The Republican Brain (19 page)

The liberals and conservatives then had to decide who should receive government subsidized drug treatment. The conservatives thought that people who were culpable in contracting AIDS shouldn't get the same care as those who were blameless. So did the liberals—on first impulse, anyway. But they tended to change their minds once they were allowed to think about it. Their sense of fairness, equality, and of caring for others shone through—and then, unlike conservatives, they appeared to reason that everybody should be treated the same way in government policy, regardless of their personal responsibility for their plight.

However, when liberals were
simultaneously
required to perform a difficult task that involved listening to music and making note of when the pitch changed, they never had time to think through the scenario or take a second step of reasoning. And then, they were just as punitive towards the culpable AIDS sufferers as the conservatives were. There was no substantial difference between the two groups. Rather famously—at least among social psychologists—Skitka summarized her result by observing, “It is much easier to get a liberal to behave like a conservative than it is to get a conservative to behave like a liberal.”

Finally—and most surprisingly—there is recent research suggesting that drinking alcohol temporarily causes people to take more conservative policy positions. For better or worse, it probably also helps liberals stop wallowing in uncertainty and act decisively—even if, for liberal men, that usually only means shutting down self-doubt and actually approaching that liberal woman who's standing across the room.

I've saved this study—conducted by the University of Arkansas's Scott Eidelman and colleagues—for the end of the chapter, because it truly is a classic and my favorite study discussed in this book. It almost starts out like a joke: “A team of psychologists walk into a bar . . .”

Actually, the researchers set up outside the bar—which was only described as being in New England—and flagged down 85 exiting patrons with quite the proposition: Get your blood alcohol tested in exchange for filling out a short questionnaire. It was a political one, of course. And when the scientists collated the results, it turned out that blood alcohol level was associated with the expression of greater conservative opinions, for self-described liberals and conservatives alike. Both appeared to shift to the right.

Why? Much like the Skitka study's “cognitive load,” alcohol shuts off complex thinking. It's kind of like dosing yourself with the need for closure. So it's entirely consistent to find that it led to more conservative expressions of opinion. (So, for that matter, is a recent study finding that liberals drink
more
alcohol. Perhaps they need to switch the thinking off sometimes, and who could blame them. But of course, Openness and seeking out new experiences would also predict more liberal alcohol and drug use.)

“The assumption,” explains Eidelman, “is that for some forms of liberalism, it's a corrective response. Under load, you strip away their ability to engage in that effortful correction.” Eidelman believes that when people are simply acting instinctively, without deep contemplation and following quick impulses, there is an inherent conservative bias—toward blaming individuals for their failings rather than looking for more complex causes, toward the status quo rather than change, toward routines versus innovations, and even toward something that already exists rather than something that doesn't. “We're suggesting people's cognitive architecture is more consistent with conservative ideology, because that's the way brains are built,” Eidelman says.

In this interpretation, alcohol would thus reset liberals to a more basic and maybe even more natural state. This liberal, at least, often welcomes the opportunity to be conservative for a while. It's a relief.

In these three cases of temporary liberal-to-conservative shift, it appears that liberals turn more conservative not because they are swayed intellectually by conservative arguments, but rather because they are impaired—emotionally or cognitively—from engaging in the types of nuanced reasoning processes that make them liberals.

Once again, this suggests that our political differences are about much more than the substantive details of ideology. It suggests they involve our emotions and how we process information—and that liberals do so very differently than conservatives . . . at least when they can.

But if our ideology is grounded in emotional and cognitive functions, then where is it ultimately rooted?

The answer, of course, is the brain. “If you believe the mountains of psychological data, then it should not be too surprising that there are differences between liberals and conservatives at the level of brain structure and function. It is not as if we expected ideology to be located in people's elbows,” says John Jost.

In the next chapter, then, I will look—very cautiously, for this is a new field and one that is full of uncertainty—at what science is beginning to show about liberal and conservative brains, and at how this research appears to link up closely with the psychology research I've already surveyed.

Notes

89
“many people are defensive and afraid of psychology”
Interview with John Jost, June 21, 2011.

91
the measuring instrument isn't so bad
For an emphasis on just how much left-right self placement can explain about political and voting behavior, see John Jost, “The End of the End of Ideology,”
American Psychologist
61 (7) 651–670.

92
“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors”
Edmund Burke,
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, 1790, full text available at
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15679/15679-h/15679-h.htm
.

92
“stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!'”
William F. Buckley, Jr., “Our Mission Statement,”
National Review
, November 19, 1955. Available online at
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/223549/our-mission-statement/william-f-buckley-jr
.

92
Ronald Reagan brought vast change to America
For one example of this objection being raised, see Jeff Greenberg and Eva Jonas, “Psychological Motives and Political Orientation—The Left, the Right, and the Rigid: Comment on Jost et al.,”
Psychological Bulletin
, 2003, vol. 129, No. 3, pp. 376–382.

