by is Mooney
What about Political Conversions?
I’ve fielded a number of objections to the psychological analysis of our political differences, and I believe the basic approach, rooted in the work of Jost and his colleagues (but also many other researchers working in this area), remains intact. Now, let me add a new argument in its favor, one that shows its surprising explanatory power.
One thing that is deeply persuasive about the psychological account of liberal and conservative differences is that it does a very good job of explaining left-to-right and right-to-left political conversions—whether permanent or, more intriguingly, temporary.
Right-to-left conversions are all around us today in the U.S., as the Republican Party shifts further to the right and alienates moderates. I’ll discuss some of these cases later, using examples like the conservative commentator and former Bush speechwriter David Frum, and the former Reagan administration official Bruce Bartlett. But let me say right now that these cases tend to have something in common. These are often people who lament the right’s loss of nuance and intellectual seriousness, its betrayal of principles, and its intolerance of dissent (namely, theirs). Therefore, it appears that these de-converting conservatives, these RINOs (Republicans-in-name-only), are reacting against authoritarianism, and are people who may have more need for cognition and more integrative complexity. The death of nuance on the right, the ideological extremism, pushes them away.
What about left-to-right shifts? If the United States were moving to the left, as it was at least perceived to be in the 1960s, you might see more of these shifts for reasons of integrative complexity and nuance. But the U.S. isn’t moving to the left, so you don’t. (Although we may note that in the first generation of conservative revolutionaries in the U.S., people like William F. Buckley and Irving Kristol were surely quite independent-minded, nuanced, and intellectual.)
But large scale political change needn’t be the only motivator of a political conversion. The psychological account of ideology also explains a surprising but regularly observed phenomenon: Liberals turning more conservative, at least temporarily, and then reverting to their liberalism again—almost as if they’ve woken from a trance.
When this happens, it is not generally for intellectual or principled reasons. Rather, it seems to occur for emotional or even physiological ones.
Fear makes liberals more conservative, and even authoritarian. Just make them mortally afraid, and they’ll become much more inclined to support decisive leaders and crackdowns on civil liberties. This nicely explains why the United States became more conservative following 9/11—and why George W. Bush’s approval ratings consistently went up following the issuance of terrorism alerts by the Department of Homeland Security.
This phenomenon accounts nicely for “liberal hawks,” like Christopher Hitchens, who wanted to attack Iraq in the early 2000s. It also explains why some of these hawks later recoiled in horror at what they had done. (I should know: I was a liberal hawk who awoke from the trance, and even felt a need to do intellectual penance for it afterwards.) As we’ll see in the next chapter, a brain region called the amygdala may be implicated in this effect.
Fear isn’t the only factor that can change a liberal into a temporary conservative. So can being distracted and unable to engage in complex and nuanced thought—or as psychologists put it, being placed under “cognitive load.”
In a rather ingenious study, Linda Skitka of the University of Illinois at Chicago and her colleagues set up an experiment in which liberals were forced to stop and think about what they would do, and go against their instinctive impulses. Only sometimes, they were distracted, and thus impaired from doing so. The results were striking.
In Skitka’s study, liberals and conservatives were asked about a scenario in which four different groups of people had contracted AIDS in a variety ways. Three of the groups were blameless: they had gotten the disease from a blood transfusion, or a long-term partner who had cheated on them, gotten AIDS, and then passed it on, et cetera. One group, though, had contracted AIDS through practicing unsafe sex while fully aware of the risks. In other words, the members of this group seemed fully responsible for their own fates.
The liberals and conservatives then had to decide who should receive government subsidized drug treatment. The conservatives thought that people who were culpable in contracting AIDS shouldn’t get the same care as those who were blameless. So did the liberals—on first impulse, anyway. But they tended to change their minds once they were allowed to think about it. Their sense of fairness, equality, and of caring for others shone through—and then, unlike conservatives, they appeared to reason that everybody should be treated the same way in government policy, regardless of their personal responsibility for their plight.
However, when liberals were simultaneously required to perform a difficult task that involved listening to music and making note of when the pitch changed, they never had time to think through the scenario or take a second step of reasoning. And then, they were just as punitive towards the culpable AIDS sufferers as the conservatives were. There was no substantial difference between the two groups. Rather famously—at least among social psychologists—Skitka summarized her result by observing, “It is much easier to get a liberal to behave like a conservative than it is to get a conservative to behave like a liberal.”
Finally—and most surprisingly—there is recent research suggesting that drinking alcohol temporarily causes people to take more conservative policy positions. For better or worse, it probably also helps liberals stop wallowing in uncertainty and act decisively—even if, for liberal men, that usually only means shutting down self-doubt and actually approaching that liberal woman who’s standing across the room.
I’ve saved this study—conducted by the University of Arkansas’s Scott Eidelman and colleagues—for the end of the chapter, because it truly is a classic and my favorite study discussed in this book. It almost starts out like a joke: “A team of psychologists walk into a bar . . .”
