Who wants to learn harder? The relationship between conservatism and liberalism, desirable difficulties, and academic learning

Previous work has shown that challenging learning strategies like desirable difficulties improve long-term learning. Nonetheless, because they might be regarded as strict and demanding learning strategies, they should not be perceived as positive by everyone. They should, however, fit conservative political attitudes since those are, among others, positively correlated with individuals’ need for order and structure as well as with challenging learning environments. Hence, we hypothesized conservative political attitudes to be correlated with more positive attitudes towards desirable difficulties, towards the use of desirable difficulties at school, towards the preferred difficulty of the learning process, and towards deeper learning strategies. We conducted three online studies assessing US American students’ political attitudes and their attitudes towards such difficult and challenging learning strategies: Study 1 found correlations among more conservative political attitudes and more positive attitudes towards difficult and challenging learning strategies, whereas Study 2 found no significant linkages among these variables. Study 3 then showed that a more conservative political attitude and favorable ratings of Republican politicians, but also more favorable ratings of Democratic politicians were linked to more positive attitudes towards our dependent variables. Self-reported interest in and importance of politics were also positively correlated with positive attitudes towards difficult learning. Our results indicate that students’ political attitudes are generally linked to positive attitudes towards difficult and challenging learning strategies and are therefore important individual characteristics regarding applications and perceptions of these learning strategies. Future work focusing on these relationships, on causal effects, and on further related variables is valuable.