by is Mooney
In other words, integrative complexity relates closely to nuance, the ability to perceive and integrate different perspectives into one’s understanding of a problem, and to see shades of gray. In this, it overlaps with yet another measure on which liberals and conservatives have been repeatedly shown to differ—the tolerance of uncertainty or ambiguity.
All of these measures and traits—the need for closure, integrative complexity, ambiguity tolerance—imply that liberals and conservatives should process information differently, and political information in particular. And indeed, my chapter 13 collaborator Everett Young has proposed that there is yet another cognitive marker lying beneath all the others that differentiates conservatives from liberals: The former, he says, have a stronger tendency to firmly categorize the world. For instance, show conservatives a bee, or a buffalo, or a goose, and then ask whether it’s a “wild” animal or a “domestic” animal, and Young finds that conservatives more than liberals want to jam the ambiguous animal into one category or the other, rather than placing it in between categories or refusing to categorize. They’re just not cool with leaving things fuzzy.
This characteristic has nothing directly to do with ideology per se—it’s prior to that, and also broader than that. It has to do with one’s deep seated reactions to the information presented by the world as we go through life. Open liberals are fine with things being complex, ill defined, blurry, novel. Closed conservatives are the opposite.
In reasonable doses, typically liberal and typically conservative traits can both have benefits. In particular, Tetlock’s historical research on integrative complexity—and above all, the example of Winston Churchill—shows that whether a particular cognitive style is beneficial depends a great deal on the particular situation and context.
But within the conservative fold, there is one group that exhibits the traits just discussed—closed mindedness, low integrative complexity, very low Openness—to an extent that is hard to say anything good about: so-called authoritarians. They’re not all conservatives, but they’re surprisingly prevalent in the United States. Based on one recent analysis, nearly half of the public scores a .75 or higher on a 0 to 1 scale of authoritarianism (which is typically measured by asking whether one would prefer to have obedient and well-mannered children, rather than independent and curious children). Authoritarians are also increasingly strong in today’s Republican Party—and especially in its most extreme and ideological arm. “The Tea Party is an overwhelmingly authoritarian group of folks,” says Vanderbilt University political scientist Marc Hetherington, who has conducted much research in this area.
Authoritarians are very intolerant of ambiguity, and very inclined toward group-think and distrustful of outsiders (often including racial outsiders). They extol traditional values, are very conventional, submit to established leaders, and don’t seem to care much about dissent or civil liberties. They are known for their closed-mindedness, and, indeed, their Manichean view of the world—good and evil, right and wrong, saved and damned, white and black. They have a need for order: Conversely, they can’t tolerate uncertainty. In America, they are often religiously conservative fundamentalists who believe the Bible is the unedited word of God.
And sure enough, across the large body of authoritarianism research, there’s a consistent finding: These people seem to engage in more emotional or biased reasoning. Authoritarians “tend to rely more on emotion and instinct” and are “less likely to change their way of thinking when new information might challenge their deeply held beliefs,” explain Vanderbilt’s Hetherington and University of North Carolina political scientist Jonathan Weiler. Non-authoritarians, they add, are the opposite: They have “a tendency towards accuracy motivation” and a need for cognition.
Consider a few studies of how authoritarians think. The first comes from the work of Robert Altemeyer, a retired psychologist from the University of Manitoba who spent his career studying them, and has repeatedly found that they just aren’t as critical in forming their beliefs, or as open to challenges to them. Indeed, he directly caught authoritarians engaging in more biased reasoning than those who were less authoritarian. (As I’ll show later, Altemeyer has also found that authoritarians like to consume information that agrees with their beliefs, but don’t want to consume evidence that contradicts them.)
In one series of studies, Altemeyer tested authoritarians’ penchant to commit what in psychology is called the “fundamental attribution error”: Ignoring situational explanations for someone’s behavior, and instead assuming that the behavior is reflective of who the person really is. A classic example would be blaming a person in poverty for being too lazy to get a job.
In one case, Altemeyer conducted several experiments in which he provided college students with a speech from a politician who wanted to get elected, and knew what the public wanted to hear (about how to handle crime) from reading the polls. So there was no reason to think the politician was saying what he actually believed. In fact, there were good situational reasons to doubt it. But when the politician was saying what they wanted to hear—smite and smash criminals, basically—right-wing authoritarians thought he was trustworthy, saying what he actually believed. Those who ranked low on authoritarianism, though, were more skeptical of the politician no matter what he was saying. Thus, authoritarians were more likely to commit the fundamental attribution error, and most of all when it helped bolster their own views.
Altemeyer’s work is not our only guidance on authoritarian bias. In another study, Markus Kemmelmeier, a social psychologist at the University of Nevada-Reno, tested whether right-wing authoritarians were more inclined to process information based on “quick and dirty” heuristics or intuitive cues (System 1, in other words) rather than more complex deliberation (System 2). As a result, Kemmelmeier found that authoritarians performed worse on two classic tests designed to trip up intuitive and emotional reasoners. Consider, for instance, a test in which you’re told that out of all the families in a city that have six children, 72 of them had a boy-girl birth order of GBGBBG. When then asked how many families had an order of BGBBBB, heuristic processors are more likely to jump to the conclusion that the second sequence is less likely to occur than the first, although it isn’t. Right-wing authoritarians performed worse on this test in Kemmelmeier’s study, suggesting they were more reliant on System 1 reasoning.
