The Republican Brain (43 page)

Misinformation isn't going to prevail in these realms, however, any more than it will on fracking, nuclear power, or vaccines. That's because while individuals and small groups may go astray, there's a deliberative structure set up on the left that ensures they will be debunked if they're wrong. And there's a psychology of disobedience and anti-authoritarianism on the left that ensures that those making these claims will be challenged, sometimes quite vigorously or even viciously.

Does such infighting and boat-rocking ever happen on the right? Sure it does. A great example would be the group of intellectually honest (and moderate) conservatives who have formed around former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, and who are constantly trying to keep conservatives accurate on global warming, the debt ceiling, and much more. Another example would be Bruce Bartlett. I'm making statements about general tendencies here, not about absolutes.

But everything we've seen about liberal and conservative psychology suggests such disloyal behavior ought to be less common on the right, and to be punished more—and indeed, real world observations confirm that this is indeed the case. Consider not only Bartlett but Frum, who charges that he was dismissed from the conservative American Enterprise Institute and is no longer invited to appear on
Fox News
for his heresies, particularly on health care. As Frum put it to me, “There are real consequences in the conservative world to people's livelihoods to being on the wrong side of some question that has become conservative orthodoxy.”

And that is one core part of the left-right difference.

But to adequately probe the problem of irrationality on the left, I need to push the argument a bit further still.

After all, I've clearly shown that some on the left can go emotionally astray on issues like fracking, nuclear power, and vaccination. There is a powerful counterweight to such biased reasoning in the scientific community and those allies who embrace its Enlightenment values—but the biased reasoning itself clearly does happen. That's impossible to deny.

In fact, although many of the psychology studies that I've surveyed seem to capture conservatives engaging in more intense motivated reasoning, liberals have been caught in the act too. I've shown that the best predictor of liberal bias, in a controlled motivated reasoning experiment, seems to be egalitarianism—e.g., liberals tend to be biased
in favor
of disadvantaged groups.

University of California-Irvine social psychologist Peter Ditto captured this tendency in the trolley problem study discussed in Chapter 4. And he captured a more modest version of it another motivated reasoning study that involved gay rights.

In this case, subjects who either accepted or rejected anti-gay stereotypes (e.g., that gays and lesbians show cross-gender behavior, or that they have psychological problems) were shown descriptions of two fake scientific studies, one that confirmed and one that denied the validity of such stereotypes. It's a classic design for detecting motivated reasoning, because all the studies used in the experiment were fake. And in this case, when respondents were asked to rate how convincing the studies were, the bias turned out to be slightly bigger among those egalitarians who rejected anti-gay stereotypes. These defenders of gay rights were somewhat
more likely
to call fake studies that supported their view convincing (and those that refuted their views as unconvincing) than those who accepted such stereotypes.

In other words, those who support gay rights on an emotional level seem to engage in motivated reasoning when confronted with evidence pertinent to this question—and may even do so a bit more than those who are anti-gay. In a controlled experiment, they appear to have strong emotional reactions that, in turn, drive their assessments of evidence—at least in one sitting or during one encounter.

So are liberals inherently more “rational” than conservatives? Certainly they're not in this particular case. And yet they nevertheless end up more correct about science, policy facts, economics, history, and much else. How could that be?

The most minimalist explanation would simply suggest that they have the right friends. “There's an argument you could make where liberals are right by accident, because they put their faith in the right people,” says Ditto—where the right people would be the scientists and experts who are heavily weighted towards the liberal camp. “If scientists all came out and said something crazy,” Ditto continues, “I think liberals would believe them.”

This limited explanation—liberals listen to their friends, and they just happen to have more reliable ones; or in another related version, liberal elites are far more intellectually responsible than conservative elites—might be sufficient to account for much of the divide over reality in American politics. The dramatic left-right imbalance in expertise that we see today, and that has been well documented in previous chapters, would in and of itself be enough to fuel a large reality gap.

But the view advanced in this book remains that the causes are probably deeper than that. I've suggested—and furnished considerable evidence to show—that there may be a
reason
why liberals and scientists are usually aligned. It turns on the Open personality and its curiosity, tolerance and flexibility—and conversely, on the psychological tendencies that accompany the Closed personality (need for closure, lower integrative complexity, intolerance of ambiguity, and so on). This affinity itself suggests that overall, liberals will be less likely to cling to particular cherished beliefs and argue back in defense of them—and more willing to change their minds (even if buttons can clearly get pushed in motivated reasoning studies). In sum, they will behave more like their own allies and psychological kin—scientists.

So it's not just that liberals have trustworthy friends to listen to on complex and contested issues; it's that there's something about who they are that makes them less defensive and more open-minded, in general. And is that really true?

That's what (with a massive amount of help) I set out to figure out, in the fall of 2011 at Louisiana State University.

The findings will be explained, in detail, in the next chapter.

Notes

220
feature story for Scientific American
Chris Mooney, “The Truth About Fracking,”
Scientific American
, October 2011. Available online at
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-truth-about-fracking
. This book presents a much shortened and also edited version of the article. All interviews were conducted for the article.

221
enough to last for decades
Energy Information Administration,
Annual Energy Outlook 2011
, April 2011. Available online at
http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/0383(2011).pdf
.

