Don't like science? Play the "phrenology" card

This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider,  a skeptic, journalist and science fiction author whose work on the politicization of science has appeared in Skeptic, Dissent and other outlets (www.dylanottokrider.com).

What makes the recent Weekly Standard cover story by Andrew Ferguson on “The New Phrenology” worth spending some time on is this: It perfectly captures the quandary faced by conservative intellectuals, who try to hold themselves up as a counter to the stereotype of grassroots conservatives as backwoods “hillbillies,” in Ferguson’s own words (sensitive much?).

As the “thinking man’s” conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard has never been profitable. But it was kept afloat by Rupert Murdoch as an idea incubator for a small but very important slice of the conservative block–the neoconservatives, and also free-market capitalists who find justifications for bare-knuckle markets in Darwin, and for whom the closest thing they have to scripture is The Virtue of Selfishness and other thoughtful writings of Ayn Rand. This audience puts up with the GOP’s constant plays for fundamentalist Christian votes due to the “savvy-ness” of using religion to rally the “hillbillies” – as they see them – to achieve a different set of ends.

The Standard knows well from experience what happens if they support the science too overtly. Consider what happened when the magazine dipped its toes in “evolving” on climate science with this passage:

No honest person can with certainty assert that global warming is a threat. But any responsible person can see that the evidence is sufficient to suggest that it might be, and that some action to contain emissions of greenhouse gases is an insurance policy worth having.

It was a passing reference in an article on Bush’s choice of Hank Paulson for secretary of the treasury–but was more than enough to prompt a backlash, as can be seen it this Newsbusters editorial by Amy Ridenour,  “Weekly Standard: Adrift?”:

Quick on the heels of its recommendation that conservatives support the Senate pro-amnesty immigration bill (for political rather than principled reasons, yet), the Weekly Standard is apparently laying the groundwork for a change in the conservative position on global warming.

It was the same lesson Newt Gingrich would learn when he made the mistake of admitting, in reference to global warming, that “We have now passed the tipping point of that argument.” It was the same lesson National Review would learn when it ran a cover story entitled, “Taking the Heat: A Conservative Strategy on Global Warming” in which they admitted, “It is no longer possible, scientifically or politically to deny that human activities have very likely increased global temperatures…conservatives should accept this reality—and move on to the question of what we should do about it.”

It was good advice, but conservatives just weren’t ready to concede the science. And they still aren’t.

So conservative intellectuals have been forced to continue the canard without driving away Wall Street conservatives like Paulson, who likes to engage in a little bird-watching on his weekends. The tightrope walk could only have gotten more difficult when Murdoch finally sold the magazine to billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, who made his money in oil, real estate and telecommunications but whose politics, according to the New York Times, is “more closely aligned with Christian conservatism, a thread not associated with The Standard.”

Having positioned itself as the well-read, academic student of science and history, the Standard‘s science denial and reality denial is reluctant and, as Mooney describes it, “genteel.” Ferguson’s defense of Sarah Palin’s death panels” falsehood in the latest cover story, for instance, attempts to paint such hyperbole as level-headed reasonableness. With regard to how many Republicans doubt President Obama’s citizenship, but firmly believe he’s a Muslim…here, Ferguson wisely doesn’t even try.

Ditto for evolution and global warming. To argue against these would just prove Mooney’s point. But because Mooney is right about conservatives’ antipathy towards well-established science, The Standard also cannot embrace that science without riling up those factions–which would also prove Mooney’s point. That’s called being in a tough spot. Ferguson’s only option, therefore, is to gloss over accepted science quickly but obliquely, with a passing reference to Mooney’s alleged denunciations of “the usual hillbilly denials of evolution and global warming…”

Although he seems aware the effort is futile, like a good liberal, Mooney tries to diagram this “hillbilly” sentence, hoping to ascertain Ferguson’s point:

So what, precisely, is going on here? Is The Weekly Standard saying that it is “hillbilly” to deny global warming and evolution, and it is too smart a publication for such nonsense? That seems unlikely, for reasons I’ll explain below.

Or alternatively, is Ferguson suggesting that I’m saying that such beliefs are “hillbilly”? But that doesn’t make sense either—if only because I’m certainly saying no such thing.

Source: Desmogblog (http://s.tt/1bSll)

Grammatically, his “hillbilly” phrase is still meaningless. Emotionally, though, it is a sentence particularly susceptible to motivated reasoning and selective interpretation.

The intellectual conservative reading it might be left with the impression that, yes, the science here is true, but Ferguson himself would never be so condescending to the earthy beliefs of real America–so Mooney must be the one denouncing “hillbillies.” For the anti-science core, the same conclusion will arise: condescending liberals believe that it’s only hillbillies who deny evolution and climate science. But we’re smart, and we actually know better.

Attempts to respond to The Republican Brain always leave the critics tied-up in knots. Ferguson’s review is the most serious attempt yet to deny the party has a problem with reality–without overtly accepting evolution and climate change or rejecting questions about Obama’s birth certificate or Islamic faith. But it ultimately fails, because conservatives do have a disconnect with reality in those areas, and a good many more. And those true believers get very, very upset if you betray the tribe by demonstrating that you actually accept modern knowledge.

A new and pretty controversial show has just gone up, by the way.

It’s with Greta Christina, the prominent atheist blogger and speaker. I interview her about her new ebook (coming out in print in June), entitled Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things that Piss Off the Godless.

Some of you may surmise that though I’m an atheist myself, I’m skeptical of atheist anger. However, Christina is very passionate and convincing in her views, and I believe we have the same basic goal…making the world just a little more rational.

I think that came across in the interview. You can listen here, and buy Christina’s book here.

When Bill Clinton came into office after 24 years of Republican presidential rule (with a brief Carter intermission),  a large majority of the federal bench had been appointed by Republicans. It was hoped Clinton could correct that, but after the Republican Revolution in 1994, the GOP employed a strategy of halting Democratic appointments.

Over 60 of Clinton’s nominees were prevented from receiving a hearing, let alone a vote.  According to Kevin Drum at the Washington Post:

Originally, after Republicans gained control of the Senate in the 1994 elections and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch assumed control of the Judiciary Committee, the rule regarding judicial nominees was this: If a single senator from a nominee’s home state objected to (or “blue-slipped”) a nomination, it was dead. This rule made it easy for Republicans to obstruct Clinton’s nominees.

Drum notes that this “anonymous holds” tactic–allowing a single senator to obstruct a nomination–“was used extensively by Republicans during the Clinton administration.”

Things got so bad, Hatch even bragged that he chose Clinton’s Supreme Court nominees. According to his autobiography, Clinton called to ask who he’d let through, and Hatch suggested Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsberg for the Supreme Court.

Of course, once George W. Bush took the White House, Hatch and the Republicans removed these impediments to appointment. (Hatch, it should be noted, is now in danger of being ousted by his own party for being too willing to compromise.)

Even with a Democratic Congress, 200 of about 240 nominees put forth by George W. Bush were allowed to be confirmed. Now under Obama, Congress has not confirmed a single nominee in 2012. Of the 23 appointments Obama has made for federal judgeships, three have passed.

This is not an isolated incident. From budget deals and the debt ceiling, to jobs and the Affordable Care Act, again and again we’ve seen Republicans refuse not only to compromise, but to cooperate. Even when they are given everything they want, they can’t seem to take yes for an answer.

So what’s going on here?

Perhaps what we are seeing is the classic prisoner’s dilemma, as it came to be known after the famous example put forward by the RAND Corporation in 1950:

Two men are arrested, but the police do not possess enough information for a conviction. Following the separation of the two men, the police offer both a similar deal—if one testifies against his partner (defects/betrays), and the other remains silent (cooperates/assists), the betrayer goes free and the cooperator receives the full one-year sentence. If both remain silent, both are sentenced to only one month in jail for a minor charge. If each ‘rats out’ the other, each receives a three-month sentence. Each prisoner must choose either to betray or remain silent; the decision of each is kept quiet. What should they do?

In the above example, both are better off if they cooperate, but it is in the interest of each individual suspect to talk to the police. Matt Ridley in The Origins of Virtue said, “Broadly speaking, any situation in which you are tempted to do something, but know it would be a great mistake if everybody did the same thing, is likely to be a prisoner’s dilemma.”

A simplified understanding of Darwin suggests everyone ought to do the selfish thing. Yet often, when humans are presented with prisoners’ dilemmas, they actually choose to cooperate. Because selfish genes so often choose the greater good, the prisoner’s dilemma has become central to understanding why despite the survival of the fittest, humans also have a capacity for altruism, morality and self-sacrifice.

