie W. Kruglanski & Lauren M. Boyatzi (2012) THEPSYCHOLOGY OF CLOSED AND OPEN MINDEDNESS, RATIONALITY, ANDDEMOCRACY, Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, 24:2, 217-232,DOI: 10.1080/08913811.2012.711023

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Arie W. Kruglanski and Lauren M. Boyatzi

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CLOSED AND OPEN

MINDEDNESS, RATIONALITY, AND DEMOCRACY

ABSTRACT: Charles Taber and Milton Lodge provide compelling evidence that

people’s minds may be closed to information that is inconsistent with their prior

beliefs. This type of inconsistency has often been termed ‘‘irrational.’’ However,

recent research suggests that being open or closed minded is not an unchanging

variable but depends on one’s goals, including one’s need for closure, which vary

from person to person and situation to situation. In this vein, as Taber and Lodge

suggest, those who have more political information may, after having been open

minded enough to acquire the information, become closed minded by virtue of

having acquired it. At the same time, being more open minded to inaccurate

information might lead one in the wrong direction; hence, open mindedness does not

necessarily enhance the accuracy of one’s judgments or the quality of one’s decisions.

We may need to rethink the concept of an enlightened, well-informed electorate, to

the extent that it assumes the unqualified benefits of open mindedness.

Democracies grant the power to vote only to those who are deemed

minimally competent to exercise the power rationally. For that reason,

children and the insane are denied the right to vote. In some states during

the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, women, African Americans,

and Native Americans were not allowed to vote on the grounds that they

were less capable of analytic and dispassionate judgment*hence that they

should not be granted a voice in matters of important public concern.

Arie W. Kruglanski, kruglanski@gmail.com, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland,College Park, MD 20742, is the author, inter alia, of The Psychology of Closed Mindedness(Psychology Press, 2004). Lauren M. Boyatzi, lminacap@gmail.com, is a graduate student at theDepartment of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742.

Critical Review 24(2): 217–232 ISSN 0891-3811 print, 1933-8007 online# 2012 Critical Review Foundation http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2012.711023

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In itself, however, rationality is insufficient for the rendition of

mature, well-considered decisions. The decision maker must also have

adequate information to assess the consequences of the choices before

her. Thomas Jefferson is reputed to have said that ‘‘whenever the people

are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government,’’

because ‘‘whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they

may be relied on to set them right’’ (quoted in Padover 1939, 88).

The notion of an informed electorate implies not only that people

should be provided with information but also that they be receptive to,

and willing to consider, the information they are provided. But are they?

Two experiments by Charles Taber and Milton Lodge (2006) cast this

supposition in doubt. In these experiments, participants who had strong

opinions on affirmative action and gun control read pro and con

arguments on these topics from partisan sources. Both before and after

these readings, Taber and Lodge measured the strength and position of

participants’ attitudes on these two issues. The experiments revealed a

prior-attitude effect, such that participants rated arguments congruent with

their attitudes as stronger and more compelling than attitude-incongruent

arguments. Furthermore, participants listed more thoughts*typically

counterarguments*about attitude-inconsistent arguments than about

attitude-consistent arguments, evincing a disconfirmation bias. And parti-

cipants tended to choose more arguments from the attitude-consistent

category than from the attitude-inconsistent category, attesting to a

confirmation bias. Taber and Lodge also found that politically sophisticated

participants reported significantly more extreme attitudes after consider-

ing the pro and con arguments than before doing so, manifesting a

polarization effect. Finally, since the polarization effect was found for

participants with strong but not weak prior attitudes, it attests to an

attitude-strength effect.

Taber and Lodge (2006, 767) summarize their results by noting that

‘‘people are often unable to escape the pull of their prior attitudes and

beliefs, which guide the processing of new information in predictable and

sometimes insidious ways.’’ They maintain that (from one perspective)

‘‘the average citizen would appear to be both cognitively and motiva-

tionally incapable of fulfilling the requirements of rational behavior in a

democracy’’ (ibid). For ‘‘far from the rational calculator portrayed in

Enlightenment prose . . . homo politicus would seem to be a creature of

simple likes and prejudices that are quite resistant to change’’ (ibid).

218 Critical Review Vol. 24, No. 2

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Setting aside eighteenth-century assumptions about citizens’ cognitive

capabilities, Taber and Lodge ask whether the kind of behavior observed

in their studies meets widespread contemporary standards of rationality.

