Liberals and
conservatives don’t just vote differently. They think
differently.
By Chris Mooney, Published:
April 12, 2012
The Washington Post
“Follow the
money.†As a young journalist on the political
left, I often heeded this well-worn advice. If
conservatives were denying the science of global
warming, I figured, big fossil-fuel companies must
be behind it. After all, that was the story with the
tobacco industry and the dangers of smoking. Why not
here?
And so I covered the attacks on the established
scientific knowledge on climate change, evolution
and many more issues as a kind of search for the
wealthy bad guys behind the curtain. Like many in
Washington, I tended to assume that political
differences are either about contrasting
philosophies or, more cynically, about money and
special interests
There’s just one problem: Mounting scientific evidence
suggests that this is a pretty limited way of understanding
what divides us. And at a time of unprecedented polarization
in America, we need a more convincing explanation for the
staggering irrationality of our politics. Especially since
we’re now split not just over what we ought to do
politically but also over what we consider to be true.
Liberals and conservatives have access to the same
information, yet they hold wildly incompatible views on
issues ranging from global warming to whether the president was born in the
United States to whether his stimulus package created any
jobs. But it’s not just that: Partisanship creates
stunning intellectual contortions and inconsistencies.
Republicans today can denounce a health-care reform plan that’s
pretty similar to one passed in Massachusetts by a
Republican — and the only apparent reason is that this one
came from a Democrat.
None of these things make sense — unless you view them
through the lens of political psychology. There’s now a
large body of evidence showing that those who opt for the
political left and those who opt for the political right
tend to process information in divergent ways and to differ
on any number of psychological traits.
Perhaps most important, liberals consistently score higher
on a personality measure called “openness to
experience,†one of the “Big Five†personality traits,
which are easily assessed through standard questionnaires.
That means liberals tend to be the kind of people who want
to try new things, including new music, books, restaurants
and vacation spots — and new ideas.
“Open people everywhere tend to have more liberal
values,†said psychologist Robert McCrae, who conducted
voluminous studies on personality while at the National
Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health.
Conservatives, in contrast, tend to be less open — less
exploratory, less in need of change — and more
“conscientious,†a trait that indicates they appreciate
order and structure in their lives. This gels nicely with
the standard definition of conservatism as resistance to
change — in the famous words of William F. Buckley Jr., a
desire to stand “athwart history, yelling
‘Stop!’ â€
I call myself a liberal, so this description of openness
resonates with me. But I think it’s vital for everyone to
understand, and it needn’t be seen as threatening or a
put-down; it seems to be part of the nature of politics.
We see the consequences of
liberal openness and conservative conscientiousness
everywhere — and especially in the political battle over
facts. Liberal irrationalities tend toward the sudden, new
and trendy, such as, say, subscribing to the now largely discredited idea that
childhood vaccines cause autism. This assertion was
tailor-made for plucking liberal heartstrings, activating a
deeply felt need to protect children from harm, especially
harm allegedly caused by big, rich drug companies.
But the claims about vaccine risks happened to be factually
wrong. And how do we know? Scientists — who themselves
lean liberal — debunked them. Over time, so did
many other liberals. And in significant measure, it worked:
There are still many people who cling to this inaccurate
belief, but it is much, much harder these days to defend it,
especially in the news media.
Compare this with a different irrationality: refusing to
admit that humans are a product of evolution, a chief point
of denial for the religious right. In a recent poll, just 43 percent of
tea party adherents accepted the established science here.
Yet unlike the vaccine issue, this denial is anything but
new and trendy; it is well over 100 years old. The state of
Tennessee is even hearkening back to the days of the Scopes
“Monkey†Trial, more than 85 years ago. It just passed a bill that will weaken
the teaching of evolution.
Such are some of the probable consequences of openness, or
the lack thereof.
Now consider another related trait implicated in our divide
over reality: the “need for cognitive closure.†This
describes discomfort with uncertainty and a desire to
resolve it into a firm belief. Someone with a high need for
closure tends to seize on a piece of information that
dispels doubt or ambiguity, and then freeze, refusing to
consider new information. Those who have this trait can also
be expected to spend less time processing information than
those who are driven by different motivations, such as
achieving accuracy.
A number of studies show that conservatives tend to have a
greater need for closure than do liberals, which is
precisely what you would expect in light of the strong
relationship between liberalism and openness. “The finding
is very robust,†explained Arie Kruglanski, a University
of Maryland psychologist who has pioneered research in this
area and worked to develop a scale for measuring the need
for closure.
The trait is assessed based on responses to survey
statements such as “I dislike questions which could be
answered in many different ways†and “In most social
conflicts, I can easily see which side is right and which is
wrong.â€
Anti-evolutionists have been found to score higher on the
need for closure. And in the global-warming debate, tea
party followers not only strongly deny the science but also
tend to say that they “do not need any more informationâ€
about the issue.
I’m not saying that liberals have a monopoly on truth. Of
course not. They aren’t always right; but when they’re
wrong, they are wrong differently.
When you combine key psychological traits with divergent
streams of information from the left and the right, you get
a world where there is no truth that we all agree upon. We
wield different facts, and hold them close, because we truly
experience things differently.
The political psychological divide goes beyond science.
Factual disputes over many issues feature the same dynamics:
Does the health-care reform law contain “death panels�
Did the stimulus package create any jobs? Even American
history is up for debate: Did the founders intend this to be
a Christian nation?
However, there only is one reality — and we don’t get
to discount it forever. And liberal-conservative differences
are part of reality, too; inescapable, and increasingly
difficult to deny.
-- 