THE PAST IS UTTERLY INDIFFERENT TO ITS WORSHIPPERS
Some folks are just all bogged down in a mythical past - it effects them greatly.
First off a copy of my verse above.
THE PAST IS UTTERLY INDIFFERENT TO ITS WORSHIPPERS
Today, in 2024, there is a large segment of us who are freaked out,
Having democratic society evolving faster than their fear allows for,
Each one longing for the 1950s or maybe the 1850s even it seems.
People whose uncomfortability prods them into delusions to act on,
And the frightened little children find relief in a bulley demagogue,
So if they can force their fears to turn back the clocks in a fairytale,
Tomorrow must not challenge their fears, that’s just not fair to them.
Indeed such fears of a more equitable society are strong in these folks,
So to the twenty thousand foot view, it’s much to do about nothing.
Understand that they use their religious dogma as a handy excuse,
To bend scripture into something to assuage their terror of change,
Trump, as irreligious as one could be, is their chosen savior in this mess,
Each one of these frightened children, some with use of their billions,
Reacting only in irrationality of their delusionary losing of something,
Lowering their thinking by brooding over some imaginary past,
Yet they insist that they must drag us all back to their ideal world.
Irrational they are, they seek their comfort in others of the same mind,
No amount of gyrations will bring back their imaginary times,
Democracy must totally be stamped out for them to reach their goals,
In a black president for eight years they totally lost their minds,
For they are more comfortable in a superficial oranged-faced dude,
Fusing about a time in the past when the competition wasn’t so much,
Every motivation hinges upon their fear of losing status, it’s ridiculous,
Republicans went from conservatism to irrational reactionary thinking,
Even though it’s frustrating to view such overreactions, we must guide,
Now we have people scared *hitless of change sabotaging all our futures,
The past is gone folks, and wasn’t all that great either, let’s move on now.
Trump’s cartoon image is hard to stomach to those of normal minds,
Of this guy, whose truly lost his mind, somehow gets enough trust to run.
In this day when we hear only more horror of Trump’s time as POTUS,
Trump is some kind of odd malevolent ticket to the exalted past,
Somehow too many haven’t heard that the country must advance.
While so many are so very confused after years of lies believed,
Of their misconceptions, perhaps they might deserve some grace,
Reactionary, demanding the past, it’s only grade A lunacy at work,
So we have no choice but have some patience with these children,
History, actual history, does not jive with their fervent “understandings,”
Indeed their belief in the supernatural largely trumps critical thinking,
People have their own superstitions which only muddies the water,
Perhaps their level of judgment is that of a snail by all indications,
Every day that goes by, with more information willfully discounted,
Republicans are such monumental liars now in nearly everything,
So what do we do about all these wishful time travelers?
“The past is utterly indifferent to its worshipers.”
— William Winter.
William Winter (July 15, 1836 – June 30, 1917) was an American dramatic critic and author, born in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1857, then chose literature as his field of endeavor, and moved to New York City (1859), where he became literary critic of the Saturday Press, then (1861–65) of the New York Albion, and for more than 40 years (1865–1909) was a drama critic of the New York Tribune. Winter was a tour de force in the original Bohemian scene of Greenwich Village, going on to become one of the most influential men of letters of the last half of the 19th century and the pre-eminent drama critic and biographer of the times.
“Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns”
—William Penn.
William Penn (24 October 1644 – 10 August 1718) was an English writer, religious thinker, and influential Quaker who founded the Province of Pennsylvania during the British colonial era. Penn, an advocate of democracy and religious freedom, was known for his amicable relations and successful treaties with the Lenape Native Americans who had resided in present-day Pennsylvania prior to European settlements in the state.
“We may make our future by the best use of the present. There is no moment like the present.”
—Miss Edgeworth.
Maria Edgeworth (1 January 1768 – 22 May 1849) was a prolific Anglo-Irish novelist of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held critical views on estate management, politics and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo. During the first decade of the 19th century she was one of the most widely read novelists in Britain and Ireland. Her name today most commonly associated with Castle Rackrent, her first novel in which she adopted an Irish Catholic voice to narrate the dissipation and decline of a family from her own landed Anglo-Irish class.
