The Republican Brain (17 page)

I fully acknowledge this. But I have nevertheless used liberal/Democrat and conservative/Republican here, because the economic and social aspects of ideology cluster together, especially in the United States. Consider the Tea Party, which is both Christian conservative and yet is also in favor of freer markets and less government. And psychology can help explain why this deep relationship between social and economic conservatism (and liberalism) exists—even as it also ties both outlooks to pro-status quo and anti-egalitarian impulses.

Let's return to the aforementioned study by Yale political scientist Alan Gerber and his colleagues, which showed, in a sample of more than 12,000 individuals, that the relationship between the “Big Five” personality traits and left-right ideology was stronger in some cases than the relationship between ideology and income or level of education. That study had another benefit, too: It looked at the relationship between personality and
both types
of liberalism and conservatism, by examining how people defined themselves ideologically and also how they responded to questions about their economic and social policy views.

In the study, Openness predicted not only social liberalism but also economic liberalism, and did so strongly in both cases. The same went for Conscientiousness—it predicted
both
types of conservatism, albeit not quite as strongly. The authors therefore concluded by suggesting that what they called “ideological constraint”—the strange but regular observation that liberals and conservatives hold matching views across social and economic realms—could be rooted in personality, and thus psychology.

When you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. Openness will lead you to support new and different policies, and innovations (
change
), in both economic and social domains. In both realms, it will also make you more able to understand and sympathize with the views of those different from yourself (
equality
)—whether they're poorer than you, or of a different race, gender, or sexual persuasion. Closedness will lead to the opposite. And Conscientiousness—respecting rules, structure, and order—will lead you to support stability in social structures but also traditional business community norms like industriousness: “Work hard and you will get ahead,” as Gerber and his colleagues put it.

Thus, defenders of the free market and conventional family values may be linked in deeper ways than we, or even they, realize.

What about the Cultural Cognition Model?

Examining ideology along both economic and social dimensions is one way of adding complexity to the standard left-right schematic. But there are other more complex models of politics, such as the previously mentioned research program centered around Yale Law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues.

As noted before, hierarchical-individuals broadly correspond to U.S. conservatives, whereas egalitarian-communitarians broadly correspond to U.S. liberals. But you can also find issues that produce more unexpected pairings between the groups. Take, for instance, so-called outpatient commitment laws, which “authorize courts to order older persons with mental illness to accept outpatient treatment.” This is not exactly a leading public policy or voting issue, but the response to it is certainly interesting—the four groups change their allegiances. Hierarchs and communitarians support such laws; egalitarians and individualists don't.

What this means is that just as is the case with social and economic ideology, this way of dividing us up into four groups, rather than two, allows for more precision in some cases. That's the advantage. The disadvantage is that we don't have a hierarch party or an individualist party (though the Libertarian Party comes pretty close), nor do we have an egalitarian party or a communitarian party. We have two parties, and not just because it's simpler, but because on most issues the four groups pair up into twos. And again, it is likely that psychology underlies this.

While I am mainly going to rely on the liberal-conservative distinction, I find much that is useful in Kahan's approach. For like Jonathan Haidt's, this research helps us understand—and even predict in advance—situations in which liberals may have issues with science and the facts, and may engage in biased reasoning to defend their views. The answer is clear: These will be situations where their egalitarian or communitarian values are threatened.

So for instance, liberals should be inclined to attack research that seems to threaten the idea that we're all equal—which helps explain the unfortunate left-academic response to E.O. Wilson's ideas about
sociobiology
, now called “evolutionary psychology,” in which Wilson was accused of reducing certain aspects of human behavior to genes and biology. At the same time, liberals might be expected to
overstate
the strength of research that suggests harm to large numbers of people: research on various types of environmental risks, for instance.

These are all areas where I feel it imperative to keep an eye on my intellectual compatriots and hold them honest—as this book will do further in chapter 12. However, when we scrutinize classic test case issues where we might expect liberal, progressive, or environmental reasoning to go astray—vaccination, nuclear power, and fracking—we find some pretty interesting things, but we do
not
find liberals acting like conservatives.

What about Leftist Regimes?

Just as economic and social conservatism can sometimes become disentangled (but generally go together), so too for resistance-to-change and resistance-to-equality conservatism (though they generally go together). Here, the key case study is communist countries.

In countries where left-wing movements come to power following revolutions—communist countries like the former Soviet Union, Cuba, or China—those who resist change to the post-revolutionary system would fall on the traditional left in terms of their economic and egalitarian views. At the same time, however, even as they defend a left-wing status quo, those craving stability and order in such countries may be very culturally traditional. By contrast, those seeking change may want to undermine or “liberalize” that status quo by opening the society up to the free market.

This is where the resistance to change and the resistance to greater equality spin apart, and there is nothing to do other than simply admit it. It is a complex world out there. Indeed, consider one telling case study of the need for closure in two European groups that differed in their communist experience. In Poland, which had a communist past, the more open-minded were more supportive of an
economically conservative
or free-market system. But in Flanders, which lacked such a past, the more open-minded were the opposite—similar to economic liberals in the U.S. And yet at the same time, in both groups, the closed-minded were more culturally conservative, and more authoritarian. (A similar result was found of Eastern and Western Europeans after the fall of communism.)