The first step toward an understanding came when Robert Axelrod held a computer tournament where programs were submitted to compete in a prisoner’s dilemma. The game was played 200 times, pitting each program against the other entries until a winner emerged. As it turned out, a one-time run of the prisoner’s dilemma favored defecting, but when the dilemma was repeated, the “nicest” programs won out. Those most likely to cooperate against their short-term self-interests reaped the biggest reward over the long run, giving rise to the idea of “reciprocal altruism” in biology.

Ridley gives the example of a tribe of hunters circling a large game, and a rabbit runs past a hunter. If he breaks the circle, the big game escapes–but the defecting hunter is guaranteed to eat. But because that defector will need to hunt again, it’s better to stand as part of the group – and we can all imagine how the other tribe members, who went hungry because of his betrayal, would have treated him back at camp if he’d gone for the rabbit.

The most successful programs to rise out of the computer competitions were variations on Tit-for-Tat. These programs started off cooperating and continued cooperating with friendlies–but retaliated against betrayers. If the defector started cooperating again, the program would happily extend its hand. The secret, Axelrod concluded, was the “combination of being nice, retaliatory, forgiving and clear.”

Now consider this prisoner’s dilemma: one political party is able to appoint judges, and the other has the ability to confirm. The confirming body could benefit in the short term if it puts holds on all nominees, thus increasing the number of vacancies when their party gets appointment power.

What prevents them from doing so is the knowledge the other party will do the same to them, Tit-for-Tat. After a few changes of power, it becomes clear no one will ever get confirmed unless both parties cooperate on nominees, voting down the ones who are too extreme and then voting on the next one. On the other side, it benefits the appointer to choose reasonable people who can get through. So after a few cycles of mutual recrimination, it eventually becomes clear both sides are better off cooperating within the system.

Axelrod’s computer tournaments showed that Tit-for-Tat eventually rooted out the defectors, making it possible for everyone to default for cooperation. It’s not too different from the way Washington insiders wistfully recall the Reagan days, an era of career politicians where deals were made and members of both parties had dinner at each other’s houses, because incumbency trumped party affiliation.

However, the computer competitions showed this arrangement was unstable, too. Once everyone defaulted to cooperation, the system became too trusting and open to exploitation by defectors.  (See: Gingrich, Newt.) When everyone plays by the rules, a betrayer can reap the the short-term rewards of defecting until the system ostracizes his or her behavior again.

Viewed through the prism of this latest science, we can start to see the personality tendencies that have allowed these dynamics to play out as they do. Many conservatives have put their energy into establishing a permanent Republican majority. Instead of working with Clinton, the GOP focused on removing Clinton from office when Republican policy could be implemented unobstructed.

The gamble of shutting down the government (in some cases literally) after 1994 failed and Clinton was re-elected. Rather than cooperating, the Republican Party doubled-down and ground things to a halt for Clinton’s second term (which Clinton helped along by giving DC Monica Lewinsky to focus all its attention).

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats were more inclined to continue the strategy of “cooperation” and triangulation of the DLC that had put them in the White House–and they took much longer than they should have to recognize the ground had shifted beneath their feet.

Now, the Republicans control confirmations yet again–and they know from experience that if they defect, the other party will not retaliate when the roles are reversed.

To create a stable environment of cooperation means not just cutting deals, but also finding cheaters, retaliating and ostracizing them. It means keeping track of who played Lucy with the football, and choosing instead to cooperate with those who reciprocate when shown nice behavior.

It’s easy to point fingers at the GOP, but the blind ideology of the Democrats and the media are equally to blame for its steady drift to extremism. Democrats never tatted. And the media let the former boundaries of acceptable politics and discourse slide by defaulting to narratives of “both sides do it.” The GOP could have their cake and eat it too: they reaped the benefits of defection without ever having to worrying about becoming ostracized, or about everyone else playing the same game.

This collapse of Tit-for-Tat reached its inevitable conclusion in the ultimate prisoner’s dilemma, the showdown over the debt ceiling. The Tea Party, which saw anything short of defection as a betrayal of its own side, was pitted against a President who campaigned as a cooperator–reported on by a media that, due to inclinations of its own, believed it takes two to fight but one to compromise.

Does anyone really believe the Democrats, when facing a Republican President, will ever bring themselves to even bluff about holding the American economy hostage as Republicans did?  Will the Republican defectors ever pay a price, or be ostracized for their betrayal of the greater good?

From experience, the GOP knows no matter how many times we play this game, it can defect all it wants and can expect nothing but cooperation in return.

Why? Ferguson’s complaint rests on a variety of methodological objections to psychology studies, especially those relying on undergraduates (as if the field has not considered these criticisms, and as if these are the only studies involved).

In other words, and just like Jonah Goldberg, Ferguson falls directly into the trap set by The Republican Brain. He attacks a book about how conservatives blithely dismiss science by….blithely dismissing science!

I expect we are going to have several posts here about this article—both because it is very revealing, and because it ups the ante when it comes to conservative attacks on the book. But let me make a few comments first.

First, the science. The question here is whether Ferguson’s statistical and methodological quibbles matter in the grand scheme of things, and the answer is that they do not. To show this, simply give Ferguson the point about relatively small studies of undergraduates (though this is very generous). Nonetheless, the broader body of evidence  remains pretty much untouched, because studies using different methodologies and samples reinforce the core findings on the psychology of ideology. For instance, this massive Yale study, discussed at length in The Republican Brain, shows dramatic personality differences between liberals and conservatives, and it is not vulnerable to Ferguson’s critiques.

Ignoring the weight of the evidence is certainly objectionable, but Ferguson’s tone is still more revealing. For instance, he starts out by calling me “young” (I’m 34), and calls John Jost, a psychologist who pioneered much of the modern research on ideology, “left-wing” upon first introducing him. This is an ad hominem rhetorical technique called “poisoning the well”—I thank empathy4all for pointing this out.

Let me quote some more passages, with the emotional phrases (and put-downs) in highlight:

A lack of self-awareness isn’t peculiar to liberals or Democrats, of course, but to judge by the behavior of psychopundits, we can safely say that they are clueless not only about themselves but about their political opposites. A young psychopundit called Chris Mooney has just published a book entitled The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality….

Mooney’s attachment to Science is touching in its insouciance….

Mooney consults the studies that Jost inspired among his ideologized acolytes, and swallows them whole…

Suitably flattered, Mooney’s liberal readers won’t learn that Jost’s meta-analysis from 2003 was crippled from beginning to end with flaws that have been amply demonstrated by other psychologists. Mooney himself appears unfamiliar with the criticism. I don’t think he gets out much….

Mooney’s wide-eyed acceptance of this social science, no matter how sloppy or ideologically motivated, is the kind of mistake we’re all likely to make once in a while, though seldom with his particular self-confidence and élan…Mooney shuts off his skepticism when he is confronted with what other people tell him is Science. He thinks of his intellectual servility as an unshakable devotion to reason, which pleasingly places him at odds with his irrational political opposites.

All of which demonstrates why conservatives should really read and take seriously the research I’m reporting on. If they did, they would know that when you emote like this, you’re just tipping your hand and showing that you’re engaged in motivated reasoning.

But, it is good to see that The Republican Brain is having its expected effect. More soon.

The genetic architecture of economic and political preferences
Daniel J. Benjamin et al. (long list)
Preferences are fundamental building blocks in all models of economic and political behavior. We study a new sample of comprehensively genotyped subjects with data on economic and political preferences and educational attainment. We use dense single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) data to estimate the proportion of variation in these traits explained by common SNPs and to conduct genome-wide association study (GWAS) and prediction analyses. The pattern of results is consistent with findings for other complex traits. First, the estimated fraction of phenotypic variation that could, in principle, be explained by dense SNP arrays is around one-half of the narrow heritability estimated using twin and family samples. The molecular-genetic–based heritability estimates, therefore, partially corroborate evidence of significant heritability from behavior genetic studies. Second, our analyses suggest that these traits have a polygenic architecture, with the heritable variation explained by many genes with small effects. Our results suggest that most published genetic association studies with economic and political traits are dramatically underpowered, which implies a high false discovery rate. These results convey a cautionary message for whether, how, and how soon molecular genetic data can contribute to, and potentially transform, research in social science. We propose some constructive responses to the inferential challenges posed by the small explanatory power of individual SNPs.

Reflection on these results: The idea of genetic transmission of complex social traits, like political ideology, finds new evidence in its favor, although twin studies may be giving heritability estimates that err on the high end. Or, the alternative methodology tried here may be giving estimates on the low end. But either way, it sure looks like something is being inherited that gets expressed as ideology.