A Twitter search of “Bring Back The Past” yielded the following which I found interesting and related to my theme today.
I found an interesting paper on mental time travel for which I’ve included today. It seems that the brooding individual stuck on the past thinks quite differently than the more optimistic person looking toward the future. If there is correlation in this study related to those who yearn for a past time of better greatness I’m not exactly sure. I do think that brooding on the past might be a factor in my discussion, and the negativity of a Trump rally must be acknowledged. The whole concept of a better country in the past on which to try to reestablish seems definitely a negative outlook, and trying to bring this world back into the future might indeed be more visually stimulating to the listeners of the narrative from Trump. I thought it worthwhile to post this entire paper, emboldening some key findings and thoughts. As for myself, I recall a time not so long ago where brooding of the past was very dominant in my thinking. Somehow through therapy much of this is now gone. So I know that if this type of phenomenon is active in the MAGA crowd that it’s possible to overcome it. If someone finds a reward in this thinking, most likely there will be little incentive to change. An obvious example of this phenomenon is in Trump’s big lie in having the 2020 election stolen from him. This is no doubt a drag on this whole movements inability to think in constructive ways. Joe Biden on the other hand is the epitome of a man working for a future with clear visions of what he wants to see. This undoubtedly influences his supporters in a positive manner.
Roger E. Beaty @Roger_Beaty - active on Twitter (X)
Paul Seli
Daniel L. Schacterc
Psychol Research. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2020 Jun 1.Published in final edited form as:Psychol Research 2019 Jun;
Remembering the past and imagining the future are hallmarks of mental time travel. We provide evidence that such experiences are influenced by individual differences in temporal and affective biases in cognitive style, particularly brooding rumination (a negative past-oriented bias) and optimism (a positive future-oriented bias). Participants completed a seven-day, cellphone-based experience-sampling study of temporal orientation and mental imagery. Multilevel models showed that individual differences in brooding rumination predicted less vivid and positive past- and future-oriented thoughts, even after controlling for depressed mood. People high in brooding rumination were also more likely to report thinking about a past experience when probed at random during the day. Conversely, optimists were more likely to report more vivid and positive future-oriented, but not past-oriented thoughts, although they did not report thinking more or less often about the past and future. The results suggest that temporal and affective biases in cognitive style influence how people think about the past and future in daily life.
Keywords: future thinking, memory, mind wandering, optimism, rumination
Mentally revisiting the past and projecting to the future are defining features of mental time travel. Remembering past experiences is undoubtedly important for normal functioning as it allows us to learn from our experiences and to develop a temporally stable sense of self. Likewise, imagining the future serves several adaptive functions. For instance, it allows us to plan future events and to engage in important decision-making processes that influence our future lives. A notable theme in the literature on mental time travel is that future thinking, like episodic memory, is a reconstructive process that draws upon prior knowledge and experiences to form mental representations that support our ability to simulate both past and future events.
Numerous studies have documented striking cognitive and neural similarities between remembered past experience and imagined future experiences. For example, studies using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have shown remarkably similar patterns of brain activation when people recall an event from their past and when they imagine an event in their future. Other experimental work has documented overlap among the underlying cognitive processes and phenomenological characteristics associated with imagining the future and remembering the past.
Several recent studies have examined past- and future-oriented cognition in the context of mind-wandering, or thoughts that arise independently of external stimulation (for a review, see Seli et al., in press). Such work has used experience-sampling methods to probe temporal orientation and other phenomenological characteristics during laboratory tasks and in daily life by periodically interrupting participants with thought probes. Spronken et al. (2016) found that future-oriented thoughts are rated as more positive than past-oriented thoughts in the lab and in daily life, consistent with the optimism bias of future-oriented cognition. Moreover, Poerio et al. (2013) assessed mood before and after mind-wandering episodes in daily life and found that sad mood often preceded mind-wandering, contrary to prior work suggesting that sad mood is a consequence of mind-wandering; and that sad mood prior to mind-wandering episodes was more frequently past-oriented.