Actually, the researchers set up outside the bar—which was only described as being in New England—and flagged down 85 exiting patrons with quite the proposition: Get your blood alcohol tested in exchange for filling out a short questionnaire. It was a political one, of course. And when the scientists collated the results, it turned out that blood alcohol level was associated with the expression of greater conservative opinions, for self-described liberals and conservatives alike. Both appeared to shift to the right.
Why? Much like the Skitka study’s “cognitive load,” alcohol shuts off complex thinking. It’s kind of like dosing yourself with the need for closure. So it’s entirely consistent to find that it led to more conservative expressions of opinion. (So, for that matter, is a recent study finding that liberals drink more alcohol. Perhaps they need to switch the thinking off sometimes, and who could blame them. But of course, Openness and seeking out new experiences would also predict more liberal alcohol and drug use.)
“The assumption,” explains Eidelman, “is that for some forms of liberalism, it’s a corrective response. Under load, you strip away their ability to engage in that effortful correction.” Eidelman believes that when people are simply acting instinctively, without deep contemplation and following quick impulses, there is an inherent conservative bias—toward blaming individuals for their failings rather than looking for more complex causes, toward the status quo rather than change, toward routines versus innovations, and even toward something that already exists rather than something that doesn’t. “We’re suggesting people’s cognitive architecture is more consistent with conservative ideology, because that’s the way brains are built,” Eidelman says.
In this interpretation, alcohol would thus reset liberals to a more basic and maybe even more natural state. This liberal, at least, often welcomes the opportunity to be conservative for a while. It’s a relief.
In these three cases of temporary liberal-to-conservative shift, it appears that liberals turn mor
e conservative not because they are swayed intellectually by conservative arguments, but rather because they are impaired—emotionally or cognitively—from engaging in the types of nuanced reasoning processes that make them liberals.
Once again, this suggests that our political differences are about much more than the substantive details of ideology. It suggests they involve our emotions and how we process information—and that liberals do so very differently than conservatives . . . at least when they can.
But if our ideology is grounded in emotional and cognitive functions, then where is it ultimately rooted?
The answer, of course, is the brain. “If you believe the mountains of psychological data, then it should not be too surprising that there are differences between liberals and conservatives at the level of brain structure and function. It is not as if we expected ideology to be located in people’s elbows,” says John Jost.
In the next chapter, then, I will look—very cautiously, for this is a new field and one that is full of uncertainty—at what science is beginning to show about liberal and conservative brains, and at how this research appears to link up closely with the psychology research I’ve already surveyed.
Notes
89 “many people are defensive and afraid of psychology” Interview with John Jost, June 21, 2011.
91 the measuring instrument isn’t so bad For an emphasis on just how much left-right self placement can explain about political and voting behavior, see John Jost, “The End of the End of Ideology,” American Psychologist 61 (7) 651–670.
92 “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors” Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, full text available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15679/15679-h/15679-h.htm.
92 “stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’” William F. Buckley, Jr., “Our Mission Statement,” National Review, November 19, 1955. Available online at http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/223549/our-mission-statement/william-f-buckley-jr.
92 Ronald Reagan brought vast change to America For one example of this objection being raised, see Jeff Greenberg and Eva Jonas, “Psychological Motives and Political Orientation—The Left, the Right, and the Rigid: Comment on Jost et al.,” Psychological Bulletin, 2003, vol. 129, No. 3, pp. 376–382.
92 the change that conservatives seek is not progressive For this answer, see Jost et al, “Exceptions that Prove the Rule—Using a Theory of Motivated Social Cognition to Account for Ideological Incongruities and Political Anomalies: Reply to Greenberg and Jonas,” Psychological Bulletin, 2003, Vol. 129, No. 3, pp. 383–393.
93 the next generation of conservatives For conservatives accepting “liberal” innovations once some time has passed, see Jost et al, “Can a Psychological Theory of Ideological Differences Explain Contextual Variability in the Contents of Political Attitudes?” Psychological Inquiry, 2009, No. 20, pp. 183–188.
93 psychoanalyze liberalism Becky L. Choma, “Why Are People Liberal? A Motivated Social Cognition Perspective,” Department of Psychology, Brock University, June 2008 Dissertation.
94 “Cowardice and appeasement” Jonah Goldberg, “Conservative study reveals academic bias,” July 30, 2003. Available online at http://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/2003/07/30/conservative_study_reveals_academic_bias/page/full/.
95 Examining politics along both economic and social dimensions Stanley Feldman and Christopher Johnson, “Understanding the Determinants of Political Ideology: Implications of Structural Complexity,” available online at http://mysbfiles.stonybrook.edu/~stfeldma/Feldman_Johnston_Ideology.pdf.
96 stronger in some cases than the relationship between ideology and income or level of education Gerber et al, “Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships Across Issue Domains and Political Contexts.” Distribution percentiles were approximated using standard normal density function area calculations. My thanks to Gretchen Tanner Goldman for performing the calculations.