221
“flowback water”
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Draft Plan to Study the Potential Impacts of Hydraulic Fracturing on Drinking Water Resources, February 2011. Available online at
http://water.epa.gov/type/groundwater/uic/class2/hydraulicfracturing/upload/HFStudyPlanDraft_SAB_020711–08.pdf
.

221
“This is not a risk free industry”
Interview with Terry Engelder, May 22, 2011.

222
cited and fined
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Environmental Protection, Consent Order and Agreement in the matter of Cabot Oil and Gas Corporation, November 4, 2009. Available online at
http://s3.amazonaws.com/propublica/assets/natural_gas/final_cabot_co-a.pdf
.

222
fined Chesapeake Energy
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Environmental Protection, News Release, “DEP Fines Chesapeake Energy More than $ 1 Million,” May 17, 2011. Available online at
http://www.bradfordtoday.com/local-regional-news/dep-fines-chesapeake-energy-more-than-1-million.html
.

222
“weak link”
Interview with Anthony Gorody, April 27, 2011.

222
“poor job of installing”
Interview with Rob Jackson, April 21, 2011. All quotations of Jackson from this interview.

223
“It just goes with the territory”
Interview with Anthony Ingraffea, April 20, 2011.

223
“Water doesn't travel uphill”
Interview with Terry Engelder, May 22, 2011.

223
“gas migration”
Stephen G. Osborn et al, “Methane contamination of drinking water accompanying gas-well drilling and hydraulic fracturing,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, May 9, 2011. Available online at
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/05/02/1100682108.full.pdf+html
.

224
“a very good physical separation”
Kevin Fisher, “Data Confirm Safety of Well Fracturing,”
The American Oil and Gas Reporter
, July 2010.

225
“chief report on this subject”
DeSmogBlog.com, “Fracking the Future: How Unconventional Gas Threatens Our Water, Health and Climate.” Available online at
http://www.desmogblog.com/fracking-the-future/
.

225
fairly unlikely
New York Department of Environmental Conservation, “Revised Draft SGEIS [Supplemental Generic Environmental Impact Statement] on the Oil, Gas, and Solution Mining Regulatory Program,” September 2011. See Potential Environmental Impacts, Part A, 6.1.6.2., “Subsurface Pathways.” Available online at
http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/materials_minerals_pdf/rdsgeisch6a0911.pdf
.

228
liberals, more than conservatives
Hank C. Jenkins-Smith et al, “Beliefs About Radiation: Scientists, The Public and Public Policy,”
Health Physics
, November 2009, Vol. 97, No. 5.

229
“society has overestimated these risks”
Interview with Hank Jenkins-Smith, July 14, 2011.

229
the experts are largely divided
Carol Silva, Hank Jenkins-Smith, and Richard Barke. 2007. “From Experts' Beliefs to Safety Standards: Explaining Preferred Radiation Protection Standards in Polarized Technical Communities,”
Risk Analysis
, Vol. 27, No. 3, 755–773

230
public policymakers should adopt a more stringent standard
Carol Silva, Hank Jenkins-Smith, and Richard Barke. 2007. “From Experts' Beliefs to Safety Standards.”

230
particulate air pollution
Clean Air Task Force, “The Toll from Coal: An Updated Assessment of Death and Disease From America's Dirtiest Energy Source,” September 2010. Available online at
http://www.catf.us/resources/publications/files/The_Toll_from_Coal.pdf
.

230
about four thousand cancer deaths
Chernobyl Forum,
Chernobyl's Legacy: Health, Environmental, and Socio-Economic Impacts
, available online at
http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Booklets/Chernobyl/chernobyl.pdf
.

231
in the neighborhood of 1,000
Frank N. von Hippel, “The radiological and psychological consequences of the Fukushima Daiichi accident,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, Vol 67, No. 5, 27–36, 2011.

231
“small enough that you couldn't detect them”
Chris Mooney interview with David Brenner on Point of Inquiry podcast, April 11, 2011. Available online at
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/nuclear_risk_and_reason_david_brenner_and_david_ropeik/
.

231
absolutely eviscerated
George Monbiot,“The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all,”
The Guardian
, April 4, 2011. Available online at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/05/anti-nuclear-lobby-misled-world
. Mark Lynas, “Time for the Green Party—and the
Guardian
—to ditch anti-nuclear quackery,” April 21, 2011. Available online at
http://www.marklynas.org/2011/04/time-for-the-green-party-and-guardian-ditch-nuclear-quackery/
.

231
a million people
Helen Caldicott, “Unsafe at Any Dose,”
New York Times
, April 30, 2011. Rebuttals available online at
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/09/opinion/l09caldicott.html?_r=1
.

231
international conspiracy theory
Democracy Now, ““Prescription for Survival”: A Debate on the Future of Nuclear Energy Between Anti-Coal Advocate George Monbiot and Anti-Nuclear Activist Dr. Helen Caldicott,” March 30, 2011. Transcript online at
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/3/30/prescription_for_survival_a_debate_on
.

232
less skeptical of nuclear power, not more
Kahan et al, “The Tragedy of the Risk-Perception Commons: Culture Conflict, Rationality Conflict, and Climate Change,” Cultural Cognition Working Paper No. 89, 2011, available online at
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503
.