The Republican Brain (14 page)

71
Authoritarians
On authoritarianism generally, see Robert Altemeyer,
The Authoritarian Specter
, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996, and Karen Stenner,
The Authoritarian Dynamic
, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

71
nearly half of the public scores a .75 or higher on a 0 to 1 scale of authoritarianism
On measuring authoritarianism in the U.S., see Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler,
Authoritarianism and Polarization in America Politics
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009., p. 47–52.

71
“The Tea Party is an overwhelmingly authoritarian group of folks”
Interview with Marc Hetherington, July 19, 2011.

72
“tend to rely more on emotion and instinct”
Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler,
Authoritarianism and Polarization in America Politics
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Quotations from Chapter 3, “Authoritarianism and Nonauthoritarianism: Concepts and Measures.”

72
directly caught authoritarians engaging in more biased reasoning
Robert Altemeyer's research is summarized in
The Authoritarian Specter
, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

73
More likely to commit the fundamental attribution error
This is reported in Altemeyer, 1996, p. 109–111.

73
more reliant on System 1 reasoning
Markus Kemmelmeier, “Authoritarianism and its relationship with intuitive-experiential cognitive style and heuristic processing,”
Personality and Individual Differences
, 2010, vol. 48, pp. 44–48.

73
“reasoning lite”
Interview with Markus Kemmelmeier, October 10, 2011.

74
prompting people to feel accountable
See e.g., Philip E. Tetlock and Jae Il Kim, “Accountability and Judgment Processes in a Personality Prediction Task,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 1987, Vol. 52, No. 2, 700–709.

74
“more tolerance of dissonance”
Interview with Philip Tetlock, September 20, 2011.

74
Authoritarians are known to be high on the need for closure
See e.g., Federico, Christopher M., John T. Jost, Antonio Pierro and Arie W. Kruglanski, 2007:
The Need for Closure and Political Attitudes: Final Report for the ANES Pilot.
” ANES Pilot Study Report, No. nes011904. Available online at
http://www.electionstudies.org/resources/papers/Pilot2006/nes011904.pdf
.

74
“You denigrate the communicator, the out-group”
Interview with Arie Kruglanski, June 2, 2011.

75
the Tea Party members were very sure of themselves
Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., & Hmielowski, J. D. (2011) Politics & Global Warming: Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and the Tea Party. Yale University and George Mason University. New Haven, CT: Yale Project on Climate Change Communication.
http://environment.yale.edu/climate/files/PoliticsGlobalWarming2011.pdf
.

75
anti-evolutionists tend to score high on the need for closure
Killian James Garvey, “Denial of Evolution: An Exploration of Cognition, Culture, and Affect,”
Journal of Social, Evolutionary, and Cultural Psychology
2008, Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Meeting of the NorthEastern Evolutionary Psychology Society. Available online at
http://137.140.1.71/jsec/articles/volume2/issue4/NEEPSgarvey.pdf
.

75
“liberals can tolerate difference, they can tolerate not knowing”
Interview with Scott Eidelman, August 2, 2011.

76
ideological symmetry
I am indebted to Dan Kahan of Yale for the symmetry/asymmetry distinction. See Chris Mooney, “The Bias Trap: Are We All Just a Bunch of Motivated Reasoners?” August 3, 2011, available online at
http://www.desmogblog.com/bias-trap-are-we-all-just-bunch-motivated-reasoners
.

Chapter Four

For God and Tribe

In ethics, there's a familiar dilemma—the so-called trolley problem. You probably know the gist: There's a train or trolley coming down a track with a number of people in the way, and you have to choose whether to throw a switch to divert it onto a different track—only, doing so will kill one innocent person to save everybody else. It's a test, basically, of whether you're an ethical consequentialist or not—whether you support the greatest good for the greatest number. Assuming that you do, you should be willing to kill the one to save the many, or at least take the position that it is ethical to throw the switch.

If people were “rational” in the old Enlightenment sense, you would expect them to maintain a consistent position on the trolley dilemma, no matter how the details of the scenario are varied. They would act like computers. They would simply calculate the total number of lives saved, and then judge. But that's not what people actually do.

