The Psychology That Leads People to Vote for Extremists & Autocrats: The Theory of Cognitive Closure

There’s a polit­i­cal dis­con­nect in the Unit­ed States. We have two polit­i­cal par­ties, each now liv­ing in its own real­i­ty and work­ing with its own set of facts. The com­mon ground between them? Next to none.

How to explain this dis­con­nect? Maybe the answer lies in the the­o­ry of “cog­ni­tive closure”–a the­o­ry first worked out by social psy­chol­o­gist Arie Kruglan­s­ki back in 1989.

“Peo­ple’s pol­i­tics are dri­ven by their psy­cho­log­i­cal needs,” Kruglan­s­ki explains in the short doc­u­men­tary above. “Peo­ple who are anx­ious because of the uncer­tain­ty that sur­rounds them are going to be attract­ed to mes­sages that offer cer­tain­ty.”

He sips a soda, then con­tin­ues, “The need for clo­sure is the need for cer­tain­ty, to have clear cut knowl­edge. You feel that you need to stop pro­cess­ing too much infor­ma­tion, to stop lis­ten­ing to a vari­ety of view­points, and zero in on what appears to be, to you, the truth.” “The need for clo­sure tricks your mind to believe you have the truth, even though you haven’t exam­ined the evi­dence very care­ful­ly.” And that, unfor­tu­nate­ly, can be very dan­ger­ous.

Kruglan­ski’s the­o­ry could help explain the rise of Nazism in the eco­nom­i­cal­ly-depressed Weimar Ger­many. And it’s per­haps why, across much of our eco­nom­i­cal­ly stag­nat­ing world, we’re see­ing pop­u­la­tions lurch toward extreme ide­olo­gies and auto­crat­ic per­son­al­i­ties. “The divi­sions, the polar­iza­tion, it’s all part of the same psy­cho­log­i­cal syn­drome,” says Kruglan­s­ki.

So what’s the cure? Lis­ten to oth­er points of view. Look at all avail­able infor­ma­tion. And, most of all, be sus­pi­cious of your own sense of right­eous.

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