The Republican Brain (16 page)

It has long been a premise of these attacks that the institutions of higher education
make
one a liberal, through a kind of brainwashing process. But in light of what we've seen, that's far too simple an account. If our political views are rooted, to a significant extent, in personality and psychological needs, then the groundwork is laid down long before we choose career paths. Academia certainly provides a self-reinforcing and self-actualizing environment for liberals, but the idea that it mints them outright is harder to believe.

The consequences of the left-right expertise gap are vast—and exert a massive influence on the constant battles over misinformation in American politics. Because just as psychology explains why liberals have more expertise and more scientists in their ranks, it also explains why conservatives (always loyal to their group) fight back against that expertise furiously—and, as we'll see, even create their own knowledge institutions and train their own “experts” to reinforce their beliefs.

Notes

77
trolley problem
My discussion of the role of the brain in differential responses to the trolley dilemma draws on Jonathan D. Cohen, “The Vulcanization of the Human Brain: A Neural Perspective on Interactions Between Cognition and Emotion,”
Journal of Economic Perspectives
, Vol. 19, No. 4, Fall 2005, p. 3–24.

78
“Tyrone Payton”
Eric Luis Uhlmann, David A. Pizzaro, David Tannenbaum and Peter H. Ditto, “The motivated use of moral principles,”
Judgment and Decisionmaking,
Vol. 4, No. 6, October 2009, pp. 476–491.

79
five separate moral intuitions
Jonathan Haidt, “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology,”
Science
, Vol. 316, May 18, 2007, pp. 998–1002; Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek, “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 2009, Vol. 96, No. 5, pp. 1029–1046.

79
greater disgust reflex
Helzer, E. & Pizarro, D.A. (in press). “Dirty liberals! Reminders of physical cleanliness influence moral and political attitudes.”
Psychological Science.

81
“yelling at the television set”
Interview with Peter Ditto, August 26, 2011.

81
Moral Politics
George Lakoff
, Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don't.
University of Chicago Press, 1996.

81
we all think in metaphors
See “George Lakoff: Enlightenments, Old and New,” episode of Point of Inquiry with Chris Mooney, where this is discussed. Available online at
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/george_lakoff_enlightenments_old_and_new/
.

82
physically punish their children
Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler,
Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. On the politics of spanking and physical punishment, see p. 1–3.

82
American Prospect
Chris Mooney, “Reality Bites,”
The American Prospect
, June 6, 2011. Available online at
http://prospect.org/article/reality-bites
.

82
“They can't have that”
Interview with George Lakoff, April 7, 2011.

82
“Old Enlightenment reason”
George Lakoff,
The Political Mind
, New York: Penguin, 2008.

85
“a person who cannot tolerate uncertainty”
Interview with Arie Kruglanski, June 2, 2011.

85 “
So of course our field is and always will be mostly liberal”
Jonathan Haidt, “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” January 27, 2011 lecture available online at
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt11/haidt11_index.html
.

86
“cultural continuity”
Interview with Yuval Levin, “Science Life” Blog, University of Chicago Medical Center, April 9, 2009. Available online at
http://sciencelife.uchospitals.edu/2009/04/09/coyne-and-levin-pt-2/
.

86
one of the most comprehensive surveys of American university professors
Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” 2007 working paper. To put the results another way, the study also found that 44.1 percent of professors were liberal, 46.6 were moderates, and just 9.2 percent were conservatives.

87
2009 survey of American Association for the Advancement of Science members
Pew Research Center for People and the Press, July 9, 2009, “Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media,” Section 4, “Scientists, Politics, and Religion.” Available online at
http://people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-4-scientists-politics-and-religion/
.

87
Americans with a post-graduate level of education
Ruy Teixeira, “Demographic Change and the Future of the Parties,” June 2010, Center for American Progress. Available online at:
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2010/06/pdf/voter_demographics.pdf
.

Chapter Five

Don't Get Defensive

At this point, it's probably time for a deep breath, followed by a long pause—and then the donning of body armor. Chances are that what I've said in the last two chapters has ticked off, like, half of America.

My arguments are rooted in a large body of published and peer reviewed research, but I fully recognize that the subject matter has fairly stunning implications. “To begin with, many people are defensive and afraid of psychology,” explains John Jost. “No one wants to sit next to a psychologist on an airplane. And most people are afraid to think about the possibility that their most cherished beliefs might have a psychological basis, rather than simply a basis in fact. And when you mix that knee-jerk defensiveness about psychological introspection with political ideology, it's pretty explosive.”

That automatic defensive response doesn't justify ignoring the evidence. But objections are strongly anticipated (so is lots of motivated reasoning!), and the purpose of this chapter will be to pause to consider them, and to flesh out many of the arguments further, before moving on.

If you're already completely sold, by the way, you may want to consider skipping this chapter. I'm going to have to deal in a lot of nuance here (damn liberals!), and even get a bit technical. That's simply inevitable in order to address all the objections that may arise.

