The Republican Brain (2 page)

In other words, political conservatives have placed themselves in direct conflict with modern scientific knowledge, which shows beyond serious question that
global warming is real and caused by humans, and evolution is real and the cause of humans
. If you don't accept either claim, you cannot possibly understand the world or our place in it.

The evidence suggests that many conservatives today just don't.

Errors and misperceptions like these can have momentous consequences. They can ruin lives, economies, countries, and planets. And today, it is clearly conservatives—much more than liberals—who reject what is true about war and peace, health and safety, history and money, science and government.

But why is that the case? Why are today's liberals usually
right
, and today's conservatives usually
wrong
? This book is my attempt to provide a convincing answer to that question, by exploring the emerging science of the political brain.

One possible answer is what I'll call the “environmental explanation.” This is an account of today's U.S. political right that, while it might admit that modern conservatives have become misaligned with reality, nevertheless relies on a fairly standard historical narrative to explain how we arrived in a world in which Democrats are the party of experts, scientists, and facts.

It's an easy tale for me to tell—I've told a version of it before, in my 2005 book
The Republican War on Science.
For science in particular, the “environmental” account runs something like this:

At least since the time of Ronald Reagan, but arcing back further, the modern American conservative movement has taken control of the Republican Party and aligned it with a key set of interest groups who have had bones to pick with various aspects of scientific reality—most notably, corporate anti-regulatory interests and religious conservatives. And so these interests fought back against the relevant facts—and Republican leaders, dependent on their votes, joined them, making science denial an increasingly important part of the conservative and Republican political identity.

Thus, for instance, the religious right (then the “Moral Majority”) didn't like evolution. And so Ronald Reagan made anti-evolutionary remarks (as, later, did George W. Bush). Corporate interests, chiefly electric power companies, didn't like the science showing they were contributing to acid rain. And they had big money—and big motives—to resist it. So Reagan's administration denied the science on this subject and ran out the clock on dealing with it—just as, later, George W. Bush would do on another environmental problem to which power companies (and oil companies, and many other types of companies) contribute: global warming.

Meanwhile, party allegiances created a strange bedfellows effect. The enemy of one's friend was also an enemy, so we saw conservative Christians denying climate science, and pharmaceutical companies donating heaps of money to a party whose Christian base regularly attacks biomedical research. Despite these contradictions, economic and social conservatives profited enough from their allegiance that it was in the interests of both to hold it together.

In such an account, the problem of conservative science denial is ascribed to political opportunism—rooted in the desire to appease either religious impulses or corporate profit motives. But is this the right answer?

It isn't wrong, exactly. There's much truth to it. Yet it completely ignores what we now know about the
psychology
of our politics.

The environmental account ascribes Republican science denial (and for other forms of denial, the story would be similar) to the particular exigencies and alignments of American political history.
That's what the party did because it had to, to get ahead.
And today, goes the thinking, this leaves us with a vast gulf between Democrats and Republicans in their acceptance of modern climate science and many other scientific conclusions, with conservatives increasingly distrustful of science, and with scientists and the highly educated moving steadily to the left.

There's just one problem: This account ignores the possibility that there might be real differences between liberals and conservatives that influence how they respond to scientific or factual information. It assumes we're all blank slates—that we all want the same basic things—and then we respond to political forces not unlike air molecules inside a balloon. We get knocked this way and that, sure. And we start out in different places, thus ensuring different trajectories. But at the end of the day, we're all just air molecules.

But what if we're not all the same kind of molecule? What if we respond to political or factual collisions in different ways, with different spins or velocities? As I will show in these pages, there's considerable scientific evidence suggesting that this is the case.

For instance, the historic political awakening of what we now call the Religious Right was nothing if not a defense of cultural traditionalism—which had been threatened by the 1960s counterculture,
Roe v. Wade
, and continued inroads by feminists, gay rights activists, and many others—and a more hierarchical social structure (family values, with the father at the head, the wife by his side). It was a classic counter-reaction to too much change, too much pushing of equality, and too many attacks on traditional values—all occurring too fast. And it mobilized a strong strand of right-wing authoritarianism in U.S. politics—one that had either been dormant previously, or at least more evenly distributed across the parties.

