How Dogmatism Leaves Us Less Informed

To answer these questions, we asked over 700 US adults to play a simple computer game that was completely unrelated to their personal values: They saw two black boxes and had to decide which contained more flickering dots (imagine comparing two old TVs without a signal). They would be paid for a correct decision, so they had an incentive to choose carefully. 

But the important part came before they gave us their final judgment. Our participants could choose between two options. They could either decide that the first set of boxes was enough to make this final choice; or, they could pay a small fee to see another, clearer display of dots, which would help them make a more informed decision.

We borrowed this set-up from cognitive neuroscience. In that field, researchers have long used simple tasks to get at people’s basic thought processes. Although they might seem simple, such experiments mirror everyday information-seeking scenarios; luckily for us however, the tasks don’t carry their political baggage.

After the task, participants filled out several questionnaires. They told us about their political preferences and how strongly they believed in their worldview. The latter allowed us to measure dogmatism. We found that both extremes of the political spectrum tended to be more dogmatic than those in the political center, although dogmatism was slightly higher on the conservative end of the spectrum.

In our dot task, more dogmatic participants made as many mistakes and were as confident as their less dogmatic peers. That meant we could be sure that they didn’t hold these simple judgments dearer than their peers, as they might with their partisanship.

However, we found a striking difference when we looked at how often they purchased the additional information: More dogmatic participants were less willing to ask for helpful information. This reluctance to seek information also didn’t pay off: Their reduced search led more dogmatic thinkers to make less accurate judgments. In the end, they lost money.

The difference between more and less dogmatic people was particularly strong when the participants had little confidence in their initial decisions. In other words, dogmatists were happier to refuse educative information—especially when they weren’t quite sure if their initial judgment was correct.

Our findings are especially concerning today: What we read and hear is, more than ever, in our own hands. At the same time, unfiltered tweets and posts are often our first contact with news stories—not a carefully vetted report. So, even if there is a correction published somewhere, we might never read it unless we care to look for it. Our study suggests that dogmatism predisposes some of us to fall prey to not checking more often.

The fact that we find this lowered search in a simple game also shows that this dogmatism isn’t just a feature of specific opinions but may be driven by more fundamental cognitive characteristics.

Importantly, the differences between more and less dogmatic participants in our study are subtle. We also do not know how information seeking with personally relevant material like news stories might alter our results. Lastly, it remains unclear what comes first: dogmatism or reduced information-seeking?

Regardless, our research tells a cautionary tale, whether we consider ourselves to be dogmatic or not. When we are unsure about something, we shouldn’t just run with it. Rather, we are often better off checking a reliable source.