Contemporary mind-wandering research emphasizes the distinction between spontaneous (unintentional) and deliberate (intentional) mind-wandering. In terms of temporal orientation, deliberate future-oriented thoughts may involve strategic and deliberate planning of an upcoming event (e.g., thinking about what items to buy at the grocery store). Spontaneous future thoughts, on the other hand, occur without conscious initiation and may arise during an ongoing task (i.e., task-unrelated thoughts), despite one’s best intention to focus attention on the task at hand. According to Christoff and colleagues, the “default state” of mind-wandering is spontaneous—freely moving from one topic to another—but various emotional and cognitive factors can impact the content and variability of thoughts via constraints. Negative emotion, for example, can constrain the spontaneous variability of thoughts by inducing a past-oriented, perseverative cognitive style.
Despite considerable experimental work on past- and future-oriented cognition, relatively less is known about how and why people differ in these abilities. Research with clinical populations, however, suggests that an over-general memory bias—describing the past and future in broad, categorical terms—contributes to deficits in both remembering and imagining. When recalling specific life events, depressed patients tend to offer a summary of related past experiences that are comprised of minimal episodic detail. Past work has found that this overgeneral memory bias extends to rumination, a tendency to perseverate on negative past-oriented information, which has been attributed to deficits in executive control during retrieval and to attentional capture to negatively-valenced mnemonic information. Studies have likewise reported reduced specificity of episodic memories and future simulations in people suffering from anxiety disorders.
Research with nonclinical populations has also shown considerable variability in the extent to which people can construct detailed mental representations about the future (e.g., D’Argembeau & Van der Linden, 2006). Moreover, individual variation in executive functioning is predictive of the quantity and quality of episodic detail in future simulations, pointing to the potential importance of cognitive flexibility. Indeed, a recent functional brain imaging study found that activity within neural systems engaged during more flexible constructions of future scenarios (i.e., incongruent with past events) correlated with individual differences in divergent creative thinking, or the ability to generate a range of possible solutions to open-ended problems. Taken together, this growing body of research suggests that individual differences in cognitive and affective processes influence how people remember the past and project the future.
Although future thinking relies on past experience, projecting into the future also requires a partial break from the past to successfully construct new simulations of what one has yet to experience. This process may therefore be disrupted by an inability to move beyond past experience—in other words, getting “stuck” in a recursive loop of past-oriented thought (e.g., ruminating) should yield greater challenges in shifting attention towards the future. On the other hand, a tendency to focus on future-related experiences might impact the constructive process by biasing attention toward the future. In the present research, we examined the role of cognitive styles characterized by past- and future-oriented thought in mental time travel. Specifically, we explored whether brooding rumination, a tendency to perseverate on negative past experiences, is related to decreases in people’s ability to vividly and positively imagine the future. We also explored whether optimism, a tendency to expect positive future events, is related to enhanced imagery for the future. Critically, although rumination and optimism have been linked to past- and future-oriented cognition, respectively, in a lab context, it remains unclear whether these traits similarly correspond to past- and future-oriented thoughts in daily life, which are more likely to be spontaneous than lab-based assessments of past and future thinking.
Using an experience-sampling design, we examined temporal orientation and mental imagery by calling people on their cellphones at random times throughout the day for one week and asking if they were thinking about the past, present, or future; we also asked them to rate the vividness, valence, and temporal distance of their thoughts. This approach allowed us to explore how temporal, cognitive, and affective biases in thinking style impact people’s momentary conscious experiences of the past, present, and future. Previous research suggests that autobiographical and future thinking deficits are related to an over-general memory bias; however, it remains unclear whether this effect is driven by negative mood or perseverative thinking, as negative mood and rumination are highly correlated constructs. To address this issue, we also measured depressive symptoms.
We hypothesized that people high in brooding rumination would not only report more past-oriented thought in daily life, but also show reductions in the vividness of future-oriented thought—a phenomenological dimension related to the specificity with which people recall the past and imagine the future. Conversely, we expected that people high in optimism would report more vivid future-related thoughts in daily life. Previous laboratory research suggests that optimism is characterized by the ability to generate vivid and positive mental imagery for the future. It is unknown, however, whether people high in optimism spontaneously generate positive and vivid future-oriented thoughts outside of the lab, and whether they show a similar profile for past-oriented thoughts. The present research thus offers a first look at the extent to which optimists experience a bias towards the future in everyday life. We hypothesized that people high in optimism would report more frequent episodes of future-oriented thought, and that such episodes would be characterized by increased vividness and positive valence.
