The Republican Brain (46 page)

Based on the results reported so far, our hypothesis was faring pretty well. Conservatives were less Open, and were considerably more biased political reasoners on nuclear science—the issue where
liberals
are supposedly more biased. Plus, science deniers were more motivated than science accepters on at least one measure of MR regarding global warming—and they were motivated in favor of being factually wrong.

However, when it came to non-political items, this pattern didn't hold any longer.

In fact, we did not achieve a satisfactory measure of general, across-the-board motivated reasoning as a trait or individual tendency. There is no question that motivated reasoning was
happening
on almost every item. For most of the items, our subjects found friendly essays more persuasive than unfriendly essays. What's more, upon closer analysis, most of the items showed that taking a strong view on the topic was associated with higher levels of motivated reasoning than taking a moderate view. In other words, there was a strong
prior attitude effect
, which is just what we would expect to find if motivated reasoning was going on.

However, on these non-political items—involving how good one's favorite quarterback is, how good one's school is, and so on—motivated reasoning seemed to be driven less by any trait that the individual possessed, and more simply by this prior attitude effect: A person's emotional investment in a particular idea, belief, or “attitude object.” In other words, we didn't find strong evidence that motivated reasoning even exists as a chronic personality trait that can be measured on a multi-item index or scale. If he's emotionally attached to a thing, a person is probably going to be motivated in his reasoning about it, at least when initially confronted with “evidence” about it. (It may well be that more open-minded people will continue thinking about things after the initial shock, and may later weigh additional evidence, whereas more closed-minded people will regard the matter as closed—but we could not test that in a single sitting.)

In other words, this is where our study tried to go considerably farther than prior work—to shoot for the moon—and we didn't succeed. We wanted to show that the same patterns of motivated reasoning that occurred on political issues would also hold up on a battery of non-political issues—indeed, that they would hold across the board. If so, this would mean that conservatives are simply more defensive about their prior beliefs, period.

At least in this first pass at the question, it didn't work out that way.

But while we didn't find conservatives systematically engaging in more motivated reasoning than liberals on non-political issues, there was something intriguing that we did find. And this was, by far, our strongest result of all.

We measured how much time our subjects spent reading the essays. We did so simply because Everett's mentors in political science, Charles Taber and Milton Lodge of Stony Brook, had found that more time spent looking at counter-attitudinal arguments was associated with stronger motivated reasoning, presumably because people spent more time arguing in their heads against the contrary evidence.

While our study design was substantially different from theirs, we wondered if increased reading time would again be associated with increased motivated reasoning. It actually wasn't, in our sample. But we anticipated there might be a complication with this idea: Liberals might spend more time reading the essays. And guess what: they did!

In sum, then, we simply didn't achieve a good enough measure of general, non-political motivated reasoning to show that any one group of people is more likely to engage in it across a diversity of topics. This doesn't mean such a measure could never be devised—only that our first attempt, into which we put much thought and even more work, didn't succeed. To be sure, motivated reasoning happened all over the place in our survey, but it wasn't systematic. The same individuals weren't doing it on every item—rather, an individual tended to think in a biased way when he was heavily invested in that particular topic or in defending that particular attitude object, but not on other items in which he was less invested.

However, we did confirm the notion, resting now on a growing mountain of evidence, that liberalism is associated with curiosity and open-mindedness as measured by conventional methods—and if you consider time spent reading as an alternative measure, as measured by an alternative method too.

So what does this all mean?

While our hypothesis about conservatives engaging in more
political
motivated reasoning held up quite well in this study, a tendency to engage in more
general
motivated reasoning did not. However, we found one possible explanation for this result, in that conservatives, more than liberals, may have been going on quicker and less informed impressions rather than deeply engaging with the material we provided. It is even possible that conservatives were making more use of heuristics—which isn't really reasoning at all, motivated or otherwise.

This suggestion itself arises out of past research on the differences between liberalism and conservatism. For instance, a study of authoritarianism and heuristic reasoning by Marcus Kemmelmeier, discussed in Chapter 3, suggested that this group of conservatives, in particular, was more susceptible to reasoning errors resulting from quick impulses or reactions to material. And again, our finding about less reading time most strongly implicated authoritarianism.

Also potentially relevant here is a study discussed in Chapter 8, on conservatives, global warming, and cable news. The study, by Lauren Feldman of American University and her colleagues, found that just as conservatives who watch Fox overwhelmingly dismiss global warming, so conservatives who watched CNN or MSNBC were more likely to
accept
that global warming is true. In other words, conservatives seemed more impressionable than liberals in both contexts.

In sum, our study very much backs up the idea that there may be something about conservatives that leads them to be more factually incorrect. But it also gives us a more nuanced view on the question, showing that we may not be able to locate this tendency simply in emotional defensiveness and the motivated reasoning that results. While highly sophisticated conservatives are likely very strong motivated reasoners about
politics
(and you can bet highly sophisticated liberals probably have this tendency too), average conservatives may be less exacting in how they assess information—less engaged, curious, exploratory—and more vulnerable to first impressions (including propaganda they encounter from trusted and intellectually sophisticated conservative opinion leaders). In other words, it may be mistaken to treat the two groups of conservatives in the same way in this context.

In future research, we would very much like to find new ways of testing these ideas, such as including measures of “need for cognition,” “need for closure,” and tests for various types of reasoning based on heuristics. It seems plausible that more and less reading time might be associated with the need for cognition and the need for closure, respectively.

As of now, we can still say that a lack of Openness probably explains much about many conservatives, including their resistance to the facts. But solely attributing this to an across the board difference in motivated reasoning that even extends outside of the political arena may be too simplistic—and thus, it is fortunate that we ran this study and were able to obtain this new evidence (and so modify our views). Instead, here is how Openness (or the lack thereof) might work:

If conservatives just aren't as interested as liberals in finding things out about the world—and that's what our essays were all about: we were purporting to bring evidence to bear about wide-ranging (and, we think, interesting) topics like ESP, quarterbacking ability, the academic quality of the participants' school, a popular singer's need to use performance enhancing technologies like auto-tune—one need not suggest conservatives are always more staunch defenders of ideas they care about than liberals are of ideas
they
care about. Conservatives' tendency to be wrong on the facts might sometimes be explained by a lack of interest in facts themselves—and, perhaps, by a relatively stronger interest in seeing government set policy in a way that that matches their
values
(which are quite easily discoverable without any need for excessive curiosity), rather than changing on-the-ground realities.