The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [124]
Why are people conservative? Why do people vote Republican? The questions are typically posed without even a whiff of awareness of the inherent bias in asking it in this manner—that because Democrats are so indisputably right and Republicans so unquestionably wrong, conservatism must be a mental disease, a flaw in the brain, a personality disorder that leads to cognitive malfunctioning. Much as medical scientists study cancer in order to cure the disease, liberal political scientists study political attitudes and voting behavior in order to cure people of the cancer of conservatism. This liberal belief bias in academia is so deeply entrenched that it becomes the political water through which the liberal fish swim—they don’t even notice it.
University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt noticed the bias and called attention to it in a widely read and commented upon essay on Edge.org, “What Makes People Vote Republican?” The standard liberal line—as reflected in the Jost study—is that people vote Republican because they are “cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death.” Haidt inveigled his fellow academics to move beyond such “diagnoses” and remember “the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats ‘just don’t get it,’ this is the ‘it’ to which they refer.”4
Why do liberals characterize conservatives in such a slanted manner? To answer the question let’s begin by reversing the process and characterize Democrats and liberals as suffering from a host of equally defective mental states: a lack of moral compass that leads to an inability to make clear ethical choices, an inordinate lack of certainty about social issues, a pathological fear of clarity that leads to indecisiveness, a naive belief that all people are equally talented, and a blind adherence in the teeth of contradictory evidence that culture and environment alone determine one’s lot in society and therefore it is up to the government to remedy all social injustices. Once you set up the adjectives in the form of operationally defined personality traits and cognitive styles, it is easy to collect the data to support them. The flaw is in the characterization process itself.
Two popular book-length examples that fall into the same belief bias trap are the 2008 book The Political Mind by University of California–Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff and the 2007 book The Political Brain by Emory University psychologist Drew Westen. The tropes are familiar: liberals are generous to a fault (“bleeding hearts”), rational, intelligent, optimistic, and appeal to voters’ reason through cogent arguments; conservatives are stingy (“heartless”), dour, and dim-witted authoritarians who appeal to voters’ emotions through threat and fearmongering. But conservatives win most elections because of their Machiavellian manipulation of voters’ emotional brains, and therefore liberal politicians need to ramp up their campaigns with an appeal to voters’ hearts instead of their heads.
Not only is the characterization driven entirely by a liberal belief bias, but the very premise that conservatives are winning the battle for voters’ hearts is erroneous. In congressional races Democrats have seized the day: in the Senate, Democrats edged out Republicans 3,395 to 3,323 in contesting 6,832 seats from 1855 to 2006, and in the House, Democrats trounced Republicans 15,363 to 12,994 in the 27,906 seats contested from 1855 to 2006.
As for the personality traits and temperament of conservatives versus liberals, and the supposedly dour nature of the former, according to the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Surveys, 1972–2004, 44 percent of people who reported being “conservative” or