The Republican Brain (3 page)

Such is the evidence I'm going to present, the story I'm going to tell. In its course, I'll introduce information that will discomfort both sides—not only conservatives. They won't like hearing that they're often wrong and dogmatic about it, so they may dogmatically resist this conclusion. They may also try to turn the tables and pretend liberals are the closed-minded ones, ignoring volumes of science in the process. (I'm waiting, Ann Coulter.)

But liberals will also be forced to look in the mirror, and if I'm right about their personality traits they'll be more open to doing so. As a result, some will learn from these pages that their refutations of false conservative claims
don't work
and should not be expected to work—and that they should not irrationally cling to the idea that somehow they should.

For after all, what
about
liberals? Aren't we wrong too, and dogmatic too?

The typical waffling liberal answer is, “er . . . sort of.” Liberals aren't always right—I'll show some cases where they're misguided and even fairly doctrinaire about it—but that's not the central problem. Our particular dysfunction is, typically, more complex and even paradoxical.

On the one hand, we're absolutely outraged by partisan misinformation. Lies about “death panels.” People seriously thinking that President Obama is a Muslim. Climate change denial.
Debt ceiling
denial. These things drive us crazy, in large part because we can't comprehend how such intellectual abominations could possibly exist. I can't tell you how many times I've heard a fellow liberal say, “I can't believe the Republicans are so stupid they can believe X!”

And not only are we enraged by lies and misinformation; we want to refute them—to argue, argue, argue about why we're right and Republicans are wrong. Indeed, we often act as though right-wing misinformation's defeat is nigh, if we could only make people wiser and more educated (just like us) and get them the medicine that is correct information.

In this, we both underestimate conservatives, and we fail to understand them.

To begin to remedy that defect, let's go back to the
Conservapedia
-relativity dustup, and make an observation that liberals and physicists did not always credit. No matter how hard it is to understand how someone could devote himself to an enterprise like
Conservapedia,
its author—Andrew Schlafly—is not stupid. Quite the contrary.

He's a Harvard Law School graduate. He has an engineering degree from Princeton, and used to work both for Intel and for Bell Labs. His relativity entry is filled with equations that I myself can neither write nor solve. He hails from a highly intellectual conservative family—his mother, Phyllis, is also Harvard educated and, according to her biographer, excelled in school at a time when women too rarely had the opportunity to compete with men at that level. Mother and son thus draw a neat, half-century connection between the birth of modern American conservatism on the one hand, and the insistence that conservatives have their own “facts,” better than liberal facts thank you very much, on the other.

So it is not that Schlafly, or other conservatives as sophisticated as he, can't make an argument. Rather, the problem is that when Schlafly makes an argument, it's hard to believe it has anything to do with real intellectual give and take or an openness to changing his mind. His own words suggest that he's arguing to reaffirm what he already thinks (his “faith”), to defend the authorities he trusts, and to bolster the beliefs of his compatriots, his tribe, his team.

Liberals (and scientists) have too often tried to dodge the mounting evidence that this is how people work. Too often, they've failed to think as we will in this book, perhaps because it leads to a place that terrifies them: an anti-Enlightenment world in which evidence and argument don't work to change people's minds.

But that response, too, is a form of denial—
liberal
denial, a doctrine whose chief delusion is not so much the failure to accept facts, but rather, the failure to understand conservatives. And that denial can't continue. Because as President Obama's first term has shown—from the health-care battle to the debt ceiling crisis—ignoring the psychology of the right has not only left liberals frustrated and angry, but has left the country in a considerably worse state than that.

Let me give you a word about my methodology, followed by a brief roadmap.

My approach in dealing with this topic is that of a science journalist first—but also, when necessary, a political analyst and commentator. My discussions of the psychology and the cognitive neuroscience of why people deny facts and resist persuasion, and why liberals and conservatives differ, are all based on large volumes of published, peer-reviewed research—along with scores of interviews with the experts working in this field.

At times I also make inferences, rooted in published science, about what the next step for research might be—or, about the broader implications of current knowledge. Here, I have generally interviewed experts to make sure the inference is not an unreasonable one, and often, I've quoted them on the point. That said, I realize that some of my conclusions will be controversial, and none of the scientists quoted or cited here should be presumed to agree with everything I say. They're not responsible for my claims—only I am.

This book is broken into five sections, so let me briefly summarize what they are.

Before we can begin to understand conservative unreason, we need a scientifically informed account of unreason in general—and to sweep away any lingering delusions about the power of old-fashioned Enlightenment “rationality.” To that end, Part I begins with a tragic story about how human rationality is supposed to work—a tragic
liberal
story set in Revolutionary France, where our political differences were first defined on a left-right spectrum. Alas, we simply don't reason in the way that some in the “Age of Reason” thought we should, and to explain why, I'll explore a phenomenon that psychologists and political scientists call “motivated reasoning.” As a result, I'll show that—sadly for the Enlightenment vision of humanity—human reason, standing on its own, isn't really a very good tool for getting at truth, and may not have even been designed (by evolution) for this purpose.

