The Republican Brain (10 page)

Contrary to the claims of Enlightenment idealists, Mercier and Sperber suggest human reason
did not
evolve as a device for getting at the objective truth. Rather, they suggest that its purpose is to facilitate selective arguing in defense of one's position in a social context—something that, we can hardly dispute, we are very good at.

When thought about in the context of the evolution of human language and communication, and cooperation in groups, this makes a lot of sense. There would surely have been a survival value to getting other people in your hunter-gatherer group to listen to you and do what you want them to do—in short, a value to being persuasive. And for the listeners, there would have been just as much of a premium on being able to determine whether a given speaker is reliable and trustworthy, and should be heeded. Thus, everybody in the group would have benefited from an airing of different views, so that their strengths and weaknesses could be debated—regarding, say, where it would be a good place to hunt today or whether the seasons are changing.

Considered in this light, reasoning wouldn't be expected to make us good logicians, but rather, good rhetoricians. And that's what we are. Not only are we very good at selectively cobbling together evidence to support our own case—aided by motivated reasoning and the ubiquitous confirmation bias—but we're also good at seeing the flaws in the arguments of others when they get up on top of the soap box, and slicing and dicing their claims (the so-called “disconfirmation bias”).

When lots of individuals blow holes in one another's claims and arguments, the reasoning of the group should be better than the reasoning of the individual. But at the same time, the individual—or the individual in a self-affirming group that does not provide adequate challenges—is capable of going very wrong, because of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. Thanks to these flaws, the sole reasoner rarely sees what's wrong with his or her logic. Rather, the sole reasoner becomes the equivalent of a crazy hermit in the wilderness—or, to quote the late Frank Zappa, the author of “that tacky little pamphlet in your Daddy's bottom drawer.” And the unchallenged group member becomes like a cult follower.

Mercier's and Sperber's “argumentative theory of reason” provides a strong case for supporting group reasoning processes like the scientific one, which are built around challenges to any one individual's beliefs or convictions. These processes may be the only reliable check on our going vastly astray. By the same token, the theory also suggests that if you insulate yourself from belief challenge, you are leaving yourself vulnerable to the worst flaws of reasoning, without deriving any of the benefits of it.

Humans may be relatively poor reasoners in comparison to some Enlightenment ideal. But that doesn't mean every human is equally bad at reasoning. Nor does it mean that we're all equally inflexible and unwilling to set aside our biases, or change our minds based on new evidence.

At least as it is now constituted, the theory of motivated reasoning does not posit
inherent
liberal-conservative differences in biased reasoning tendencies. Yet I've already discussed a number of motivated reasoning studies—all relating to political or politicized beliefs—in which conservatives seemed to show more bias in favor of their preexisting views (or a stronger rejection of reality) than liberals did. And I also discussed an array of studies in which having more knowledge, or more political expertise, made conservatives' biases worse, not better. All in all, I showed
a lot
of conservative wrongness, defensiveness, and overconfidence, in both public opinion studies and controlled psychology experiments.

But how far can one go with this? It's important to be cautious, because liberals have also been shown to engage in motivated reasoning—just not always as much as conservatives, or not in the same way. In fact, we'll even encounter a few studies in later chapters in which liberals' egalitarian values appeared to make them even
more
biased than conservatives, at least in key contexts.

Other motivated reasoning studies, meanwhile, either don't seem to examine the difference between liberals and conservatives closely, are not designed to do so, or in some cases, find the two groups to be equally biased. And the studies often use different parameters and designs, and focus on different political issues which may excite different emotions—which makes generalizing about them difficult.

Moreover, it is important to reiterate that these motivated reasoning studies only capture individuals' one-time reactions to inconvenient information. They do not study repeated encounters over time.

Based on what we've already seen, though, it is certainly clear that conservatives are often strong motivated reasoners. And this seems to help explain many of their incorrect beliefs, as well as their persistence and their endless rationalizations.

But are liberals just the other side of the same coin? There are a lot of reasons
not
to think so—reasons that are themselves also rooted in published science. In the next section, then, I'll turn to a different strand of research—one explicitly designed to test for liberal-conservative differences—and examine how it maps onto the kinds of biased reasoning behaviors discussed here.

Notes

43
reject the expertise of experts who don't agree with them
Kahan et al, “Cultural Cognition of Scientific Consensus,”
Journal of Risk Research,
Vol. 14, pp. 147–74, 2011. Available online at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1549444
.

44
backfire effect
Nyhan, Brendan and Jason Reifler. 2010. “When Corrections Fail: The Persistence of Political Misperceptions.”
Political Behavior
32(2): 303–330. Available online at http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf.

