The Republican Brain (8 page)

Notes

26
“A man with a conviction . . .”
My account of the Seekers is based on Festinger's classic book (with Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schacter),
When Prophecy Fails
, first published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1956. My edition is published by Pinter& Martin, 2008. All quotations are from this text.

28
how smokers rationalize
For a highly readable overview of “cognitive dissonance” theory and the many different phenomena it explains, see Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson,
Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts,
New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. The smoking example is provide by Aronson in his foreword to
When Prophecy Fails
, Pinter & Martin, 2008.

29
motivated reasoning
For an overview see Ziva Kunda, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,”
Psychological Bulletin
, November 1990, Vol. 108, No. 3, pp. 480–498.

29
Thinking and reasoning are actually suffused with emotion
See Antonio Damasio,
Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
, New York: Putnam, 1994, and Joseph LeDoux,
The Emotional Brain
, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

29
about 2 percent
George Lakoff,
The Political Mind
, New York: Penguin, 2008, p. 9.

29
classic 1979 experiment
Lord, Ross & Lepper, “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 1979, Vol. 37, No. 11, p. 2098–2109.

29
affirmative action and gun control
Taber & Lodge, “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs,”
American Journal of Political Science
, Vol. 50, Number 3, July 2006, pp. 755–769.

30
the accuracy of gay stereotypes
Munro & Ditto, “Biased Assimilation, Attitude Polarization, and Affect in Reactions to Stereotype-Relevant Scientific Information,”
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
, June 1997, Vol. 23, No. 6, p. 636–653.

30
“confederation of systems”
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.

30
closely related to those that we find in other animals
See Joseph LeDoux,
The Emotional Brain
, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

30
somewhere in Africa
“Homo sapiens,” Institute on Human Origins, available online at
http://www.becominghuman.org/node/homo-sapiens-0
.

30
fast enough to detect with an EEG device
Milton Lodge and Charles Taber,
The Rationalizing Voter
, unpublished manuscript shared by authors.

31
“natural selection basically didn't trust us”
Interview with Aaron Sell, August 12, 2011.

31
control system to coordinate brain operations
Leda Cosmides & John Tooby, “Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions,”
Handbook of Emotions
, 2
nd
Edition, M. Lewis & J.M. Haviland Jones, Eds. New York: Guilford, 2000.

31
“primacy of affect”
R.B. Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences,”
American Psychologist
, February 1980, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 151–175.

31 spreading activation Milton Lodge and Charles Taber,
The Rationalizing Voter
, unpublished manuscript shared by authors.

32
“They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs”
Interview with Charles Taber and Milton Lodge, February 3, 2011.

32
we're actually being lawyers
Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,”
Psychological Review
, 2001, Vol. 108, No. 4, 814–834.

32
“confirmation bias”
For an overview, see Raymond S. Nickerson, “The Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises,”
Review of General Psychology
, 1998, Vol. 2, No. 2, p. 175–220.

32
“disconfirmation bias”
Taber & Lodge, “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs,”
American Journal of Political Science
, Vol. 50, Number 3, July 2006, pp. 755–769.

33
“a person who claimed that he had won the race”
Paul Bloom & Deena Skolnick Weisberg, “Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science,”
Science
, May 18, 2007, Vol. 316, pp. 996–997.

33
either heavy metal or country
Paul A. Klaczynski, “Bias in Adolescents' Everyday Reasoning and Its Relationship With Intellectual Ability, Personal Theories, and Self-Serving Motivation,”
Developmental Psychology
, 1997, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp. 273–283.

35
“At least by late adolescence. . .”
Paul A. Klaczynski and Gayathri Narasimham, “Development of Scientific Reasoning Biases: Cognitive Versus Ego-Protective Explanations,”
Developmental Psychology
, 1998, Vol. 34, No. 1, 175–187.

35
our groups
For the role of group affiliation in identity-protective cognition, and an overview of motivated reasoning generally and how it operates in a legal context, see Dan M. Kahan, “The Supreme Court 2010 Term—Foreword: Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition, and Some Problems for Constitutional Law,” 125
Harvard Law Review,
p. 1–77.

36
the more powerful it becomes
George Lakoff,
The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist's Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics
, New York: Penguin, 2008.

36
“change brains”
George Lakoff,
The Political Mind
, New York: Penguin, 2008.

40
Drew Westen
Drew Westen et al, “Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election,
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
, Vol. 18, No. 11, pp. 1947–1958.