However, finding a single “liberal gene” or “conservative gene” just ain’t gonna happen. The studies that we’ve heard about so far focusing on individual “political” genes may be suspect, and much larger samples will be needed. In all likelihood, there isn’t going to be any one gene that does a lot of work to explain ideology–the phenomenon is going to be polygenic…and very tough to study.

In other words, a research opportunity. Back to work, liberals!

Bill Maher by David Shankbone

This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider,  a skeptic, journalist and science fiction author whose work on the politicization of science has appeared in Skeptic, Dissent and other outlets (www.dylanottokrider.com).

The ideas of “I’m Rubber, You’re Glue” politics has gained some traction lately. The basic concept is to paint your opponent as guilty of your sins, so that balanced centrists split the difference and say “everybody does it.”

Thus, Democrats are waging a War on Women because Republicans are getting a lot of flak over forced vaginal ultrasounds. In a sure sign The Republican Brain: The Science of Why they Deny Science – and Reality  is having an impact, conservatives are now throwing together Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Science Left at break-neck speed.

There are many cynical reasons for encouraging partisanship, but one no longer need to search for economic or political self-interests to explain inexplicable stands: tribal politics is reason enough. There is now literally nothing for which conservatives will not find reason to become enraged.

Who can argue with encouraging kids to exercise and eat healthy? Sarah Palin, for one, who showed up at a school with sugar cookies to protest Michelle Obama’s anti-obesity campaign.

Bill Maher’s recent monologue  perfectly skewered this knee-jerk opposition:

I’m not saying the right objects to Mrs. Obama’s efforts because the Teabaggers are stupid, or because they’re hysterical, or because they hate black people, though all of that is true, but what does it say about America that even a First Lady’s suggestion has to be controversial? Especially when she picked one no one could disagree with.

Environmentalism, health, safety and a college education ought to be places where we all agree. But it has become painfully clear that liberal support is cause enough for conservatives to dissent.

“I think the Republican Party is at war with common sense. I think if the Democrats came out against eating yellow snow, Rick Perry would eat yellow snow,” Maher said. “I think Republicans now live in a world where no matter what a liberal says, no matter how sensible is automatically evil, wrong, and needs to be fought with the fervor of a starving raccoon on crystal meth.”

Conservative politics succeeds when things are at their most partisan. As Bill Clinton once said to a heckler, “Don’t scream. Let’s talk. They (Republicans) win the screaming matches. We win the conversations.”

No wonder, then, conservatives put so much energy into making everything devolve into a shouting match. Those, they win.

But as old Republican stalwarts like Dick Lugar go down for a willingness to compromise, Republicans are starting to fret this reflexive “anything but” politics is self-defeating.

The six term Senator lost his primary battle last night to Tea Party Republican Richard Mourdock, who said: “I have a mindset that says bipartisanship ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”

The loss finally freed Lugar to criticize the party’s insistence on knee-jerk opposition: “In effect, what [Mourdock] has promised in this campaign is reflexive votes for a rejectionist orthodoxy and rigid opposition to the actions and proposals of the other party.”

For soft-spoken Lugar, that was the equivalent of the tirade of another Tea Party target, Orin Hatch:

“These people are not conservatives. They’re not Republicans,” Hatch angrily responds. “They’re radical libertarians and I’m doggone offended by it.”

Then Hatch, a former boxer, turns combative. “I despise these people, and I’m not the guy you come in and dump on without getting punched in the mouth.”

But you know things have really gotten out of hand when Sarah Palin tells the Tea Party to take it easy.

The right has gotten a lot of mileage out of reflexive opposition, but ride the tiger long enough, and eventually the tiger rides you. THe latest election results have given us a good glimpse of who is really riding whom.

Cara Santa Maria

Over at the Huffington Post, science correspondent Cara Santa Maria has just done an awesome video about political personalities–how who we are drives what we think–for her “Talk Nerdy to Me” series.

In the video, I play the role of talking head, via Skype.

The big scientific study this is all based on, by the way, is here.

I can’t figure out how to embed the video here–Wordpress issues getting to be a serious hassle–but it’s right at the link below. Plus, there’s a brief political personality quiz that Huffington Post has set up, which is simple but also pretty revealing.

So check it out. What personality are you? Liberal or conservative? (Grin)

Link here.

WordPress will not cooperate and post the video right now, but it is here. And a picture is to the right.

There is tons to discuss about this segment, and most prominently, how Haidt and I differ. It is a pretty subtle affair.

But I’m thrilled that he put his stamp of approval on The Republican Brain‘s science reporting, noting:

Chris has done a great job of surveying the literature. I want to give him a stamp of approval. He is not cherry picking, he is representing the current state of thinking about politics and personality.

More soon. For now, if you haven’t already, watch the segment.

Lee Harris has a critique of The Republican Brain up at The American, an “online magazine of the American Enterprise Institute.” So we already know where it is going. It manages to distinguish itself in how it can at once demonstrate a handle on history, and yet be so misguided it deserves a response.

Harris cites historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn to make the point that “every scientific revolution begins by overturning the dominant scientific paradigm of its time.” (We’ll get back to him.)

This is fine, as far as it goes, but usually devolves into the “Galileo defense” employed by many pseudoscientists when confronted with the fact the scientific community thinks they’re bonkers. Galileo got in some trouble for his sun-centered solar system. Therefore, this line of reasoning asserts, the fact that the scientific community rejects them just shows how revolutionary their scientific idea really is, and that it will eventually be accepted.

The problem with this argument is that if you take the greatest scientific revolutionaries of the past couple hundred years – Darwin and Einstein – far from being persecuted, they were hailed by the scientific communities in their lifetimes.

Einstein was working in a patent office at the time he published his theories in 1905. If anyone were to be rejected as a crackpot, it would be him, yet he was awarded the Nobel prize 16 years later, and was able to quit the patent office in 1909. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species sold out when it went on sale in 1859 and the scientist was buried in Westminster Abbey next to Isaac Newton.

There are plenty of examples of scientists who stubbornly held to wrong ideas, but Harris chooses Darwin as his example of pig-headed denial. According to Harris, Darwin “refused to change his mind about his theory of natural selection even when the greatest physicist of his day, Lord Kelvin, offered irrefutable evidence that the earth simply could not have been as old as Darwin’s theory required it to be.”

The fact that Kelvin turned out to be wrong and Darwin turned out right, Harris insists, doesn’t undermine his point at all:

It is irrelevant that Lord Kelvin’s irrefutable evidence turned out to be not so irrefutable. Darwin’s theory was saved by the discovery of nuclear energy, but Darwin could not have anticipated that any more than Lord Kelvin could. By challenging the scientific consensus of his day, Darwin’s persistence in arguing for his pet theory might be put forward as a flagrant example of anti-science.

I’m actually willing to go along with this argument. I don’t think the flat-Earthers were wrong in Greek times. Until there was some empirical reason to believe otherwise, only crackpots thought the Earth was round.

But he loses me here:

When Copernicus made his daring conjecture placing the sun at the center of the then known universe, he had only half-dispelled the old Ptolemaic paradigm. Copernicus made the earth revolve around the sun, along with the other planets, but he could not shake off the Platonic fixation with perfect circles that had been embodied in the Ptolemaic system. In Copernicus’s new astronomy, the earth and planets might revolve around the sun, but they still had to revolve in perfect circles. The reason for this seemed quite obvious at the time. Because there was an infinite number of different oval shapes, God, the designer of the universe, had no reason to pick one particular oval shape over another. He would have needed to resort to a process that involved arbitrary choice, for example, by going “eeny, meeny, miny, moe” among the possible elliptical orbits. But for Copernicus, just as for Einstein, God did not play dice. Therefore, God would stick to perfect circles, since this was the only rational choice He could make.

So far, so good. Then he follows that paragraph with this: “Kepler disagreed.”

With that, we get the portrayal of Kepler as the crackpot uprooting the current understanding. Harris writes, “[W]e are taught scientists are supposed to look at empirical evidence, not attempt to fathom the inner workings of the mind of God,” but Kepler stubbornly championed the ellipse over the circle. Harris concludes:

In short, the so-called Republican brain, with its deep resistance to yielding before mere scientific evidence, has played an indispensable role in the making of modern science, long before the emergence of the Grand Old Party in 1856. This fact, however, has been obscured for most of us because of the way in which we learn science in our classrooms.

This certainly wasn’t the way I was taught the story.

Back when I was an astronomy/physics major before going through quarter-life crises and pursuing writing, I stumbled upon the story of Kepler whom scientists use as a parable about the scientific method.

In my recollection, Kepler was, indeed, remembered for his stubbornness, but his stubborn insistence in holding to the Ptolemaic paradigm he would eventually upend.