Discussion
The present research suggests that temporal and affective biases in cognitive style influence mental time travel in everyday life. Using an experience sampling design, we found that brooding rumination (a negative past-oriented bias) and optimism (a positive future-oriented bias) predicted a distinct pattern of decreases and increases in past- and future-oriented mental imagery. Not only did people high in brooding rumination report less vivid imagery for the past and future, they also spent more time dwelling in past-oriented thought. In contrast, people high in optimism reported enhanced imagery for the future, but they did not spend more or less time in the past or the future. Taken together, these results suggest that individual differences in cognitive style influence how people think about the past and future in daily life.
Overall, participants reported more present or atemporal thoughts (68%) than past (13%) and future (19%) thoughts. It is important to note that the prevalence of future-oriented thought reported in the current study was greater than previous experience sampling studies on temporal orientation and mental imagery, potentially due to methodological differences across studies, such as thought sampling procedure. Regarding temporal distance, participants reported thinking more about events in the recent past and near future, which suggests a relatively narrow window of mental time travel in daily life. Moreover, the phenomenological quality of past and future thoughts was notably different across temporal dimensions: participants reported a greater degree of positive valence for future-oriented thoughts, pointing to an enhanced conscious experience of the future in daily life.
Mental Time Travel and Cognitive Style
Our results extend previous research on deficits in past- and future-oriented thinking. Specifically, we found that brooding rumination was related to reductions in past- and future-oriented mental imagery, even when controlling for levels of depressed mood. This finding builds on past work by suggesting that future thinking decreases stem from a perseverative, past-oriented cognitive style (i.e., rumination), rather than a depressed mood per se. Although depressed participants reported less positively valenced future thoughts, this effect was no longer significant once levels of rumination were taken into account. Furthermore, people high in brooding did not report significantly less positive valence in their thoughts about the future. They were, however, less likely to report vivid imagery for the future. Thus, although people high in brooding reported thinking about the past more often, their thoughts were actually characterized by less mental imagery for both the past and the future.
Regarding changes in future thinking reported by people high in brooding, one plausible explanation is that a perseverative, past-oriented thinking style disrupts future thinking via cognitive inflexibility. In other words, a fixation on past experiences may prevent attention from being reoriented toward the future. According to the impaired disengagement hypothesis, a chronic perseverative focus on negative self-referential events can lead to an overall difficulty in withdrawing attention from negative thoughts. In this context, it could be that brooders become “stuck” in a recursive loop of past-oriented thought, thereby preventing attention from disengaging from the past and reorienting toward the future. On the other hand, brooding was not associated with a global reduction of future-oriented thought in daily (the effect was specific to vividness) so the extent to which future thinking deficits in rumination are a function of impaired past engagement requires further investigation. Moreover, brooding rumination is associated with an abstract cognitive style —or a tendency to think about past and future experiences with minimal concrete detail—which may in part explain the link between rumination and decreased vividness of past and future thoughts in the current study.
However, if brooders indeed experience difficulty disengaging from past experience, they may rely more on recasting those experiences, rather than constructing novel ones, when imagining possible future events, which might further impact the novelty of future-oriented thought. People high in brooding may therefore oversample from past experience when imagining the future because their attention is chronically biased towards past-oriented thought. Indeed, recasting past experience when imagining novel future episodes is a symptom of cognitive impairment in neuropsychological disorders such as semantic dementia. An interesting question for future work to consider is whether impaired cognitive flexibility affects the novelty of future-oriented thought, or the extent to which future thought content deviates from past experience. In this context, the ability to construct novel future thoughts can be construed as a type of creative thought process.