96 Openness predicted not only social liberalism but also economic liberalism Alan S. Gerber et al, “Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships Across Issue Domains and Political Contexts,” American Political Science Review, February 2010, p. 1–23.
97 Outpatient commitment laws Kahan, Dan M., “Cultural Cognition and Public Policy: The Case of Outpatient Commitment Laws.” (2010). Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 96. http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/96.
98 communist countries For more elaboration see Jost et al, “Exceptions that Prove the Rule—Using a Theory of Motivated Social Cognition to Account for Ideological Incongruities and Political Anomalies: Reply to Greenberg and Jonas,” Psychological Bulletin, 2003, Vol. 129, No. 3, pp. 383–393. See also Jost et al, “Can a Psychological Theory of Ideological Differences Explain Contextual Variability in the Contents of Political Attitudes?” Psychological Inquiry, 2009, No. 20, pp. 183–188.
98 the need for closure in two European groups that differed in their communist experience Malgorzata Kossowska and Alain van Hiel, “The Relationship Between Need for Closure and Conservative Beliefs in Western and Eastern Europe,” Political Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2003.
98 Eastern and Western Europeans after the fall of communism Thorisdottir et al, “Psychological needs and values underlying left-right political orientation: Cross-national evidence from Eastern and Western Europe,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 2007, Vol. 71, No. 2, pp. 175–203.
99 we ought to be talking about ideological extremism The objection regarding left extremes also appears in Jeff Greenberg and Eva Jonas, “Psychological Motives and Political Orientation—The Left, the Right, and the Rigid: Comment on Jost et al.,” Psychological Bulletin, 2003, vol. 129, No. 3, pp. 376–382.
100 not a single study showed more left rigidity than right rigidity See Jost et al, “Exceptions that Prove the Rule—Using a Theory of Motivated Social Cognition to Account for Ideological Incongruities and Political Anomalies: Reply to Greenberg and Jonas,” Psychological Bulletin, 2003, Vol. 129, No., 3, pp. 383–393.
100 measured political views and ideological extremism simultaneously Jost et al, “Are Needs to Manage Uncertainty and Threat Associated With Political Conservatism or Ideological Extremity?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 33, No. 7, July 2007, pp. 989–1007.
101 when sophistication and authoritarianism do coincide Christopher Federico et al, “Expertise and the Ideological Consequences of the Authoritarian Predisposition,” Public Opinion Quarterly, September 2011, p. 1–23.
101 “the Loch Ness Monster of political psychology” See Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Chapters 8–9.
102 “the data don’t really support the rigidity of the left hypothesis” Interview with Scott Eidelman, August 2, 2011.
102 “It is just manifestly obvious that such creatures exist” Interview with Philip Tetlock, September 20, 2011.
102 hardliners on the American and Soviet sides were both authoritarians Robert Altemeyer, The Authoritarians, 2006. Available online at http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/.
103 one version of the argument See Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. See chapter 6: “Authoritarianism and Conservatism: How They Differ and When It Matters.”
103 the party that calls itself conservative blends together all these strands Stenner herself admits this, writing, “In contemporary U.S. politics, ‘conservative’ does tend to mean, all at once, intolerance of difference, attached to the status quo, and opposed to government intervention in the economy” (p. 138).
103 “conservatism has become an authoritarian conservatism” Interview with Marc Hetherington, July 19, 2011.
104 the number of Independents in U.S. politics has been on the rise Pew Research Center, “Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology,” May 4, 2011. Available online at http://people-press.org/2011/05/04/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/.
; 104 become their political selves Christopher Federico et al, “Expertise and the Ideological Consequences of the Authoritarian Predisposition,” Public Opinion Quarterly, September 2011, p. 1–23.
105 middle of the psychological range Just as they are in the middle of the political range I am indebted to Everett Young for feedback on this section about independents in particular, and for this suggestion.
105 Openness . . . predicts weaker partisan attachment Alan S. Gerber et al, “Personality and the Strength and Direction of Partisan Identification,” Political Behavior, forthcoming. Available online at http://huber.research.yale.edu/materials/23_paper.pdf.
105 more opinion intensity on the right than the left Pew Research Center, “Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology,” May 4, 2011. Available online at http://people-press.org/2011/05/04/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/.
107 George W. Bush’s approval ratings consistently went up Willer, R. (2004). The effects of government-issued terror warnings on presidential approval ratings. Current Research in Social Psychology, 10, 1–12.
108 “It is much easier to get a liberal to behave like a conservative than it is to get a conservative to behave like a liberal” Linda J. Skitka et al, “Dispositions, Scripts, or Motivated Correction? Understanding Ideological Differences in Explanations for Social Problems,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002, Vol. 83, No. 2, pp. 470–487.
108 drinking alcohol Eidelman, S., Crandall, C.S., & Goodman, J.A. (2010, July). Disruption of deliberate thinking promotes political conservatism. Paper presented in symposium at the 33rd meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology, San Francisco, CA.