Was this fact obscured for me by the way I was taught in my science classroom? I wondered, so I pulled down my old textbook, The Copernican Revolution by none other than Thomas S. Kuhn (I told you I’d get to him).

Harris’ Kepler is the exact opposite of the Kepler Kuhn describes. If the perfect circle was the ideal of the day, in the period Harris glosses over to get to “Kepler disagreed,” Kepler was its greatest champion.

Kepler took Tycho Brahe’s data on the movements of Mars, considered to be the best data of the day, and spent the next decade trying to force the numbers into his perfect geometry.

“It was an immense labor which occupied much of Kepler’s time for almost ten year,” Kuhn writes. “Again and again Kepler was forced to change the combination of circles used in computing these orbits. System after system was tried and rejected because if failed to conform to Brahe’s brilliant observations.”

So why is Kepler revered? Because despite his most deeply held convictions, and despite the years of denial, in the end Kepler did the difficult thing, the courageous thing, really: based on the evidence, he abandoned his religious conviction.

“A long series of unsuccessful trials forced Kepler to conclude that no system based upon compound circles could solve the problem,” Kuhn writes, and so Kepler tried the ellipse.

Kepler is not revered for his Republican brain because of its “deep resistance to yielding before mere scientific evidence.” He is revered because when confronted with contrary evidence, his Republican brain did a very un-Republican thing: it changed.

Andrea Kuszewski

This is an guest post by Andrea Kuszewski, a Behavior Therapist and Consultant for children on the autism spectrum based in San Francisco, and a researcher and manager with VORTEX: Integrative Science Improving Societies, based in Bogotá, Colombia. She blogs at The Rogue Neuron and tweets as  @AndreaKuszewski. She is author of the widely read post “This is Your Brain on Politics: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Liberals and Conservatives” at Discover Blogs.

(Creative Commons)

This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider,  a skeptic, journalist and science fiction author whose work on the politicization of science has appeared in Skeptic, Dissent and other outlets (www.dylanottokrider.com).

Hurricane Katrina could have been a story like the boy stuck in the drain pipe, parodied by The Simpson’s star-studded “Sending Our Love Down the Well” episode. Those stories, while schmaltzy, are in the spirit of “a nation comes together.”

Instead, pundits of a particular partisan proclivity worried about rape gangs – allegations later found to be exaggerated (if there was any truth to the stories at all). Other pundits pondered why the people didn’t simply walk out of New Orleans. They obsessed about crime and looting. All of these stories served the same function: to shut down our feelings of empathy.

Whether intentional or instinctual, how we view evidence is often self-serving. Just as science showing that humans affect the environment might lead to regulations, so empathy for the poor can lead to welfare, and concern for African Americans can lead to affirmative action. So to feel okay about denying aid to those in need, one must see the recipients as scam artists, freeloaders, or having brought the situation upon themselves.

We feel bad for people who lost their homes. Rapists? Looters? Not so much.

Nonetheless, Hurricane Katrina reinforced an overall suspicion about the Bush administration’s incompetence, and became a turning point in W.’s presidency. If Bush were to take the blame, it was important to make the disaster “less bad” and minimize a national calling for aid – which might take some time to arrive.

Now we are seeing the same thing in the case of Trayvon Martin, the teen who was shot in a gated community after returning home from a convenience store. As the story started to gain traction, conservatives began to probe for a way to counter the perception of Martin as an innocent victim. They floated the conspiratorial idea that the media “lightened” photos of Trayvon to make him look “innocent,” and posted pictures of another kid with gold teeth whom they claimed was Trayvon (but wasn’t).

As each charge evaporated, conservative bloggers simply moved on to the next one–until something stuck: the fact that Zimmerman was reported to have a bloody nose and gashes on the back of his head.

What principles are threatened in the case of Trayvon Martin are not as immediately evident. When people started to set their sights on “Stand Your Ground” legislation, psychology suggests the instincts of 2nd Amendment advocates to favor the shooter would kick in.

Tribal politics may also have played a role. After Obama commented on the case, Newt Gingrich, appealing to the extreme base during a primary where he was positioning himself as the “true conservative,” called Obama’s comments “disgraceful,” and other conservatives followed suit. For many, the mere fact that liberals were outraged – and Obama’s association with one position – was reason enough to rally against the cause.

Once the killing of Trayvon Martin was seen to benefit a certain side, it’s not surprising that much of the media narrative – often traceable back to the conservative megaphone – was aimed at shutting down empathy for the victim.

Then there’s the cognitive explanation. Liberal ideology depends on empathy. Programs for the poor and safety nets all depend on seeing things from other’s points of view and feeling for those who are not us. Whereas fear, stress and threats hand over control to more defensive parts of the brain like the amygdala–a region that has been associated with political conservatism.

If we are more predisposed to accept liberal ideas when we empathize, then empathy poses the same political threat as a scientific study suggesting the need for collective or government action (say, on global warming). Emotions are powerful, and to some, dangerous.

We should use them.

(Credit: Gage Skidmore)

Yesterday, Jonah Goldberg extensively misrepresented The Republican Brain in a column for USA Today. He talks about Republicans having “bad brains,” as if this is something that I allege. This is both inflammatory and false. I say no such thing.

I’ve composed a letter and sent it to USA Today. In the meantime, though, it is hard to miss the irony here. Conservatives are reacting defensively to a book about how they react defensively…just as the book predicted they would.

More soon. Meanwhile, chew on Goldberg’s five paragraph attempt to take down a single political neuroscience study (original paper here). Alas, he misses the target entirely, and doesn’t even seem to understand the point of the study (which simply looked at how left and right perform on a standard test for using the anterior cingulate cortex):

Of course, Mooney believes he’s simply going where the science leads. Consider that one of the more famous studies was conducted by liberal researchers at University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) and New York Universityand published in Nature Neuroscience. Subjects were asked to spot the letters M or W on a screen for a fraction of a second. It turns out that self-described liberals did somewhat better on the test than the conservatives.

What does that mean? Well, according to the researchers, it means: “Liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty.” Liberals are also “more likely than are conservatives to respond to cues signaling the need to change habitual responses,” NYU says.

Translation: Conservatives literally aren’t smart enough to be spell-checkers at an M&M factory because they won’t be able to understand quickly enough that the occasional W is just an upside down M.

Absurd conclusions

The data might be correct, but as with Mooney, the conclusions are beyond absurd. London’s Guardian newspaper responded to the study by declaring, “Scientists have found that the brains of people calling themselves liberals are more able to handle conflicting and unexpected information.” The Los Angeles Times announced in an editorial that the study “suggests that liberals are more adaptable than conservatives” and “might be better judges of the facts.”

Huh? The test didn’t measure “informational complexity.” It measured informational simplicity. As Slate‘s science columnist William Saletan notes, the study actually excludes complexity and ambiguity. It measured response times to a rudimentary visual acuity test. Almost by definition, conscious thought isn’t part of the equation. My hunch is that Socrates would do very poorly hunting and pecking for Ms and Ws on a screen, too.

Your “hunch”? Alas, refuting this study is going to take a lot more than a Google search!

Full Goldberg column here.

Days after 911, the FOX News science writer Steven Milloy published a column that fingered asbestos regulation for costing lives in the collapse World Trade Center towers. Immediately after the space shuttle disaster, Milloy blamed enviro-friendly foam.

Both charges, it turns out, were untrue, but maybe facts aren’t really what folks like Milloy are after. If there are going to be pitchforks, they want the mob calling for the head of “regulations.” And once the public has a culprit, that impression becomes nearly impossible to uproot.

Neither of Milloy’s ideas took hold, but it could be argued George W. Bush harnessed the post-911 hunger for justice (and revenge) far more effectively. Liberals still talk bitterly about how what could have been a unifying moment was instead used for partisan gain by portraying Democrats as anti-American no matter how much they went along with Bush’s anti-terror proposals. The belief in Iraq’s involvement in 9/11 persists, to this day, among the more stubborn factions.

 In The Republican Brain, Mooney quotes University of Maryland’s Arie Kruglanski as saying “In times of great uncertainty, decisive leaders, like Churchill and Bush, are more appealing than leaders who are full of ambiguity and indecisiveness, which is what liberals tend to be because of their makeup.”

Mooney’s latest post for Discover cites research that shows people actually become more conservative when distracted, under time pressure or in a state of fear. As he writes:

[I]t is striking that the research literature does not, at least at present, contain such a plethora of ways to bring about a temporary liberal shift—to make conservatives move left. Instead, what these cases seem to reveal are some inherent conservative political advantages, especially at times of deep fear, uncertainty, and stress. (And we’ve seen some of those recently.)

