The Republican Brain

by is Mooney

  Lakoff’s system intriguingly ties our political differences to child-rearing styles (much evidence suggests that Republicans are more likely to physically punish their children). It also overlaps with Haidt’s—particularly when it comes to wanting to care for those who are harmed (nurturing parent) and respecting authority (strict father). What’s more, both accounts overlap with the research on personality and psychological needs—the strict father model, respect for authority, and the exercise of group loyalty all help to provide certainty and order through the affirmation of hierarchy and stability and the resistance of changes to existing social structures.

  But there’s also a key difference. Lakoff’s account implies that liberals and conservatives will have a different relationship with science and with the facts. He told me as much in an interview for this book (and an article in The American Prospect magazine that preceded it).

  The core reason for this differential bias turns on the issue of authority and from whence it springs. In our interview, Lakoff explained that conservatives should have no problem with science or other factual information when it supports their moral values, including free market goals (e.g., the science of drilling for oil, the science of nuclear power). The strict father wants the kids to go out and thrive, and producing energy through technology is an honorable way of doing it. However, science can also be an unruly guest at the party—highly destabilizing and threatening to conservative values, and with the potential to undermine traditional sources of authority that conservatives respect. Scientific evidence “has a possible effect over the market, foreign policy, religion, all kinds of things,” says Lakoff. “So they can’t have that.”

  Liberals, to Lakoff, are just different. Science, social science, and research in general support an approach that he calls “Old Enlightenment reason”: finding the best facts so as to improve the world and society, and thus advance liberals’ own moral system, which is based on a caring and nurturing parent-run family. “So there is a reason in the moral system to like science in general,” says Lakoff.

  Here also arises a chief liberal weakness, in Lakoff’s view, and one that is probably amplified by academic training. Call it the Condorcet handicap, or the Enlightenment syndrome. Either way, it will sound very familiar: Constantly trying to use factual and reasoned arguments to make the world better, and being amazed to find that even though these arguments are sound, well-researched, and supported, they are disregarded, or even actively attacked, by conservatives.

  When glimpsed from a bird’s eye view, all the morality research that we’re surveying is broadly consistent. It once again reinforces the idea that there are deep differences between liberals and conservatives—differences that are operating, in many cases, beneath the level of conscious awareness, and that ultimately must be rooted in the brain.

  But this body of research also has different implications—depending on whose model you’re using—for the question of liberal and conservative bias. Neither account implies that liberals can’t ever go astray. But for Lakoff it is the reflexive conservative trust of authority that leads most of all to factual intransigence. Simply put, there are just too many conservative authorities out there that turn out to be dead wrong—from religious authorities to the “authority” of the free market. Anti-authoritarian liberals are too good at exposing all these naked emperors—whereupon conservatives fight back vigorously in defense of their beliefs.

  And not only will pro-authority biases drive conservatives to stray from reality. Biases in favor of the group, or the political party, will often have the same consequence. These will tend to make conservatives more unified and supportive of their political “team,” but also less willing to pick a fight with their friends, less likely to issue a corrective when they need to issue one, less motivated to step out of rank and call out bogus assertions, and more willing to ostracize dissenters (and we’ll see this actually happening soon enough).

  For now, then, my sympathies remain tilted towards Lakoff. Add together the moral intuitions research with the personality and psychology research that we’ve already sampled, and the weight of evidence still seems to imply more conservative bias and belief intransigence.

  But short of the new research reported on in chapter 13, can we go farther here? I think so. Lakoff’s account of the liberal addiction to the Enlightenment—to using reason to solve problems and advance liberal values, which is at once both a bias and yet also a key motivator of factual accuracy, and is perhaps related to the need for cognition—may help guide the way.

  Everything that we’ve surveyed thus far about liberal and conservative psychology points in another direction, too: Liberals should be more likely, all else being equal, to pursue careers in the sciences, academia, the arts, journalism, and many other related realms where we expect to find people who rate high on Openness, who share the Condorcet worldview or “Old Enlightenment reason” approach described by Lakoff, who are intellectually curious, and who strive to get the facts right.

  The university is kind of like a playground for people who score high on Openness to Experience. They get to indulge their thoughts and their tastes, sample a smorgasbord of ideas and artistic creations—and of course, they get to encounter lots of difference. At the same time, it is here that they learn the norms that go along with scientific and social scientific inquiry—how your biases can lead you astray, the importance of winning a consensus of experts to your position, and so on. And many will go on to obtain advanced degrees in fields where they have to prove their competence in these norms, before they are allowed to begin using their expertise to make the world better.

  In other words, personality, psychological needs, and different moral intuitions ought to create an “expertise gap” between liberals and conservatives in the modern world. And, as we’ll see, they have.

  Before surveying the data on the politics of these professions, though, let me make clearer the psychological reasons for this expectation. I’ll focus in on the connection between liberalism and science in particular, but there’s no reason that the same account wouldn’t apply to the social sciences, to history, or to many other fields.

