Feeling superior about your political beliefs is a bipartisan issue

Katie Harbath

Currently, issues of extremism and intransigence aren't just of academic interest—they're headline news every day. If anything, that strengthens the case for understanding those two issues, which makes a study released by Psychological Science very timely. A team of Duke University researchers has looked at the degree to which people feel their beliefs are superior and the degree to which they are dogmatic about their beliefs. The study found differences across the ideological spectrum, but it discovered that those with extreme beliefs share some things in common.

You might think that the sense that your beliefs are superior and a bit of dogmatism would go hand-in-hand, but the authors of the new study would be happy to point out where you'd be wrong. "Dogmatic statements tend to reflect the centrality of rigidity—the belief that one’s views could not (and should not) change from what they are currently," they note in their introduction.

In contrast, issues like certainty of beliefs and the sense that they're the only correct choice are more subtle things. For example, someone could take a look at the evidence available on a topic like climate science and decide that the same conclusion reached by almost every scientist who works in the field is correct. They could be very certain that their conclusion is correct and that it is superior—it's the only reasonable conclusion anyone could reach. But they wouldn't necessarily be dogmatic about it; they could also believe that their views should change if some new evidence was uncovered. They could also feel that their conclusion is superior because it is well researched but not feel confident in it because the research involved a lot of technical details.