The closed mind: ‘Experience’ and ‘cognition’ aspects of openness to experience and need for closure as psychological bases for right–wing attitudes

Openness to Experience and Need for Closure (NFC) are dispositional variables related to social–cultural right–wing attitudes. The present study investigated their joint effects. Factor analysis revealed an ‘experiential’ dimension with high loading openness items, and a ‘cognition’ dimension with high loadings for most NFC items and about a quarter of the openness item set. The experiential openness items were weakly related to right–wing attitudes, demonstrating little predictive value. Conversely, the cognitive openness and NFC items were powerful predictors of right–wing attitudes, and also played an important role in integrative models, both as a predictor of authoritarianism–based racism and as a mediator of age related increments in right–wing attitudes. It is concluded that right–wing attitudes should be primarily understood in terms of (motivated) cognition, and to a smaller extent in terms of experiential openness. The distinction between ‘experiential’ and ‘cognitive’ openness is critically assessed, and it is asserted that because cognition is a multifaceted construct openness contains more than one cognitive dimension. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.