This is the principle behind Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, which suggests the powerful have been using crises to push through radical legislation for some time, possibly even manufacturing upheaval to make the populace receptive to massive “reforms.” But one hardly need create crises. Disaster and tragedy seems to do just fine without our help. All you need is people ready to spin the case to their advantage.

If people are most receptive to conservatism in the immediate shock of world events, then it’s not surprising conservative flaks make their move when the psychology favors them. Liberals, in contrast, tend to call for a truce after a disaster so as not to appear to be exploiting the situation, and there are plenty of conservative groups ready to jump on them if they do. It is also self-serving: people are at their most liberal in times of calm, so they’d rather wait it out or help diffuse the situation.

A culprit, once found, can have fast-moving and far-reaching policy implications. The killing of Trayvon Martin, for example, managed to galvanize people against a liberal target: the Stand Your Ground laws.

However, the people most willing to jump in and polarize a story have the advantage over those who “rise above” and want to not be seen as exploiting it. The result is the story has often been shaped before they’re even ready to get in the game.

Mooney is careful to avoid a slide into reductionism; repeatedly emphasising that while insights from psychology, neuroscience and even genetics are relevant to understanding the causes of political disagreement, they don’t provide simple or complete answers.

To reinforce this point, he devotes a section of the book to wider factors in US political culture, such as the rise of rightwing think-tanks and partisan media, such as Fox News, which “interact with conservative psychology in such a way as to make the misinformation problem worse”.

He also highlights how liberals can display their own patterns of biased reasoning. Yet, despite these attempts at balance, and an admission that writing the book left him with a “new-found admiration” for conservatives, Mooney anticipates that many on the right will attack the book without properly reading it – observing wryly that this behaviour will only reinforce his case.

Yup. I have barely had a single substantive critique from the right. It has been almost entirely invective from people who don’t even appear to understand what they’re criticizing.

You can read Wilsdon’s review here.

Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief

1. Will M. Gervais*,
2. Ara Norenzayan*

Scientific interest in the cognitive underpinnings of religious belief has grown in recent years. However, to date, little experimental research has focused on the cognitive processes that may promote religious disbelief. The present studies apply a dual-process model of cognitive processing to this problem, testing the hypothesis that analytic processing promotes religious disbelief. Individual differences in the tendency to analytically override initially flawed intuitions in reasoning were associated with increased religious disbelief. Four additional experiments provided evidence of causation, as subtle manipulations known to trigger analytic processing also encouraged religious disbelief. Combined, these studies indicate that analytic processing is one factor (presumably among several) that promotes religious disbelief. Although these findings do not speak directly to conversations about the inherent rationality, value, or truth of religious beliefs, they illuminate one cognitive factor that may influence such discussions.

Quick translation: It appears that the more you use stage 2, or System 2, reasoning, the more it eats away at religiosity. By contrast, the more you privilege automatic, quick, instinctive thinking, the more it privileges faith.

This suggests that in a sense, brains may be “built” for religion, or at least inclined to default to it, and that it may take more effort to get all the way to atheism–it is a less natural or simple state.

Full study here.

The longest, fairest, and most substantive critique I’ve gotten from someone who has actually read the book is from the philosopher and ethicist Ronald Lindsay. As it happens, he is also my part-time boss, as he is president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry and I host its podcast, Point of Inquiry.

That creates a slightly odd dynamic, but since Ron has opted to weigh in at such length, it seems only natural that I should respond.

Defining Conservatism? Ron makes the following objection:

Chris claims that there are groups that we can identify as “liberals” and “conservatives” and that these groups have different, contrasting psychologies that dramatically influence how they perceive the world.

I certainly do claim this. Indeed, moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, in his new book The Righteous Mind, could also be said to be making this claim. And no wonder: The claim is built on a mountain of evidence, and I’m puzzled by Ron’s attempt to get around it.

To do so, he goes back and critiques a way of measuring conservatism that is from the late 1960s, and that I don’t mention in the book. Alas, you can’t refute me with dated criticisms…because science advances.

Consider this 2010 study, discussed at length in the book, and entirely immune to Ron’s criticism. It examines over 12,000 people, and in it, left and right are measured not by the “Wilson Patterson Scale” (which Ron worries about) but by simple conservative-liberal self identification, and stances on two economic and two social issues (health care and taxes, abortion and civil unions). The analysis shows dramatic personality differences between liberals and conservatives when measured in this way, and the biggest difference of all is on the dimension that is the central focus of the book: Openness to Experience.

The point is that this stuff shows up across studies (including a new study reported in the book). All you need is a simple self-identification of conservatism to get the result in question. Therefore, the argument is not vulnerable to Ron’s criticism of any one way of measuring conservatism. The field has refined its measurements (it has also done so for authoritarianism, which used to be measured with some items that were problematic) to get around criticisms like Ron’s, and the results still stand.

Left Wing Authoritarianism? Next, Ron brings up the issue of whether there is an authoritarianism of the left, a topic addressed in the book. Here, Ron naturally turns his attention to totalitarian communist countries—where, he suggests, there are left wing authoritarians.

Well, yeah. But this is no criticism of the book’s argument or the “psychology of ideology” thesis. As I explain, the psychology-ideology dynamic likely flips in communist regimes that are well established, with psychologically right wing authoritarian personalities aligning to the left, because they support the status quo and submit to those in power.

Such people are still right wing in a psychological sense. They have become left wing in a substantive or egalitarian sense, but this should not be so surprising, and certainly is no contradiction. For as I emphasize in the book, psychological needs don’t have any explicit content to them. They adapt themselves to the circumstances. They seize on what is available. And in such regimes, that’s what’s available.

In fact, the issue with totalitarian communist regimes is bigger than this. The “psychology of ideology” thesis presumably fares best in a democracy where people get to choose which ideology to adopt. If you don’t have that choice, then you’re not going to have a very good psychological-ideological sorting of people. They won’t be able to follow their “affinities,” their guts, in adopting an ideology that feels suitable to them.

Finally, Ron should consult Robert Altemeyer on why in the Soviet Union, psychologically right wing authoritarians were on the substantive political left.

Liberal and Conservative Errors. I’m afraid that Ron sells short my attempt to show that the right today is simply more wrong than the left (in the United States). He says that I “improvise a measuring stick” for conservative errors, and largely focus on the data from fact checkers, who tend to rate conservatives worse.

To the contrary, that’s one tiny piece of the argument. The evidence that conservatives are just more factually wrong (or believe more misinformation) comes from a range of places: Surveys of the views of Fox News viewers, surveys of conservative and Tea Party beliefs, and analyses of conservative positions on an array of issue areas: science, history, economics, and so on.

I then propose a “consilience” or “weight of the evidence” approach. I say that while there is no way to explicitly quantify conservative wrongness, the evidence before us suggest that it vastly outweighs anything on the left (in the United States).

What Does The Theory Explain? Ron also claims that we don’t need anything more than sheer politics to explain why conservatives today have such problems with science. He says it’s simple:

The big change in the Republican Party came when it allied itself with the religious right—a marriage consummated by Reagan— in an effort to build a successful political coalition between fiscal conservatives and social conservatives.

Yes, but who were the social conservatives, the religious right? The evidence suggests that many of them were, psychologically, right wing authoritarians—see Hetherington and Weiler on this.

This drags us right back to psychology, and real psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. Therefore, we do need a theory like mine to explain what we see today. We lack a full understanding without invoking underlying psychological factors.

Motivated Reasoning? Finally, there seems to be a confusion here. I admit in the book that both liberals and conservatives engage in motivated reasoning. And I give examples of both doing so.

My argument, therefore, does not solely depend on the claim that conservatives engage in *more* motivated reasoning. My ultimate conclusion on this point is that it is probably only true of educated or sophisticated conservatives.

The broader argument is that left and right process information differently across the board. And the “reality gap” between them likely reflects motivated reasoning, but may also reflect other behaviors like selective exposure, or simple quick, reflexive thinking. In short, we don’t know all the reasons. We need more research to figure out how these very real personality and psychological differences play out in the live political world.

So if Ron thinks I’m merely arguing that conservatives engage in more motivated reasoning than liberals, I don’t think he sees the bigger argument.

Conclusion. Ron writes,

I think the burden of proof is fairly borne by Chris, as he is advancing a novel, sweeping claim. The claim that conservatives and liberals are different people requires a strong justification. He’s supplied some evidence in this solidly researched book, but he has not met his burden of proof.