92
the change that conservatives seek is not progressive
For this answer, see Jost et al, “Exceptions that Prove the Rule—Using a Theory of Motivated Social Cognition to Account for Ideological Incongruities and Political Anomalies: Reply to Greenberg and Jonas,”
Psychological Bulletin
, 2003, Vol. 129, No. 3, pp. 383–393.

93
the next generation of conservatives
For conservatives accepting “liberal” innovations once some time has passed, see Jost et al, “Can a Psychological Theory of Ideological Differences Explain Contextual Variability in the Contents of Political Attitudes?”
Psychological Inquiry
, 2009, No. 20, pp. 183–188.

93
psychoanalyze liberalism
Becky L. Choma, “Why Are People Liberal? A Motivated Social Cognition Perspective,” Department of Psychology, Brock University, June 2008 Dissertation.

94
“Cowardice and appeasement”
Jonah Goldberg, “Conservative study reveals academic bias,” July 30, 2003. Available online at
http://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/2003/07/30/conservative_study_reveals_academic_bias/page/full/
.

95
Examining politics along both economic and social dimensions
Stanley Feldman and Christopher Johnson, “Understanding the Determinants of Political Ideology: Implications of Structural Complexity,” available online at
http://mysbfiles.stonybrook.edu/~stfeldma/Feldman_Johnston_Ideology.pdf
.

96
stronger in some cases than the relationship between ideology and income or level of education
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.

96
Openness predicted not only social liberalism but also economic liberalism
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.

97
Outpatient commitment laws
Kahan, Dan M., “Cultural Cognition and Public Policy: The Case of Outpatient Commitment Laws.” (2010). Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 96.
http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/96
.

98
communist countries
For more elaboration see Jost et al, “Exceptions that Prove the Rule—Using a Theory of Motivated Social Cognition to Account for Ideological Incongruities and Political Anomalies: Reply to Greenberg and Jonas,” Psychological Bulletin, 2003, Vol. 129, No. 3, pp. 383–393. See also Jost et al, “Can a Psychological Theory of Ideological Differences Explain Contextual Variability in the Contents of Political Attitudes?” Psychological Inquiry, 2009, No. 20, pp. 183–188.

98
the need for closure in two European groups that differed in their communist experience
Malgorzata Kossowska and Alain van Hiel, “The Relationship Between Need for Closure and Conservative Beliefs in Western and Eastern Europe,” Political Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2003.

98
Eastern and Western Europeans after the fall of communism
Thorisdottir et al, “Psychological needs and values underlying left-right political orientation: Cross-national evidence from Eastern and Western Europe,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 2007, Vol. 71, No. 2, pp. 175–203.

99
we ought to be talking about ideological extremism
The objection regarding left extremes also appears in Jeff Greenberg and Eva Jonas, “Psychological Motives and Political Orientation—The Left, the Right, and the Rigid: Comment on Jost et al.,” Psychological Bulletin, 2003, vol. 129, No. 3, pp. 376–382.

100
not a single study showed more left rigidity than right rigidity
See Jost et al, “Exceptions that Prove the Rule—Using a Theory of Motivated Social Cognition to Account for Ideological Incongruities and Political Anomalies: Reply to Greenberg and Jonas,” Psychological Bulletin, 2003, Vol. 129, No., 3, pp. 383–393.

100
measured political views and ideological extremism simultaneously
Jost et al, “Are Needs to Manage Uncertainty and Threat Associated With Political Conservatism or Ideological Extremity?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 33, No. 7, July 2007, pp. 989–1007.

101
when sophistication and authoritarianism do coincide
Christopher Federico et al, “Expertise and the Ideological Consequences of the Authoritarian Predisposition,” Public Opinion Quarterly, September 2011, p. 1–23.

101
“the Loch Ness Monster of political psychology”
See Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Chapters 8–9.

102
“the data don't really support the rigidity of the left hypothesis”
Interview with Scott Eidelman, August 2, 2011.

102 “It is just manifestly obvious that such creatures exist” Interview with Philip Tetlock, September 20, 2011.

102
hardliners on the American and Soviet sides were both authoritarians
Robert Altemeyer, The Authoritarians, 2006. Available online at
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/
.

103
one version of the argument
See Karen Stenner,
The Authoritarian Dynamic
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. See chapter 6: “Authoritarianism and Conservatism: How They Differ and When It Matters.”

103
the party that calls itself conservative blends together all these strands
Stenner herself admits this, writing, “In contemporary U.S. politics, ‘conservative' does tend to mean, all at once, intolerance of difference, attached to the status quo, and opposed to government intervention in the economy” (p. 138).

103
“conservatism has become an authoritarian conservatism”
Interview with Marc Hetherington, July 19, 2011.

104
the number of Independents in U.S. politics has been on the rise
Pew Research Center, “Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology,” May 4, 2011. Available online at
http://people-press.org/2011/05/04/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/
.

104
become their political selves
Christopher Federico et al, “Expertise and the Ideological Consequences of the Authoritarian Predisposition,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
, September 2011, p. 1–23.