Research shows while people with moderate attitudes tend to be more evenhanded, those on the extreme ends of the political spectrum seem especially convinced that their viewpoints are the only "correct" ones.

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People with the most extreme political views tend to feel superior to others and think most strongly that their beliefs are better than everyone else’s

As the government shutdown drags on, the new finding adds to a growing understanding about how basic psychological phenomena can contribute to the passions people often develop for their opinions. When those opinion-holders are politicians, consequences can be disastrous.

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“My guess is that people feeling superior about their beliefs is part of what’s going on in Congress,” said Kaitlin Toner, a social psychologist now at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, who worked on the new study while at Duke University in Durham, N.C.

“If you feel superior about what you believe, there’s little reason to compromise,” she said. “If you think you’re right and everyone else is wrong, it would be hard to come to a middle ground.”

During the 2012 elections, Toner became interested in what drove pundits and politicians to feel so sure about their views, regardless of which side of the aisle they were on. Not everyone could be right all the time, she figured. So what made people from diverse standpoints believe unwaveringly that their ideas were the best ones?

Plenty of previous research has focused on dogmatism, or ideological inflexibility, and study after study has shown that conservatives tend to be the most rigid and unwilling to change their views.

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Toner and colleagues chose instead to look at the sense of superiority, which can apply to people’s beliefs about everything from environmental issues to the use of cell phones in public and even whether Coke or Pepsi is the better soda. In all of these cases, Toner has found, people often think their views are both right and better than those of people who disagree.

To see how superiority might apply to politics, the researchers used online surveys to assess the beliefs of more than 500 people about nine controversial issues, including affirmative action, illegal immigration, voter identification and the government’s role in health care.

On a four or five-point scale, participants rated how conservative or liberal their views were on each topic. They also ranked how correct their beliefs were compared to other people's and they answered questions that assessed their level of dogmatism.

Consistent with earlier studies, people with more conservative views were more dogmatic and rigid. But when it came to superiority, the researchers reported in the journal Psychological Science, it didn’t matter if views were liberal or conservative.