by is Mooney
It’s an easy tale for me to tell—I’ve told a version of it before, in my 2005 book The Republican War on Science. For science in particular, the “environmental” account runs something like this:
At least since the time of Ronald Reagan, but arcing back further, the modern American conservative movement has taken control of the Republican Party and aligned it with a key set of interest groups who have had bones to pick with various aspects of scientific reality—most notably, corporate anti-regulatory interests and religious conservatives. And so these interests fought back against the relevant facts—and Republican leaders, dependent on their votes, joined them, making science denial an increasingly important part of the conservative and Republican political identity.
Thus, for instance, the religious right (then the “Moral Majority”) didn’t like evolution. And so Ronald Reagan made anti-evolutionary remarks (as, later, did George W. Bush). Corporate interests, chiefly electric power companies, didn’t like the science showing they were contributing to acid rain. And they had big money—and big motives—to resist it. So Reagan’s administration denied the science on this subject and ran out the clock on dealing with it—just as, later, George W. Bush would do on another environmental problem to which power companies (and oil companies, and many other types of companies) contribute: global warming.
Meanwhile, party allegiances created a strange bedfellows effect. The enemy of one’s friend was also an enemy, so we saw conservative Christians denying climate science, and pharmaceutical companies donating heaps of money to a party whose Christian base regularly attacks biomedical research. Despite these contradictions, economic and social conservatives profited enough from their allegiance that it was in the interests of both to hold it together.
In such an account, the problem of conservative science denial is ascribed to political opportunism—rooted in the desire to appease either religious impulses or corporate profit motives. But is this the right answer?
It isn’t wrong, exactly. There’s much truth to it. Yet it completely ignores what we now know about the psychology of our politics.
The environmental account ascribes Republican science denial (and for other forms of denial, the story would be similar) to the particular exigencies and alignments of American political history. That’s what the party did because it had to, to get ahead. And today, goes the thinking, this leaves us with a vast gulf between Democrats and Republicans in their acceptance of modern climate science and many other scientific conclusions, with conservatives increasingly distrustful of science, and with scientists and the highly educated moving steadily to the left.
There’s just one problem: This account ignores the possibility that there might be real differences between liberals and conservatives that influence how they respond to scientific or factual information. It assumes we’re all blank slates—that we all want the same basic things—and then we respond to political forces not unlike air molecules inside a balloon. We get knocked this way and that, sure. And we start out in different places, thus ensuring different trajectories. But at the end of the day, we’re all just air molecules.
But what if we’re not all the same kind of molecule? What if we respond to political or factual collisions in different ways, with different spins or velocities? As I will show in these pages, there’s considerable scientific evidence suggesting that this is the case.
For instance, the historic political awakening of what we now call the Religious Right was nothing if not a defense of cultural traditionalism—which had been threatened by the 1960s counterculture, Roe v. Wade, and continued inroads by feminists, gay rights activists, and many others—and a more hierarchical social structure (family values, with the father at the head, the wife by his side). It was a classic counter-reaction to too much change, too much pushing of equality, and too many attacks on traditional values—all occurring too fast. And it mobilized a strong strand of right-wing authoritarianism in U.S. politics—one that had either been dormant previously, or at least more evenly distributed across the parties.
The rise of the Religious Right was thus the epitome of conservatism on a psychological level—clutching for something certain in a changing world; wanting to preserve one’s own ways in uncertain times, and one’s own group in the face of difference—and can’t be fully understood without putting this variable into play. (When I say “psychology” here and throughout the book, I’m referring to the scientific discipline, not to the practice of psychotherapy or counseling.)
The problem is that people are deathly afraid of psychology, and never more so than when it is applied to political beliefs. Political journalists, in particular, almost uniformly avoid this kind of approach. They try to remain on the surface of things, telling endless stories of horse races and rivalries, strategies and interests, and key “turning points.” All of which are, of course, real. And conveniently, by sticking with them you never have to take the dangerous journey into anybody’s head.
But what if these only tell half the story?
This book is my attempt to consider the other half—to tell an “environment plus psychology” story. And it’s about time.
As I began to investigate the underlying causes for the conservative denial of reality that we see all around us, I found it impossible to ignore a mounting body of evidence—from political science, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics—that points to a key conclusion. Political conservatives seem to be very different from political liberals at the level of psychology and personality. And inevitably, this influences the way the two groups argue and process information.
Let’s be clear: This is not a claim about intelligence. Nor am I saying that conservatives are somehow worse people than liberals; the groups are just different. Liberals have their own weaknesses grounded in psychology, and conservatives are very aware of this. (Many of the arguments in this book could be inverted and repackaged into a book called The Democratic Brain—with a Spock-like caricature of President Obama on the cover.)
Nevertheless, some of the differences between liberals and conservatives have clear implications for how they respond to evidence in political debates. Take, for instance, their divergence on a core personality measure called Openness to Experience (and the suite of characteristics that go along with it). The evidence here is quite strong: overall, liberals tend to be more open, flexible, curious and nuanced—and conservatives tend to be more closed, fixed and certain in their views.
What’s more, since Openness is a core aspect of personality, examining this difference points us toward the study of the political brain. The field is very young, but scientists are already showing that average “liberal” and “conservative” brains differ in suggestive ways. Indeed, as we’ll see, it’s even possible that these differences could be related to a large and still unidentified number of “political” genes—although to be sure, genes are only one influence out of very many upon our political views. But they appear to be an underrated one.
What all of this means is that our inability to agree on the facts can no longer be explained solely at the surface of our politics. It has to be traced, as well, to deeper psychological and cognitive factors. And such an approach won’t merely cast light on why we see so much “truthiness” today, so many postmodern fights between the left and the right over reality. Phenomena ranging from conservative brinksmanship over raising the debt ceiling to the old “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” problem—why do poor conservatives vote against their economic interests?—make vastly more sense when viewed through the lens of political psychology.
Before going any further, I want to emphasize that this argument is not a form of what is often called reductionism. Just because psychology seems relevant to explaining why the left and the right have diverged over reality doesn’t mean that nothing else is, or that I am reducing conservatives to just their psychology (or reducing psychology to cognitive neuroscience, or cognitive neuroscience to
genes, and so on). “We can never give a complete explanation of anything interesting about human beings in psychology,” explains the University of Cambridge psychologist Fraser Watts. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be learned from the endeavor.
Complex phenomena like human political behavior always have many causes, not one. This book fully recognizes that and does not embrace a position that could fairly be called determinism. Human brains are flexible and change daily; people have choices, and those choices alter who they are. Nevertheless, there are broad tendencies in the population that really matter, and cannot be ignored.
We don’t understand everything there is to know yet about the underlying reasons why conservatives and liberals are different. We don’t know how all the puzzle pieces—cognitive styles, personality traits, psychological needs, moral intuitions, brain structures, and genes—fit together. And we know that environmental factors are at least as important as psychological ones. This means that what I’m saying applies at the level of large groups, but may founder in the case of any particular individual.
Still, we know enough to begin pooling together all the scientific evidence. And when you do—even if you provide all the caveats, and I’ve just exhausted them—there’s a lot of consistency. And it all makes a lot of sense. Conservatism, after all, means nothing if not supporting political and social stability and resisting change. I’m merely tracing some of the appeal of this philosophy to psychology, and then discussing what this means for how we debate what is “true” in contested areas.
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 motiv
ations 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.