They aptly note that a thin line separates, on the one hand, rigid en-

slavement by one’s prior attitudes and, on the other hand, healthy

skepticism grounded in the assumption that one’s prior attitudes are based

on extensive reflection and therefore should not be altered precipitously.

Finally, they observe that social science cannot resolve the normative

question of what is the rational response to new information that

contradicts one’s prior attitudes. As the authors pithily put it: ‘‘Research

can explore the conditions under which persuasion occurs (as social

psychologists have for decades), but it cannot establish the conditions

under which it should occur’’ (Taber and Lodge 2006, 768); they conclude

that ‘‘it is, of course, the latter question that needs answering if we are

to resolve the controversy over the rationality of motivated reasoning’’

(ibid.).

We shall address several fundamental issues raised by Taber and

Lodge’s provocative paper. First, we consider the conditions under

which people are likely to be ‘‘open’’ or ‘‘closed’’ to new information,

particularly information inconsistent with their prior beliefs. Second, we

consider whether motivational biases are rational or irrational in light

of what influential social scientists have assumed that rationality means.

We finally consider whether more open mindedness is necessarily better

for judgment and decision making, and the implications this has for the

notion of an ‘‘enlightened electorate.’’

Motivated Cognition and Closed Mindedness

We begin with the assumption that the process of judgment*that is, the

process of forming beliefs or opinions*has a motivational basis. In other

words, thinking is purposive. It is ‘‘for doing,’’ as Susan Fiske (1992) has

aptly proclaimed (recalling William James [(1890) 1983]). We form

judgments in the service of the cognitive goals to which we subscribe.

Social cognitive theory and research suggest that if one’s current beliefs

satisfactorily serve those goals, then one would be more likely to resist

new information that contradicts those beliefs (and hence undermines

the goals in question). Conversely, however, where one’s current beliefs

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are incompatible with one’s goals, one will readily abandon those beliefs

and welcome novel information that contradicts them.

The explicit motivation in forming any judgment is to get to the truth

on a given topic; that is, to render an accurate judgment or arrive at a

correct opinion. By definition, we believe that any opinion that we hold

is correct. Thus, when one attempts to form an opinion, one avowedly

strives to form an accurate opinion. That is the intrinsic goal of judg-

ment formation; to hold a judgment that one believes to be false is

philosophically incoherent. Yet a variety of extrinsic goals may also bias

judgments toward desired conclusions (Dunning 1999; Jervis 1976;

Kruglanski 1989 and 2004; Kunda 1990; Vertzberger 1990). One might

not be conscious of such extrinsic goals, and of the biases they introduce,

and therefore one may continue to feel that one’s sole concern in the

judgmental process, one’s exclusive underlying goal, is accuracy. None-

theless, various extrinsic goals may importantly determine whether the

individual will be closed or open to new information.

What might be the extrinsic goals of judgment, beyond the intrinsic

goal of accuracy? In our own work, we have emphasized the extrinsic

need for nonspecific closure and for various specific types of closures

(Kruglanski 1989 and 2004; Kruglanski and Webster 1996; Kruglanski,

Pierro, Mannetti, and DeGrada 2006). The need for nonspecific closure

is a desire for an assured opinion on a topic, as opposed to uncertainty

and ambiguity. The need for nonspecific closure varies stably across

individuals, and a scale (now translated into many languages) may be used

to assess any person’s need for it. In addition, situational circumstances

can induce the need for nonspecific closure. Thus, the need to move on

to another task may induce the goal of closure concerning the object

of one’s current opinion formation (Webster 1993). Closure may also

seem desirable in circumstances that make it difficult to process new

information, such as ambient noise, fatigue, being under a tight deadline,

or being in the nadir of one’s circadian cycle (Kruglanski and Webster

1996; Kruglanski, Pierro, Mannetti, and DeGrada 2006; Pierro and

Kruglanski 2008).

In principle, any cognitive goal would induce open mindedness

toward information that promised to advance the goal’s attainment, and

closed mindedness toward information that threatened to undermine

it. To test this prediction, Arie W. Kruglanski, Donna M. Webster, and

Adena Klem (1993) exposed participants with and without committed

opinions to someone who contradicted the opinionated participants’

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beliefs. Orthogonally, we manipulated the goal of cognitive closure by

raising the ambient noise in the room. We found that when exposed

to noise, the opinionated subjects resisted the other person’s opinion,

reflecting closed mindedness. Participants lacking an opinion, however,

were significantly more persuaded when they were exposed to noise than

when they were not, reflecting open mindedness. In other words, for

opinionated participants, the goal of closure was already satisfied, so they

resisted information that was inconsistent with their beliefs to a greater

extent when the physical environment elevated their need for closure.