One battery of questions will surely involve how conservatism is defined and measured, and how to account for its different strands. After all, we've already encountered one way of dividing up people's moral and political systems—Kahan's hierarchs, individualists, egalitarians, and communitarians—that is more complex than the one dimensional left-right definition used in the last two chapters. And there are many others.

Similarly, many people will want to draw a distinction between economic and social conservatism. Isn't any argument that tosses libertarians and authoritarians into the same pot missing something rather crucial?

Scholars differ on precisely how to piece the different parts of the political right together. And if you disagree with me about what a conservative is—or how different breeds of conservatism travel together, jammed into the suitcase of today's Republican Party—you also may disagree with many aspects of this analysis. In any case, I will make clear what definition I'm using and why.

Another core objection will surely involve the left, and its own extreme versions: Aren't leftists just as capable of closed-mindedness and irrationality as anything found on the right wing? And aren't there just as many left-wing authoritarians as right-wing ones? Actually, the evidence suggests the answer is no, especially in America today.

What about independents? They exist in large numbers, and they certainly need to be explained. We'll take a crack at that key question.

Finally, people are bound to wonder about political conversions, and how these can be explained. I'll sketch the beginnings of an answer here, though this will receive more elaboration later in the book, when we actually run across some very important and noted right-to-left converts. For now, though, I'll show something more surprising, but also very telling: You can make a liberal more conservative fairly easily—not through argument, but rather, through fear and distraction (and heavy drinking!). All of which counts as a great strength—not weakness—of the psychological and even physiological explanation of ideology.

So without further ado, let's consider these problems, before getting into even more controversial waters—the possible role of the brain in conservatism, and the genetic underpinnings of our political differences.

Who's a Conservative?

The first area of doubt involves how we identify conservatives. Often, this is done in surveys and questionnaires in which people
self-report
their views, by ranking themselves on a scale from “very liberal” to “very conservative,” or perhaps by describing their political party affiliations or answering questions about basic policy views.

This obviously raises problems: People might be defining themselves in opposition to something they hate rather than in alignment with something they believe. Furthermore, how they identify themselves will vary in different countries and over time, along with the meanings and connotations of these words.

For instance, liberals have been strongly demonized in the U.S., a campaign that has surely made people less likely to affiliate with liberalism, regardless of their actual policy views. A Republican Party affiliation and voting record can also mean many things, given that there are still moderates in the party who resist its rightward tilt, but remain allegiant despite their misgivings.

The response to this objection is to concede it, but also to ask for some realism. It is impossible to come up with a perfect measurement; all will have their weaknesses. The question is whether you have a reasonably good measurement, not whether you have a flawless one.

Here, the measuring instrument isn't so bad: The survey questions being used have been validated to ensure that they are reasonably reliable in picking up what they're intended to pick up. Thus, a test of one's self-placement on the liberal/conservative spectrum lines up nicely (although never perfectly) with one's Democratic or Republican voting, one's responses on sets of policy questions, and so on. So using these measures winds up being a pretty good way of capturing what we all mean when we talk about conservatives, liberals, Republicans, and Democrats in the modern U.S. context.

What's really extraordinary here is that despite all the looseness and subjectivity inherent in how people define and practice their ideologies, Jost and his colleagues were nevertheless able to find consistent results about the psychology of conservatism in research conducted
across countries.
The signal still came through, despite a very large amount of noise.

What Do Conservatives All Share?

Beyond difficulties in identifying conservatives out there in the wild, there are also vast debates over how to define conservatism. No one really disputes that it exists. But what core elements of the belief system are relatively stable across time periods and even countries, and will persist long after the issues of the present are behind us?

That's a pretty important question: You can't show how conservatism appeals psychologically unless you can show what it provides to people.

Following Jost and his colleagues, I'm arguing that the deepest element, tying it all together and conferring its greatest appeal, is a resistance to change. This, in turn, is tied to less Openness to Experience (and other related traits), and helps to assuage conservatives' fear and uncertainty about life and the world.

The fact that the resistance to change has something to do with conservatism—and with psychology—is pretty hard to dispute. History's most famous conservatives have described their belief system in just this way. Thus, criticizing the French Revolution, Edmund Burke wrote that “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” And describing the purpose of the magazine he founded,
The National Review
, William F. Buckley, Jr., wrote that the publication “stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop'!”

It should be obvious how an ideology that is resistant to change would appeal to the need for certainty and stability and the desire to manage fear and threat. And I have already shown that those who hold the ideology and those who have these psychological needs match up, to a remarkable extent.

Nevertheless, in opposition to this definition, it is sometimes said that Ronald Reagan brought vast change to America, and what's so conservative about that? George W. Bush's tax cuts were also a change—a rather big one. How can you call someone an anti-change conservative when he changed America so dramatically?

