‘Belief superiority’: A reason for the political impasse?

The Washington Post:

As we enter the second week of the government shutdown with legislators unwilling to reach across the aisle to find a compromise, it seems appropriate that a study on extreme political views and “belief superiority” has been published in a scholarly journal.

The results are no surprise: People holding the most extreme views are the ones who are the most convinced they’re not only correct, but that the rest of the world is wrong. That holds true for both liberals and conservatives on the far ends of the political spectrum.

The research, conducted at Duke University, was published in “Psychological Science,” the peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The study was inspired by the 2012 presidential election campaign. “We were looking at things like comments on blogs and pundits and politicians on TV,” Dr. Kaitlin Toner said in a phone interview. “It seemed like there were a lot of people who felt very certain that their views were correct but they contradicted one another and there’s no way that everyone could be 100 percent correct all the time.” Toner, the lead author on the study, did the research while a graduate student at Duke.

Read the whole story: The Washington Post