45
Iraq and Al Qaeda were secrectly collaborating
Monica Prasad et al, “‘There Must Be a Reason': Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification,”
Sociological Inquiry
, Vol. 79, No. 2, May 2009, 142–162.

47
“if they're sophisticated . . .”
Interview with Charles Taber and Milton Lodge, February 3, 2011.

47
a little chart
Pew Research Center for People and the Press, “A Deeper Partisan Divide over Global Warming,” May 8, 2008. Available online at
http://people-press.org/report/417/a-deeper-partisan-divide-over-global-warming
.

48
This finding recurs
Here's a brief rundown: Study A found that less educated Republicans and less educated Democrats—or, Republicans and Democrats who profess to know less about the issue—were closer to one another in their views about whether global warming is really happening. Yet Democrats and Republicans who think they know a lot about the issue were completely polarized, with Republicans quite confident the science is wrong. (Lawrence C. Hamilton, “Climate Change: Partisanship, Understanding, and Public Opinion,” Carsey Institute Issue Brief No. 26, Spring 2011. Available online at
http://www.carseyinstitute.unh.edu/publications/IB-Hamilton-Climate-Change-2011.pdf
.)

Study B found that among Republicans and those with higher levels of distrust of science in general, learning more about the issue doesn't increase one's concern about it. (Ariel Malka, Jon A. Krosnick, and Gary Langer, “The Association of Knowledge with Concern About Global Warming: Trusted Information Sources Shape Public Opinion,”
Risk Analysis,
Vol. 29, No. 5, 2009, finding, “Among people who trust scientists to provide reliable information about the environment and among Democrats and Independents, increased knowledge has been associated with increased concern. But among people who are skeptical about scientists and among Republicans more knowledge was generally not associated with greater concern.”)

Study C found that conservative white males in particular were overwhelmingly more likely to deny climate science than other adults (59 percent versus 36 percent), and those conservative white males who thought they understood the issue were even more likely to be deniers. (Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap, “Cool Dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States,”
Global Environmental Change 21
, p. 1163–1172, 2011.)

Study D found that “the effects of educational attainment and self-reported understanding on global warming beliefs and concern are positive for liberals and Democrats, but are weaker or negative for conservatives and Republicans.” (Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap, “The Politicization of Climate Change and Polarization in the American Public's View of Global Warming, 2001–2010,”
The Sociological Quarterly
, 52, p. 155–194, 2011.)

You could go on like this for some time. The point is that on climate change, the more highly engaged, informed, and educated are
less
amenable to changing their beliefs in the face of the evidence. And this is hardly the only issue where that's the case.

48
the claim that President Obama is a Muslim
John Sides, “Why Do More People Think Obama is a Muslim?”
The Washington Post
, August 26, 2010.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/08/why_do_more_people_think_obama.html
.

48 “
death panels”
Brendan Nyhan, “Why the ‘Death Panel' Myth Wouldn't Die: Misinformation in the Healthcare Reform Debate,”
The Forum
, Volume 8, Issue 1, 2010. Available online at
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~nyhan/health-care-misinformation.pdf
.

49
“education problem”
Ben Geman, “White House official cites ‘education problem' on climate,”
The Hill
, January 30, 2011.
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/141143-white-house-official-cites-capitol-hill-education-problem-on-climate-

49
clever way to test it
Kahan et al, “The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change,” Cultural Cognition Working Paper No. 89, 2011, available online at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503
.

51
“I reached this pro-capital punishment decision”
Interview with Jon Krosnick, January 6, 2011.

51
“their life is going to go less well”
Interview with Dan Kahan, January 7, 2011.

52
a little bit wrong and still alive
Michael Shermer,
The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies, How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
, New York: Henry Holt/Times Books, 2011.

52
reasoning about reasoning all wrong
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, “Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory,”
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
, 2011 (34), 57–111.

52
“hands were made for walking”
Hugo Mercier, “The Argumentative Theory of Reasoning,”
https://sites.google.com/site/hugomercier/theargumentativetheoryofreasoning
.

54
liberals have also been shown to engage in motivated reasoning
See for instance Geoffrey Cohen, “Party Over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 2003, Vol. 85, No. 5, 808–822.

54
don't seem to examine
Taber & Lodge, “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs,”
American Journal of Political Science
, Vol. 50, Number 3, July 2006, pp. 755–769.

54
find the two groups to be equally biased
See for instance Geoffrey Cohen, “Party Over Policy: The Dominating Impact of Group Influence on Political Beliefs,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 2003, Vol. 85, No. 5, 808–822.

