When Marina Lindel invited to a deliberation participents with pro and anti-immigration attitudes, she found out that anti-immigrationsits tended come less to the experiment (Lindell, 2014, p. 7).
Jost et al, had found that conservatives (in Lindell’s experiment, they are the anti-immigrationists), have higher need for mind closure (Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003), and therefore, I speculate that they may less enjoy deliberation, which naturaly open more options to solutions, and creates more obscurness.
Also, when I had talked with conservatives after deliberative events, they often described it as a nightmare, whereas liberals tended to describe it as enjoying.
Does deliberation is more suited for liberals then to conservatives? How can we overcome this bias, if such exists?
References
1) Lindell, M. (2014). What Drives the Polarization and Moderation of Opinions? Evidence from a Finnish Citizen Experiment on Immigration. In ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops 2014, workshop “Systematising Comparison of Democratic Innovations: Advanced Explanations of the Emergence, Sustenance and Failure of Participatory Institutionsâ€,.
2) Jost, J., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339–375.
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