The rise of the Religious Right was thus the epitome of conservatism on a psychological level—clutching for something certain in a changing world; wanting to preserve one's own ways in uncertain times, and one's own group in the face of difference—and can't be fully understood without putting this variable into play. (When I say “psychology” here and throughout the book, I'm referring to the scientific discipline, not to the practice of psychotherapy or counseling.)

The problem is that people are deathly afraid of psychology, and never more so than when it is applied to political beliefs. Political journalists, in particular, almost uniformly avoid this kind of approach. They try to remain on the surface of things, telling endless stories of horse races and rivalries, strategies and interests, and key “turning points.” All of which are, of course, real. And conveniently, by sticking with them you never have to take the dangerous journey into anybody's head.

But what if these only tell half the story?

This book is my attempt to consider the other half—to tell an “environment
plus
psychology” story. And it's about time.

As I began to investigate the underlying causes for the conservative denial of reality that we see all around us, I found it impossible to ignore a mounting body of evidence—from political science, social psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and genetics—that points to a key conclusion. Political conservatives seem to be very different from political liberals at the level of psychology and personality. And inevitably, this influences the way the two groups argue and process information.

Let's be clear: This is not a claim about intelligence. Nor am I saying that conservatives are somehow worse people than liberals; the groups are just different. Liberals have their own weaknesses grounded in psychology, and conservatives are very aware of this. (Many of the arguments in this book could be inverted and repackaged into a book called
The Democratic Brain
—with a Spock-like caricature of President Obama on the cover.)

Nevertheless, some of the differences between liberals and conservatives have clear implications for how they respond to evidence in political debates. Take, for instance, their divergence on a core personality measure called Openness to Experience (and the suite of characteristics that go along with it). The evidence here is quite strong: overall, liberals tend to be more open, flexible, curious and nuanced—and conservatives tend to be more closed, fixed and certain in their views.

What's more, since Openness is a core aspect of personality, examining this difference points us toward the study of the political brain. The field is very young, but scientists are already showing that average “liberal” and “conservative” brains differ in suggestive ways. Indeed, as we'll see, it's even possible that these differences could be related to a large and still unidentified number of “political” genes—although to be sure, genes are only one influence out of very many upon our political views. But they appear to be an underrated one.

What all of this means is that our inability to agree on the facts can no longer be explained solely at the surface of our politics. It has to be traced, as well, to deeper psychological and cognitive factors. And such an approach won't merely cast light on why we see so much “truthiness” today, so many postmodern fights between the left and the right over reality. Phenomena ranging from conservative brinksmanship over raising the debt ceiling to the old “What's the Matter with Kansas?” problem—why do poor conservatives vote against their economic interests?—make vastly more sense when viewed through the lens of political psychology.

Before going any further, I want to emphasize that this argument is not a form of what is often called
reductionism
. Just because psychology seems relevant to explaining why the left and the right have diverged over reality doesn't mean that nothing else is, or that I am
reducing
conservatives to just their psychology (or reducing psychology to cognitive neuroscience, or cognitive neuroscience to genes, and so on). “We can never give a
complete
explanation of anything interesting about human beings in psychology,” explains the University of Cambridge psychologist Fraser Watts. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to be learned from the endeavor.

Complex phenomena like human political behavior always have many causes, not one. This book fully recognizes that and does not embrace a position that could fairly be called
determinism
. Human brains are flexible and change daily; people have choices, and those choices alter who they are. Nevertheless, there are broad tendencies in the population that really matter, and cannot be ignored.

We don't understand everything there is to know yet about the underlying reasons why conservatives and liberals are different. We don't know how all the puzzle pieces—cognitive styles, personality traits, psychological needs, moral intuitions, brain structures, and genes—fit together. And we know that environmental factors are at least as important as psychological ones. This means that what I'm saying applies at the level of large groups, but may founder in the case of any particular individual.

Still, we know enough to begin pooling together all the scientific evidence. And when you do—even if you provide all the caveats, and I've just exhausted them—there's a lot of consistency. And it all makes a lot of
sense.
Conservatism, after all, means nothing if not supporting political and social stability and resisting change. I'm merely tracing some of the appeal of this philosophy to psychology, and then discussing what this means for how we debate what is “true” in contested areas.