Part Two

The “Nature” Hypothesis: Dangerous Certainty

Chapter Three

Political Personalities

If you
really
don't like a scientific result—if it injures your sense of self, or threatens the group with which you associate—the evidence presented in the last two chapters suggests that you will exercise a disconfirmation bias. You will vigorously attack the study, seek to refute it, challenge its funding sources, and hurl any other argument that seems to disparage the finding and, perhaps, those who produced it.

If you don't believe me, go read a blog sometime.

In 2003, a fairly dramatic version of this phenomenon emerged in response to a lengthy and dense study published in the journal
Psychological Bulletin
, which is put out by the American Psychological Association and is one of the most influential publications in the field. The journal is peer reviewed, of course, and focuses on publishing broad overviews, or “reviews,” of the psychology literature. In this case, the overview (technically called a meta-analysis) examined 88 separate samples from studies conducted over the last half century on
political conservatism
—studies from 12 countries and involving, overall, nearly 23,000 individuals.

And the howls from conservatives came fast and furious.

The scientists involved were John Jost of New York University, who has helped spark a revival of research on the psychological underpinnings of political ideology; Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, who stands in similar relation to the psychological study of closed-mindedness; and Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of the University of California at Berkeley. Overall, they found that holding a politically conservative outlook, as measured in a variety of ways over the years (ranging from individuals describing their own ideologies and issue positions to the examination of voting records), was statistically linked to a variety of psychological traits (as measured by personality questionnaires and other types of tests). Not all of those sound so good: dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty, the fear of death, less openness to new experiences, less “integrative complexity” in thinking, more need for “closure,” and so on.

Synthesizing it all, the authors depicted conservatism as an ideology that, by most centrally emphasizing the resistance to change and the acceptance or rationalization of inequality, satisfies key psychological needs. Behind it all, they argued, lay the deep human desire to manage uncertainty and fear, and to do so by finding something certain, stable, and unchanging to believe in and to cling to.

The scientists cautioned that they were
not
arguing that conservatism is pathological, crazy, or anything of the kind. Interviewed recently in his office at NYU—as folk music streamed from his desktop computer—Jost explained that as a social psychologist he studies “the normal,” not the abnormal. That's a whole other branch of psychology. “All these things we talk about in the study, including needs for order, structure, and closure, the management of uncertainty and threat, these are within a completely normal range of responding,” Jost observed. “There is nothing pathological about them.” It's just that these traits are more prevalent on the right—or, their opposite is more prevalent on the left. The study showed both, simultaneously.

Indeed, observes the University of Maryland's Arie Kruglanski, the character traits that tend to accompany conservatism—like patriotism, decisiveness, and loyalty to one's friends and allies—could be considered very valuable and admirable in many contexts. “In times of great uncertainty, decisive leaders, like Churchill and Bush, are more appealing than leaders who are full of ambiguity and indecisiveness, which is what liberals tend to be because of their makeup,” he explains.

If conservatives wanted to refute the claim that they view the world with less complexity than liberals, their response to the Jost study didn't help. Ann Coulter gave perhaps the most stereotypical reply, writing about nuance without . . . any nuance:

Whenever you have backed a liberal into a corner—if he doesn't start crying – he says, “It's a complicated issue.” Loving America is too simple an emotion. To be nuanced you have to hate it a little. Conservatives may not grasp “nuance,” but we're pretty good at grasping treason.

The Christian conservative columnist Cal Thomas, meanwhile, further strengthened the authors' case by describing conservatism as the view that “certain ideas about life, relationships and morality are true for all time regardless of the times.” Exactly.

That was only the beginning of motivated attacks on the research.
National Review
called it the “Conservatives are Crazy” study. Congressional Republicans started investigating Jost's and Kruglanski's federal research grants from the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Mental Health. “When you are basically confiscating money from taxpayers to fund left-wing rhetoric and dress it up as scientific study, I think you have a real problem with credibility,” said Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney. The Berkeley College Republicans demanded an apology for the study's press release, which had waved a red flag in front of a bull by linking together Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Ronald Reagan—a set of
very
different conservatives. That was an error—of interpretation and of tact—a liberal one.

Jost recalls that he was driving across the country with his wife when the feeding frenzy hit. He stopped and checked his email, and found a deluge. “I tried to answer a lot of the emails and respond in a reasonable way,” he says, “and some of them were just incredibly aggressive, and obnoxious and threatening. Ironically, they epitomized all the things they were trying to deny.”

For conservatives, it was over in a matter of days. They'd raged, they'd slammed the study and charged its authors with liberal academic “bias,” and now they could ignore it.