On the contrary, this claim kind of obvious, lying in plain sight, and is hardly extraordinary. The only reason I can get any  mileage out of making it is that people don’t like to admit it. But there is really little way around it.

Again, go check out that 2010 study of over 12,000 self-identified liberals and conservatives, showing differences on every personality measure, and really big differences on Conscientiousness, Openness, and Stability.

Then tell me these are not, psychologically, different people.

This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider

When the victims of hurricane Katrina started to flood into Houston, I drove to the Astrodome to volunteer to help the refugees, over the objections of friends who insisted security would make it impossible. As it turned out, the entire registration process consisted of pulling into the parking lot, at which point I was handed a garbage bag of clothes.

I’d like to say it was charity that drove me, but the more likely motivation was voyeurism: a desire to witness history. That meant my impression of the people of New Orleans was not formulated by the endlessly looped footage of the people chanting outside the Superdome, but the refugee whom ran up to help me carry the donations because, “You’re here to help us, so we’ll help you.” It’s the elderly black man who said his distrust of white people disappeared when we welcomed them with open arms, and the other elderly gentleman who arrived on a hijacked bus with four untreated bullet wounds that had gone untreated for days.

The people I knew who experienced Katrina through the cable news had a very different impression. They were more reluctant to give money to “looters.” They often asked the question, posed on CNN, why these people didn’t simply walk out of New Orleans.

Reading the account I wrote immediately afterwards, I can see I got a bit carried away by the emotion. For me, it was very personal. Which is the point. Times of intense emotions become defining moments that influence how we feel about things the rest of our lives.

Chris Mooney describes how we call mental associations from our emotional reactions this way:

Memory, as embodied in the brain, is conceived of as a network, made up of nodes and linkages between them… As you begin to call a subject to mind (like Sarah Palin) from your long-term memory, nodes associated with the subject (“woman,” “Republican,” “Bristol,” “death panels,” “Paul Revere) are activated… And subconscious and automatic emotion starts the burn. It therefore determines what the mind has available to work with—to argue with.—The Republican Brain, pg. 31-32

If emotion decides what to pull from our memory banks, it also decides what we store. Research shows emotion narrows our focus, prioritizes which memories we store and those memories associated with high emotion are less likely to fade.

I’ve noticed many of these associations are formed in emotional moments when a person has a revelation. “I was lying in a ditch, and my heart stopped from a heroin overdose,” the street preacher says. “As I was hauled into the ambulance and declared dead, I re-evaluated my life, and I prayed to God that if I got out of this, I would devote my life to him.” It makes sense periods of pain or fear would have a profounder effect on us. Stick your hand in a fire, and the instinct “do not touch” gets etched rather deeply in our brains.

It is those epiphanies we often harken back to when the belief we formed is threatened. Virtually no amount of evidence can overcome the fact that your father pulled through that operation after you prayed for him.

Each new area of the brain is built upon older parts of the brain. So that prefrontal cortex we humans are so proud of still relies on the areas that are more automatic and binary in their thinking. The more primitive areas of the brain are in control more than we like to believe.

This might explain our tendency to stereotype. Get bitten by a snake, one still quivers at the sight of a harmless gardener. Our reptilian brain doesn’t distinguish such subtleties. Likewise, someone whose father was held in a Japanese concentration camp might have a lifelong aversion to buying Japanese cars.

Now consider these facts: a black teenager is shot and killed in a gated community by a neighborhood watchman after returning home from the convenience store with an ice tea and bag of Skittles.

The possibilities of what actually occurred are endless, but most everyone upon first hearing them has already drawn a pretty clear picture of what they believed occurred, drawn from a lifetime of associations. Not surprisingly, those interpretations separate down familiar racial and partisan divides.

A "Romney Diagram"

This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider,  a skeptic, journalist and science fiction author whose work on the politicization of science has appeared in Skeptic, Dissent and other outlets  (www.dylanottokrider.com).

Liberals often talk about conservatives as living in a parallel universe. When Mitt Romney speaks, he does seem to be communicating by different rules. Some favorite Romney lines are so demonstrably untrue, several high profile progressives have resorted to diagramming his sentences in the hopes of discovering some clever weazling.

On Tuesday, Greg Sargent took a valiant stab at interpreting Mitt’s statement: “If I’m so fortunate to become president, I will not apologize for America’s success at home, and I would certainly not apologize for America’s success abroad.”

So America is succeeding at home? That doesn’t seem all that on message for Romney, does it?

Or perhaps when Romney said he won’t “apologize for America’s success at home,” he didn’t mean America is succeeding overall. Rather, he meant he wouldn’t apologize for the success of the wealthy, i.e., the class that would see higher taxes under Obama’s policies. But the inescapable logical extension of that interpretation is that Romney means that America is succeeding … as long as the rich are doing well.

Which doesn’t seem like such a great message for Romney, either.

This whopper, in particular, befuddles non-Republican partisans because… well, Obama never apologized for America. Greg’s update says he meant this “as a bit of a joke,” but if so, it is at the expense of the progressive need to connect the words to definitions, saying something technically true while conveying the opposite – to depend on what the meaning of “is” is.

A few days ago, Rachel Maddow attempted to deconstruct this Romneyism delivered to the NRA: “We need a president who will enforce current laws. Not create new ones that only serve to burden lawful gun owners. President Obama has not, I will.”

MADDOW: President Obama has not, what? Has not enforced current laws or are you talking about the second part of what you said. He`s not created new laws?

Technically, Mr. Romney is saying that Obama has not not created new laws. It`s hard to understand the dangling negative. I think what he is trying to give the impression of that President Obama has created new restrictive gun laws.

Romneyism is not confined to Romney. Mississippi State Senator Hob Bryan let loose this verbal pretzel:

What we have not done is to pass bill after bill after bill that was obviously unconstitutional just so we could all get on record one more time as casting another vote realizing that what was going to happen was someone would file suit the next day and the legislation would never take effect.

Laura Conaway blogged these sentence diagrams.

What is so adorable about this is their approach is so predictably liberal: dividing the sentences up into clauses, tracing modifiers, searching for some underlying structure of literal meaning that can give some inkling of the inner workings of the conservative mind that could produce it, and upon hearing it understand – and believe.

Such efforts start from the mistaken assumption that Romney and Bryan are communicating through the classical model of politics, when we have, as David Javerbaum wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times, “entered the age of quantum politics; and Mitt Romney is the first quantum politician.”

Javerbaum’s “A Quantum Theory of Mitt Romney,” like the wave/particle properties of light, could be considered a joke or one of the most important political pieces written in years. The concepts behind this model are Complimentarity, Probability, Uncertainty, Noncausality, Duality and Entanglement:

[T]he act of observing cannot be separated from the outcome of the observation. By asking Mitt Romney how he feels about an issue, you unavoidably affect how he feels about it. More precisely, Mitt Romney will feel every possible way about an issue until the moment he is asked about it, at which point the many feelings decohere into the single answer most likely to please the asker.

This is a giant leap forward toward understanding that the sentences Maddow and Sargent find so counterintuitive are all perfectly coherent within conservative anti-reality. To understand, one must stop thinking about what the words say, but how they feel.

I once had a writing teacher who made a graph. Words would move along the X axis based on the emotional impact of the words and up the Y axis based on the number of senses the word impacted.

Words like “hope” have a very high emotional impact, but very little descriptive power, whereas with “strawberry” one can see the red, smell it, taste it, feel the bristle of tiny seeds. (Some words like blood or flag ranked high along both axes.)

The words with high emotion and little meaning were the vocabulary of politicians, my professor explained, whereas “strawberry” was the word of a writer.

Sargent and Maddow try to interpret Romney’s speech along the X axis. Romney’s audience is judging it along the Y.

“Apologize” conjures up associations of treason, protesters, hippies spitting on soldiers. These are all negative things, all directed at a positive thing “America,” and they have nothing to do with asking for forgiveness.

“But,” our inner Maddow objects, “Obama didn’t apologize.”

During the classical period of politics that might have mattered. But it is like the two-dimensional square of Flatland attempting to comprehend the three-dimensional sphere that visits once a millennium to tell the geometric shapes about spaceland.

Romney’s language is unique in that it has abandoned definitions altogether in favor of meaning – the meaning we give to it. In this instance, Maddow has Romney’s number: he has almost made his lack of conviction a selling point; he will say what wins. He will do what you secretly want. Even if every member of the audience wants different things.

In addition, the Washington Post Outlook section has run a piece by me about the book this weekend. It’s entitled “Liberals and Conservatives Don’t Just Vote Differently. They Think Differently.” You can read it here.

