Rethinking cognitive style in psychology

Bibliography: leaves 240-257.This thesis proposes to answer a single question: do the stylistic features of cognition operate independently of cognitive contents? The question itself has a history, and the way it has been framed, and the types of answers it has attracted have been related to ideological and political interests. Chapter 1 reviews four social psychological theories of the relationship between cognitive style and ideological beliefs - authoritarianism, extremism theory, context theory, and value pluralism theory. It argues that these (empiricist) accounts have been bedeviled by a tension between theoretical universalism and political critique, and have fostered the view that cognitive traits are stable, general, and pervasive properties of individual psychology. Chapter 2 focuses on the construct of intolerance of ambiguity, and shows how - in the manner of Danziger's (1985) "methodological circle" - universalistic assumptions have become incorporated into measurement instruments; and how all evidence of individual variability in cognitive style has been accommodated by interactionist models of personality, leaving the empiricist view intact. Roy Bhaskar's critical realism is used as an alternative to a empiricist psychology, and Michael Billig's rhetorical psychology is used as an alternative to universalistic theories of cognitive style. A measurement procedure is developed which can assess cross-content variability in ambiguity tolerance. Three studies are performed in order to justify a move towards an anti-universalistic conception of cognitive style. Study l evaluates the hypothesized generality of ambiguity tolerance on a sample of university students. Factor analysis and correlational matrices show that ambiguity tolerance toward different authorities is domain specific, and that different factors are related to each other positively, negatively, and orthogonally. Study 2 employs the same sample, and uses polynomial regression analysis to show that the relationship between ambiguity tolerance and ideological conservatism is highly variable across content domain. Study 3 replicates these central findings with another student sample and with different scale contents. The results of all three studies arc contrary to the predictions of the social psychological accounts of cognitive style. They show that expressions of cognitive style are context- and content-dependent, and suggest that the empiricist "thing-like" ontology be replaced with a praxis- and concept-dependent ontology