comments on "cognitive functioning and socio-political ideology revisited"

Comments on "Cognitive Functioning and Socio-Political Ideology Revisited"Author(s): Dana WardSource: Political Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Mar., 1986), pp. 141-147Published by: International Society of Political PsychologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791161 .

Accessed: 04/04/2014 05:36

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

International Society of Political Psychology is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Political Psychology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.117.10.254 on Fri, 4 Apr 2014 05:36:54 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ispp

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3791161?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Political Psychology, Vol. 7, No. 1, 1986

The Forum

Comments on "Cognitive Functioning and Socio-Political Ideology Revisited"

Dana Ward1

Conceptually and methodologically, "Cognitive Functioning and Socio- Political Ideology Revisited" is highly sophisticated and addresses a most fundamental topic in the analysis of belief systems: the relationship between cognitive structure and political ideology. The sophistication derives from the fact that Sidanius has met Rokeach's "basic requirement" for studying belief systems, a requirement which has been systematically ignored in the political science literature on the structure of beliefs:

To study the organization of belief systems, we find it necessary to concern ourselves with the structure rather than the content of beliefs... Thus, a basic requirement is that the concepts to be employed in the description of belief systems must not be tied to any one particular belief system; they must be constructed to apply equally to all belief systems. (Rokeach, 1960, p. 6)

Although many studies purport to address structure, most are little more than catalogues of belief content, employing passive collection measures, and are analytically limited to identifying "what goes with what?" (Carmines and Stimson, 1982; Converse, 1964; Field and Anderson, 1969; Luttbeg, 1968; Nie and Anderson, 1974; Nie et al., 1976; Stimson, 1975). In the studies adher- ing to the basic epistemological and methodological approach pioneered by Philip Converse and his associates, "structure" is assumed, rather than demonstrated: If all the predetermined ideological content is manifest in a subject's responses, then the subject is assumed to have a particular cognitive structure.

At best, the only cognitive operation measured by such procedures is that of class inclusion. Reversibility, causality, flexibility, complexity, con- creteness, abstractness, and any number of other cognitive functions and

'Department of Political Science, Pitzer College, Claremont, California 91711.

141

0162-895X/86/0300-0141$05.00/1 @ 1986 International Society of Political Psychology



142 Ward

characteristics remain untapped. In most of the political science literature on belief structure, the only "cognitive" measure employed is level of education (e.g., Nie et al., 1976). In short, rarely are direct, multiple, and active measures of cognitive structure used in studying the structure of ideological systems.

The great strength of Sidanius' study, then, is that the structural dimen- sion of ideology is assessed by engaging the subjects in active, direct, and multiple tests of cognitive processing, rather than relying solely on passive survey responses.

Furthermore, Sidanius has clearly presented three competing theories seeking to explain the nature of the interface between ideology and cognitive functioning and he has put those theories to a test, the results of which pro- mise to turn conventional wisdom upside down (once the problems noted below are eliminated). Equally important, the strongest model (the context model) has major theoretical advantages in that it avoids the time and culture boundedness of conventional studies of belief systems, (see Ward et al., 1985) thus permitting meaningful cross-cultural research. For all these reasons, then, the author is to be highly commended for his efforts.

Given these accomplishments, one hesitates to find fault with the study, but faults there are to find. Three serious and related flaws render the findings of the study suspect (the theory simply remains untested): first, the synchronic, rather than diachronic, model of cognition upon which the study is based; second, the assumed relationship between complexity and cognitive structure; and third, the choice of subjects. Since these failings are in fact quite common in the belief systems literature, the following criticisms are applicable not only to the particular study at hand but also to the general conduct of inquiry into belief structure.

The key problem is symbolized in the article's bibliography. Notable for their absence are developmental psychologists. Nowhere is there any hint that humans are not born with cognitive skills intact. The fact that cognitive operations such as conservation, reversibility, identity, and seriation must develop is ignored. Since the development of these particular cognitive skills has a direct bearing on cognitive complexity and flexibility (key elements in Sidanius' study), the failure to account for developmental differences is quite curious. Similarly, the fact that at critical stages in the life cycle these various operations are recombined and reorganized to form distinctly new and different cognitive structures is not taken into account.