Back in 2002, when I wrote for the Houston Press, Rush Limbaugh devoted a lot of air time to a scientific study that showed that oil was seeping up from lower depths into higher reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico, and relatively quickly in geologic time. There was also some suggestion that oil is being generated to this day–slowly, anyway.

This was proof for Limbaugh we will never run out of oil. Likewise, Newsday declared “Oil Fields’ Free Refill,” and Bruce Bartlett used the study in a National Review editorial to claim “the world will never run out.”

So I did something I wish far more reporters would do before running with something handed to them from their sources: I called the scientist responsible for the study, Dr. Mahlon Kennicutt of A&M University, and asked him if this was true. “That’s about as far from the truth as can be,” Kennicutt told me. “They are finite resources. They always will be.”

I have since found many scientists who work in politicized areas have similar stories. The response was usually to ignore the chatter and go on doing science unless such political posturing threatened their funding. Thankfully, times have changed, and this week I see a scientist fighting back:

Citing a recent study by the government of Nunavut in Canada, conservative media are claiming that the number of polar bears is “increasing.” The takeaway, according to these media outlets, is that concerns about the fate of polar bears in a warming world are overblown. But polar bear scientist Steven Amstrup says these commentators are mistaken.

It is unclear who took the initiative, Amstrup or Media Matters (the source of the passage above), but I get the feeling if Amstrup had waited for the outlets reporting this story to get his take, he would have waited a long time.

The conservative claim is based on a 2009 review of polar bear populations. Using the method of capture and recapturing, Amstrup estimated a polar bear population in Hudson Bay to have shrunk from 1,194 in 1987 to 935 in 2004. A follow up study using an aerial survey put the number somewhere between 717 and 1,430. An article in Canada’s Globe and Mail reported the number as 1,013. This was enough for the conservative media to declare the population of all polar bears had risen and every study that came before it suggesting polar bear populations affected by global warming amounted to so much bunk.

In fact, the population in question is one of 19 populations west of Hudson Bay, and one of eight found to be shrinking in the 2009 review (one was increasing, three were stable, and seven lacked enough data to be meaningful).

Amstrup told Media Matters, “The population size is just a number.  It is a valuable number to have, but from the standpoint of population welfare, it is the trend in numbers that is critical.”  The conservative media was using a single estimate and declaring it a trend, but the difference in the numbers could easily be attributed to the different methodology and the fact that the count was done in a different geographical area.

If anything, since 2002 the shamelessness of the right wing has gotten worse. The Washington Post – not the Washington Times, mind you, the Washington Post – has yet to issue a correction for a Feb. 15, 2009 column in which George F. Will cited a scientific study as saying the opposite of what the study did.

As demagogues and propagandists like Will have gotten more shameless, the scientists have gotten less docile: the researchers of that study came forward to say the study Will cited, in fact, showed the exact opposite of what Will claimed. The official position of the Post is that although the scientists say the study says one thing, it is Will’s opinion it says the opposite, and the Post does not correct any earnestly held inferences of its columnists.

On the other hand, we now have places like www.realclimate.org where people can hear directly from climate scientists what they think of their studies in the news. Of course, we also have more scientists like Steven Amstrup willing to stand up when their research is distorted for political reasons, and organizations like Media Matters willing to place the call.

It may not stop conservative outlets from distorting science, but those who care about science can, hopefully, get good enough at pushing back to keep these distortions contained within the conservative echo chamber and prevent them from entering the mainstream.

(Paul Krugman, who has denounced the "Cult of Centrism")

This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider,  a skeptic, journalist and science fiction author whose work on the politicization of science has appeared in Skeptic, Dissent and other outlets (www.dylanottokrider.com).

The latest psychological research cited by Chris Mooney suggest that liberals and conservatives have a particular inclination toward different psychological traits. Conservatives tend to be more dogmatic and intolerant of ambiguity, whereas a liberal, in the words of Jonathan Chait, “is somebody who won’t even take his own side in an argument.” All of which means that the intentionally provocative title to Mooney’s book, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality” may particularly niggle at someone more prone to value even-handedness, objectivity and viewing questions from other people’s perspectives–e.g., a liberal!

If some liberals are more predisposed to resist the premise they have a superior way of thinking (Mooney actually states both liberal and conservative approaches are often complimentary, and each comes with its own advantages and disadvantages), they will naturally want to find a counter example of liberal ideological blindness. But maybe such compulsive centrists should look a little closer to home.

In truth, there is one particular bit of liberal dogma that aids on the conservative disinterest in facts: centrism.

This liberal ideal – which Paul Krugman aptly describes as “The Cult of Centrism”– insists that to be right, one must see all sides, and give all views equal weight. It is similar to science in that it believes reality can best be ascertained by letting advocates of different sides battle it out, and the view most able to withstand challenges is the most “true” one. Usually, the liberal assumes, the truth is somewhere in between.

Liberals tend to gravitate toward professions like academia, science and journalism which value objectivity and determining facts from evidence. Liberal/centrists like to see themselves as able to keep their biases in check, and particularly delight in being attacked by “both extremes.” A liberal/centrist is wary of espousing “liberal” views because it is when espousing views they actually believe they are most in danger of appearing biased. A liberal naturally wants to “rise above” the fray and take their place in the sensible middle, arrived at logically, and derive particular joy from being able to cite those instances where they deviate from their own “team’s” orthodoxy.

Rather than hierarchical, liberal/centrism is more likely to see morality as relative, is different viewpoints as equally valid, and assume we all earnestly seek the truth by evaluating the evidence, are all susceptible to bias but all do our best to see beyond them.

A centrist might naturally find the thesis of the centrist cult attractive because centrists are most comfortable when they can point to blind ideology in their side as well as the other. Having a liberal/centrist ideology might be what allows a centrist/liberal to give up the insistence “both sides” are always equally blind because it gives them a philosophical failing of the left to balance the scales, thus securing their place between two competing extremes.

Because liberals instinctively seek the coveted middle ground, they need to find liberals equal in number and disdain for their views for confirmation they are free from bias. But when centrism is the liberal ideal, then centrism is the extreme, so where does a liberal/centrist go to find extremists on the left to triangulate?

Where a liberal/centrist cannot find people frothing at them from their left, a liberal/centrist must invent liberals/straw men of conservative temperament, equally as dogmatic and prone to motivated reasoning, or magnify the importance of the few misguided extremists they do find, putting animal rights one equal footing with creation science in both political platforms.

The poster child for the cult of centrism is New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman and his notorious pining for a third party that happens to have a platform nearly identical to Obama’s. In this way, Freidman can support Obama’s policies from the middle ground. The inability to admit Obama’s centrism, or recognize the great lengths Obama went through to reach a compromise during the brinksmanship over the debt ceiling exemplifies a denial of reality to rival any creation scientist or global warming denier.

The irony is because liberals are unaware of their embrace of centrism, the mental checks they employ on their “liberal tendencies” rather than “centrist tendencies” has them fall prey to the same motivated reasoning those checks are meant to prevent.

The greatest value of understanding the differences between those inclined to a particular ideology is that we can have a better understanding of where are biases actually are, and therefore wary of the areas where we are most likely to succumb to our own motivated reasoning.

Details are here.

Contest goes through April 30.

If you want to enter to win, click here.

A lot has been written about Harvard man Mitt Romney’s shameless attacks on Obama’s Harvard elitism, and Romney’s apparent complete lack of concern for accuracy altogether. What this is, in fact, has nothing to do with Romney’s veracity, but everything to do with the right’s decades long slide into anti-empiricism.

Why liberals are always left flat-footed when confronting such flagrant hypocrisies is their own bias that insists, no matter how much evidence to the contrary, that conservatives care about intellectual consistency as much as they do. They assume everyone values the scientific approach which attempts to find out what’s really going on.

There is another approach to viewing the world, which is to divide people according to teams with which they have a strong emotional investment. Anyone who has attended a sports event has witnessed this phenomenon. Every fan thinks “bad calls” hurt their team, never benefit them. An emotionally invested fan can mold the play they see to align with their own emotional desires to win.

This may simply be bias, seeing what we want to see. Or it can be the result of cynicism – working the refs by getting outraged at a call so that the referee instinctively wants to make a close call in your favor next time to demonstrate their objectivity.

What is new is that the Internet and rise of partisan outlets has reinforced these tendencies to the extreme. Someone who wants Romney to win will only hear what helps Romney. Unlike a scientific approach that would, say, wait to see if deficits increased after Bush’s tax cut passed on the claim it would increase revenue, true believers will never be informed when their experiment fails, or be given a scapegoat if they are. When people can create their own ideological isolation bubble, every experiment comes back with the same results: you were right all along. Conservatives can get the reassurance the need to know they are never wrong, only wronged.