  Because scientific research is always characterized by uncertainty, and frequently a very high degree of it, it stands to reason that uncertainty- and ambiguity-tolerant liberals would be more likely to want to be scientists (although not necessarily engineers!), and more likely to revel in the complexities and ambiguities of research. “I think all things considered, a person who cannot tolerate uncertainty, would not probably be very strongly attracted to science,” observes Arie Kruglanski.

  Jonathan Haidt, who has prominently criticized his own field of social psychology for being too insensitive to the conservative perspective, also agrees with this analysis:

  Of course there are many reasons why conservatives would be underrepresented in social psychology, and most of them have nothing to do with discrimination or hostile climate. Research on personality consistently shows that liberals are higher on openness to experience. They’re more interested in novel ideas, and in trying to use science to improve society. So of course our field is and always will be mostly liberal.

  But that’s not the only reason to associate science with liberalism. Scientific research is nothing if not an engine of change. It fuels innovation, uncovers uncomfortable realities about our species and our world (like the fact that we have a common ancestor with the rest of life on Earth, and are causing dangerous changes to the planet), and creates new technologies that can be very destabilizing (from in vitro fertilization to embryonic stem cell research to the potential for human cloning, genetic engineering, biological enhancements, drugs that change our moods, and on and on). For all of these reasons, change-friendly liberals have a built-in reason to be more pro-science, and change-resistant conservatives more anti-science—at least on the most disruptive of issues.

  If you have any doubt about this, just recall the highly political stories of Galileo and
Darwin—free-thinking scientists whose discoveries destroyed the old certainties, dissolving fixed categories to leave behind troubling ambiguities. Galileo dismantled the artificial separation between the Earth and the rest of the heavens, and with it the theological notion that the heavens are idealized and perfect, while the Earth is sinful and corrupt. Darwin undermined the view that species have unique, divinely created essences, as well as the false idea that humans are somehow a category apart from other animals—instead, all of life lies on a continuum. Not surprisingly, the psychologically liberal insights of these singularly brilliant scientists were fiercely resisted by the more conservative (and religious) elements of their respective societies—and in Darwin’s case, they still are.

  Even some conservative intellectuals recognize this. Take Yuval Levin, a conservative writer on science and science policy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of the book Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy. When his book came out, Levin was asked whether the political right was more hostile to science than the left because the political right is more religious. Here’s his answer:

  I don’t think it’s being religious that explains why the right thinks a certain way about science. I think it’s an attitude the right has toward cultural continuity. That makes a big difference. It’s also why the right tends to be more open toward religion. On those issues where the right has a problem with science, it usually arises when science poses some kind of threat to what conservatives see as the imperative of cultural continuity, whether it’s at the juncture of generations or around society’s ability to present a picture of its own past, an argument about morals and values.

  Certain liberal values can certainly also create tensions with science, and I already have identified which values those are (egalitarianism, communitarianism). Later, I will suggest that these tensions are often dealt with in a different way than they are among conservatives, in large part because liberals are more tolerant of new information and more prone to integrative complexity, while having less need for certainty or closure—and also because of the powerful counterweight provided by Enlightenment values. But the point for now is that the body of psychology research shows that there are differences that matter among liberals and conservatives, and this research further suggests that the two groups will have a different relationship with the world of science and research—and also that they will be more and less likely to occupy that world to begin with.

  And that’s precisely what one does find out there in the real world. In one of the most comprehensive surveys of American university professors, sociologists Neil Gross of the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons of George Mason University found that 51 percent described themselves as Democrats and 35.3 percent as Independents—and the vast bulk of those Independents were distinctly Democrat-leaning. Just 13.7 percent were Republicans. It’s just one in a long line of studies demonstrating the overwhelming liberalism of academia—which we can now, perhaps, see in a rather different light.

  Gross’s findings parallel the results of surveys on two overlapping groups: scientists and those with graduate degrees (whether or not they stay in academe). A 2009 survey of American Association for the Advancement of Science members found they were overwhelmingly more Democratic, and more likely to describe themselves as liberal, than the general public. 55 percent were Democrats, 32 percent were Independents, and just 6 percent were Republicans.

  Then there are all the folks with letters after their names. Here, interestingly, we see a trend toward more liberalism over time, which the psychology research alone cannot explain. That’s a problem I’ll tackle in the next section. For now, though, just the data: Ruy Teixeira of the Center for American Progress has shown that Americans with a post-graduate level of education have been trending more and more strongly Democratic in the past three presidential cycles. They supported Al Gore by a margin of 52 percent to 44 percent in 2000, John Kerry by 55 percent to 44 percent in 2004, and Barack Obama by 58 percent to 40 percent in 2008.