Another goal of the present work was to determine whether optimism is related to enhanced future thinking in daily life. We found that people high in optimism reported an active imagination for the future. To our knowledge, this study is the first to provide evidence that optimism is characterized by greater vividness and positive valence for future-oriented thought in everyday life, therefore validating a widely used self-report measure of optimism. Past research has shown that optimists report more vivid mental imagery than pessimists when imagining plausible future episodes. Our study extends this work by demonstrating that optimists report enhanced vividness ratings for future-oriented thoughts, but not for past. Regarding temporal distance, people high in optimism were not more likely to be thinking about the near or distant future, which suggests that their thought content showed variability across time.
We also found that, contrary to our hypothesis, optimists did not show a bias toward future-oriented thought in daily life. In hindsight, however, it may be reasonable to assume that optimists would not report spending more time in the future. Optimism is a positive psychological trait characterized by the tendency to expect positive future outcomes —not necessarily a tendency to perseverate on, or think more often about, such outcomes. Indeed, a high degree of future-oriented thought may be indicative of psychological disorder (e.g., worry or anxiety). Unlike the past-oriented focus of brooders, then, optimists may engage in a more adaptive cognitive style that allows attention to freely shift among past, present, and future-oriented thoughts in daily life.
It is important to note that worry is strongly correlated with rumination in clinical populations: people who tend to ruminate about past events also tend to worry about future events, pointing to a general tendency toward repetitive thinking in people with clinical conditions. Because we did not assess worry in the current study, the extent to which the observed effects of rumination on past- and future-oriented thought in daily life reflects a global bias to engage in negative, repetitive thought is unclear. Future work might therefore assess common and unique effects of rumination and worry on past- and future-oriented thought in daily life using a bi-factor approach, which can assess global or high-order effects of a latent construct (e.g., negative/repetitive thinking) and specific or lower-order effects indicating that construct (e.g., rumination and worry).
Optimism is also associated with an ability to cope with stressful life events. To what extent do optimists rely on their ability to vividly imagine the future in the face of stressors in daily life? One possibility is that people high in optimism are successful in managing stressful events because they can more easily disengage from the present and mentally project positive and vivid future experiences. This capacity may provide an adaptive, self-regulatory buffer, whereby further negative affect is prevented by the ability to disengage from adverse physical and psychological conditions and mentally simulate positive future experiences. Subsequent research should explore whether optimists show enhanced future-oriented mental imagery when confronted with stressful events in daily life, and determine the extent to which enhanced future thinking aids in self-regulation.
Our results may also have implications for debates about the role of temporal factors in studies of remembering the past and imagining the future. As discussed by Schacter et al., references to ‘‘past events’’ and ‘‘future events’’ in these studies are often confounded with the distinction between ‘‘remembering’’ and ‘‘imagining.” Remembered events, of course, necessarily refer to the past.
However, cognitive or neural characteristics attributed to ‘‘future events’’ could potentially also be attributed to ‘‘imagined events,’’ regardless of whether such events refer to the future, the past, or the present. For example, studies of atemporal scene construction reveal many of the same cognitive and neural features documented for remembered past and imagined future experiences, even though no mental time travel is involved. Thus, it is not always clear whether studies of the relation between remembering the past and imagining the future specifically address the relation between past and future, or whether they address the relation between memory and imagination, regardless of the involvement of mental time travel.
With respect to our study, we cannot know for certain whether the differences documented here between brooding ruminators and optimists are entirely accounted for by differences in temporal orientation (i.e., past vs. future); it is conceivable that the effects we observed are attributable to differences between memory (past) and imagination (future) that would not be observed if participants were imagining (as opposed to remembering) past events. Because we did not obtain the content of the past and future events reported by participants, we do not know whether past events reported by participants were imagined, as opposed to remembered. This issue may merit exploration in future research. Nonetheless, given that the individual difference variable we examined was defined in terms of temporal orientation, we think that our data most likely do reveal differences that are specifically related to mental time travel.
