The psychological study of ideology has traditionally emphasized the content of ideological beliefs, guided by questions about what people believe, such as why people believe in omniscient gods or fascist worldviews. This theoretical focus has led to siloed subdisciplines separately dealing with political, religious, moral, and prejudiced attitudes. The fractionation has fostered a neglect of the cognitive structure of ideological worldviews and associated questions about why ideologies—in all their forms—are so compelling to the human mind. Here I argue that it is essential to consider the nature of ideological cognition across a multitude of ideologies. I offer a multidimensional, empirically tractable framework of ideological thinking, suggesting it can be conceptualized as a style of thinking that is rigid in its adherence to a doctrine and resistance to evidence-based belief-updating and favorably oriented toward an in-group and antagonistic to out-groups. The article identifies the subcomponents of ideological thinking and highlights that ideological thinking constitutes a meaningful psychological phenomenon that merits direct scholarly investigation and analysis. By emphasizing conceptual precision, methodological directions, and interdisciplinary integration across the political and cognitive sciences, the article illustrates the potential of this framework as a catalyst for developing a rigorous domain-general psychology of ideology.

意识形态的心理学研究传统上强调意识形态信仰的内容，以人们信仰什么的问题为指导，例如为什么人们相信全知的神或法西斯世界观。这种理论焦点导致了各自处理政治、宗教、道德和偏见态度的孤立的子学科。这种分裂导致了对意识形态世界观认知结构的忽视，以及相关问题：为什么各种形式的意识形态对人类心灵如此有吸引力。在这里，我认为有必要考虑多种意识形态的意识形态认知的本质。我提供了一个多维的、经验上易于处理的意识形态思维框架，表明它可以被概念化为一种思维方式，这种思维方式僵化地坚持教条，抵制基于证据的信念更新，并倾向于内部群体和对抗性的观点。到外群体。文章指出了意识形态思维的组成部分，并强调意识形态思维构成了一种有意义的心理现象，值得直接进行学术调查和分析。通过强调概念精确性、方法论方向以及跨政治和认知科学的跨学科整合，本文阐明了该框架作为发展严格的意识形态领域一般心理学的催化剂的潜力。