Conversely, the ‘‘opinionless’’ participants had yet to attain closure, so

they embraced information that promised to do so more quickly when

the environmental noise elevated their desire for closure.

Kruglanski et al. 1993 demonstrates that even people with a height-

ened need for closure can, in some circumstances, be (temporarily)

open minded while ultimately seeking closure. Such temporary open-

mindedness has been known as ‘‘seizing’’ on closure-promising infor-

mation, which is to say accepting it uncritically (Kruglanski and Webster

1996). Once closure has been attained, however, people with a height-

ened need for closure typically ‘‘freeze’’ their judgment and become

impervious to subsequent information. In support of these conclusions,

research on the nonspecific need for closure (whether induced by a

dispositional need for closure or by situational manipulations of this

motivation) has found that those with a relatively high need for

closure form impressions more quickly and on the basis of more limited

evidence (Kruglanski and Freund 1983); tend more to base social

judgments on widespread stereotypes (Dijksterhuis, Van Knippenberg,

Kruglanski, and Schapper 1996; Jamieson and Zanna 1989); and tend

to exhibit correspondence bias (or the ‘‘fundamental attribution error’’)

in certain circumstances (Webster 1993). Further, they generate fewer

hypotheses while engaged in problem solving (Mayseless and Kruglanski

1987); tend to fixate on their own perspective and fail to attune their

communications to audience characteristics (Richter and Kruglanski

1999); and are less empathetic to the predicaments of people whose

perspectives differ from their own (Webster-Nelson, Klein, and Irvin

2003).

It thus seems fair to conclude that not all people in all situations

equally resist new information. Those with a higher need for closure are

more resistant than those with a lower need for closure*when the

former already have an opinion on a given topic. But in the absence of

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an opinion, those with a high need for closure are in fact more open to

new information than are those with a low need for closure (Kruglanski

et al. 1993).

However, closed and open mindedness are general phenomena, not

traits that are solely restricted to the need for nonspecific closure. Any

information-processing goal may induce either open or closed mind-

edness to new information depending on whether it promised to advance

the goal or undermine it. Consider the various needs for specific

closure*for example, the need for self-esteem, control, and other

desired outcomes. These have been studied extensively in the domains

of cognitive-dissonance phenomena related to maintaining self-esteem

(Aronson 1992; Cooper and Fazio 1984; Harmon-Jones and Mills 1999;

Steele 1988, 261�302) and through motivated-reasoning research that

addressed a broader variety of specific, motivationally desirable conclu-

sions (Dunning 1999; Kruglanski 1999; Kunda 1990; Kunda and Sinclair

1999). In accordance with the present analysis, people with specific

closure needs would freeze on their prior knowledge and be closed

minded if such knowledge were congruent with their motives (rep-

resenting the attainment of goals that such motives define), yet they

would be quite ready to unfreeze their beliefs if those were incongruent

with, or undesirable from the perspective of, their goals. Consistent with

this analysis, Peter H. Ditto and David F. Lopez (1992) obtained evi-

dence that people curtail the processing of further information, attesting

to closed mindedness, if the previous information has supported their

pre-existing conclusions (e.g., in the domain of health treatments), and

that they prolong the processing of information, suggesting open

mindedness, if the initial information was inconsistent with their prior

conclusions or was undesirable from the perspective of their current

cognitive goals.

Research by Lisa Sinclair and Ziva Kunda (1999) further suggests that

needs for specific closure may activate from memory information likely

to support individuals’ preferred judgments and, to the contrary, may

inhibit available knowledge inconsistent with desirable judgments. For

instance, if the actions of a black doctor offended the perceiver in some

way, she would tend to activate the black stereotype (suggesting in-

competence) and inhibit the doctor stereotype (suggesting competence),

to better disparage the black doctor. By contrast, if pleased, the perceiver

would activate the doctor stereotype so as to applaud him. Overall

then, extant research findings suggest that both closed and open

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mindedness are pervasive and should be seen not as unvarying per-

sonality traits but as situational: They can be triggered when the new

information confronting the perceiver promises to support her or his

cognitive goal in the specific situation (inducing open mindedness)

or, contrarily, when the new information threatens to undermine it

(inducing closed mindedness).

