The relationship between tolerance of ambiguity and attitudinal conservatism: a multidimensional analysis

The predictions of four social psychological theories of the relationship between cognitive style and conservatism-the theory of the authoritarian personality, extremism theory, context theory, and value pluralism theory-are examined in two empirical studies. Unlike previous research, these studies employ a measure of ambiguity tolerance, the Attitudinal Ambiguity Tolerance scale, which can assess cross-content variability in cognitive style. The results of the two studies conflict with the expectations of all four theories. In particular, only certain aspects of conservatism were related to ambiguity tolerance toward a particular content domain; and massive variability was evident in the shape of the relationship between ambiguity tolerance and conservatism across different content domains of ambiguity tolerance. The results are discussed in terms of value conflict which arises from endorsing conservative beliefs in a liberal institutional context. (C) 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.