from Hacker News

New research indicates social rigidity is a key predictor of cognitive rigidity

by lgvln on 7/15/23, 11:53 AM with 26 comments

• by ilaksh on 7/15/23, 12:34 PM

  It looks like another one of those sincere efforts to prove that people who have different worldviews from the authors are just stupid.

  And people love to vote up those papers because they assume that it scientifically proves their belief system is the correct one and the other guys are just dumb.

  I'm an atheist and my twin brother is very religious. Worldviews come from the information streams you are subject to and also from the groups you are in.

  Just because it was published doesn't mean it's not absolute nonsense.

• by p-e-w on 7/15/23, 12:14 PM

  From the abstract (emphasis added):

  > Thus, we hypothesized a relation between forms of social rigidity, including Socio-cognitive polarization (i.e., a factor capturing conservative political ideology, absolutism/intolerance of ambiguity, and xenophobia)

  Did they seriously classify "conservative political ideology" in general as an aspect of socio-cognitive polarization, and casually toss it into the same bin as xenophobia?

  This reeks of bias from a mile away.

• by Mountain_Skies on 7/15/23, 12:52 PM

  Historians know how this eventually ends as an ever-growing group is "othered" by the dominate societal power structure. Doubt those chuckling at their cleverness at finding new ways to turn up the heat on divisiveness will fare very well, just like they didn't fare very well in other societies that collapsed from internal strife.