According to one of the classical psychological theories of ideology, conservatism is associated with a simple, intuitive, unsophisticated, rigid, and authoritarian cognitive and psychological style. This rather unflattering portrait of conservatives has been the target of criticism lately. Critics have argued that it is a product of a “liberal bias” and hostility toward conservatism among social and political psychologists. Studies have been designed to show that the associations between the aforementioned characteristics and political ideology are symmetrical—or in other words, that extremists of any ideological persuasion are simple-minded, rigid, authoritarian, and susceptible to cognitive biases. Some of the criticism of the classical “rigidity-of-the-right” theory is undoubtedly warranted. But the problem…