The Republican Brain (12 page)

Integrative complexity describes the tendency to view an issue from multiple perspectives, and then to merge those perspectives into a more nuanced position (or, to assess their commonalities and interrelations), and is typically measured by analyzing the structure of speeches and writings. Consider an example from the psychology literature. The following statements about abortion would rank, respectively, lowest and highest on a seven point scale of integrative complexity:

Abortion is a basic right that should be available to all women. To limit a woman's access to an abortion is an intolerable infringement on her civil liberties. Such an infringement must not be tolerated. To do so would be to threaten the separation of Church and State so fundamental to the American way of life.

Some view abortion as a civil liberties issue; others see abortion as tantamount to murder. One's view of abortion depends on a complicated mixture of legal, moral, philosophical and, perhaps, scientific judgments. Is there a constitutional right to abortion? What criteria should be used to determine when human life begins? Who possesses the authority to resolve these issues?

As you can tell from the second passage, academics tend to possess a high degree of integrative complexity—sometimes to the point of considering so much nuance and so many sides of the story that they never really end up saying
anything.

In a series of studies published in the 1980s, psychologist Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania showed that integrative complexity is also politically correlated. Studying speeches given by U.S. Senators in the 1975 and 1976 Congresses, he found that liberal and moderate senators rated higher on integrative complexity than did conservatives. Moving across the Atlantic to examine interviews with 89 members of the British House of Commons, Tetlock obtained a similar result: Moderate socialists were the most integratively complex, followed by moderate conservatives. Extreme socialists and extreme conservatives showed the lowest complexity. Finally, applying his methodology to the opinions of Supreme Court justices, Tetlock once again found the same effect—liberal and moderate judges showed more complexity in their reasoning.

It is important to emphasize that even if conservatives overall are less integratively complex—more likely to create binaries, and divide the world up into good guys and bad guys, rather than seeing commonalities or a middle ground—this is not always a weakness. Sometimes you
need
to fight the bad guys and not waffle while you try to understand them, which is precisely why conservative decisiveness in truly dangerous situations can be a great strength. Other studies by Tetlock have shown that Winston Churchill was considerably lower on integrative complexity than Neville Chamberlain—thank goodness for that—and that abolitionists were just as low in IC as defenders of slavery.
Both
were wholly dedicated to their cause, disinclined to compromise, and absolutely sure their opponents were wrong.

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.)