The present research investigated the reason for mixed evidence concerning the relationship between analytic cognitive style (ACS) and political orientation in previous research. Most past research operationalized ACS with the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), which has been criticized as relying heavily on numeracy skills, and operationalized political orientation with the single-item self-placement measure, which has been criticized as masking the distinction between social and economic conservatism. The present research recruited an Amazon Mechanical Turk sample and, for the first time, simultaneously employed three separate ACS measures (CRT, CRT2, Baserate conflict problems), a measure of attitudes toward self-critical and reflective thinking (the Actively Open-Minded Thinking Scale; AOT), and separate measures of social and economic conservatism, as well the standard measure of political orientation. As expected, the total ACS score (combination of the separate measures) was negatively related to social, but not economic, conservatism. However, the CRT by itself was not related to conservatism, in parallel with some past findings, while the two other measures of ACS showed the same pattern as the combined score. Trait reflectiveness (AOT) was related negatively to all measures of political conservatism (social, economic, and general). Results clearly suggest that the conclusion reached regarding the ACS-political orientation relationship depends on the measure(s) used, with the measure most commonly employed in past research (CRT) behaving differently than other measures. Future research must further pursue the implications of the known differences (e.g., reliance on numeracy vs. verbal skills) of ACS measures and distinguish different senses of reflectiveness.

The interplay between intuitive and deliberative processing is known to be important for human decision making. As independent modes, intuitive processes can take on many forms from associative to constructive, while deliberative processes often rely on some notion of decision theoretic rationality or pattern matching. Dual process models attempt to unify these two modes based on parallel constraint networks or on socially or emotionally oriented adjustments to utility functions. This paper presents a new kind of dual process model that unifies decision theoretic deliberative reasoning with intuitive reasoning based on shared cultural affective meanings in a single Bayesian sequential model. Agents constructed according to this unified model are motivated by a combination of affective alignment (intuitive) and decision theoretic reasoning (deliberative), trading the two off as a function of the uncertainty or unpredictability of the situation. The model also provides a theoretical bridge between decision-making research and sociological symbolic interactionism. Starting with a high-level view of existing models, we advance Bayesian Affect Control Theory (BayesACT) as a promising new type of dual process model that explicitly and optimally (in the Bayesian sense) trades off motivation, action, beliefs and utility. We demonstrate a key component of the model as being sufficient to account for some aspects of classic cognitive biases about fairness and dissonance, and outline how this new theory relates to parallel constraint satisfaction models.

In commenting on the articles in this Editors' Forum, three questions are addressed: (i) how should we operationalize and measure creative outputs to enable a sound analysis of cross-cultural differences in creativity; (ii) could it be that culture impacts not only the valuation of originality and usefulness but also the psychological processes through which original yet useful ideas and insights are achieved; and (iii) does culture impact the domains in which individuals are more or less motivated to perform creatively? Using recent work on creativity as a starting point, and the key findings reported in this Editors' Forum, I propose that new research on culture and creativity would benefit from separating creative products from creative processes, and would do justice to the nature and functionality of cultures by asking not only when and how individuals and groups achieve creativity, but also why they would bother to be creative in the first place.