One interesting concept the researchers touched on in their survey was respondents’ levels of so-called ‘need for cognitive closure.’ The higher your NCC, the less comfortable you are with ambiguity. So as co-author Dannagal Young put it to me in an email, 'The phenomenon of transgender people (and hence rights) ought to be problematic for individuals uncomfortable with ambiguous or uncertain situations or constructs.’ Sure enough, the researchers found that need for closure predicted reduced support for trans rights. It wasn’t a huge effect, but it was statistically significant, and was twice as strong a predictor as party identification, and 2/3 percent as strong as religiosity — meaning need for cognitive closure explained the differences in support for trans rights even when the researchers controlled for these, and other, variables as well.