For instance, let's change things up a bit so that
you
have to
physically
push a fat man in front of the trolley to save truckloads of people (rather than throwing a distant switch). Suddenly we aren't such consequentialists any more. Even though the same number of lives are being saved and sacrificed, we're far more reluctant to do it, or to call it ethical. Why do we shift like this, based solely on the particular mechanism by which one person dies and many are saved?

Think back to motivated reasoning: We appear to have preconscious emotional impulses that powerfully shape how we feel about situations and dilemmas, and then we “reason” in the direction we've been subconsciously driven. In the case of the fat man, there's a deep moral revulsion to physically pushing someone to his death that overrides the rational, conscious, utilitarian calculation. And then we “reason” differently about the trolley problem.

Now consider this scenario: The trolley has gotten rolling again, but the individual set to die (by being pushed) is named Tyrone Payton, and the group to be saved is 100 members of the New York Philharmonic. Or consider this alternative: The person to be pushed is Chip Ellsworth III, and the group saved is 100 members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra.

When the trolley dilemma was presented in these two implicitly racialized versions to a group of college students by University of California-Irvine psychologist Peter Ditto and his colleagues, liberals were more willing to sacrifice an (apparently) white guy to save 100 black people than to sacrifice an (apparently) black guy to save 100 white people. That's even though they'd previously told interviewers that race should not be a factor in deciding whether it would be permissible to harm one individual to promote the welfare of many. Liberals were flat out
more biased
, and more intellectually inconsistent, in this version of the trolley dilemma. Their motivated reasoning was worse than that of conservatives, at least when you set the problem up in this way.

But the conservatives shouldn't go slapping high fives yet. Ditto and his colleagues caught them in something just as troubling.

Conservatives and liberals alike tend to agree that neither race, nor nationality, should be a factor in determining whether it would be ethical to sacrifice one person for a greater cause, or to save a large number of lives. Liberals subsequently betrayed this principle when it came to “Tyrone Payton” and “Chip Ellsworth III.” But it wasn't hard to get conservatives to be just as inconsistent.

In another study, Ditto and his team constructed a scenario involving civilian casualties of different nationalities. In it, a military leader in Iraq launches an offensive to take out some of the other side's leaders, knowing that civilians may die but reasoning—in ethical consequentialist mode—that the attack will save the lives of his own soldiers in the future. Only
sometimes
, it was an American military leader and troops attacking Iraqi insurgent leaders (leading to Iraqi civilian deaths), while at other times, it was an Iraqi insurgent leader and troops attacking American leaders (leading to American civilian deaths). And voila: Now the conservatives were much more likely to tolerate Iraqi civilian deaths (in service of a greater goal) than American civilian deaths. Now
they
were more biased in this particular ethical test of consequentialism.

So what's going on here?

The research on personality types and psychological needs, discussed in the last chapter, provides a variety of reasons for thinking that overall, liberals and conservatives will process information differently. And now we're encountering a third body of research that once again reinforces this idea, while also opening up some new dimensions on it—research on moral intuitions and moral systems.

Peter Ditto is a collaborator with the aforementioned University of Virginia social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who is a leader in applying an understanding of motivated reasoning to our views about what's right and what's wrong. To that end, Haidt has identified five separate moral
intuitions
that appear to make us feel strongly about situations before we're even consciously aware of thinking about them, and that powerfully guide our reasoning. These are 1) the sense of needing to provide care and protect from harm; 2) the sense of what is just and fair; 3) the sense of loyalty and willingness to sacrifice for a group; 4) the sense of obedience or respect for authority; and 5) the sense of needing to preserve purity or sanctity.

Here's the thing: In surveys, Haidt finds that liberals tend to strongly emphasize the first two moral intuitions (harm and fairness) in their responses to situations and events, but are much weaker on emphasizing the other three (group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity or sanctity). By contrast, Haidt finds that conservatives more than liberals respond to all five moral intuitions. (Indeed, multiple studies associate conservatism with a greater disgust reflex or sensitivity. In one telling experiment, subjects who were asked to use a hand wipe before answering questions, or answer them near a hand sanitizer, gave more politically conservative answers.)

And now we can fully understand the results above: In the racial variant of the trolley problem, a sense of fairness or egalitarianism—and perhaps empathy—biased liberals. But in the civilian casualties scenario, respect for authority (military) and the group (America) appear to have biased conservatives.

