A surprising finding from U.S. opinion surveys is that political disagreements tend to be greatest among the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans. Recent experiments suggest a hypothesis that could explain this pattern: cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing of new information. However, the designs of these experiments tend to contain several limitations that complicate their support for this hypothesis. In particular, they tend to (i) focus on people's worldviews and political identities, at the expense of their other, more specific prior beliefs, (ii) lack direct comparison with a politically unbiased benchmark, and (iii) focus on people's judgments of new information, rather than on their posterior beliefs following exposure to the information. We report two studies designed to address these limitations. In our design, U.S. subjects received noisy but informative signals about the truth or falsity of partisan political questions, and we measured their prior and posterior beliefs, and cognitive sophistication, operationalized as analytic thinking inferred via performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test. We compared subjects' posterior beliefs to an unbiased Bayesian benchmark. We found little evidence that analytic thinking magnified politically biased deviations from the benchmark. In contrast, we found consistent evidence that greater analytic thinking was associated with posterior beliefs closer to the benchmark. Together, these results are inconsistent with the hypothesis that cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing. We discuss differences between our design and prior work that can inform future tests of this hypothesis.

美国舆论调查的一个令人惊讶的发现是，在最认知复杂的反对党派中，政治分歧往往是最大的。最近的实验提出了一个可以解释这种模式的假设：认知的复杂性会放大政治上对新信息的偏见。但是，这些实验的设计往往包含一些局限性，使他们对该假设的支持更加复杂。特别是，他们倾向于（i）着眼于人们的世界观和政治身份，而以牺牲他们的其他更具体的先验信念为代价；（ii）与政治上没有偏见的基准缺乏直接的比较；（iii）着眼于人们对政治的偏见新信息，而不是暴露于信息后的后继信念。我们报告了旨在解决这些局限性的两项研究。在我们的设计中，美国主体收到了关于党派政治问题的真相或虚假性的嘈杂但有益的信号，我们测量了他们的先验和后继信念以及认知的成熟度，并通过认知反射测试中的表现推论为分析性思维。我们将受试者的后验信念与无偏贝叶斯基准进行了比较。我们几乎没有发现证据表明分析思维会放大政治偏向基准的偏差。相比之下，我们发现了一致的证据，即更大的分析思维与更接近基准的后验信念有关。在一起，这些结果与认知复杂性会放大政治偏见的处理这一假设不一致。