In short, the Sidanius perspective is synchronic, rather than diachronic. From this perspective, developmentally based differences in cognitive structure are viewed as irrelevant to subject populations older than 18 years of age. This approach assumes that all development has taken place and that all subjects have achieved equivalent developmental stages.



Comments on "Cognitive Functioning and Socio-Political Ideology Revisited" 143

There is an underlying assumption in this perspective that structural differences are a question of quantity, rather than quality. That is, it is assumed that certain differences can be identified by counting the number of dif- ferentiations a subject makes in forming a judgment, or counting the number of subgroups a subject can generate from a larger set. This assumption is tied to the general epistemological perspective articulated by John Locke and elaborated upon, among others, by Hume, Russell and Ryle [see Ward et al., (1985) for an analysis of the Lockean epistemology]. Essential to this perspective is the idea that all individuals reason in fundamentally the same way - some may be quicker, some smarter, some may have more of one particular intellectual quality, others less, but in essence cognitive structure is seen as a question of more or less of otherwise shared cognitive capacities. The emphasis, then, is on the quantity of particular attributes.

The diachronic perspective, in contrast, places the emphasis on the quality of cognitive processes. Different qualities produce fundamentally different structures of thought. While it is true that individuals within a particular developmental stage reason in essentially the same way, there are fundamental qualitative differences in reasoning across stages of development. These qualitative differences produce different cognitive structures which result in quite different processes by which social and political judgments are reached. Since not all individuals reach the highest stage of development, adult populations include individuals who employ different structures of thought.

These structural differences may or may not coincide with quantitative differences associated with particular cognitive functions or attributes. In- deed, in some cases, more may well be less. For example, whereas preadolescents may view the world in terms of a number of unconnected events, ideas, and relationships and may be able to identify large numbers of categories within each of the classifications, adolescents in fact may con- dense that bewildering array into relatively few categories based upon certain shared social, economic, and political principles. The result may be a less highly differentiated world in terms of the quantitative complexity of perspectives actually employed in reaching a judgment about events, ideas, and relationships in the sociopolitical world. Piaget commented on this adolescent tendency to simplify in the early stages of hypothetical-deductive thought when he noted: "Adolescent egocentricity is manifested by belief in the om- nipotence of reflection, as though the world should submit itself to idealistic schemes rather than to systems of reality" (Piaget, 1968, p. 64).

Therefore, it is not necessarily safe to assume that complexity and structural development are directly proportionate. It may well be the case that the later stages in any period of development exhibit greater categorical complexity than the early stages of the subsequent period, even though the



144 Ward

subsequent period is qualitatively a more highly equilibrated adaptation to reality. In sum, within a particular stage, complexity generally increases as development proceeds. Across stages, no uniformly proportionate relationship between complexity and development can be assumed.

The third major point concerns the subjects upon which Sidanius based his study. Although the temptation is almost irresistible, I shall not dwell on the fact that the empirical foundations of modern political and social psychology would become emaciated if all studies based on captive student audiences were excluded arbitrarily from consideration. Rather, my point concerns the important changes in ideological systems which take place in late adolescence, the age of Sidanius' subjects.

By ignoring developmental issues, Sidanius inadvertently chose a target population known to be undergoing significant structural transformation in sociopolitical reasoning at about age 18. In many cases, affective, cognitive, and moral systems all undergo reorganization as the adolescent leaves the world of the family to assume adult roles (the works of Erikson, Piaget, Kohlberg elaborate this point). It is at this juncture that individuals begin to try out new ideological positions "through free role experimentation" (Erikson, 1963 and 1968, p. 156). Consequently, there may be a great deal of ideological mixing at this stage as different perspectives are experimented with, sometimes producing greater, and sometimes lesser, flexibility and complexity in belief structure (greater due to changing perspectives, lesser due to the convert's tendency toward dogmatism).

Similarly, Kohlberg has shown that an identity crisis, which can com- monly occur at about the age in question, is often a precursor to movement to the higher stages of moral reasoning (Kohlberg, 1964, 1969, 1971, and 1973, p. 183). To the degree that moral reasoning is an essential element of sociopolitical reasoning, one can not fail to account for the contribution different levels of moral reasoning make to the flexibility and complexity of thought, as well as the fundamental structural differences which mark off different stages of moral reasoning.