The Temporal Dimension of Goal Pursuit

Goal-related phenomena also have an important temporal dimension. As

recent decades of extensive goal research in social cognition have shown

(for reviews see Kruglanski and Kopetz 2009a and 2009b; Fishbach and

Fergusson 2007; Moskowitz and Grant 2009), goals can be activated

or inhibited by features of the environment and by other goals. That

means that information that at time T1

might have been desirable and

welcome might, at T3, become undesirable and unwelcome if, at T

2,

a new goal was activated with which the T1

information was incon-

sistent. Relatedly, Fishbach, Shah, and Kruglanski 2004 showed that

high-calorie foods were rated as tasty when the goal of food enjoyment

was activated but were rated less tasty when the dieting goal was

activated. One may surmise that if one’s dieting goal was activated one

might resist (or be closed minded to) information suggesting that high-

calorie foods are tasty, and likewise, if one’s eating enjoyment goal was

activated, one might welcome such information while resisting informa-

tion that high-calorie foods are fattening.

Such processes of forming judgments likely apply to all types of goals

and information, including those that are politically relevant. For in-

stance, if an individual’s goal is to affirm the importance of individual

rights, she might strongly object to ‘‘enhanced’’ interrogation procedures

seen as compromising those rights. This cognitive preference or goal

might prompt her to resist (and hence, be closed minded to) arguments

or information implying that human rights are secondary to security

concerns. However, if her security concerns were suddenly aroused*such as by a major terrorist attack in her vicinity*this might activate,

and increase the perceived importance of, the goal of maximizing

security. She may then be more open minded to the argument that

security concerns trump human-rights concerns.

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Thus, although individuals may occasionally behave like ‘‘motivated

skeptics,’’ as Taber and Lodge (2006) clearly demonstrate, it would be

excessive to conclude that motivated skepticism constitutes a general

phenomenon, and that people invariably resist information inconsistent

with their current beliefs. Often, our beliefs can be contrary to our

desires (such as the belief that the economy is bad, that our health is in

jeopardy, that our career is stagnant); in those cases we may welcome

contradictory information and quickly accept it. Thus, our ‘‘informa-

tional skepticism’’ and ‘‘informational gullibility’’ depend on the relation

between the new information at hand and one’s cognitive goals at the

moment.

The Rationality Issue

An intriguing point implicit in Taber and Lodge’s argument is that

‘‘motivated skepticism’’ betokens people’s irrationality, and that it is

therefore inimical to the democratic ideal of an informed, fully rational

electorate. In the preceding sections, we have suggested that motivated

skepticism and closed mindedness are not necessarily general phenom-

ena, and that often people can be open minded. But even when people

are closed minded, does that imply that they are irrational? It pays to

consider the concept of rationality and how it has been interpreted by

previous scholars.

In a recent analysis, Kruglanski and Edward Orehek (2009) have

noted that rationality has typically been interpreted in relation to both

means and ends. This approach assumes that a means is rational if it serves

the actor’s objective and is irrational if it does not. From the same

perspective, a goal may be considered rational if it is attainable by some

means and irrational if it is generally unattainable. Framing rationality

in terms of means and ends is compatible with grades of rationality,

whereby a means that serves the end better than another means is,

therefore, considered more ‘‘rational.’’ For instance, if a politician’s goal

is to be elected, making frequent appearances before a targeted audience

might be considered (by some pundit) a more rational means than merely

running TV ads geared at that audience*if the pundit assumes that the

former is more likely to lead to the politician being elected than the

latter.

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In contrast, in Durkheim’s work individual rationality pertained to the

means used to achieve personal or selfish interests while social rationality

referred to means that serve the public good and larger societal interest.

Thus, according to Durkheim, religion is rational because it serves the

societal ends of cohesion and solidarity. ‘‘Religions are able by means

of ceremonies to assemble individuals, put them in direct contact with

each other, and bring forth the same ideas or sentiments amplified by

their reciprocal influences’’ (Segre 2008, 116). Similarly, for Max Weber

([1918] 1946, 117), only means can be rational, if they are instrumental

to ends; ends, however, are akin to faiths, neither rational (they cannot

be justified) nor irrational (they cannot be refuted). Herbert Simon

(1978, 2), too, viewed means as the locus of rationality: ‘‘Fundamental

(to the conception of rationality) are assumptions about adaptation of

means to ends, of actions to goals.’’ According to Simon (ibid., 3),

the concept of rationality in the social sciences is closely related to

functionality: ‘‘Behaviors are functional if they contribute to certain goals

where these goals may be the pleasure or satisfaction of an individual

or the guarantee of food and shelter for the members of a society.’’

