The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [123]
—ISAAC ASIMOV, THE RELATIVITY OF WRONG, 1989
11
Politics of Belief
Are you a political liberal or a conservative? If you are a liberal, I predict that you read the New York Times, listen to progressive talk radio, watch CNN, hate George W. Bush and loathe Sarah Palin, adore Al Gore and revere Barack Obama, are pro-choice, anti-gun, adhere to the separation of church and state, are in favor of universal health care, vote for measures to redistribute wealth and tax the rich in order to level the playing field, and believe that global warming is real, human caused, and potentially disastrous for civilization if the government doesn’t do something dramatic and soon. If you are a conservative, I predict that you read the Wall Street Journal, listen to conservative talk radio, watch FOX News, love George W. Bush and venerate Sarah Palin, despise Al Gore and abhor Barack Obama, are pro-life, anti–gun control, believe that America is a Christian nation that should meld church and state, are against universal health care, vote against measures to redistribute wealth and tax the rich, and are skeptical of global warming and/or government schemes to dramatically alter our economy in order to save civilization.
Although this cluster of specific predictions may not be a perfect match for any one person’s positions, the fact that most Americans do fall into one of these two sets of attitudes indicates that even political, economic, and social beliefs form distinct patterns that we can identify and assess. In this chapter on our journey into the believing brain, I want to pull back for a grander visage of belief systems and how they operate in the realm of politics, economics, and ideologies of various types.
The Power of Political Beliefs, or Why People Divide Themselves into Liberals and Conservatives
In 2003, Stanford University social psychologist John Jost and his colleagues published a paper in the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin entitled “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” which was a synthesis of fifty years of findings published in eighty-eight papers encompassing 22,818 subjects that led the researchers to conclude that conservatives suffer from “uncertainty avoidance” and “terror management,” and have a “need for order, structure,” and “closure” along with “dogmatism” and “intolerance of ambiguity,” all of which leads to “resistance to change” and “endorsement of inequality” in their beliefs and practices.
“Understanding the psychological underpinnings of conservatism has for centuries posed a challenge for historians, philosophers, and social scientists,” the authors concluded.
We regard political conservatism as an ideological belief system that is significantly (but not completely) related to motivational concerns having to do with the psychological management of uncertainty and fear. Specifically, the avoidance of uncertainty (and the striving for certainty) may be particularly tied to one core dimension of conservative thought, resistance to change. Similarly, concerns with fear and threat may be linked to the second core dimension of conservatism, endorsement of inequality.1
The paper was picked up by the news dailies and the story broke that scientists had at long last discovered what makes conservatives tick. One commentator for Psychology Today asked “Is Political Conservatism a Mild Form of Insanity?”2 The British paper the Guardian reported: “A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in ‘fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity.’” If this was not enough to get the blood boiling of conservatives everywhere, the report’s authors linked Ronald Reagan and the right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh to Hitler and Mussolini, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.3 Needless to say,