People with extreme political opinion can not tell when they are wrong, study findings

People with radical political views, on the left and right, are less able to judge when they are wrong, study suggests.

Scientists at the University College of London found that those on the political margins tend to overstate their assurance after having wrong questions.

But the researchers did not experience their knowledge of politics. Instead, they used a simple game where participants had to measure what picture they were presented with more dots.

Their study was an attempt to measure "metacognition" – the term for a person's ability to recognize when they are wrong.

They wanted to establish whether the dogmatic beliefs of political radicals were going to be over-suffering in those specific judgments, or more general differences in metacognition.

In their study, the scientists asked that two groups of around 400 people complete surveys measuring their beliefs and political attitudes toward the world's alternatives.

From these surveys, they identified those on the right side and side of the spectrum.

The characteristics of these individuals were radical views about authorization and intolerance towards others.

Participants were then asked to complete a simple task in which he looked at two pictures and was judged who had the most dots.

After that they were asked to rate their confidence in making their decisions, and the scientists used cash prizes to motivate them to judge their confidence correctly.

"We found people who have radical metacognition radical political beliefs worse than those with more moderate views," said lead author and neuroscience Dr Steve Fleming.

"They often have a wrong assurance when they are actually wrong about something, and are resistant to changing their beliefs in the face of evidence that proves them wrong."

To prove how participants responded to being proven incorrectly, a bonus set of dots was shown to them which should have been blocked towards the correct decision.

For moderators who made the wrong decision the first time, showing that this bonus information has made them less confident in their choice. On the other hand, radicals were held on their initial decision even after seeing evidence suggesting it was wrong.

Although the researchers were confident, their results stood up to scrutiny, repeated in two sets of people, their task explained a little radicalism on the show.

"We suspect this is because the task is completely related to politics – people may even be more dissatisfied to admit that they were inaccurate if politics had come in," said PhD Max Rollwage.

A collection drawn from their study, published in the magazine Current biology, was that failure of recognition was really true across the political spectrum.

They said that this suggests that radicalism has based on a way of thinking that "turns political attractions".