A prominent example of such functionalism is Freud’s psychoanalytic

theory, which explains ‘‘the patient’s illness in terms of the functions it

performs for him’’ (ibid). Crucially, the concept of functionality does not

require the actor’s conscious awareness of the degree to which her or his

behaviors and feelings are means to certain (possibly inchoate) ends. For

instance, in Freudian terms a patient may be unaware that her or his

‘‘hysterical’’ symptoms afford secondary gains and are actually means of

getting attention or avoiding blame.

Finally, rational-choice theory, which has greatly affected several

fields of the social sciences, is also committed to the instrumentalist

conception of rationality (Kruglanski and Orehek 2009). Rational-

choice models are premised on the assumption that individuals act in

their own best interests according to stable preferences and constraints

(March 1994). In other words, individuals’ choices are assumed to reflect

their striving to maximize benefits and minimize costs. In turn, an

action’s costs and benefits can be gauged in terms of an individual’s

various ends. A rational choice is one that maximizes outcomes by

choosing a means (i.e., making a decision) that leads to the most

important goal while simultaneously keeping alive possible alternative

goals. Rational-choice models often assume unrealistically that indivi-

duals possess perfect information (March 1994)*or at least accurate

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probabilistic notions about the outcomes of any given choice*and that

they have the time and the cognitive ability to weigh every choice

against every other choice.

Is Closed Mindedness Irrational?

Against this backdrop, we may now revisit the question of whether

closed mindedness is irrational. The answer would seem to depend on

whom one asks, and when one poses the question. Any behavior may be

considered ‘‘locally’’ and momentarily*from a first-person, intraperso-

nal perspective*to be instrumentally rational. When one makes a

decision, one does so because, in that moment, it appears to gratify one’s

most salient or dominant goal. In the foregoing sense, then, closed

mindedness as well as open mindedness may each be considered locally

rational in that they both serve the perceiver’s momentarily active

objectives. This view of rationality, which encompasses all actions, is

tautological, divesting the term irrationality of all meaning. Irrationality

claims can make sense, however, if one transcends the moment or the

actor’s momentary perspective. Specifically, from a third-person, inter-

personal perspective (including the perspective of the decision maker

reflecting on her former self’s decision), a decision can be deemed

‘‘irrational.’’ Thus, were a critic to assume that the perceiver’s goal was,

or should have been, X (whereas in fact it was Y), he would judge the

perceiver’s action, Z, as inappropriate or irrational.

For instance, the critic might regard accuracy as the objective that the

perceived had, or should have had, and assume further that accuracy

is best served by openness to new information. From that perspective,

the critic might consider the actor’s defensive closed mindedness as

irrational. Alternatively, the critic might agree that Y was the goal but

adjudge action Za as an ineffective means compared to action Zb, and

hence as less rational than was possible, although the actor herself might

disagree that this is the case.

Finally, the actor herself might later regret her actions as ‘‘irrational,’’

that is, incongruous with an alternative, more important, objective that

she might have suppressed at the moment; or she may regard her

previous actions as ineffective (hence less rational) means to reaching her

objective.

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Is Open Mindedness Rational?

If closed mindedness can be considered subjectively rational (at least

momentarily so), a companion question is whether open mindedness is

necessarily rational and whether it invariably contributes to the quality of

one’s outcomes. An affirmative answer to this question is fundamental

to the concept of an enlightened democracy, whereby a well-informed

electorate is seen to be superior to a less-informed one. Indeed, the view

that more information is better*in the sense that more information leads

to a more accurate judgment*has been pervasive in the philosophy

of knowledge and in the cognitive sciences (for a recent review see

Kruglanski and Gigerenzer 2011). Rudolph Carnap (1947), for example,

proposed the ‘‘principle of total evidence,’’ where one is advised to use

all of the available evidence to estimate the probability of a specific

outcome. Many theories of cognition (e.g., the Bayesian model and

prospect theory) similarly assume that all information is, or should be,

integrated into one’s final judgment (but see Gigerenzer and Brighton

2009). Leslie Zebrowitz McArthur and Reuben M. Baron’s (1983) sug-

gestion that active perceivers are typically more accurate than passive

perceivers could be interpreted to be justified by the claim that active

exploration leads to the accumulation of greater amounts of information

than passive receptivity. Too, these authors’ notion of ‘‘sins of omission’’

