(Page 1 of 18) - Thinking about Chemistry, Social Identity and Political Tolerance: A Multi-Method Study of Individual Differences in Political Cognition authored by Rosenberg, Shawn. and Wrigley, Ted.

Thinking about Chemistry, Social Identity and Political Tolerance:

A Multi-Method Study of Individual Differences in Political Cognition

Paper presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the

American Political Science Association, Boston, MA

Shawn Rosenberg and Ted Wrigley

University of California, Irvine

## email not listed ##

In this paper we explore the different ways in which people make sense of and

identify with social and political groups. In so doing, we draw on a structural pragmatic
view of political thinking. This view suggests that a person’s political thinking is
structured. Drawing on this claim, we explore the hypothesis that although a person may
know more about some events and groups and less about others, his or her
understandings will share common formal characteristics. Structural pragmatic theory
also suggests that the structural qualities of political thinking may vary from one
individual to the next. Following this, we explore the hypothesis that individuals may
think in structurally different ways and therefore that different people may understand the
same event in qualitatively different ways. Unlike earlier research on these questions, we
adopt an approach which bridges the interpretive concerns and empirical methods of
structural pragmatics with those which are more commonly adopted in political science
studies of public opinion.

Our work is oriented by the structural pragmatic tradition of George Herbert

Mead (Mead, 1934) and Jurgen Habermas (Habermas, 1979; 1984/7), the neo-Piagetian
tradition in developmental psychology (e.g., Piaget, 1971; Luria, 1976; Wertsch, 1991;
Kegan, 1994; Nicolopoulou and Weintraub, 1998; Hogan and Tudge, 1999) and related
work on political cognition (e.g., Haan et al. 1968; Wilson, 1992; Braunwarth, 1996;
Muhlberger, 2000; Golec, 2002). To distinguish between different types of thinking we
adopt Rosenberg’s three-fold typology of sequential, linear and systematic (Rosenberg,
1988a, 1988b, 2002). Each type generates its own distinctive understandings of social
and political phenomena. The three types are related to one another as steps in a
developmental trajectory that begins in childhood and continues through adolescence into
adulthood. Of the three types, sequential develops first followed by linear and then
systematic thinking. In general terms, this cognitive development progress leads to
thinking is increasingly complex, integrative, reflective, abstract and hypothetical. While
all people are assumed to have the capacity to develop systematic thinking, not all do so.
How far people develop is understood to be a result of the quality of the environments to
which they are exposed. To the degree the environment is more cognitively demanding
(the more complex the everyday social tasks the individual must address) and is more
supportive (more emotional and social support is provided to individuals as they attempt
to better understand the world around them), cognitive development will be facilitated.
Insofar as social environments are relatively simple (e.g. they consist of routinized
exchanges with familiar others) and unsupportive (the costs of making mistakes are
high), cognitive development will be obstructed. As a result of these different