Are the Left and Right Equally Biased?–Debating Dan Kahan

The latest Point of Inquiry just went up. It’s actually a double length episode, because that’s how long I needed to really get into the question that I’ve been meaning to air on a show for some time–the question of, er, who’s right, politically, about everything for all time.

That sounds ambitious, and I’m of course exaggerating..but actually somewhat less than you might think. Let me explain.

My guest was Yale’s Dan Kahan, who was also on the show a year earlier, discussing his cultural cognition model. This is a very powerful and increasingly influential account of how different ideological groups–hierarchs, individualists, egalitarians, communitarians–are biased towards rejecting science on particular topics that are, shall we say, in their emotionally defensive “zones.”

Kahan ascribes this to motivated reasoning--e.g., our preexisting emotional commitments, or group commitments, skew our reading of evidence (scientific or otherwise) and lead us to elaborately defend our prior commitments. And because hierarchical-individualists have a very different vision of the “good” society and how it is organized than do egalitarian-communitarians, they accordingly reason very differently about scientific issues that threaten their values (like global warming) than do those on the other side.

So far, so good.

The question we debated on the show, though, was whether the different camps are “equal” in their biases–or not. I think not, and argue as much in my new book. Kahan isn’t so sure, though, and rightly points out that his studies have captured all the ideological groups showing biased reactions, at least to an extent.

Why does this matter? As I illustrate in the handy-dandy image below, hierarchical-individualists tend to be Republicans; egalitarian-communitarians tend to be Democrats.

So are the people in the top left, and the people on the bottom right, equally biased, but just in different directions or in different areas?

That’s certainly possible. In such an account–an account I would tend to associate with Kahan–issues involving government intervention to stave off environmental problems (like global warming) will trigger defensive ideological reactions from those in the top left quadrant, who don’t like such government intrusions. Meanwhile, issues involving alleged corporate threats to the environment and human health, or public safety (e.g., nuclear power), will trigger biased reactions from those on the bottom right, who very much don’t trust big industry and those in power.

So is that all? Have we thereby successfully diagrammed all of our public spats over science, technology, and the environment? Or is there more to it than that?

On the show, for instance, I argued that the morally or politically-based differences between the groups above might not be the only difference that matters. There are also “dispositional” or psychological and personality differences, for instance, that don’t appear in the figure above.

I am not sure our debate had a “winner,” and it was certainly very civil–but I am confident that it laid out the contours of this issue, and why it matters so much. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Listen here.

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