But for the research community, the psychological study of conservatism—which is also the study of liberalism, at least to the extent that liberalism is its inverse—has boomed ever since. And subsequent studies have only reaffirmed the findings published by Jost and his colleagues in 2003, which themselves were built on a longstanding prior body of research.

“Our meta-analysis was based on 88 studies,” says Jost. “I think there are probably as many studies on the psychology of political orientation that have been published since then. And the results clearly stand up.” The original 2003 study has been cited well over 800 times, according to Google Scholar. It is fair to say that it has been very influential in the science realm (although the political realm still conveniently ignores all of this).

As a result of this paper and much follow-up research, there is now a fairly strong consensus on some key findings about the psychological underpinnings of ideology. The broadest and most solid of these is surely the following: In aggregate, political liberals and political conservatives are different
—in ways that extend far beyond mere philosophy or views about public policy.
They have different personalities, psychological needs, and moral intuitions or responses. They are different
people.
To some extent, the Jost study suggested, this even appears to be true across countries and time periods. While there are certainly many variations in ideology that depend on the national or historical context—communist countries in particular put the theory to the test—the core left-right spectrum, originating in the French Revolution, recurs in a wide variety of settings. Such consistency, of course, would make a great deal of sense if the divide has psychological underpinnings—and if, whatever you may call them at a given place or time,
liberals
are pretty universally the agents of change, and
conservatives
(pretty universally) the resisters of it.

Another very broad implication of this research is that liberals are likely to be better at some things, and conservatives at others. Sometimes, decisiveness serves us well; sometimes, you need to pause and let things stew. In fact, the two groups seem to have complementary strengths and weaknesses—almost a kind of yin and yang. Perhaps human societies fare best with both of these elements within them, which may suggest (very tentatively) an evolutionary hypothesis about why we
are
different to begin with. But make no mistake: A growing body of science suggests that we are.

That's why, although these findings are controversial—wildly so, to judge by the response to Jost's 2003 study—if one cares about the truth it is scarcely possible to ignore them any longer. There are too many studies and too much consistency across them. It is hard to believe it could all be a mistake, especially since the results are neither anomalous nor surprising. Rather, they consistently reinforce what has long been folk wisdom about liberals and conservatives.

To capture that folk wisdom, let me quote a prominent political writer, Jonathan Chait of
The New Republic
, on how liberals and conservatives differ. In early 2011, Chait wrote about why he thought there would be a government shutdown—because liberals value compromise and are willing to bend, but conservatives often don't and won't (a very astute psychological observation). In the process, Chait perfectly described one key implication of the Jost research, but without making any direct reference to it:

Liberalism is an ideology that values considering every question through the side of the other fellow and not just through your own perspective. . . The stereotype of liberalism, which is sometimes true, often runs toward bending over so far backward that you can't make obvious moral judgments: Who are we to judge this or that dictator? Criminals are just the result of bad environment. In any case, the joke about liberals—a liberal is somebody who won't even take his own side in an argument—is not a joke you'd hear about conservatives. Now, I think the qualities of confident assertion of principle and willingness to bend both have their place. One of my meta-beliefs about, well, everything is that one needs to be able to understand both black-and-white situations and shades-of-gray situations. In any case, I think conservatives tend to err toward the black-and-white worldview, and liberals toward the shades-of-gray worldview.

Whether he knows it or not, the science says Chait is absolutely right. And it also suggests—based on the complex and nuanced nature of his argument, and his ability to see other perspectives and integrate them into his own—that he's a liberal himself!

It's time, then, to fully survey what we know about liberals and conservatives, because the implications of this knowledge for our political battles over reality are very substantial. As we will see, the two groups have, on average, different cognitive styles, which can be expected to significantly impact the way they process information. In particular, they tend to handle uncertainty and ambiguity very differently. And based on all of this, there are reasons to think they will ultimately differ in their degree of persuadability, openness to new information, and defensiveness about their beliefs.

The simplest opening wedge into what is sometimes called the psychology of ideology involves the study of personality—which is clearly and strongly related to politics.

Over time, psychologists have come up with a widely accepted scale for measuring the so-called “Big Five” traits that characterize the human personality: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (sometimes referred to by its opposite, Emotional Stability). Or, to use the handy acronym in the field, OCEAN. We all possess each of these traits to a greater or lesser degree. It's a bit like we each have five knobs, tuned to a particular amplitude. These traits show up when we are very young—indeed, they are thought to be significantly rooted in genetics, and don't change much over the course of our lifetimes. And they've been shown to persist across cultures, suggesting they may even be part of a universal and biologically grounded human nature.