ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Cognitive underpinnings of nationalistic ideology in the context of Brexit.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- An authoritarianism-compatible text changes British attitudes towards EU immigration.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Mechanisms of mistrust: A Bayesian account of misinformation learning.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Exploring Meta-Reasoning Propositional Confidence in Conspiratorial Beliefs and Socio-Cognitive Polarization.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Social Psychological Perspectives on Political Polarization: Insights and Implications for Climate Change.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2025Review
- Does social rigidity predict cognitive rigidity? Profiles of socio-cognitive polarization.Psychological research · 2023Article
- A neuro-computational social learning framework to facilitate transdiagnostic classification and treatment across psychiatric disorders.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- (A)symmetries in Memory and Directed Forgetting of Political Stimuli.Experimental psychology · 2023Article
- Not Getting Vaccinated? It Is a Matter of Problem-Solving Abilities and Socio-Cognitive Polarization.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- National Narcissism predicts the Belief in and the Dissemination of Conspiracy Theories During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Evidence From 56 Countries.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2023Article
- Cognitive ability and voting behaviour in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership.PloS one · 2023Article
- The psychological causes and societal consequences of authoritarianism.Nature reviews psychology · 2023Review
- Does social intolerance vary according to cognitive styles, genetic cognitive capacity, or education?Brain and behavior · 2022Article
- A Psychology of Ideology: Unpacking the Psychological Structure of Ideological Thinking.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2022Article
- Leadership in Education, Medical Education and Health.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Tracking group identity through natural language within groups.PNAS nexus · 2022Article
- Considerations for using the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test to assess cognitive flexibility.Behavior research methods · 2021Review
- The evolution of strongly-held group identities through agent-based cooperation.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Political games of attack and defence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes: a data-driven approach.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Toward a neuropsychology of political orientation: exploring ideology in patients with frontal and midbrain lesions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
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3 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Nationalistic identities often play an influential role in citizens' voting behavior and political engagement. Nationalistic ideologies tend to have firm categories and rules for what belongs to and represents the national culture. In a sample of 332 UK citizens, we tested whether strict categorization of stimuli and rules in objective cognitive tasks would be evident in strongly nationalistic individuals. Using voting behavior and attitudes from the United Kingdom's 2016 EU referendum, we found that a flexible representation of national identity and culture was linked to cognitive flexibility in the ideologically neutral Wisconsin Card Sorting Test and Remote Associates Test, and to self-reported flexibility under uncertainty. Path analysis revealed that subjective and objective cognitive inflexibility predicted heightened authoritarianism, nationalism, conservatism, and system justification, and these in turn were predictive of support for Brexit and opposition to immigration, the European Union, and free movement of labor. This model accounted for 47.6% of the variance in support for Brexit. Path analysis models were also predictive of participants' sense of personal attachment to the United Kingdom, signifying that individual differences in cognitive flexibility may contribute toward ideological thinking styles that shape both nationalistic attitudes and personal sense of nationalistic identity. These findings further suggest that emotionally neutral "cold" cognitive information processing-and not just "hot" emotional cognition-may play a key role in ideological behavior and identity.
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