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Supplemental Material for Professed Democracy Support and Openness to Politically Congenial Authoritarian Actions Within the American Public by Ariel Malka and Thomas H. Costello in American Politics Research

A brief pilot survey examining the circumstance under which people prefer to take money from politically salient individuals.

Measures of intellectual humility (IH) ought to predict an increased awareness of whether one is right or wrong. Indeed, one recent review opened by describing IH as "recognizing that there are gaps in one’s knowledge and that one’s current beliefs might be incorrect" (Porter et al., 2022). Insofar as IH fundamentally entails awareness of the limits of one's knowledge, then, measures of IH should be especially good at buffering against overconfidence when one is wrong. Yet, to our knowledge, whether or not IH measures buffer against overconfidence has not been tested in a published study. Recently, we conducted an exploratory study in which we asked participants a series of true/false knowledge questions pertaining to science and COVID-19. Following each question, participants were asked to indicate how confident they were in each answer. At the end of the paradigm, participants were asked to estimate how many questions they correctly answered. Using nested generalized additive models, we found that intellectual humility measures (1) do not predict having a smaller Dunning-Kruger effect, (2) do not predict decreased confidence when one is incorrect, and (3) do correlate with increased confidence when one is correct. Hence, IH was not substantively associated with people (not) thinking that they are right when they are wrong. We also found that IH measures perform disfavorably relative to thinking style measures (like actively open-minded thinking). Regarding the positive correlation between confidence and IH when people are accurate, we also found the same thing for thinking style measures. Here, we outline a direct, confirmatory replication of these findings.

We plan to replicate and extend previous research (Costello et al., 2020) suggesting that left-wing authoritarianism and right-wing authoritarianism manifest a comparable pattern of relations with relevant external criteria. Given that all previous studies have relied on convenience samples, we plan to use a U.S. nationally representative sample to replicate key findings from Costello et al. while assessing a number of new variables.

All additional materials for Costello, Bowes, Stevens, Waldman, Tasimi, and Lilienfeld (2021).

We aim to explore the construct of moral curiosity using scale development. To clearly delineate confirmatory and exploratory analyses, we here preregister our predictions concerning moral curiosity's relations with all criterion-related variables we plan to include in our data collection.

Political polarization, especially affective polarization – personal animus toward individuals who hold sharply differing views from us – appears to be on the rise. Such polarization is likely to deepen divisions among citizens and amplify already formidable challenges with achieving bipartisan consensus on critical policy issues. Still, relatively little is known about variables that might temper affective polarization and ideological antipathy in political domains, especially among individuals who already harbor strong convictions. The increasingly researched but still poorly understood variable of intellectual humility, which relates to the extent to which individuals are aware of their cognitive limitations and biases, may hold promise in this regard, as it may allow individuals to better understand and appreciate others’ perspectives. We intend to use a series of questionnaires and tasks in undergraduate and community samples to examine the extent to which intellectual humility buffers against political polarization and extremism. Specifically, we plan to examine the potential role of intellectual humility as a correlate and moderator of negative affective views of, and reactions to, individuals with markedly differing political perspectives. If our central hypotheses are corroborated, they may bear fruitful implications for interventions designed to foster intellectual humility, lessen bias, and lessen extremism.

Supplemental material, sj-docx-4-spp-10.1177_19485506211070410 for Absolute Certainty and Political Ideology: A Systematic Test of Curvilinearity by Thomas H. Costello and Shauna M. Bowes in Social Psychological and Personality Science