The Republican Brain

by is Mooney

  That’s why, although these findings are controversial—wildly so, to judge by the response to Jost’s 2003 study—if one cares about the truth it is scarcely possible to ignore them any longer. There are too many studies and too much consistency across them. It is hard to believe it could all be a mistake, especially since the results are neither anomalous nor surprising. Rather, they consistently reinforce what has long been folk wisdom about liberals and conservatives.

  To capture that folk wisdom, let me quote a prominent political writer, Jonathan Chait of The New Republic, on how liberals and conservatives differ. In early 2011, Chait wrote about why he thought there would be a government shutdown—because liberals value compromise and are willing to bend, but conservatives often don’t and won’t (a very astute psychological observation). In the process, Chait perfectly described one key implication of the Jost research, but without making any direct reference to it:

  Liberalism is an ideology that values considering every question through the side of the other fellow and not just through your own perspective. . . The stereotype of liberalism, which is sometimes true, often runs toward bending over so far backward that you can’t make obvious moral judgments: Who are we to judge this or that dictator? Criminals are just the result of bad environment. In any case, the joke about liberals—a liberal is somebody who won’t even take his own side in an argument—is not a joke you’d hear about conservatives. Now, I think the qualities of confident assertion of principle and willingness to bend both have their place. One of my meta-beliefs about, well, everything is that one needs to be able to understand both black-and-white situations and shades-of-gray situations. In any case, I think conservatives tend to err toward the black-and-white worldview, and liberals toward the shades-of-gray worldview.

  Whether he knows it or not, the science says Chait is absolutely right. And it also suggests—based on the complex and nuanced nature of his argument, and his ability to see other perspectives and integrate them into his own—that he’s a liberal himself!

  It’s time, then, to fully survey what we know about liberals and conservatives, because the implications of this knowledge for our political battles over reality are very substantial. As we will see, the two groups have, on average, different cognitive styles, which can be expected to significantly impact the way they process information. In particular, they tend to handle uncertainty and ambiguity very differently. And based on all of this, there are reasons to think they will ultimately differ in their degree of persuadability, openness to new information, and defensiveness about their beliefs.

  The simplest opening wedge into what is sometimes called the psychology of ideology involves the study of personality—which is clearly and strongly related to politics.

  Over time, psychologists have come up with a widely accepted scale for measuring the so-called “Big Five” traits that characterize the human personality: Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (sometimes referred to by its opposite, Emotional Stability). Or, to use the handy acronym in the field, OCEAN. We all possess each of these traits to a greater or lesser degree. It’s a bit like we each have five knobs, tuned to a particular amplitude. These traits show up when we are very young—indeed, they are thought to be significantly rooted in genetics, and don’t change much over the course of our lifetimes. And they’ve been shown to persist across cultures, suggesting they may even be part of a universal and biologically grounded human nature.

  Many of the Big Five traits are self-explanatory, but the two on which conservatives and liberals diverge most meaningfully perhaps are not: Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness.

  Across a large range of studies—which, as usual, find statistical correlations between the subjects’ political views and their personality types—liberals consistently rate higher on Openness. And once again, this appears to be true across cultures. “Open people everywhere tend to have more liberal values,” observes the psychologist Robert McCrae, who conducted voluminous studies on the human personality while at the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health. And to say liberals are more Open is also, of course, to say that conservatives score much lower on the same measure—or, that they’re more closed. So what does it mean to be Open?

  Openness is a broad personality trait that covers everything from intellectual flexibility and curiosity to an enjoyment of the arts and creativity. It denotes being experimental, a risk taker in one’s way of living and one’s choices, and wanting to sample variety across the range of life’s experiences. People who are open tend to enjoy travel, reading lots of books, listening to many different types of music, dining out, and going to art and theater openings. They’re very self-expressive and creative—and very inclined to distinguish themselves, to show that they’re unique and different from everybody else.

  Open people tend to congregate together—and to marry each other, too. That means they pass on openness, genetically or otherwise, to their children. Want to find (or date) an open person? Just go hang out at a coffee shop with a unique looking book (and outfit). Or, if you have a little more time, plan a trip to New York City or Massachusetts.

  Openness is not the same thing as intelligence. People who are open tend to score better on the verbal section of the SAT, but not necessarily on the math section. But the personality trait certainly does impart intellectual flexibility, curiosity, a willingness to entertain new ideas, and a toleration of different perspectives and values. And thus it seems perfectly linked to one of the core dimensions of left-right ideology identified by Jost and his colleagues—acceptance versus resistance to change. Openness is all about embracing change and even reveling in it, thumbing your nose at those who want to preserve the status quo. Closedness is the opposite.

