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Preliminary findings
Today I ran the first analyses of my pilot study of idealism and "cognitive style." In this context, idealism refers to how people answer a short set of questions about how they feel about ideals in general, and different aspects of cognitive style have their own set of questions too.
With all the usual caveats in place about how the ways people represent themselves when answering questions may not reflect how they actually "are," and that the questions may not be measuring what it's claimed they are measuring, and that what surveys tell us about mostly female undergraduates in U.S. universities may not apply generally...
I can report tentatively that people who are "idealistic" also tend to be
less likely to engage in either/or thinking
less likely to make negative overgeneralizations
more tolerant of ambiguity
less in need of structure and predictability
less closed-minded
and, interestingly, more likely to endorse both "rational thinking" and "intuition" in problem-solving.
With all the usual caveats in place about how the ways people represent themselves when answering questions may not reflect how they actually "are," and that the questions may not be measuring what it's claimed they are measuring, and that what surveys tell us about mostly female undergraduates in U.S. universities may not apply generally...
I can report tentatively that people who are "idealistic" also tend to be