The fact that resistance-to-change and defense-of-inequality conservatism can demagnetize in the communist context is really more a strength than a weakness of the psychological account of ideology. After all, there is every reason to think that support for the status quo and resistance to change
ought
to be context dependent.

As mentioned, psychological needs don't have any explicit ideological content to them. They merely predispose us to favor whatever ideology is available to us at a particular time that satisfies those needs. And ideologies morph over time, as do political systems. Thus conservatism can simultaneously be a human universal, in the sense that people will always seek an ideology that provides stability and order by resisting change, and yet it can also take different forms in different contexts.

Another way of putting this is to say that when we talk about the
substantive
meaning of “left” and “right” today—social safety nets and progressive taxation versus free markets and deregulation, the extension of minority rights versus the preservation of traditional views of marriage and the family, and so on—we are hardly capturing the substance of all human political disputes since our very origins. The left and right distinction is of far more recent vintage, and is most applicable in the West since the time of the French Revolution. From then until now, the two types of conservatism—status quo and anti-egalitarian—have glommed together most of the time, but there have been exceptions.

Beneath
all this lies psychology, the rarely discovered continent in our politics. The need for order and stability is more constant, older, and surely part of our evolutionary heritage. It is a superstructure undergirding the two-century-old left-right distinction, but it has been operating in many different contexts for far longer than that. And if for some reason we ever drop the left-right distinction, it will
still
be operating.

What about Left Wing Ideologues?

Another very persistent objection is that rather than talking about conservatism, we ought to be talking about ideological extremism, on either the left or the right, because
both
will feature closed-mindedness, defensiveness, intolerance of ambiguity, and all the rest. In other words, an extreme left winger will be just as rigid and dogmatic as a right-wing authoritarian. In particular, we can expect to hear conservatives say that.

The trouble is, the evidence doesn't really support that conclusion (at least, I stress, for noncommunist countries). Rather, it suggests that as you depart from the center and approach the political poles, ideological extremism does increase, but rigidity and inflexibility increase more on the right than on the left. Again, that would make sense if the two aspects of the resistance to change—political resistance and resistance to changing one's beliefs—go together.

To show this, John Jost and his colleagues specifically looked at the subset of studies of conservatism that allowed for a direct contrast between a “rigidity of the right” hypothesis and an “ideological extremism” stance, which would posit symmetrical rigidity on both political poles. There were 13 of these studies in all, from 6 countries (the U.S., England, Sweden, Germany, Israel, Italy), none of them communist. The test was whether rigidity and inflexibility increase in a linear way from left to right; whether they instead increase equally in
either
direction as you depart from the political center; or whether a “combined” model fits the data best: Rigidity increases in both directions as you depart from the center, but increases more on the right than on the left.

The result was that not a single study showed
more
left rigidity than right rigidity. But 6 out of 13 showed somewhat more left rigidity than center rigidity, even though right wingers were more rigid than either the left or the center in these studies. This usually occurred when the psychological trait being measured was “integrative complexity.” Therefore, a combined model—more rigidity at both extremes, but considerably more on the right than on the left—seems the best fit to the available data. (Acknowledging, of course, that the center is not “fixed,” but rather, is culturally and socially determined; and that you might expect a different outcome in communist countries.)

Later, Jost and a new team of researchers tackled this question in yet another way. In three more studies, they measured political views and ideological extremism simultaneously, by giving subjects lots of gradations to choose from in how they described their beliefs. Were they
moderately liberal, very liberal, extremely liberal
, and so on. Those who picked the farthest ends of the distribution, on either side, were the extremists. Those closer to the center counted as less extreme, but of course, were still liberal or conservative.

By setting it up in this way, it was again possible to distinguish between an “ideological extremism” hypothesis on the one hand, and the “rigidity of the right” view on the other. And the result was that neither liberalism nor left wing extremism wound up being linked to psychological traits like the need for closure, the intolerance of uncertainty, and so on. Rather,
conservatism
was linked to these traits.

On the far left, this approach even yielded a hint of
more
tolerance of uncertainty and Openness—which makes sense. For someone living in a liberal democracy, it probably requires real novelty and complexity to rationalize a very ideological left wing position. It may require plowing through
Das Kapital
. But this is not the kind of behavior we expect to see in right wing authoritarians, the conservative ideological extreme (although when sophistication and authoritarianism do coincide, you can find inflexibility and ingenious arguments going hand in hand).

The idea of left-wing closed-mindedness was also tested in another form by Robert Altemeyer, who went on a very extensive and amusing chase for what he labeled “the Loch Ness Monster of political psychology”—namely, a left-wing authoritarian.

Altemeyer came up with a variety of statements to try to find lefties who showed authoritarian tendencies—following leaders unquestioningly, showing aggression, wanting to force conformity on others—but did so in service of a revolutionary or anti-establishment movement, rather than a reactionary or conservative one. Some of the statements he came up with, to mirror the types of views that right-wing authoritarians tend to espouse, are kind of hilarious:

The members of the Establishment deserve to be dealt with harshly, without mercy, when they are finally overthrown.

A leftist revolutionary movement is quite justified in attacking the Establishment, and in demanding obedience and conformity from its members.

If certain people refuse to accept the historic restructuring of society that will come when the Establishment is overthrown, they will have to be removed and smashed.