Chapter Two

Smart Idiots

I'm convinced that in most cases in which people (especially today's political conservatives) deny inconvenient facts, resist contrary evidence, and sometimes come up with elaborate counterarguments, motivated reasoning is a key part of the process. In other words, it is all around us. Our political discourse is choking on it—even though very few of us seem to notice or admit it.

One reason for this is that while the arguments we hear may be impelled by automatic emotional reactions, that doesn't make them any less clever-sounding or persuasive. Some can be crafty indeed. And that's perhaps never more true than when they become technical and involve “expertise.”

In debates over scientific or technical matters with partisan implications—is global warming happening, did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction, and so on—the same game recurs. Let's call it “My expert is better than yours.” It's very simple: In a dispute where neither participant is actually an expert, the two debaters cite different experts, with different views, to bolster their beliefs. Both believe their expert is right and reliable, and that the other guy's isn't.

Motivated reasoning explains this phenomenon too. According to intriguing research by Yale Law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, people's deep-seated views about morality, and about the way society should be ordered, strongly predict who they consider to be a legitimate scientific expert in the first place—and where they consider “scientific consensus” to lie on contested issues. These same views also lead them to reject the expertise of experts who don't agree with them. They simply assume they're not really experts at all.

In Kahan's research individuals are classified, based on their political and moral values, as either
individualists
or
communitarians
, and as either
hierarchical
in outlook or
egalitarian
. To conceptualize this, picture a simple Cartesian plane with two axes, of the sort that we all remember from algebra class. One axis runs from very hierarchical in outlook (believing that society should be highly structured and ordered, including based on gender, class, and racial differences) to very egalitarian in outlook (the opposite). The other runs from very individualistic in outlook (believing that we all are responsible for our own fates in life and people should be rewarded for their choices and punished for their faults, and that government should not step in to prevent this) to very communitarian in outlook (the opposite).

This creates four ideological quadrants, with each of us located in one of them. And though sometimes the picture grows more complicated, broadly speaking,
hierarchical-individuals
correspond to U.S. conservatives, whereas
egalitarian-communitarians
correspond to U.S. liberals. The two groups will largely be found occupying different quadrants—although in reality, individuals are scattered all over the place and may change quadrants depending on the issue at hand.

In the next section, I will say more about Kahan's scheme—and others—that divide up the political parties based on their followers' cultural values or moral systems. For now, though, let's survey the consequences that divisions like these have for how we understand science and facts.

In one of Kahan's studies, members of the different groups were asked to imagine that a close friend has come to them and said that he or she is trying to decide about the risks on three contested issues: whether global warming is caused by human beings, whether nuclear waste can be safely stored deep underground, and whether letting people carry guns either deters violent crime on the one hand, or worsens it on the other. The experiment continued:

The friend tells you that he or she is planning to read a book about the issue but before taking the time to do so would like to get your opinion on whether the author seems like a knowledgeable and trustworthy expert.

Then study subjects were shown alleged book excerpts by fake “experts” on these issues, as well as phony pictures of the authors and fictitious resumes. All the authors were depicted as legitimate experts and members of the National Academy of Sciences. The only area where they differed was on their view of the risk in question.

The results were stark: When the fake scientist's position stated that global warming is real and caused by humans, only 23 percent of hierarchical-individualists agreed the person was a “trustworthy and knowledgeable expert.” Yet 88 percent of egalitarian-communitarians accepted the same scientist's alleged expertise. (Similar divides, although not always as sharp, were observed on the other issues.)

In other words, people were rejecting the scientific source because its conclusion was contrary to their deeply held views about the world. None of the groups were “anti-science” or “anti-expert”—not in their own minds, anyway. It's just that
science
and
expertise
were whatever they wanted them to be—whatever made them feel that their convictions had been bolstered and strengthened.

When they deny global warming, then, conservatives think the best minds are actually on their side. They think
they're
the champions of truth and reality, and they're deeply attached to this view. That is why head-on attempts to persuade them otherwise usually fail. Indeed, factual counterarguments sometimes even trigger what has been termed a
backfire effect
: Those with strongly held but clearly incorrect beliefs not only fail to change their minds, but hold their wrong views more tenaciously after being shown contradictory evidence or a refutation.

To show this, let's move from global warming to a question that, from the perspective of the political mind, is very similar: whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed hidden weapons of mass destruction prior to the U.S. invasion in 2003. When political scientists Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth and Jason Reifler of Georgia State showed subjects fake newspaper articles in which this incorrect claim was first suggested (in a real-life 2004 quotation from President Bush) and then refuted (with a discussion of the actual findings of the 2004 Duelfer report, which found no evidence of concerted nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons efforts in pre-invasion Iraq), they found that conservatives were
more likely
to believe the claim than before.