Another important caveat of the study is that the thought probes did not distinguish between spontaneous and deliberate cognition. This distinction is particularly relevant for the topic of the special issue in Psychology Research, and it has been increasingly emphasized in the mind-wandering literature. Although some work has examined intentionality and spontaneity of past- and future-oriented thoughts in a laboratory context, to our knowledge, no research has explored these dimensions in daily life. Because mind-wandering varies across lab and daily-life contexts, an interesting direction for future research would be to compare temporality and spontaneity in lab and life. In our study, we suspect that many thought probes captured task-unrelated cognitions or daydreams, while others may have captured some deliberate aspects of planning. Future work could assess whether intentionality and temporality interact with cognitive style: it is possible that rumination is associated with more spontaneous and negative past-oriented thought, whereas optimism is related to more deliberate future-oriented thought. We encourage researchers to examine temporality and spontaneity in the context of individual differences in cognitive style.
A final methodological limitation of the current work worth noting concerns the response rate of daily-life surveys. On average, people responded to about 57% of the surveys over the course of the week. Although consistent with past work using IVR systems, other experience-sampling methods that do not require participants to respond to phone calls (e.g., personal digital assistants, PDA; app-based methods) may be preferred in future studies. Indeed, Burgin and colleagues found that survey completion rates were higher in a PDA condition compared to an IVR condition, although the daily-life ratings provided in this study were comparable. We suggest future daily-life experience-sampling studies consider employing one of the many app-based methods currently available (e.g., MetricWire; www.metricwire.com) which may be more conducive to higher survey completion rates.
Summary and Future Directions
The present research examined the role of cognitive style in everyday mental time travel, which is more likely to be spontaneous than the kind of cue-elicited mental time travel typically studied in the lab. We found that although people high in brooding rumination spent more time engaged in past-oriented thought, they experienced less vivid mental imagery for their past- and future-oriented thoughts. In addition, we found that people high in optimism were not more or less likely to be thinking about the past or future, but they reported enhanced mental imagery and positive valence for future-oriented thoughts. Our results suggest that certain temporal biases in cognitive style affect the frequency and phenomenology of past- and future-oriented cognition. Future work could extend this correlational study with experimental manipulations that induce the temporal direction of spontaneous cognition. Moreover, because we did not ask people to report what they were thinking about, our conclusions concerning the content of such thoughts are necessarily limited. Subsequent research should explore additional subjective and objective criteria by exploring past- and future-oriented cognition in individuals with cognitive, affective, and temporal biases, and further examine future-thinking deficits in clinical populations.
My research brought me to another item in the form of research on how right-wing authoritarianism leads to people stuck in their beliefs. It seems it is hard for them to readjust even if they learn that they may be mistaken. I will include excerpts from the transcript of the podcast.
Transcription
Myers: You’re listening to All Things Cognition, a Psychonomic Society podcast. Now here is your host, Laura Mickes [@lmickes].
Mickes: I’m speaking with Allie Sinclair [@Sinclair_Allie - active on Twitter (X)] who is currently a graduate student in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University about her paper recently published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.
Hi Allie. Thanks so much for talking with me.
Sinclair: Hi Laura. Thanks for having me.
Mickes: What’s the title of the paper?
Sinclair: The title of the paper is “Closed-Minded Cognition: Right-Wing Authoritarianism is Negatively Related to Belief Updating Following Prediction Error.”
Mickes: You wrote this with a couple of people. Who are your co-authors?
Sinclair: My co-authors are Matthew Stanley, who’s another graduate student finishing up his degree at Duke. And Paul Seli, who is a new assistant professor in the department. Actually, neither of them are in my lab or my mentors, but it was a side project that grew out of a wonderful conversation that we had where we were kind of just talking about the state of the world and how we can understand it in terms of cognition and social psychology.
So it was sort of a conversation that ran wild and then we ended up running some studies again.
Mickes: Why did you choose a political angle?
Sinclair: We started off with a pilot study where we actually looked at a number of different individual differences measures. We were interested in cognition more broadly. For example, we looked at a construct called intellectual humility, which basically captures your willingness to be wrong. Um, so like, are you receptive to being challenged on what you believe?
And then we also looked at some other measures, like actively open-minded thinking, which did make it into the paper. It’s a cognitive style that’s related to openness, but then we also included right-wing authoritarianism because we thought that this ideological factor might actually reflect some underlying cognitive biases that might be captured even in a totally apolitical domain.
