Are Defenders of the Status Quo (Conservatives) More Biased Than Those Who Seek Change (Liberals)?
In my latest DeSmogBlog post, I got to delve a bit into the psychology of ideology, and some of the kinds of arguments in my new book, while also gleefully skewering Rush Limbaugh.
Yes, I know–an embarrassment of riches.
Rush was going on and on recently about how apparently faked research having to do with people who eat meat relates to the “hoax” that is global warming. In the process, he showed how much he absolutely loathes vegetarians:
Let me make an observation here, folks. I know meat eaters. I am a meat eater. I have never met anybody who feels superior to anybody or anything because they eat meat. But I have run into all kinds of holier-than-thou vegetarians and vegans and other wackos who do think they are superior and better and smarter than everybody else. I know gazillions of beef eaters, and I don’t know a’one of them who has forced his eating choices on anybody else; but I know a bunch of ragtag, stupid vegan vegetarians — holier-than-thou superiorists — who try to force everybody to eat what they eat and to not eat what they don’t approve of. Such as this bunch of louts that demanded in Berkeley, California, that Burger King sell veggie burgers — and, of course, Burger King caved. So lie after lie after lie about “white people,” other aspects of sociology and science, and meat eaters and so forth — and all of it fraudulent.
Now, there is something really fascinating about this passage. Rush is claiming that vegetarians are these extremist ideologues–and yet, in fact, his detestation of “stupid vegan vegetarians” strikes me as at least as strong as any loathing they have for meat-eaters. (If not much stronger, frankly.)
What’s up with that? Well, I think a fascinating study from psychologists at Berkeley sheds some light. As I write:
Psychologists Dacher Keltner and Robert J. Robinson were studying how groups in ideological conflicts misperceive the views of those on the other side. And they found a very interesting ideological asymmetry in a deeply provocative case study—the 1990s battle over teaching the “Western Canon,” versus the works and narratives of under-privileged groups, in college English classes.
Here was the asymmetry: Literary traditionalists assumed that literary revisionists onlywanted to teach the works of women writers, African-American authors, and writers from other disadvantaged or non-white male groups. But in fact, that is not what the revisionists wanted to teach at all. They weren’t nearly as radical as the traditionalists assumed. Rather, they merely wanted to mix in a few examples of such texts with old white male literary classics: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Sophocles, Homer, James Joyce, Herman Melville.
The revisionists, however, knew quite well what the traditionalists wanted to teach—just what they had always been teaching! As the researchers found:
In our studies, the tendency for partisans to exaggerate the magnitude of their conflict was qualified by two provocative asymmetries in social bias. First, across conflicts, a consistent perceiver effect emerged: Partisans in power exaggerated the magnitude of their conflict more than partisans seeking change. For example, traditionalists, more likely to be tenured males and guardians of the literary status quo, polarized the Western Canon dispute more than revisionists.
Do you think something similar might be going on with Rush Limbaugh’s defense of meat eaters (traditionalists) against “stupid vegan vegetarians” (revisionists)? I certainly do. (And I’m speaking as a moderate liberal who could be spotted at a Brazilian steakhouse last weekend.)
This is, of course, yet another case of ideological asymmetry in biased reasoning, of the sort that I point out in the new book…
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