closed-mindedness

n. Closed-mindedness is an unwillingness to entertain seriously the validity of conceptions that deviate from one,s own. Closedmindedness is often described in terms of its manifestations, which include a tendency to leap to conclusions while ignoring relevant information and to stick to one's beliefs even if reality proves to have little or nojustification for such beliefs. As a result of these tendencies, closed-mindedness is often associated with black-and-white thinking and ideological extremism. Closed-mindedness refers to a motivational propensity rather than a lack of ability to consider alternative views. For instance, while a lack of intelligence may cause an individual to overlook new information, closed-mindedness typically involves the lack of willingness to do so, or the active willingness to avoid any ideas or conceptions that might threaten the integrity of one's existing knowledge system. Moreover, closed-mindedness can be considered a trait inherent to a particular person, but it may also be evoked by particular situations.

The concept of closed-mindedness has been central in a variety of prominent traditions in psychology. Psychodynamic perspectives have considered closed-mindedness a psychological defense mechanism consisting of a basic mistrust in the world that originates in frustration of the search for oral gratification during early childhood. Lack of such frustration is assumed to create openness to new experiences, a tendency considered to be adaptive in dealing with the outside world. The social excesses that may originate from closed-mindedness have figured prominently in Adorno and Frenkel-Brunswik’s treatment of the authoritarian personality. Their central term, intolerance of ambiguity, a term highlighting the motivational facets of closed-mindedness, is argued to give rise to a type of personality that is especially likely to follow leadership and rules of any kind slavishly.

While the authoritarian personality as a psychological construct was specifically developed to describe and explain the rise of fascist ideology, subsequent theorizing has deemphasized the relation between closedmindedness and ideological content. In the early 1960s, Rokeach was especially influential in stressing that closed-mindedness, as captured by him under the label of dogmatism, is to be understood as a process rather than a content. Irrespective of the ideology one may hold, the closed as opposed to the open mind manifests itself through the aversion to anything that deviates from this ideology.

This process-based, content-free analysis of closed-mindedness dominates the recent history and contemporary thinking on the phenomenon. Closed-mindedness is also taken out of the realm of the pathological. While it may be the result of a traumatic experience, closedmindedness is now considered by many a natural response to a social world characterized by an informational load that would be impossible to deal with using piecemeal processing alone. It may not be - just - personal uncertainties that give rise to closed-mindedness; situations may also necessitate an information processing strategy whereby reliance on existing knowledge is preferred to new information. Furthermore, to the extent it can be considered a normal, adaptive response to complex environments, closed-mindedness should encompass a broad range of implications, not only related to one’s belief system, or how one treats different-minded others, but also to basic information processing strategies.

Over the past decades, research on the need for nonspecific closure by Arie Kruglanski and colleagues has indeed unveiled such a wide range of implications of closed-mindedness for the processing of (social) information. The need for closure refers to the desire for immediate and definite knowledge and the aversion to the uncertainties associated with the lack thereof. Given the conceptual overlap of the need for closure and closedmindedness, the research program on the need for closure provides important insights for the understanding of closed-mindedness. Consistently with the modern view of closed-mindedness, the need for closure is considered both a personality characteristic and a state that can be induced in a particular situation. A number of factors may help to induce the need for closure. In an experimental setting, a state of closed-mindedness is often created by having participants perform particular tasks under heightened time pressure while performing cognitively demanding tasks or while being exposed to aversive ambient noise.

At the heart of the need for closure research program lies the notion that the way ordinary people come to believe particular things is essentially the same as the way scientists arrive at their insights. Like scientists, laypeo- ple begin to believe by observing, developing expectancies about a particular domain, and subsequently testing and evaluating the validity of these expectancies. These processes of hypothesis generation and hypothesis validation are of relevance to demarcate the workings of the closed versus the open mind.

Within this framework, closed-mindedness is to be understood as a tendency to use relatively few observations to form particular hypotheses and to consider relatively few pieces of evidence to accept the hypotheses. Closed-mindedness thus manifests itself in very basic psychological operations, as well as more complex forms of social behavior and thought. On a basic level, closed-mindedness restricts the extent to which information is deemed useful to form a particular judgment. It further limits the number of hypotheses that an individual is willing to generate while making a particular judgment. Research has also revealed that closed-minded individuals tend to have greater confidence in the hypotheses they do form than their open- minded counterparts. Furthermore, closedmindedness has been found to encompass information search strategies that confirm existing categorizations rather than enable further crystallization of stimulus information, thus showing that closed-mindedness not only affects the amount of information processing, but also the type of information that is processed.

Closed-mindedness is also associated with the tendency to base a judgment on early cues. Closed-minded individuals are thus especially likely to base impressions of a target on information presented early versus late in a sequence, a phenomenon called the primacy effect. The use of early cues is also reflected in their greater likelihood to exhibit anchoring effects, whereby information that is presented just prior to a particular judgment comes to play a particularly influential role in that judgment. In the domain of social perception and communication, closed-mindedness encompasses a variety of implications. Their greater reliance on existing knowledge makes closed-minded individuals especially likely to base interpersonal judgments on stereotypes. More generally, closed-mindedness has been found to reduce the ability to empathize with interaction partners and to tune one’s communications and adaptations to intended audiences, thus reducing effective communication and interaction.

On a group level, the motivational nature of closed-mindedness implies the utility of membership of groups that share a similar reality with the closed-minded individual. As a result, the group dynamics among the closed-minded is characterized by a cluster of features that serve to reduce uncertainty and maintain a simple, stable shared reality. Research has identified a number of these features, including pressures to opinion uniformity among group members, endorsement of an autocratic leadership and decision-making structure, intolerance of diversity in group composition (that betokens the potentiality for dissent), rejection of opinion deviates and extolment of conformists, in-group favoritism and out-group derogation, attraction to groups (both in- and out-groups) possessing strongly shared realities, conservatism and adherence to the group’s norms, and loyalty to one's in-group qualified by the degree to which it constitutes a “good” shared reality provider.

The research showing these relations between closed-mindedness and group dynamics has often induced the state of mind by using techniques such as imposing time pressure or having participants perform particularly cognitively demanding tasks. Hence, also with regard to group dynamics, the concept of closed-mindedness has been

studied in mundane and content-free ways. Nonetheless, despite the ease with which experimental techniques can be employed to induce closed-mindedness, its often adaptive function in particular contexts, and its frequent manifestations in everyday life, the concept continues to have a pejorative connotation. A recent publication arguing that there might be a relation between political conservatism and closed-mindedness has given rise to considerable controversy both inside and outside academia. The controversy again centered on the alleged suggestion that political conservatism in the light of its relation with the need for closure could be considered a pathological tendency, thus raising issues reminiscent of Adorno's work on the authoritarian personality. Nonetheless, it should be stressed that the contemporary analysis of closed-mindedness suggests that it can be adaptive in dealing with particular situations. For example, closed-mindedness may be associated with generally valued characteristics such as personal commitment and unwavering loyalty. As such, the contemporary concept of closed-mindedness does not encompass any guidance for demarcating the normal from the pathological.

- md, ak