[jkldotio]

Getting a representative sample in social science is really hard.

"The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That’s lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it’s well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It’s also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both"[0]

How many richer people are spending their days on Mechanical Turk? The authors don't seem to have collected any income, educational or other data that might help us ascertain how representative their sample is. Even when completely random 196 people is a fairly small sample in social science although it's much larger than many psychology studies, which seems to be the background of the authors. Other discussion[1] seems to suggest the people using the service are not very representative of the population at large.

[0]http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-mythology-of-trumps-...

[1] http://themonkeycage.org/2012/12/how-representative-are-amaz...

[mistermann]

Not saying you should draw any conclusions from this, but something I noticed:

"Second, research has shown that conservative attitudes are related to relying on intuitive thinking styles [5] while cognitive complexity (i.e., the tendency to construct a variety of perspectives for viewing an issue) is avoided [6,7]"

[5] leads to:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886909... Authoritarianism and its relationship with intuitive-experiential cognitive style and heuristic processing

So the author conveniently swapped conservative in for authoritarianism.

It's kind of ironic because I can most definitely imagine some of my left-leaning friends using this study as yet more "proof" of their side's righteousness.