  The average liberal is clearly much more open than the average conservative, but conservatives have an admirable trait of their own—a characteristic where they best liberals by a good margin. It’s called Conscientiousness, and those who rate high on this trait tend to prize orderliness and having a lot of structure in their lives—being on time, working hard, sticking to a predictable schedule, and keeping one’s home or office neat and clean. Think of a lawn that’s highly manicured, shoes that are perfectly shined, a shirt that is crisply starched. Think, in short, of corporate America and the military. The conscientious are highly goal oriented, competent, and organized—and, on average, politically conservative. (Conservatives also appear to tend toward more Extraversion, though it’s a smaller effect. And interestingly, the two groups may score about the same on Agreeableness because liberals emphasize one core aspect of this trait—empathy—while conservatives emphasize another—politeness.)

  These relationships between personality and politics have been detected so many times, in so many studies, that they’re virtually a closed matter in psychology at this point—especially when it comes to the powerful relationship between liberalism and Openness. This relationship is real. And it’s nothing to trivialize, either. In a recent study, a team of researchers at Yale and Brooklyn College, led by Yale political scientist Alan Gerber, found that the apparent influence of Openness (or the lack thereof) on one’s politics is larger than the influence of one’s level of education (which strongly predicts greater liberalism) or one’s level of income (which strongly predicts greater conservatism). The last two relationships are benchmarks in social science—everybody knows education and income exert a big tug on our political views. Well, personality is at least as big of an influence—perhaps bigger.

  To show how powerful this relationship is, let me cast it in terms of percentages. In the Yale study (with a very large sample, more than 12,000 individuals), people who rated very high on Openness were, on average, more liberal in outlook than 71 percent of the respondents (or conversely, those who rated very low on Openness were more conservative than 71 percent of the respondents). Something similar went for Conscientiousness. A person who rated very hig
h on this trait was, on average, more conservative in outlook than 61 percent of the respondents. By comparison, a person with a very high level of education was, on average, more liberal overall than 59 percent of respondents; while a person with a very high income was (on average) more conservative overall than 56 percent of respondents.

  The implications of these results are profound, for they mean that liberals and conservatives don’t just differ in ideology, they also differ in lifestyles and in behavior—where they like to hang out, who they date, how they dress, what they do for fun, what careers they choose. Indeed, in a fascinating study of liberal and conservative bedrooms and work spaces, John Jost collaborated with the psychologist Dana Carney of Columbia and several other researchers to show that these traits powerfully shape our lives, all the way down to the kinds of stuff we leave lying around.

  The bedrooms of conservatives tended to contain the kinds of items you use to keep your life organized—calendars, stamps—and also to be tidier and full of cleaning supplies: “laundry baskets, irons and ironing boards, and string or thread.” The decorations were also more likely to be conventional: “sports paraphernalia, flags of various types, American flags in particular.” In other words, the spaces reflected more Conscientiousness, but also less Openness. The apartments of liberals were vastly different—messier, of course (less Conscientious), but also brimming with articles suggesting Openness to Experience:

  They contained a significantly greater number and variety of books, including books about travel, ethnic issues, feminism, and music, as well as a greater number and variety of music CDs, including world music, folk music, classic and modern rock, and “oldies.” Liberal bedrooms also contained a greater number of art supplies, stationery, movie tickets, and a number of items pertaining to travel, including international maps, travel documents, books about travel, and cultural memorabilia.

  As if that’s not enough, scientists have also shown that the notorious American divide between “red states” and “blue states” partly reflects personality differences. In the 1996, 2000, and 2004 elections, the average Openness or Conscientiousness of a state’s residents could be used to predict whether it went to the Democratic (Clinton, Gore, Kerry) or Republican (Dole, Bush, Bush) candidate. It’s more than just a cliché, then, to say that the bicoastal “blue” regions of the U.S. are where the intellectuals and creative types live, and that the South, Midwest, and Sun Belt are the home to hard-working, orderly traditionalists.

  You may have noticed from the percentages presented above that while personality traits strongly predict political outlooks, there’s still plenty of statistical wiggle room. The data leave more than enough space for there to be plenty of open conservatives and closed liberals—it’s just that they’ll be a minority overall.

  But we’re all unique, and there are multiple psychological dimensions that, in combination with our life experiences, make us who we are. Just because these relationships between personality and politics hold true for large groups of people doesn’t make them destiny for any particular one of us. I’m a liberal, for instance, but I happen to score just as highly on Conscientiousness as I do on Openness. So does my brother, another liberal; maybe it runs in the family.

  Going forward, it may help to use an analogy to explain the significance of social science results like these—where a real relationship is consistently detected, and yet it clearly doesn’t explain everything, and many exceptions can and will be cited. That’s always the situation we find ourselves in with fields like psychology, because there are far too many factors that go into making people who they are for any single one of them to account for anything more than some percentage of the phenomenon or behavior in question (or, to use wonk language, to “explain” more than some modest percentage of the “variance”).

