Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: 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 matters and less about others, the various understanding he or she constructs 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. Thus we use an open-ended problem solving task, a chemistry experiment, to assess the quality of the subjects thinking. We then draw on this to predict how subjects will perform on close-ended survey measures of their social identification with ingroups and their evaluation and political tolerance of outgroups. The results provide general support for hypothees of an underlying structure of thought and individual differences. They also suggest the potenital of empirical research which combines qualitative and quantitative measures of cognition.