In terms of cognitive development, abstract reasoning may or may not have been consolidated by age eighteen. While most adolescents possess fully developed cognitive capacities, some do not [see Adelson (1971) and Adelson and O'Neil (1966) for some of the best work on the political thought of adolescents]. Evidence is now emerging that, as Piaget suspected, the thought of the child is of "interest because the same phenomena reappear in adult mental life" (Piaget, 1950, 1953, 1965, p. 75, 1968, 1969, 1971a, 1971b).

For example, a recent study by the present author demonstrated that adults' concepts of democracy can be supported by concrete or abstract cognitive structures (Ward, 1981). Rosenberg (1982) has also demonstrated experimentally that there is a wide range of cognitive structures found in adults' political reasoning. The rather obvious conclusion is that simply




because an individual has reached the chronological age at which the average individual acquires fully developed cognitive structures does not mean that particular individual has done so. After all, we are dealing with averages.

In sum, Sidanius chose an age during which social and political reasoning is typically in flux. A far wiser research strategy would have been to pick several age groups as a control for developmentally related differences in reasoning. Ironically, had Sidanius collected data from a diverse age range, I suspect his correlations would be far stronger than the fairly weak relationships found. The reason is that differences on both sides of the developmental divide associated with this age group may be washing out a good deal of the correlations.

To strengthen these three criticisms, let me anticipate at least two possible responses. One could be that not only is development essentially com- plete by age 18 (the issue dealt with above), but an overwhelming amount of evidence points to general continuity in beliefs across generations and within generations over time, and this evidence suggests that after age 18, while there is some change, stability is the norm.

For example, in the best study in the genre, Jennings and Niemi's Generations and Politics, both change and stability were prevalent. While there was considerable evidence of openness and change, the most forceful evidence for stability was "the simple but powerful fact that virtually all the over-time correlations were greater than zero." (Jennings and Niemi, 1981, p. 384.) Recalling the extent of political turmoil during the intervening years of their study (1965-1973), the authors were quite prudent in cautioning that "if behavior and attitudes were no more transformed during this period than what we observed, then they must be much more stable during less stormy periods." (Jennings and Niemi, 1981, p. 385.)

What is important to note, however, is that the Jennings and Niemi study was based entirely on the content of beliefs. Consequently, we have no way of knowing if correlations or lack of correlations are based on stable or unstable structuring processes. The reason is that identical content can be supported by fundamentally different cognitive structures, just as different content can be supported by identical structures.

For example, an individual might hold the belief that workers should control the means of production at time 1, and again 4 years later at time 2. But at time 1 (say 18 years old) the logic supporting that belief may con- sist of nothing other than "because Karl Marx said so, and Marx is revered in my family." That is, unilateral respect for authority structures the belief. [See Piaget (1965, p. 340, passim) for a discussion of unilateral respect for authority.]

At time 2, the same content might be found, but the underlying cognitive structure supporting that particular ideological content might have changed such that the individual justifies his position by arguing that since it is the



146 Ward

worker's labor which produces value, workers ought to control what their own labor produces and therefore ought to own the means of production. That is, the belief is produced by deducing positions through the application of principles. The stability or instability of particular issue content, then, is irrelevant to the issues I am raising here. What is important to ask is not what is believed, but how it is believed. Consequently, relying on the stability of belief content as a rationale for not sampling a larger age range is not an adequate defense.

The second possible response that I would like to anticipate might be simply that we approach the topic from two different and incompatible theoretical perspectives. It is common, for example, to distinguish between developmental theories of moral and political reasoning, and social learning, environmental theories of moral and political reasoning:

The current state of the field - at the risk of oversimplification - reflects a division, generally between those scholars who favor a social learning approach and those whose allegiance is to the cognitive development school. The basic difference between the two approaches concerns what is regarded as the more important factor in the development of mature moral judgment - the autonomous reorganization of cognitive processes during growth, or the social inputs that affect individuals during childhood and beyond." (Wilson and Schochet, 1980, p. xix) (See also Ethics Vol. 92, No. 3, for a symposium on this issue)

Such a division is indeed an oversimplification. In the above statement development is confused with maturation. Maturation will occur essentially regardless of environment. Development, on the other hand depends upon the environment as much as it depends on the organism. Piaget's genetic epistemology is founded on this fundamental principle.