The same thing happened in another experiment, when conservatives were primed with a ridiculous (and also real) statement by Bush concerning his tax cuts—“the tax relief stimulated economic vitality and growth and it has helped increase revenues to the Treasury.” The article then went on to inform study subjects that the tax cuts had not actually increased government revenue. Once again, following the factual correction, conservatives believed Bush's false claim
more strongly.

Seeking to be evenhanded, the researchers then tested how liberals responded when shown, in a similar format, that despite some Democratic claims, George W. Bush did not actually “ban” embryonic stem cell research. And it's true: Bush merely restricted government funding to research on a limited number of stem cell lines, while leaving research completely unregulated in the private sector. Liberals weren't particularly amenable to persuasion in the experiment either—but unlike conservatives, they did not “backfire.” Perhaps they were less defensive about the matter, less wedded to the notion of a “ban.” Perhaps whether or not it was technically a ban, they still felt Bush's limits on stem cell research were a bad policy.

The Nyhan and Reifler study presents another piece of evidence suggesting that conservatives may defend their beliefs more strongly than liberals do in the face of challenge, and be less amenable to changing their minds based on the evidence—at least in the political realm.

Another similar study gives some inkling of what may be going through people's minds when they resist persuasion—and shows powerful evidence of conservative defensiveness in particular.

Take the common insinuation during the George W. Bush years that Iraq and Al Qaeda were secretly collaborating in some way. Northwestern University sociologist Monica Prasad and her colleagues wanted to test whether they could dislodge this belief among those most likely to hold it—Republican partisans from highly GOP-friendly counties in North Carolina and Illinois. So the researchers set up a study in which they directly challenged some of these Republicans in person, citing the findings of the 9/11 Commission as well as a statement by George W. Bush, in which the former president himself protested that his administration had “never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and Al Qaeda.”

As it turned out, not even Bush's own words could change the minds of these Bush voters. Just one out of 49 partisans who originally believed the Iraq–Al Qaeda claim changed his or her mind about it upon being challenged and presented with new information. Seven more claimed never to have believed the claim in the first place (although they clearly had). The remaining 41 all came up with ways to preserve their beliefs, ranging from generating counterarguments to simply being un-movable:

INTERVIEWER:
. . . the September 11 Commission found no link between Saddam and 9/11, and this is what President Bush said. [pause] This is what the commission said. Do you have any comments on either of those?

RESPONDENT:
Well, I bet they say that the Commission didn't have any proof of it but I guess we still can have our opinions and feel that way even though they say that.

I didn't choose these two studies of political misinformation and the Iraq war by accident. It is hard to think of many liberal-conservative divides over the facts that have held greater consequences for lives, economies, and international security, than this one.

The split over whether Iraq had the touted “WMD,” and whether Saddam and Osama were frat buddies, represented a true turning point in the relationship between our politics and objective reality. In case you missed it: Reality lost badly. Conservatives and Republicans were powerfully and persistently wrong, following a cherished leader into a war based on false premises—and then, according to these studies, finding themselves unable to escape the quagmire of unreality even after several years had passed.

And still, I have not yet described what may be the most insidious side of motivated reasoning, particularly as it relates to conservative denial of the seemingly undeniable.

Call it the “smart idiots” effect: The politically sophisticated or knowledgeable are often
more
biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant. “People who have a dislike of some policy—for example, abortion—if they're unsophisticated they can just reject it out of hand,” says Stony Brook's Milton Lodge. “But if they're sophisticated, they can go one step further and start coming up with counterarguments.” These counterarguments, because they are emotionally charged and become stored in memory and the brain, literally become part of us. They thus allow a person with more sophistication to convince him- or herself even more strongly about the correctness of an initial conviction.

It was this “smart idiots” effect, and especially its recurrent appearance on the political right, that changed how I think about our disputes over science and the facts, and eventually set in motion the writing of this book. I even remember when I first became aware of it. It was thanks to a 2008 Pew report documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the reality of global warming—a divide that, maddeningly for scientists, has shown a tendency to widen even as the basic facts about global warming have become more firmly established.

Those facts are these: Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the “radiative” properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation that would otherwise escape to space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place, but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can't explain what we're seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and smokestacks.