  Overall, the liberal lopsidedness of science, academia, and PhD-land is striking—and as noted, it is becoming even more dramatic today. But the psychology research surveyed in the last two chapters puts this fact—as well as the right’s repeated attacks on higher education, dating all the way back to William F. Buckley, Jr.’s 1951 classic God and Man at Yale—in an interesting light.

  It has long been a premise of these attacks that the institutions of higher education make one a liberal, through a kind of brainwashing process. But in light of what we’ve seen, that’s far too simple an account. If our political views are rooted, to a significant extent, in personality and psychological needs, then the groundwork is laid down long before we choose career paths. Academia certainly provides a self-reinforcing and self-actualizing environment for liberals, but the idea that it mints them outright is harder to believe.

  The consequences of the left-right expertise gap are vast—and exert a massive influence on the constant battles over misinformation in American politics. Because just as psychology explains why liberals have more expertise and more scientists in their ranks, it also explains why conservatives (always loyal to their group) fight back against that expertise furiously—and, as we’ll see, even create their own knowledge institutions and train their own “experts” to reinforce their beliefs.

  Notes

  77 trolley problem My discussion of the role of the brain in differential responses to the trolley dilemma draws on Jonathan D. Cohen, “The Vulcanization of the Human Brain: A Neural Perspective on Interactions Between Cognition and Emotion,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 19, No. 4, Fall 2005, p. 3–24.

  78 “Tyrone Payton” Eric Luis Uhlmann, David A. Pizzaro, David Tannenbaum and Peter H. Ditto, “The motivated use of moral principles,” Judgment and Decisionmaking, Vol. 4, No. 6, October 2009, pp. 476–491.

  79 five separate moral intuitions Jonathan Haidt, “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology,” Science, Vol. 316, May 18, 2007, pp. 998–1002; Jesse Graham, Jonathan Haidt, and Brian A. Nosek, “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2009, Vol. 96, No. 5, pp. 1029–1046.

  79 greater disgust reflex Helzer, E. & Pizarro, D.A. (in press). “Dirty liberals! Reminders of physical cleanliness influence moral and political attitudes.” Psychological Science.

  81 “yelling at the television set” Interview with Peter Ditto, August 26, 2011.

  81 Moral Politics George Lakoff, Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

  81 we all think in metaphors See “George Lakoff: Enlightenments, Old and New,” episode of Point of Inquiry with Chris Mooney, where this is discussed. Available online at http://www.pointofinquiry.org/george_lakoff_enlightenments_old_and_new/.

  82 physically punish their children Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler, Authoritarianism & Polarization in American Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. On the politics of spanking and physical punishment, see p. 1–3.

  82 American Prospect Chris Mooney, “Reality Bites,” The American Prospect, June 6, 2011. Available online at http://prospect.org/article/reality-bites.

  82 “They can’t have that” Interview with George Lakoff, April 7, 2011.

  82 “Old Enlightenment reason” George Lakoff, The Political Mind, New York: Penguin, 2008.

  85 “a person who cannot tolerate uncertainty” Interview with Arie Kruglanski, June 2, 2011.

  85 “So of course our field is and always will be mostly liberal” Jonathan Haidt, “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology,” January 27, 2011 lecture available online at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt11/haidt11_index.html.

  86 “cultural continuity” Interview with Yuval Levin, “Science Life” Blog, University of Chicago Medical Center, April 9, 2009. Available online at http://sciencelife.uchospitals.edu/2009/04/09/coyne-and-levin-pt
-2/.

  86 one of the most comprehensive surveys of American university professors Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, “The Social and Political Views of American Professors,” 2007 working paper. To put the results another way, the study also found that 44.1 percent of professors were liberal, 46.6 were moderates, and just 9.2 percent were conservatives.

  87 2009 survey of American Association for the Advancement of Science members Pew Research Center for People and the Press, July 9, 2009, “Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media,” Section 4, “Scientists, Politics, and Religion.” Available online at http://people-press.org/2009/07/09/section-4-scientists-politics-and-religion/.

  87 Americans with a post-graduate level of education Ruy Teixeira, “Demographic Change and the Future of the Parties,” June 2010, Center for American Progress. Available online at: http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2010/06/pdf/voter_demographics.pdf.

  Chapter Five

  Don’t Get Defensive

  At this point, it’s probably time for a deep breath, followed by a long pause—and then the donning of body armor. Chances are that what I’ve said in the last two chapters has ticked off, like, half of America.

  My arguments are rooted in a large body of published and peer reviewed research, but I fully recognize that the subject matter has fairly stunning implications. “To begin with, many people are defensive and afraid of psychology,” explains John Jost. “No one wants to sit next to a psychologist on an airplane. And most people are afraid to think about the possibility that their most cherished beliefs might have a psychological basis, rather than simply a basis in fact. And when you mix that knee-jerk defensiveness about psychological introspection with political ideology, it’s pretty explosive.”