All people reason in a motivated, biased way some of the time—just think of some of the arguments you had during your last relationship. But that doesn't necessarily make us all equally resistant to persuasion, or equally closed-minded. Part II therefore explores the two core political ideologies—liberalism and conservatism—and what psychologists have learned about their underlying motivations and attributes. In the process, I'll synthesize a body of psychological evidence suggesting conservatives may be
more
rigid, less flexible in their style of thinking. But I'll also show the counterpoint—perhaps it is tougher to detect this left-right bias differential than we may think, and the cause of the present reality gap between liberals and conservatives lies elsewhere. And I'll examine what is in some ways the most revolutionary idea at all—the increasingly powerful notion that, while the environment assuredly matters, much of the left-right difference may ultimately be influenced by genetics, and even detectable in structures in the brain.

Yet it would be foolish to claim that psychology determines everything. Our core differences are real, but they are also set against the shifting backdrop of U.S. politics, where the Republican Party has lurched to the right in the past four decades, grown more ideological and authoritarian, and consequently alienated many scholars, scientists, and intellectuals with its repeated assaults on their knowledge—pushing them further into the liberal camp.

In Part III, then, I'll consider the changing and increasingly polarized political context, and how these
environmental
factors have interacted with our ideological predispositions. To that end, this section tracks the growth of the modern right, and shows how conservatives have forged their own sources of “counterexpertise” in an array of think tanks and ideologically sympathetic media outlets—even as, in response, the expert class as a whole has shifted further to the left. The section also examines the process that political scientists and psychologists call
selective exposure
: How we sort ourselves into different information streams that reaffirm our core convictions—an effect that cable and the Internet seem to have put on speed, with Fox News serving as our case in point.

By this point the book's central argument will be established, and Part IV summarizes where that leaves us. Here I will show that while liberals aren't always right, conservatives are
vastly more wrong
today about science and the facts in general—and, to give two case studies, economics and American history. And given motivated reasoning, liberal-conservative differences, selective exposure, and the growth of right-wing counterexpertise and today's fractured media, we can begin to understand why. In fact, the truly monumental state of conservative wrongness about the facts is itself powerful evidence that my combined psychological and environmental interpretation has something going for it.

At the close of Part IV, I'll weigh potential counterarguments. To that end, I'll examine three prominent issues where liberals, it is alleged, tend to be more wrong about science and the facts than conservatives—natural gas extraction using an increasingly controversial (although not particularly new) technology called “fracking,” the safety of nuclear power, and the nonexistent relationship between childhood vaccines and autism. Here I'll show that, although some liberals (or occupants of the political left) do seem to err seriously on these issues—and not surprisingly, for these issues push particular buttons that make liberals emotional and biased—there's something else going on, too, that makes the outcome very different from leading cases of conservative denial of the facts.

Part V then presents something fairly novel in a journalistic work like this one—a new psychology experiment. Here, I'll describe how I collaborated with a political scientist named Everett Young to test whether conservatives and liberals differ in their basic tendency to engage in motivated reasoning—a hypothesis implied by the well-known differences between liberals and conservatives, but not yet proven. And what did we find? You may be surprised—we certainly were.

Finally, the conclusion explains
what we must do
in light of what science is beginning to reveal about our political psychology, and indeed, our biopolitics.

Notes

1
285 million page views
As of September 15, 2011. See
http://www.conservapedia.com/Special:Statistics
.

1
BCE . . . rather than B.C.
Stephanie Simon, “A Conservative's Answer to Wikipedia,”
Los Angeles Times
, June 19, 2007.

1
“It's impossible for an encyclopedia to be neutral”
National Public Radio, “Conservapedia: Data for Birds of a Liberal Feather?” March 13, 2007. Available online at
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=8286084
.

1
37,000 plus pages of content
As of September 15, 2011. See
http://www.conservapedia.com/Special:Statistics
.

1
wrongly claiming Conservapedia
, “Causes of Homosexuality,” accessed September 16, 2011. See
http://conservapedia.com/Causes_of_Homosexuality
.

1
contrary to psychological consensus
American Psychological Association, “Sexual orientation and homosexuality,” noting, “most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation”; “lesbian, gay, and bisexual orientations are not disorders. Research has found no inherent association between any of these sexual orientations and psychopathology”; and “To date, there has been no scientifically adequate research to show that therapy aimed at changing sexual orientation (sometimes called reparative or conversion therapy) is safe or effective.” See
http://www.apa.org/helpcenter/sexual-orientation.aspx
.