Openness is unrelated to any type of resistance against opposing political views; conscientious individuals are hesitant to actively resist incongruent opinions; agreeable individuals avoid political information that challenge their beliefs

Dispositioned to resist? The Big Five and resistance to dissonant political views. Chiara Valli, Alessandro Nai. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 207, June 2023, 112152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2023.112152

Highlights

• Openness is unrelated to any type of resistance against opposing political views.

• Conscientious individuals are hesitant to actively resist incongruent opinions.

• Extraverts defend their political attitudes by bolstering their preexisting views.

• Agreeable individuals avoid political information that challenge their beliefs.

• Neurotic individuals experience negative affect to oppositional political views.

Abstract: This article investigates how dispositional traits influence the way individuals resist dissonant political information. More specifically, the relationship between the Big Five personality traits and four resistance strategies (avoidance, contesting, empowering, and negative affect) is explored. To do so, we present new evidence from an online survey where respondents from a Swiss sample (N = 936) were exposed to tailored counterarguments on a political initiative and asked to report their cognitive, behavioral, and affective responses to the dissonant messages. Against our expectations, openness is unrelated to any type of resistance. Conscientious individuals are hesitant to actively resist counter-attitudinal political information, while extraverts defend their attitude by bolstering their preexisting views. Similar tendencies are visible for agreeable respondents, although these individuals primarily rely on avoiding dissonant political content. Individuals high on neuroticism exhibit a strong emotional response by reacting with negative affect to oppositional political information.

Keywords: PersonalityBig FivePolitical disagreementResistanceConflict behavior

5. Discussion

Following research that showed that people's reaction to social conflict and, importantly, opposing political views varies with their predispositions, this study examined the role of personality in people's resistance against incongruent political opinions. To do so, we exposed participants to a tailored counterargument on a political issue and analyzed their responses in form of four distinct types of resistance strategies, namely contesting, avoidance, empowering, and negative affect.

In line with a recent study on the effect of personality on the evaluation of political counterarguments, and opinion change (Nai et al., 2023), we did not find any association between openness and resistance to opposing political views. Given that openness is one of the personality traits most often related to political behavior (e.g., Mondak, 2010), we suspect that these nonsignificant results are a product of competing lower-level facets, however. Future research should, thus, replicate these findings with longer inventories that allow a more “granular identification of motivational, emotional, and behavioral tendencies” (Xu et al., 2021, p.755).

Conscientious individuals were relatively cautious about resisting opposing political views and were especially unlikely to experience negative affect. While we cannot rule out that these results come from a response bias – that is, conscientious individuals are more wary to “openly” challenge opposing positions because they want to comply with social norms –, their lack of engagement might reflect their tendency to inhibit their impulses. Because conscientious individuals are susceptible to directions from authority figures (Alkiş & Taşkaya Temizel, 2015), they might have also responded to the source of the counter-attitudinal message, which we operationalized as an official referendum committee. Future research should explore these source cues more carefully.

Next, we find that extraverted individuals resist opposing political views by bolstering their prior political views. A closer look at the index of empowering strategies reveals that this effect is driven by social validation (i.e., reminding oneself that significant others share the same opinion). Because extraverts are social in nature, they might seek reassurance from their social environment when their opinions are challenged. This idea seems to align with earlier research that suggests that extraverts are significantly affected by the opinions of their peers (Alkiş & Taşkaya Temizel, 2015).

Similar to extraverts, agreeable individuals value the ideas of their social circle (Alkiş & Taşkaya Temizel, 2015). In line with this, our data shows that agreeable individuals remind themselves that others in their environment share their views. However, if they can, they will avoid confrontation with alternative political information. Out of the Big Five, agreeable individuals also seem the most resistant. Although surprising, this finding somewhat aligns with previous studies that emphasized the importance of conflict-orientation in understanding people's reactions to political disagreement (e.g., Testa et al., 2014).

Although neurotic individuals react to opposing views with negative affect, they do not seem to avoid such confrontation. Instead of withdrawing from the confrontation – which we hypothesized – we have indications that they engage with the opposing views through contesting and empowering strategies, even if only marginally. Thus, the expected mechanism might be reversed: neurotic individuals become activated precisely because they find counter-attitudinal views emotionally upsetting. This logic aligns with previous findings that show that the strongest motive for neurotic individuals to comment on news stories is when the story affects them emotionally (Barnes et al., 2018).

5.1. Limitations

This article does not come without limitations: first, several resistance strategies were assessed with short forms of established scales. Although most measurements showed good reliability, shorter measurements can impede construct validity. Second, we relied on self-reported measures, which might be subject to response bias. We urge future research to replicate these findings using longer, established measurements and, where possible, thought-listing techniques to examine people's response to controversial information. Next, we used a relatively short 10-item personality battery to examine the Big Five, which fails to capture the subdimensions of the personality traits. Last, we specifically focused on resistance to opposing political views and thereby, neglected the possibility of more positive responses.

5.2. Implications

Arguing for the importance of cross-cutting exposure for a functioning democracy, most of the literature focused on how personality influences people's willingness to expose themselves to political disagreement. The findings of this study emphasize the need to go beyond the question of who is exposed to incongruent information and ask how these individuals react to that information. From a theoretical perspective, this study, thus, adds to the literature by looking at an additional step in the information processing sequence which begins with the exposure to a communication, continues with the processing and is followed by the evaluation of that information (Minson & Chen, 2022, p. 94). In terms of personality research more broadly, this study again illuminates the predictive power of personality and highlights that these stable characteristics influence behavioral and attitudinal tendencies above and beyond specific situational contexts (e.g., organizational conflict).

From a broader societal perspective, this study can shed new light on the psychological mechanism related to political extremism, including recent events such as the violent occupation of government buildings in the US and Brazil. In a world increasingly defined by political contrasts and ideological oppositions, knowing why and under which conditions citizens resist incongruent political views likely matters for scholars, public officials, and democracy practitioners alike.