However, and as Kemmelmeier emphasized in an interview for this book, it is important to keep in mind that these kinds of errors aren’t necessarily the same thing as motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is often emotional and elaborate, and worsens with intellectual sophistication, as System 1 drives System 2. Heuristic processing, however, is just plain rapid. “The authoritarians are inclined to give this ‘reasoning lite,’” says Kemmelmeier. “They don’t reason it through.” The implication of his study, therefore, is that authoritarians may “jump at superficial information and not really understand what’s behind it.”
The research on integrative complexity also suggests, through a different route, the flaws of authoritarian styles of reasoning. In a series of studies, Tetlock has shown that prompting people to feel accountable—in other words, letting them know they will have to justify a decision, potentially to a hostile or critical audience—makes them more integratively complex in making that decision, more careful and self-critical and less prone to overconfidence. They then commit less errors—which shouldn’t be surprising. Integrative complexity, after all, involves weighing viewpoints other than one’s own and integrating them into your perspective. The more you do that, the less sure of your own beliefs you tend to become, and the less challenged you’ll be by potential contradiction. “If you have more IC, you have more tolerance of dissonance,” Tetlock told me in an interview. Indeed, he said he viewed this as part of the “definition” of integrative complexity.
Insofar as authoritarians are low on integrative complexity, then, they may be more challenged by dissonance, and more inclined to resolve
it by reacting defensively to preserve their beliefs.
Finally, and unsurprisingly, authoritarians are known to be high on the need for closure, yet another trait that’s linked to defensiveness and biased reasoning. The need for closure, notes Arie Kruglanski, means being more likely to look for belief affirmation (confirmation bias). It also means being more likely to defend one’s existing beliefs, to lash out against challenges to those beliefs (disconfirmation bias), and to persist in beliefs in the face of challenge. In other words, it means “being shut off to arguments to the contrary, and also engendering counterarguments,” says Kruglanski. “It means defending your current views. You denigrate the communicator, the out-group.”
The reactions of authoritarians and those high in the need for closure may therefore explain some of the differences in liberal and conservative bias described in the last chapter. And if we now turn to the data on a group of very authoritarian U.S. conservatives—the Tea Party—and examine their denial of reality on a specific issue (global warming), we see a close match between theory and reality.
In a recent survey by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, Tea Party members rejected the science of global warming even more strongly than average Republicans did. For instance, considerably more Tea Party members than Republicans incorrectly thought there was a lot of scientific disagreement about global warming (69 percent to 56 percent). Most strikingly, the Tea Party members were very sure of themselves—they considered themselves “very well informed” about global warming and were more likely than other groups to say they “do not need any more information” to make up their minds on the issue. In other words, not only were they the most factually incorrect, but they were also the most overconfident and closed-minded, and least likely to want to inquire further. (Tea Partiers also tend to reject evolution—and we know from other research that anti-evolutionists tend to score high on the need for closure.)
Authoritarians and the closed-minded, therefore, are our broadest and easiest avenue into understanding why we find conservatives today so misaligned with empirical reality. Without suggesting that every conservative fits this description, it’s easy to see how those who do exhibit these characteristics would be likely to be paragons of biased and defensive reasoning.
But do such tendencies also arise on the extreme political left? I’ll get to that difficult and crucial question soon enough.
I’ve only begun to survey the relevant research on liberal and conservative differences. But thus far, these differences seem to imply an asymmetry between the two groups when it comes to ideological rigidity and inflexibility. The open personality is much more accepting of change and new ideas; the closed personality should be expected to show much more defensiveness, and even the angry rejection of inconvenient truths.
Scott Eidelman, a social psychologist at the University of Arkansas whose stunning study of liberals and drunkenness we’ll encounter soon enough, summarizes the “asymmetry” position nicely. As he put it to me in an interview:
Just by virtue of their ideological stance, liberals can tolerate difference, they can tolerate not knowing, wondering ‘it could be this, it could be that.’ They can tolerate someone saying, ‘you’ve got it wrong.’ Liberals are just more open to all of that. It’s less of a problem, it’s less of a concern. They’re much more open to compromise, more open to experience—what would otherwise be threatening to people would not be as threatening because of their ideological disposition.
But as noted in the last chapter, despite a number of studies showing greater conservative bias, many researchers who work on motivated reasoning take a different view—namely, ideological symmetry. They would counter that there’s no inherent reason to think that liberals would not also engage in motivated reasoning if they believed something strongly enough, and made it central enough to their identities.
So which viewpoint is right: The asymmetry thesis, or the symmetry thesis? That’s the critical question at the center of our politics and our battle over reality—and one that this book hopes to help resolve. But we first have to examine the differences between liberals and conservatives in another crucial area: Morality.
