The Republican Brain Part Five: Smart Idiots

The next section of Chris Mooney's book, The Republican Brain, is called "Smart Idiots" and it's honestly one of the most depressing sections of the book. It begins with a study of why motivated reasoning, which we talked about last time, occurs in individuals. Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale, has a classification system based on how people reason with their moral and political values. Imagine a Cartesian plane like this one:

Now, imagine that the X Axis is a measure of individualism on the right and communitarians on the left. With the Y Axis, imagine egalitarians on the bottom and hierarchicals on the top. Broadly speaking, Kahan discovered that US conservatives are in Quadrant 1 (individual, hierarchical) and US liberals are in Quadrant 3 (communitarian, egalitarian). It's important to note here that individuals are really scattered all over the place and we're just talking about general groups.

Still, this explains so much to me personally. I've always wondered how a group of people who are so obsessed with individual rights are also so authoritarian. Now we know. They believe that a chief organizing principle for society is hierarchies, with the "right" people at the top. With so many US conservatives from the South, this clearly goes back to the Antebellum and all of its mythical structures.

So, how do these classifications apply to the issues of the day? One of Kahan's studies took groups of people and had them imagine helping a friend make a decision about three important topics: whether global warming is caused by human beings, whether nuclear wasted can be stored safely underground, and whether letting people carry guns either deters violent crime or worsens it.  The study subjects were then shown fake excerpts from a variety of "experts" on each topic.

The results were very telling. Only 23% of individual-hierarchicals agreed that any of the experts knew what they were talking about while 88% of communitarian-egalitarians accepted the experts as being knowledgeable and trustworthy. Right here is that instant and most adolescent reaction to people who are in authority and knowledgeable of which I always speak. Why? I simply don't get it. Are they that insecure about themselves?

What tends to happen in examinations of these issues is what Mooney calls the "My Expert v Your Expert" battle. Even worse....

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 usually fail. Indeed, factual counterarguments sometimes even trigger what has been termed the backfire effect: Those with the most 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.

This is very key information to have when having a discussion with a conservative these days. Remember, they feel like they are under physical attack. If they have very strongly held views, it will be worse due to the backfire effect.

Now, what's interesting about the backfire effect is that applies to conservatives only. Brendan Nyhan of Dartmouth and Jason Reifler of Georgia State found that when conservatives were shown more and more evidence that Saddam Hussein did not have WMDs and that tax cuts do not increase revenue, they were MORE likely to believe the claim than before. I can personally attest to tax cut-revenue BS sadly being valid. Yet, when liberals were shown evidence in the same study that refuted claims that George W Bush "banned" embryonic stem cell research (he never did), liberals didn't backfire. They weren't more likely to believe the claim and, in fact, wavered more given the new information.

What this tells us quite simply is that liberals are generally more reflective and tend to be more open to new information. Consider the basic definitions of each word in objective reality

liberal: not opposed to new ideas or ways of behaving that are not traditional or widely accepted

conservative: not liking or accepting changes or new ideas

I'm always willing to accept valid, unbiased and verifiable data regardless of whether or not it supports my ideology. I am speaking of information that the cold and rational part of the brain can analyze. I haven't seen any such data from conservatives on most of the issues I discuss and quite honestly dismiss nearly all of it as wacky, ideological nonsense. Speaking of which...

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.

The "cherished leader" line echoes what I have said previously about President Bush and conservatives. He was their savior...their white knight... yet, on his watch, we suffered the worst attack on our home soil in history, a city fell into the sea, and the economy collapsed. By any metric in objective reality, he was a colossal failure. Much of the anger toward Barack Obama comes from the massive cognitive dissonance occurring within their brains.

At this point, we come to the most depressing part of the chapter and the origin of its title. Mooney posits that there is a "smart idiots" effect when it comes to many of these issues. One would think that the more educated a person is, the easier it is for them to accept objective reality. In fact, the opposite is true. It is because they are extremely intelligent that they can come up with intricate counter arguments and employ confirmation bias to convince themselves that their belief system is solid. Never was this more true than with global warming.

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 would otherwise escape into 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 are seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and smokestacks.

This is a great example of objective reality and thankfully one that is more reliable than people, especially the educated ones. Pew polls over the years have shown that Democrats accept this objective reality and Republicans do not. Worse, the more educated a Republican is, the more likely he is to reject the theory of man caused global warming. Astonishing...

Mooney offers further explanation of why this is the case. Even smart conservatives, for example, chiefly consume conservative news sources like Fox News. So, like anyone else, they are being conditioned. The more intelligent they are, the more resistant which does hold some good news for the rest of us in objective reality. We can, at least, attempt to persuade the less intelligent conservatives because the studies and the data show that they are easier to persuade.

What's even more vexing about this is that Kahan's studies sprinkled in other questions that were scientifically based but not very political. Nearly all respondents, despite their cultural background, answered the question with their colder and more rational System 2 brain. In fact, those who scored higher on the non political scientific questions but were individual-hierarchical distrusted climate science in greater numbers. Stunning!!

One big takeaway from all of this is the liberal line of "educate more people" needs to be retired. Becoming more knowledgeable will actually make it worse so the old idea about converting people with more education needs to go away forever. It won't work. They will just get worse.

In wrapping up this first section of the book, "Politics, Facts, and Brains,"  Mooney warns...

Motivated reasoning poses a deep challenge to the ideal of Jeffersonian democracy, which assumes that voters will be informed about the issues-not deeply wedded to misinformation. We're divided enough about politics as it is, without adding irreconcilable views about the nature of reality on top of that. 

Add in all of the new media of the last two decades and it truly exacerbates the problem.

The next section of the book is called "The Nature Hypothesis: Dangerous Certainty." It looks to be an even deeper explanation of the problem which is sort of a drag. At this point, I'd like to get to some solutions on how to go forward!