Personality factors, ideology, and sensitivity to change
This study examined the potential for a predictive relationship between political conservatism and change detection. Research on the visual system has revealed a general tendency to overlook changes in a stationary scene when two versions of it are displayed alternately with a masking slide, known as the flicker paradigm. We examined whether political conservatism and various related measures predicted whether and how quickly changes were detected during a flicker paradigm task. Measures of interest were conservatism as measured by the Social and Economic Conservatism scale (Everett, 2013), openness as measured by the short form of the Big Five Inventory (John, Donahue & Kentle, 1991), authoritarianism as measured by the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale (Altemeyer, 2006), political party, and a single bipolar conservatism scale. Despite predictions that greater conservatism and authoritarianism would shorten response latencies, authoritarianism appeared to lengthen the time it took to identify a change, while social conservatism shortened it. Openness and other forms of conservatism did not demonstrate significant predictive relationships. Implications of this pattern are discussed.