The Republican Brain (44 page)

232
vaccine-autism issue
My reporting on this topic can be found in Chris Mooney, “Why Does the Vaccine/Autism Controversy Live On?”
Discover
, June 2009. Available online at
http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jun/06-why-does-vaccine-autism-controversy-live-on
.

233
pesky little problem called scientists
Institute of Medicine, “Immunization Safety Review: Vaccines and Autism,” May 14, 2004. Available online at
http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2004/Immunization-Safety-Review-Vaccines-and-Autism.aspx
.

233
empediological studies
For a very readable account of the epidemiological research and its findings, see Paul Offit,
Autism's False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure
, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, Chapter 6.

233
polling data at the national level
See Chris Mooney, “More Polling Data on the Politics of Vaccine Resistance,”
Discover Magazine (“Intersection Blog”)
, April 27, 2011, available online at
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/04/27/more-polling-data-on-the-politics-of-vaccine-resistance/
.

234
it's already happening
See Paul Offit,
Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threatens Us All
, New York: Basic Books, 2011.

235
dismissed from the conservative American Enterprise Institute
David Frum, “When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality,”
New York Magazine
, November 20, 2011. Available online at
http://nymag.com/print/?/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011–11/
.

235
motivated reasoning study that involved gay rights
Geoffrey D. Munro and Peter H. Ditto, “Biased Assimilation, Attitude Polarization, and Affect in Reactions to Stereotype-Relevant Scientific Information,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
, 1997, Vol. 23, pp. 636–653.

236
“real consequences”
Chris Mooney interview with David Frum and Kenneth Silber, Point of Inquiry podcast, August 1, 2011. Available online at
http://www.pointofinquiry.org/david_frum_and_kenneth_silber_conservatives_and_science/
.

236
“I think liberals would believe them”
Interview with Peter Ditto, August 26, 2011.

Part Five

The Political Laboratory

Chapter Thirteen

A Liberal Confronts New Data

with Everett Young

Over the course of this book, a large amount of evidence has been assembled suggesting that liberals and conservatives, in aggregate, are just different people. And it would be amazing if these differences didn't have an influence on how the two groups respond to political information, or information in general.

More specifically, it is clear that conservatives being repeatedly and insistently wrong about political and scientific facts, and conservatives engaging in a lot of motivated reasoning, often go together. This naturally leads to the idea that there might be something about conservatism in general that is tied to more motivated, defensive responses—and something about liberalism that is tied to the opposite.

In particular, it may be that Openness to Experience, the leading liberal personality trait, makes one less defensive in the face of threatening information, and more tolerant of cognitive dissonance, period. That wouldn't mean liberals never engage in motivated reasoning—just that motivated reasoning among liberals and conservatives differs in some meaningful way, due to the broad groups' differing personalities.

That's a scientific hypothesis—one with much evidence to suggest it, perhaps, but still just a hypothesis. In this chapter, then, I want to tell you about an attempt to put this notion to a test, through an experiment that challenged college students' beliefs in a wide variety of areas, just to see how they would respond.

Normally, someone who attacks another's beliefs would simply be called a jerk. But at least for a short while during this study, I suppose such a person could instead be called a “scientist.”

I would never have been involved in criticizing people's favorite football quarterbacks—and musicians, and cities, and movies, and cars, and their alma maters—if I hadn't fallen in with a creative young political scientist named Everett Young.

I first met Everett just as I meet all my journalistic sources: I asked to interview him by phone. I still remember where I was when we talked—holed up in a snowy hotel in Boulder, Colorado—because not all interviews go so well. Not all turn you into a collaborator with the person you set out to interview.

Everett had, just a year earlier, completed his Ph.D. dissertation at Stony Brook University under two professors of political science already much quoted in this book, Charles Taber and Milton Lodge. It's entitled “Why We're Liberal, Why We're Conservative: A Cognitive Theory on the Origins of Ideological Thinking.” In it, he presents evidence suggesting conservatives are less open to persuasion; more likely to think that the fans of rival sports teams are less likeable people; more likely to prefer having friends that share their beliefs; more likely to want to keep germs out of their bodies; more likely to blame Britney Spears for her faults and troubles; more likely to elect a candidate to Congress who keeps his or her lawn neatly edged—and much, much else.

Like I said, Everett is creative.

Everett had already done much to document a variety of liberal-conservative differences, and I suggested to him that it might be intriguing to try to go further. I asked whether he could think of any way to test this idea about conservatives engaging in more, or more intense, motivated reasoning.

And before long, he had designed a fascinating study to do just that. Indeed, by the time this book was due, the study had already been run at one university—Louisiana State—with 144 college undergraduate participants, who were about two-thirds female and completed the study for extra credit.

I was involved in helping design the study—providing feedback and acting as a kind of research assistant—and traveled to LSU twice during the fall of 2011 to observe the research. And with Everett's permission and also his help, I've decided to report the first round of findings—caveats included—here.

At the outset, let me note that Everett hopes to run the study at another university in the near future, and its results have not yet been peer reviewed (something that was not really possible on a popular book's timeline). Nevertheless, what he found was intriguing—and in one case, quite surprising. To put it bluntly: One scientific finding in particular simply leap out of the data and gave us a shake.