The response to this objection is that the change that conservatives seek is not progressive; rather it is in the direction of restoring something they perceive as
prior
and
better
—like, say, America before the New Deal. Often, it is an imaginary past that has been romanticized, and the desire is to restore what never even was. So you can certainly have conservative revolutionaries; they're just favoring an earlier status quo, and not necessarily even one that ever existed. It need only be the case that they think it did, and they long for it, and this drives their policy prescriptions and agendas.

The second core element of conservatism postulated by Jost and his colleagues is the resistance to equality (or, the rationalization of inequality). Conservatives will surely balk at this description even more strongly, but it does tend to go along with the resistance to change. Moreover, egalitarianism is powerfully related to liberalism in general—as we've seen, it's one of the chief moral intuitions that liberals have.

The fact is that the conservatives in society have always been the ones who resisted measures to increase equality—from women's suffrage to desegregation, from interracial marriage to gay marriage. At the time, each of these changes was viewed as threatening to the social structure. And conservatives, accordingly, resisted change and supported the status quo—although for the next generation of conservatives, once the change was fully established it probably came to seem far less threatening.

On top of that, right-wing authoritarians may be resistant to equality because they distrust people not like them and would not always extend them the same rights. Economic conservatives (or individualists) who affirm a free marketplace without many social safety net protections are, effectively, in favor of the economic inequality that will inevitably result. They may consider such a system
fair
—the only way anyone gets anywhere in this world is to work hard, not to have it handed to you—but there's little doubt about the ultimate outcome. Not everybody gets ahead, and the society ends up unequal.

Why Don't You Psychoanalyze Liberals, Too?

The answer to this one is easy: I have. Didn't you notice?

If any theme should be apparent from this discussion, it is that conservatism is hardly the only ideology that can be traced to psychology. Liberalism, too, has its psychological correlates. A 2008 PhD thesis in psychology even sought to psychoanalyze liberalism just as Jost and his colleagues did for conservatism, postulating that liberals are motivated by the “need for understanding,” the “need for change,” the “need for inclusiveness,” and (I always laugh here) “avoidance of decisional commitment.”

Indeed, at least one conservative who beat up on the Jost study—Jonah Goldberg of the
National Review
—was perceptive enough to notice that the findings could easily be inverted. He started off his own takedown of the research with a rather impressive parody:

A massive new study from Berkeley scientists at has found that political liberals have the following qualities in abundance:

• Cowardice and appeasement
  
• Comfort with confusion and ignorance
  
• Recklessness
  
• Indecisiveness and similar cognitive defects
  
• Terror mismanagement
  

In short, after an exhaustive research effort, the scientists concluded that the typical liberal is very much like Renfield, that sniveling, nasty, bug-eating sidekick to Dracula. This is why liberals always say, “Yethhh, master” to bullies and tyrants like Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, or Saddam Hussein: They are dim-witted, cowardly, nasty creatures who can never make up their minds.

Perhaps Goldberg thought it obvious that liberals would find such claims absurd and offensive. To the contrary, I would say that this hits a little too close to home. Indecision and appeasement really
are
leading liberal weaknesses that hobble us in key situations—and these weaknesses really
are
rooted in the liberal personality and psychology.

The broader point is that all belief systems—liberalism, conservatism, religious faith, and so on—address psychological needs, which is a chief reason why they are adopted. At the same time, all belief systems are also defended by their proponents on the basis of evidence and reasoned arguments. The two function on different levels; examining an ideology on a psychological level does not refute its logical validity, because psychological needs don't have any intellectual content to them. Such needs will be satisfied in different cultures, or at different points in history, by whatever ideologies happen to be on offer at that point in time.

Similarly, refuting an ideology on a logical or argumentative level may not reduce its psychological appeal. (I doubt there will be any dispute about that.)

Nevertheless, explaining the existence of a belief system through psychology can provide much perspective on why it exists and persists, despite change over time in our political systems and the issues being debated. That's especially the case if the explanation is a robust one, in the sense that many or most proponents of the ideology do possess the psychological traits that seem to accompany it. And I've already shown that this is the case.

What about the Difference between Economic and Social Conservatives?

It may not be obvious, at least at first, how resistance-to-change conservatism and resistance-to-equality conservatism relate to a breakdown of conservatism more familiar to us—between “social” and “economic” conservatism. This requires some unpacking.

Economic conservatives preach fiscal responsibility and the free market, but don't always go for the conservative cultural agenda of the religious right. They may not want anything to do with it—especially if they are libertarians—and may not much like being lumped in with them, especially based on the claim that both groups resist change and support inequality. Isn't that an unfair move?

Yes and no. On the one hand, it would be foolhardy to assert that economic and social conservatism are precisely the same thing. They're different sets of ideas, in many cases held by different people. Indeed, political scientists have shown that when you survey the general population, you can come up with much more finely tuned descriptions of the views of average Americans than “liberal” and “conservative.” Examining politics along both economic and social dimensions, rather than just along a single left-right dimension, does a better job of capturing the complexity that actually exists.