  But that doesn’t make social scientific explanations powerless or useless—quite the contrary. Rather, as John Jost explains, it’s better to think of the proven relationship between, say, Openness and liberalism as akin to the relationship between something like height and sex. Yes, there are tall women out there; yes, there are short men. But “you’d win a lot of money in Las Vegas if you bet, based on sex, who was taller than whom,” Jost says. It’s the same with liberalism and Openness. There are rigid and closed-minded liberals out there, but if I give you a room of 50 people scoring high on Openness, tell you nothing else about them, and ask you to guess their politics, the best strategy would be for you to guess “liberal” every time.

  And no house in Vegas is going to let you play that game.

  Precisely how strong is the relationship between the psychological traits studied by Jost and his colleagues, and being a conservative? The scientists calculated that if you were to combine all the traits they surveyed—lack of openness, fear of threat, intolerance of uncertainty, and so on—together into a single statistic, then scoring above average on it would make a person somewhere between four and seven times more likely to be a conservative.

  As this combinatorial approach suggests, the open personality is like a cornucopia. Out of it burst many other traits that also differ among liberals and conservatives. Several of these are very central to my analysis of why the two sides might diverge in their handling of scientific and factual information, and their defensiveness about core beliefs.

  Consider, for instance, the need for cognitive closure, which describes the state of being uncomfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty, and wanting these to be resolved into a firm belief, either on a specific issue or in general. Sometimes—more pejoratively—people with a high need for closure are called “closed minded.” Having a high need for closure tends to mean that one will seize on a piece of information that dispels doubt or uncertainty, and then freeze, refusing to admit or consider new information. Those who have a high need for closure can also be expected to spend less time processing information that those who are driven by different motivations, such as the goal of achieving factual accuracy.

  A large body of studies—across countries—show that conservatives tend to have a greater need for closure than do liberals, which is precisely what you would expect to find in light of the strong relationship between liberalism and Openness (and conservatism and Conscientiousness). “The finding is very robust,” explains Arie Kruglanski, who has pioneered research in this area. Indeed, “epistemic closure” is a concept that has even made its way into mainstream political debate about why conservatives today deny reality—though few seem to have squarely acknowledged this trait is fundamentally more a conservative than a liberal one.

  And not only do liberals tend to have much less need for closure than conservatives. At the same time, liberals often have more need for cognition. They like to think, in an effortful and self-challenging way, and take pride in doing a good job of it. They enjoy complex problems and trying to solve them.

  Clearly, the need for closure drives an unwillingness to consider new information (and less time spent focusing on it), as well as a defensive fixation on one’s current beliefs. Meanwhile, another Openness-related trait on which the two political camps differ—integrative complexity (or IC)—has similar implications.

  Integrative complexity describes the tendency to view an issue from multiple perspectives, and then to merge those perspectives into a more nuanced position (or, to assess their commonalities and interrelations), and is typically measured by analyzing the structure of speeches and writings. Consider an example from the psychology literature. The following statements about abortion would rank, respectively, lowest and highest on a seven point scale of integrative complexity:

  Abortion is a basic right that should be available to all women. To limit a woman’s access to an abortion is an intolerable infringement on her civil liberties. Such an infringement must not be tolerated. To do so would be to threaten the separation of Church and State so fundamental to the American way of life.

  Some view abortion as a civil liberties issue; others see abortion as tan
tamount to murder. One’s view of abortion depends on a complicated mixture of legal, moral, philosophical and, perhaps, scientific judgments. Is there a constitutional right to abortion? What criteria should be used to determine when human life begins? Who possesses the authority to resolve these issues?

  As you can tell from the second passage, academics tend to possess a high degree of integrative complexity—sometimes to the point of considering so much nuance and so many sides of the story that they never really end up saying anything.

  In a series of studies published in the 1980s, psychologist Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania showed that integrative complexity is also politically correlated. Studying speeches given by U.S. Senators in the 1975 and 1976 Congresses, he found that liberal and moderate senators rated higher on integrative complexity than did conservatives. Moving across the Atlantic to examine interviews with 89 members of the British House of Commons, Tetlock obtained a similar result: Moderate socialists were the most integratively complex, followed by moderate conservatives. Extreme socialists and extreme conservatives showed the lowest complexity. Finally, applying his methodology to the opinions of Supreme Court justices, Tetlock once again found the same effect—liberal and moderate judges showed more complexity in their reasoning.

  It is important to emphasize that even if conservatives overall are less integratively complex—more likely to create binaries, and divide the world up into good guys and bad guys, rather than seeing commonalities or a middle ground—this is not always a weakness. Sometimes you need to fight the bad guys and not waffle while you try to understand them, which is precisely why conservative decisiveness in truly dangerous situations can be a great strength. Other studies by Tetlock have shown that Winston Churchill was considerably lower on integrative complexity than Neville Chamberlain—thank goodness for that—and that abolitionists were just as low in IC as defenders of slavery. Both were wholly dedicated to their cause, disinclined to compromise, and absolutely sure their opponents were wrong.