Let me also note that while earlier chapters of this book have provided broad discussions of the results of multiple studies, this one is different. It dives deep into the design and results of one single, new experiment. That requires providing much more detail than usual—and sometimes getting a tad technical. But considering that we're on new ground here and readers cannot follow a reference to a scientific journal to learn further about this research, that seems appropriate.

To establish scientifically that conservatives are more motivated reasoners in our study, it was necessary to do the following: 1) measure study participants' ideology; 2) measure their
general
tendency to reason in a motivated way; and then 3) demonstrate a relationship between these two “variables,” such that more political conservatism was statistically linked to a heightened tendency to engage in motivated reasoning, or MR.

Measuring ideology is something political psychologists do all the time, and doing so here was relatively straightforward. When students sat down at their computer consoles to take our study, they were asked their political opinions on both moral and fiscal issues, as well as to place themselves on a scale from “very liberal” to “very conservative,” with a number of gradations in between. They also answered several other questions that allowed us to locate them politically, as well as questions to determine their “Big Five” personality traits, religiosity, and degree of authoritarianism. Furthermore, since motivated reasoning has often been shown to increase with political sophistication, the students were asked standard political knowledge questions to determine how much they actually knew.

Measuring the subjects' tendency to engage in motivated reasoning, however, was a more difficult challenge. And to describe how we did it, it will be necessary to get a bit wonky for a moment.

In scientific parlance, we wanted to create a
scale
of general motivated reasoning—a measure of an individual's
general tendency
to be more or less slanted in his or her reactions to “evidence” that we provided on a wide variety of topics, mostly
not
political ones. This last detail was particularly crucial. To establish motivated reasoning as a general psychological tendency—an element of a person's style of thinking and responding to information in general, and not just a result of his or her views about one particular political topic—we needed to show its presence as individuals responded to a variety of issues across different walks of life. As far as we knew, nobody had ever attempted to construct such a motivated reasoning scale before, one in which subjects' answers to a variety of questions would capture their general motivated reasoning tendency.

Our strategy, then, was this. We asked our participants to state their opinions on twelve quite diverse topics. Then we showed them some “information”—lies, mostly, but always presented as convincing-sounding “evidence”—that, in each case, either supported or undercut that opinion. The information came in the form of essays, bullet-points, or in some cases, simple ratings and quotations. In most cases we claimed to have found the information on the Internet.

The order in which the participants encountered our twelve items, and whether they received congenial or uncongenial information on any particular one of them, was determined at random. Then, after each item, we asked the student (A) to indicate how persuasive he or she found the information, and (B) to restate his or her initial opinion, so that we could determine whether it had changed.

These answers allowed us to derive two
separate
measures of motivated reasoning. For question A, the “spread” or difference between participants' persuasiveness ratings for friendly (or “pro-attitudinal”) versus unfriendly (or “counter-attitudinal”) information constituted our first measure. We expected most participants to find friendly information more persuasive than unfriendly information, of course—but
how much more persuasive
would constitute a measure of just how motivated an individual's reasoning was, relative to others in the sample.

For question B, participants' reacting to friendly essays by strengthening their pre-existing opinions, combined with their reacting to unfriendly essays by resisting changes to their opinions (or even by strengthening their prior views, the “backfire effect”), would constitute our second measure. Here, we weren't just measuring whether our subjects thought our essays were “persuasive,” but whether their minds actually seemed to change.

What were the essays about? This was the really fun part of the study design, and one where Everett came up with a number of highly believable phony essays attacking any number of things that people care about, and doing so in seemingly authoritative fashion.

First, we included essays that either did or did not support our participants prior beliefs on two politicized scientific topics, global warming and nuclear power. These were chosen for an obvious reason: One might expect conservatives to be more biased on the former, and liberals to be more biased on the latter.

The essays provided a barrage of scientific “facts” and were pretty in-your-face, mimicking the language that you might find on a very ideological blog. For instance, here's a brief (and highly misleading) excerpt from the global-warming-is-bogus item:

IT IS A FACT that whatever global warming we are experiencing is mostly natural. The Earth's orbital cycles, complex changes in solar radiation, and other natural causes can account for most of the measured temperature increase. While the climate science “establishment” may claim that human contributions have swamped this natural variability, the opposite is actually the case. Human influences on the Earth's vast climate system are puny in comparison with the power of the sun.

And here's some bogus information on nuclear power, from our “anti” essay on this subject:

It doesn't take a meltdown to cause nuclear-related deaths. Disturbing statistics point to increases in cancer, low birth weight, and even mental illness in areas near perfectly good-functioning nuclear power plants. Experts estimate premature deaths worldwide from mere
proximity
to nuclear power plants could exceed 100,000 per year.

Thus did we attempt to get a rise out of liberals and conservatives, alike, on politicized scientific issues. (But bear in mind that the study participants might have gotten essays that
confirmed
their views about either of these topics, rather than attacking them.)

Beyond our global warming and nuclear power items, everything else in the study was pretty apolitical. We asked our study subjects to read fake essays that either trashed or heaped praise on their favorite brand of car, their home city, their alma mater, and their favorite musician, film, writer, and football quarterback. We also gave them contrary “facts” about the alleged superiority of Macs and PCs, culled from internet debates on the subject. And we asked them to read essays about the reality of extra sensory perception, the validity of astrology, and whether it is better to breastfeed or bottle-feed a child.