refers to cases in which one overlooks crucial data because of attentional

selectivity or because the stimulus array is impoverished. In this view,

errors are due to limited information, caused by one’s inability to search

for it. Research in the ‘‘biases and heuristics’’ tradition in the judgment-

and-decision-making literature similarly assumes that using simple

heuristics is generally inferior to more extensive information processing

embodied in normative (e.g., Bayesian) or deliberative processes (e.g.,

Kahneman 2003; Kahneman and Tversky 1973; Tversky and Kahneman

1974; but see Gigerenzer and Goldstein 1996).

However, recent theoretical analysis and empirical findings suggest

that the view that ‘‘more (information) is better (for accuracy)’’ is not

unfailingly correct.1 First, information is generally mediated. Thus, the

new information one receives necessarily reflects someone’s framing,

which is inevitably subject to some kind of (motivational or cognitive)

bias. For all we know, our initial judgment might have been veridical

and the new information to which we might be open minded might lead

us astray (Kruglanski 1989; Kruglanski and Gigerenzer 2011). In other

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words, ‘‘curiosity’’ or openness to new (potentially pernicious) informa-

tion might result in highly negative outcomes.

There is growing evidence, too, that in some cases ‘‘frugal’’ heuristics

may outperform extensive and systematic aggregation of information. For

instance, following the pioneering work of Robyn M. Dawes (1979;

Dawes and Corrigan 1974), Jean Czerlinski, Gerd Gigerenzer, and Daniel

G. Goldstein (1999) used twenty studies to compare the ‘‘tallying heuris-

tic’’ (where one tallies up information and assigns equal weight to each

datum, as opposed to assigning more or less weight to certain data) with

multiple linear regression (where one is concerned with the relationship

between different data, as opposed to their particular ‘‘weighting’’). The

authors found that, averaged across all studies, tallying achieved higher

predictive accuracy than multiple regression. This doesn’t mean that

tallying will outperform multiple regression in all circumstances. The

challenge for researchers is to delineate the tasks, or ‘‘informational

ecologies’’ (Fiedler 2007), under which each of these inferential rules

produces the more accurate predictions (see Einhorn and Hogarth

1975).

Various theories of social cognition and perception (Funder 1987;

McArthur and Baron 1983; Swann 1984) highlight the notion that simple

rules can yield accurate inferences in appropriate ecologies. The eco-

logical approach emphasizes that in their natural environments, humans

and animals generally draw accurate inferences, where accuracy is

defined in pragmatist terms as ‘‘that which works’’ (James 1907 and

1909), and where ‘‘less is more.’’ To argue that heuristics necessarily lead

to errors and that complex statistical rules are necessarily aligned with

rational judgments is to miss the ecological nature of judgment. It also

misinterprets the adaptive use of less effortful rules and frugal heuristics as

signs of limited capacities and even irrationality.

Ecological judgment is particularly important in the realm of politi-

cal behavior. Research by Howard Lavine, Marco Steenbergen, and

Christopher Johnston (forthcoming) suggests that politically sophisticated

individuals are, if anything, more likely to reach biased judgments in

defense of their original position than their less-sophisticated counter-

parts, which parallels Taber and Lodge’s findings. Presumably, political

sophistication stems from having been exposed to greater amounts of

political information*suggesting that the political sophisticates were

open minded enough to have been receptive to that information. In

short, openness to information does not free one from bias. Given strong

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enough motivations (i.e., goals of sufficient magnitude) any amount

of information can be twisted, reinterpreted, suppressed, or ‘‘spun,’’

culminating in bias. Thus, sophisticated philosopher-kings can be as

vulnerable to motivational biases as the common folks, if not more so.

* * *

Essentially, then, we agree with Taber and Lodge that the idea of an

enlightened electorate is unrealistic. However, we disagree that this is

because people’s minds are generally closed to new information; often-

times, they are not. Rather, as we have seen, the problem is that open-

ness to new information assures neither the elimination (nor even the

reduction) of bias, nor does it guarantee objectively superior outcomes.

NOTE

1. One might object that more information means more accurate information,

where accuracy is defined as information that leads to better outcomes. Such

framing, however, renders tautological (or definitional) the assertion that more

information leads to better outcomes.

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