Trained as a biologist, Piaget based his approach on how organisms adapt to environments, with intelligence being a form of adaptation. All forms of adaptation assume both assimilation (the action of the organism on the environment) and accommodation (the action of the environment on the organism), and both occur simultaneously in every form of adaptation. Con- sequently, the division between developmentalist and social learning theorists is needlessly artificial. Each can inform the other, producing a far more elaborate and adequate understanding of the origins, structure, and functioning of belief systems.

The fact that Sidanius has built his theory in order to accommodate the context in which beliefs are produced allows for a natural bridge between our two perspectives. This elaborate, and overly long response has simply been an invitation to cross that bridge.

REFERENCES

Adelson, J. (1971). The political imagination of the young adolescent. Daedalus 100: 1013-1050. Adelson, J., and O'Neil, R. (1966). The growth of political ideas in adolescence: The sense of

community. J. Personal. Social Psychol. 4: 295-306.




Carmines, E., and Stimson, J. (1982). Racial issues and the structure of mass belief systems. J. Politics 44(1): 2-20.

Converse, P. (1964). The nature of belief systems in mass publics. In Apter, D. (ed.), Ideology and Discontent, Free Press. New York.

Erikson, E. (1963). Childhood and Society, Norton, New York. Erikson, E. (1968). Identity: Youth and Crisis, Norton, New York. Field, J., and Anderson, R. (1969). Ideology in the public's conception of the 1964 election.

Public Opinion Quart. 33: 380-398. Jennings, K., and Niemi, R. (1981). Generation and Politics, Princeton University Press,

Princeton, N.J. Kohlberg, L. (1964). The development of moral character and ideology. In Hoffman, M., and

Hoffman, L. (eds.), Review of Child Development Research, Russell Sage, New York. Kohlberg, L. (1969). Stage and sequence: The cognitive-developmental approach to socializa-

tion. In Goslin, D. (ed.), Handbook of Socialization Theory and Research, Rand McNally, New York.

Kohlberg, L. (1971). From is to ought: How to commit the naturalistic fallacy and get away with it in the study of moral development. In Mischel, T. (ed.), Cognitive Development and Epistemology, Academic Press, New York.

Kohlberg, L. (1973). Collected Papers on Moral Development and Moral Education, Moral Education and Research Foundation, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Luttbeg, N. (1968). The structure of beliefs among leaders and the public. Public Opinion Quart. 32(3).

Nie, N., and Anderson, K. (1974). Mass belief systems revisited: Political change and attitude structure. J. Politics 36: 540-590.

Nie, N., Verba, S., and Petrocik, J. (1976). The Changing American Voter, Harvard Universi- ty Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Piaget, J. (1950). The Psychology of Intelligence, Littlefield, Adams & Co., Totowa, N.J. Piaget, J. (1953). Logic and Psychology, Manchester University Press, Manchester, England. Piaget, J. (1965). The Moral Judgment of the Child, Free Press, New York. Piaget, J. (1968). Six Psychological Studies, Vintage, New York. Piaget, J. (1969). The Psychology of the Child. Harper, New York. Piaget, J. (1971a). Structuralism, Harper & Row, New York. Piaget, J. (1971b). Genetic Epistemology, Norton, New York. Rokeach, M. (1960). The Open and Closed Mind, Basic Books, New York. Rosenberg, S. (1982). The study of political reasoning: An alternative to the belief systems ap-

proach. Paper delivered at 1982 Annual Meeting, American Political Science Association. Stimson, J. (1979). Belief systems, constraint, complexity, and the 1972 election. J. Political

Sci. 19: 383-418. Ward, D. (1981). The structure of the idea of democracy in Eastport. Paper presented at an-

nual meeting, Northeast Political Science Association. Ward, D., Rosenberg, S., and Chilton, S. (1985). Piaget and Politics, in press (copies available

from Ward). Wilson, R. W., and Schochet, G. J. (eds.) (1980). Moral Development and Politics, Praeger,

New York.



comments on "cognitive functioning and socio-political ideology revisited"

Documents