Thinking like a patriot: Criticising the country and the nation is linked to the differences in thinking style and cognitive ability

Abstract

Some forms of national identification facilitate criticism of one's own country and nation, whereas others prevent it. The critical form of national identification – constructive patriotism – is characterized by the willingness to criticise the group in order to improve it. The uncritical form of national identification – glorification – is characterized by seeing the group as superior to others and by intolerance of criticism of the group. We used dual-process theories to examine whether differences in thinking style and cognitive ability help predict the emergence of the critical and uncritical form of national identification. We ran three correlational studies (total N = 2509) in Poland including two samples representative of Polish society. We ran an internal meta-analysis to summarise the obtained results from all studies. We found that constructive patriotism was positively linked with need for cognition (i.e., the willingness to engage in slow, effortful information processing; for the random effect model r = 0.18). Constructive patriotism was also positively linked with cognitive ability (r = 0.07). In contrast, glorification was negatively associated with need for cognition (r = -0.26) and cognitive ability (r = -0.09). Glorification was also positively linked with faith in intuition (r = 0.14).