You will probably have noted by now that the moral intuition research of Haidt and Ditto is not fully separate from the research covered in the last chapter. It overlaps. For instance, take conservatives' greater respect for authority, and their stronger loyalty to the in-group, the tribe, the team. Respect for authority, at its extreme, is hard to distinguish from authoritarianism. And viewing the world with a strong distinction between the in-group and the out-group clearly relates to having lower integrative complexity and less tolerance of difference (although it can also, on a more positive note, mean showing more loyalty and allegiance to one's friends, and more patriotism).

The Haidt model of liberal-conservative morality also relates closely to another model that we've already encountered—Dan Kahan's “cultural cognition” framework, which paints liberals as egalitarian-communitarians and conservatives as hierarchical-individualists. Egalitarians worry about fairness; communitarians about protecting the innocent from harm; hierarchs about authority and the group (and probably sanctity). Individualists are a bit more of a wildcard, but one thing they do
not
worry as much about is harm—they tend to think that everybody gets what they deserve in life and you have to struggle to succeed. (And if you fail, well, you deserved it—that is
their
version of fairness.)

In comparing the psychological, personality, and moral differences between liberals and conservatives, it is not clear which differences come first—which are more deeply rooted, and whether one causes the other or not. But it is clear that they travel together, and that all are reliable dimensions for distinguishing between the two broad groups.

You may also note something else: In Haidt's “moral intuitionist” tradition, liberals and conservatives are both biased by their intuitions, but it is hard to say one group is
inherently
more biased than the other. This account, unlike the personality-centered account provided in the last chapter, therefore implies symmetry, rather than asymmetry, in each side's self-serving biases.

That's not to say that conservatives won't be more defensive and more resistant to key types of challenges. What authorities (especially religious authorities) say matters to them, in a way that it just doesn't to liberals. Attacks on the group or tribe also matter to them, much more than to liberals. And the conservative defensiveness that will occur in the face of these challenges is not something that liberals will readily understand—especially when, they think, they're just putting forward information that will help make the world better by protecting against harm and ensuring fairness.

But liberals have their biases too, which can come out in key variants of the trolley problem (and other scenarios). From the moral intuitionist perspective, then, it may well be the case that conservatives have to exercise their biases more frequently in the modern world or in U.S. politics—but there's nothing inherent about conservatives that makes those biases stronger across the board.

“When I'm at home, I spend all my time, like a good liberal, yelling at the television set, denouncing Republicans and how biased they are,” explains Peter Ditto. “Then I assume my persona at work and I say, theoretically, it's really hard to know why there would be a difference. Once you're committed emotionally, morally, to some position, it shouldn't really matter. It's hard, at least initially, to think of ways they should differ.”

However, there is another famous account of the different moral systems of liberals and conservatives, which implies a more uneven distribution of biases. It is closely related to Haidt's account in some ways, but not others. I'm referring to the account advanced by Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, in his book
Moral Politics
and subsequent works.

Lakoff's opening premise is that we all think in metaphors. These are not the kind of thing that English majors study, but rather real, physical circuits in the brain that structure our cognition, and that are strengthened the more they are used. For instance, we learn at a very early age how things go up and things go down, and then we talk about the stock market and individual fortunes “rising” and “falling”—a metaphor.

For Lakoff, one metaphor in particular is of overriding importance in our politics: The metaphor that uses the
family
as a model for broader groups in society—from athletic teams to companies to governments. The problem, Lakoff says, is that we have different conceptions of the family, with conservatives embracing a “strict father” model and liberals embracing a caring, “nurturing” parent version. The strict father family is like a free market system, and yet also very hierarchical and authoritarian. It's a harsh world out there and the father (the supreme authority) is tough and will teach the kids to be tough, because there will be no one to protect them once the father is gone. The political implications are obvious. In contrast, the nurturing parent family emphasizes love, care, and growth—and, so the argument goes, compassionate government control.

Lakoff's system intriguingly ties our political differences to child-rearing styles (much evidence suggests that Republicans are more likely to physically punish their children). It also overlaps with Haidt's—particularly when it comes to wanting to care for those who are harmed (nurturing parent) and respecting authority (strict father). What's more, both accounts overlap with the research on personality and psychological needs—the strict father model, respect for authority, and the exercise of group loyalty all help to provide certainty and order through the affirmation of hierarchy and stability and the resistance of changes to existing social structures.