And right-wing authoritarianism is especially salient right now because we’re seeing a highly politicized, polarized climate where there’s a lot of misinformation being disseminated, especially when it’s about a political topic. And we also see that there seems to be more clashing of discourse when people are trying to share opinions or figure out what is correct and what is not, especially when it’s about politics.
Mickes: Why did you choose just right-wing, or did you also look at left-wing authoritarianism?
Sinclair: We did not in this one. there is a substantial body of literature out there that have shown before that radicals are extremists on both ends of the political spectrum can sometimes show very similar cognitive biases. It’s kind of like if you go far enough to one side or the other, you end up in a circle.
That’s one thing that we would like to explore with followup studies, whether you see a similar pattern of disrupted belief updating with left-wing authoritarians.
Mickes: Right. Academics are often criticized for being too liberal, but the decision to investigate right-wing authoritarianism was based on prior literature.
Sinclair: Yeah. That is actually a point that I’d like to address because one thing that’s really important to note is that we did not find any effects of conservatism. So if we just look at how liberal or conservative are you, or what’s your political affiliation, that’s not related to belief updating. So we’re not trying to say that everyone who’s conservative, um, has this impairment in belief updating, rather, we’re saying there’s something specific about this authoritarian attitude that seems to reflect some underlying cognitive tendencies.
Mickes: Before we get too ahead of ourselves, what were your hypotheses?
Sinclair: We had two main hypotheses.
The first was that people who score high on right-wing authoritarianism would tend to be less successful at updating their false beliefs.
And the second hypothesis was that specifically, they might show an altered pattern of response to prediction error. So on a trial by trial basis, if feedback is more surprising instead of that being more effective and leading them to be more likely to update their beliefs, we thought that they might be less likely or equally likely, I suppose, to show low levels of prediction error.
Mickes: How did you test this?
Sinclair: So to test this, we created a stimulus set of urban myths, which are a bunch of false beliefs that are really commonly held.
So a couple of examples of them are like dogs see in black and white; salting a pot of water makes it boil faster.
Mickes: You also included true statements.
Sinclair: Yes. We also had about 40% or so of the statements were true statements. And we ended up not really looking into those very much, but they were primarily included as filler items so that people wouldn’t realize that just everything in the test was false.
Mickes: I think your title says it all, but what did you find?
Sinclair: Our main finding was as we predicted people who score high on right-wing authoritarianism tend to be less successful at updating their beliefs, both on the immediate test and after a one week delay. And that’s a pretty strong effect. Um, and we replicated it across two samples. And then we also had a secondary finding, which was consistent with our prediction about prediction error. And what we saw there was that indeed at the immediate test to people who scored high on right-wing authoritarianism tended to be especially poor at updating their beliefs when prediction error was really strong. So in other words, on the trials that were most surprising, they were less likely to update their beliefs.
And that goes directly against what we would predict from learning theories of cognition that say that when prediction error is strong, we should be more likely to learn from that information.
Mickes: So what does it all mean?
Sinclair: So I think there are two take-home messages that we should draw from this.
The first at a broader theoretical level is that we should think critically about the context of learning and individual differences when we’re trying to understand cognition. So when we want to take a theory that we have about the way that people learn and the way that people revise their memories, we also need to look at what’s happening in the real world and think about what conditions might limit this updating process, what conditions might influence the way that people learn? And ultimately, how can we come up with strategies to get around that? How can we support learning across a variety of contexts and meet people where they are. Like, if people are bringing a certain motivational or emotional state into learning, how does that influence the process of learning and what can we do about that?
An attempt at another rhyming verse similar to an actual sonnet. This one just might rate high in snarkiness.
I want to return to a hickory nut
They look only toward a make believe like past,
MAGA want to completely turn back the clock,
These red hats atop a head made of bedrock,
They wish to return to olden times real fast,
Let us just say they are backwards unsurpassed,
There are many a mind under key and lock,
Living through lives with change is only a shock,
As living with a change is to be harassed.
Brooding over the mythical past always,
They just feel painfully uncomfortable,
To try to adapt would be insufferable,
They can never accept any of your ways,
The press seems to always ask these gobers what,
Instead of ditching them as hickory nuts.
That’s what I have today. Hopefully edification has had its desirable effects.
182nd Posting, March 22, 2024.