Notes
59 a lengthy and dense study John Jost et al, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” Psychological Bulletin, 2003, vol. 129, No. 3, 339–375.
59 study of closed-mindedness Arie Kruglanski, The Psychology of Closed-Mindedness, New York: Psychology Press, 2004.
60 The scientists cautioned Arie Kruglanski and John Jost, “Political Opinion, Not Pathology,” Washington Post (oped), August 28, 2003.
60 “within a completely normal range of responding” Interview with John Jost, June 21, 2011.
60 “In times of great uncertainty . . .” Interview with Arie Kruglanski, June 2, 2011.
60 “Loving America is too simple an emotion” Ann Coulter, “Closure on nuance,” July 31, 2003 column, available online at http://townhall.com/columnists/anncoulter/2003/07/31/closure_on_nuance.
61 “certain ideas . . . are true for all time” Cal Thomas, “Like I’m psychologically disturbed,” July 29, 2003 column. Available online at http://townhall.com/columnists/calthomas/2003/07/29/like_im_psychologically_disturbed.
61 the “Conservatives are Crazy” study Byron York, “The ‘Conservatives Are Crazy’ Study,” National Review, August 1, 2003, available online at http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/207712/conservatives-are-crazy-study/byron-york.
61 Tom Feeney Quoted in Byron York, 2003.
61 Berkeley College Republicans Megan Greenwell, “Reagan No Hitler, Says UC GOP Group,” The Berkeley Daily Planet, July 29, 2003. Available online at http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2003–07–29/article/17081.
61 “they epitomized all the things they were trying to deny” Interview with John Jost, June 21, 2011.
62 “the results clearly stand up” Interview with John Jost, June 21, 2011.
63 “The stereotype of liberalism” Jonathan Chait, “Why Liberals Like Compromise and Conservatives Hate It,” The New Republic (Online), March 3, 2011, available online at http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/84630/why-liberals-compromise-and-conservatives-hate-it.
64 “Big Five” traits For an overview that focuses on Openness in particular see Robert R. McCrae, “Social Consequences of Experiential Openness,” Psychological Bulletin, 1996, Vol. 120, No. 3, pp. 323–337.
64 significantly rooted in genetics Written interview with Robert McCrae, September 13, 2011.
64 don’t change much over the course of our lifetimes Caspi et al, “Children’s behavioral styles at age 3 are linked to their adult personality traits at age 26,” Journal of Personality, 2003, Vol. 71, 495–514.
64 persist across cultures Robert R. McCrae and Antonio Terracciano, “Universal Features of Personality Traits from the Observer’s Perspective: Data from 50 Cultures,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005, Vol. 88, No. 3, 547–561. See also Robert R. McCrae and Antonio Terracciano, “Personality Profiles of Cultures: Aggregate Personality Traits,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005, Vol. 89, No. 3, 407–425.
64 liberals consistently rate higher on Openness Robert R. McCrae, “Social Consequences of Experiential Openness,” Psychological Bulletin, 1996, Vol. 120, No. 3, pp. 323–337, noting, “a case can be made for saying that variations in experiential Openness are the major psychological determinant of political polarities.” For another summary of studies, see John Jost et al, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” Psychological Bulletin, 2003, vol. 129, No. 3, pp. 356–357.
64 “Open people everywhere tend to have more liberal values” Written interview with Robert McCrae, September 13, 2011.
64 So what does it mean to be Open? This overview draws upon McCrae, R. R., & Sutin, A. R. (2009). “Openness to Experience.” In M. R. Leary and R. H. Hoyle (Eds.), Handbook of Individual Differences in Social Behavior (pp. 257–273). New York: Guilford.
65 Conservatives also appear to tend toward more Extraversion Alan S. Gerber et al, “Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships Across Issue Domains and Political Contexts,” American Political Science Review, February 2010, p. 1–23.
65 score about the same on Agreeableness Jacob B. Hirsh et al, “Compassionate Liberals and Polite Conservatives: Associations of Agreeableness With Political Ideology and Moral Values,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 5, pp. 655–664, 2010.
66 personality is at least as big of an influence Alan S. Gerber et al, “Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships Across Issue Domains and Political Contexts,” American Political Science Review, February 2010, p. 1–23.
66 cast it in terms of percentages Gerber et al, “Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships Across Issue Domains and Political Contexts.” Distribution percentiles were approximated using standard normal density function area calculations. My thanks to Gretchen Tanner Goldman for performing the calculations.
66 bedrooms of conservatives Carney, D.R. et al, “The secret lives of liberals and conservatives: Personality profiles, interaction styles, and the things they leave behind,” Political Psychology, 2008, Vol. 29, No. 6, 807–840.
67 “red states” and “blue states” partly reflect personality Rentfrow, P.J., Jost, J.T., Gosling, S.D., & Potter, J. (2009). Statewide differences in personality predict voting patterns in 1996–2004 U.S. Presidential Elections. In J.T. Jost, A.C. Kay, & H. Thorisdottir (Eds.), Social and psychological bases of ideology and system justification (pp. 314–347). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.