If one is not concerned with who is, objectively, elitist, but only with winning one for the team, then one is only concerned with what will hurt the other guy, not what is actually true. If being elitist is a minus, then a Romney supporter wants evidence to support this, which is that Obama went to Harvard. What they don’t want to hear is anything that makes it difficult to score points: that Romney went to Harvard. Who actually went to Harvard is unimportant. It’s an effective cudgel and they want to use it.

This is what liberals find so frustrating arguing with conservatives. How can they claim Obama is a Muslim, an atheist and tied at the hip with extremist black preachers? You have to choose, right?

That’s the liberal way of thinking. It is a view predicated on the idea one cares whether or not Obama is, in fact, a Muslim. If one cares about hurting Obama, then one believes what hurts Obama politically, which would be that he’s a Muslim. And an Atheist. And associated with radical black Christian leaders. Which one is asserted at any particular moment depends entirely on what will hurt Obama the most in the given context. That could be that he’s a Muslim if the topic is terrorism, or a black radical when discussing race, or it could be all three simultaneously, without so much as batting an eye at the obvious logical paradox. One who believes these three things is, in fact, being entirely consistent in their anti-Obamaness.

What makes Romney’s bold claim so striking is that it shows how confident Romney is he will never suffer any consequences for his blatant hypocrisy. He would not make such a claim – over and over again – unless he knew his audience would never hear about the contradiction, and if they did hear it, would dismiss it.

Romney’s Harvard jabs are the inevitable result of the groundwork that has been laid with the establishment of alternative right-wing information outlets and a flock increasingly prone to empiricism-free reasoning. It means not only that conservatives are uninterested in the facts, they don’t even pretend any more.

This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider

As a long-time reader, I anxiously awaited Kevin Drum’s skeptical take on Mooney’s book. Having read it, I am equally anxious to read Mooney’s response [now online here]. However, this passage immediately jumped out at me:

When you read arguments that conservatives are anti-science, the bill of particulars is often fairly long. But really, there are only two big-ticket items: evolution and climate change. The rest is either small beer or highly arguable.

This stuck out because Drum seems to want to see these disagreements quite narrowly, whereas I see them as quite broad. I think our disconnect derives from his defining anti-science as opposition to particularly well-established theories, whereas I see it as systematic of conservative’s entire approach to the world.

Conservative assaults can be found on practically any empirical, fact-gathering enterprise. We have seen it with journalism, economics, history and intelligence agencies. We are starting to see it in attacks on universities and education.

What all these disciplines have in common a somewhat scientific approach to ascertaining reality – call it “sciency.” Journalism gathers the facts through sources, intelligence analysts look at satellite photos for evidence of weapons factories, historians rely on letters and documents. The approach may be “hard” science, like physics, or softer sciences like history. But all of them value approaching evidence with an open mind and letting the facts lead them to a conclusion, and try to put mechanisms in place to limit our biases.

Time and again, the right tags all of these non-partisan, objective pursuits as “liberal.” And I’m finally at the point where I agree with them. For a long time my own biases – a misguided belief people of all political persuasions are honestly pursuing truth – kept me from seeing I was imposing my values on them, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. Just because I value science does not necessarily mean everyone else does. Because I want to know what reality is, I value an approach that is honest and objective, but that approach always runs the danger of undermining your current objectives and principles, which is what conservatives value. Facts are not loyal, and therefore liberal – except in such cases that those facts happen to agree with the prevailing orthodoxy.

When liberal blogs posted a link to a study that suggested crime rates could be tied to lead exposure, this had implications for liberal policies that primarily blame poverty or seek rehabilitation. And it was met with much skepticism and debate. But it was posted.

However the right wing’s relentless coverage of the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida never gets around to mentioning the fact that the shooter, David Zimmerman, has not been arrested – a key fact to understanding the liberal uproar.

What liberals have a hard time wrapping their mind around is the fact that conservatives simply don’t care about the facts. They care about winning the argument.

I keep returning to an incident reported in the New York Times in 2004 where a scientist came forward alleging the USDA stopped testing beef when a bovine from Canada tested positive for Mad Cow.

All sorts of questions emerge: Why stop testing for Mad Cow because the beef is testing positive? If some beef tests positive, doesn’t that imply others are heading to market? The fact that they stopped testing suggests they were concerned this was a real possibility. If they think the beef is safe, testing would prove this. But if you think some could test positive, some people will eat it, and some people will be sick, won’t they?

This could be short-sightedness, not wanting to hurt sales now regardless of what happens in the future. But we might need to consider another, more troubling possibility: that all these questions assume the truth can be determined by scientific tests.

What if the truth can’t be determined by science? Why, then, the results of those tests don’t matter to conservatives any more than climate science studies. The maybe they aren’t on a pursuit of truth after all, but are pursuing the institutionalization of their own “truth” by brute force.

How they arrive at this truth is another topic, but it isn’t by science. But what if the same process decided global warming is a sham also told them the beef is safe? Then having it test positive would only serve to obscure a truth they already know.

In my last post here, I explored what I called thescience of “truthiness”: How we can come to understand the denial of science, on issues like global warming, by examining the underlying psychology of political conservatism itself.

But I must confess that in that item, I was relying on a fairly clichéd understanding of the word “truthiness.” Since it was first coined by Stephen Colbert in 2005, the term has taken on a massive life of its own — coming to mean, in its broadest sense, the problem of people making up their own reality, one just “truthy” enough that they actually believe it.

Frankly, though, most of us only have a “truthy” sense of what “truthiness” actually meant in its original formulation.

That’s why, when I went back and re-watched the original Colbert truthiness segment, I was so stunned. After a year spent researching the psychology of the right for my book The Republican Brain, Colbert’s words took on dramatic new meaning for me. Frankly, it now seems to me that in some ways, Colbert was ahead of the science on this matter — anticipating much of what we are only now coming to know.

You can read on to the full item here.

People seem to be enjoying the video, and commenting on it, so I thought I’d repost it here:

This is a guest post by Dylan Otto Krider

The anti-vax movement is typically the first counter example the springs to mind when one wants to challenge Mooney’s contention, in The Republican Brain, that science-denial is most comfortable in the right wing. In an interview for the fifth annual World Autism Day, one of the world’s most prominent birthers, Donald Trump, demonstrated the psychology of the right does indeed provide fertile ground for conspiracy:

In a Monday interview on Fox News, the reality star explained that a series of casual observations had led him to the conclusion that “monster” vaccinations cause autism.

“I’ve gotten to be pretty familiar with the subject,” Trump said. “You know, I have a theory — and it’s a theory that some people believe in — and that’s the vaccinations. We never had anything like this. This is now an epidemic. It’s way, way up over the past 10 years. It’s way up over the past two years. And, you know, when you take a little baby that weighs like 12 pounds into a doctor’s office and they pump them with many, many simultaneous vaccinations — I’m all for vaccinations, but I think when you add all of these vaccinations together and then two months later the baby is so different then lots of different things have happened. I really — I’ve known cases.”

(If you aren’t up on why this is nonsense, check out Chris Mooney’s article for Discover Magazine, or my own de-bunking primer.)

I live 15 minutes outside Boulder, Colorado, one of the nation’s largest pockets of anti-vax parents, and not coincidentally, one of the pockets where we see the re-emergence of whooping cough, a disease with a perfectly good vaccine that would probably eradicate it if we used it. What prevents this from happening is high-profile celebrities like Bill Maher, Jenny McCarthy, and now, Donald Trump.

Conservatives recognize the power of celebrity, where the left has held a distinct advantage, which is the motivation behind the book Hollywood Hypocrites by Andrew Breitbart heir and Human Events editor Jason Mattera.

The anti-vaccination rage in Hollywood is one area where I would cheer Mattera’s skewering of the oversized influence of actors and reality show hosts who speak on subjects well beyond their expertise. However, Mattera’s emphasis on “gotcha” over journalism led him to get his now infamous EXCLUSIVE AMBUSH INTERVIEW WITH BONO!!! impersonator, Pavel Sfera. When you reject empiricism, even when you’re right, you’re wrong.

Celebrities have a microphone, and the effect is evident in my home town. Broomfield is split into two school districts, Boulder Valley School District (BVSD), which includes the city of Boulder, and Adams 12 made up of a generally poorer segment of the North Metro Denver area. Vaccination rates in BVSD could already be below the magic number required for herd immunity, whereas those in Adams 12 are nearing 100 percent.

So like whooping cough, misguided anti-vax arguments spread to neighboring communities. More disturbingly, just as better educated conservatives are more likely to doubt scientific consensus with regards to global warming, the anti-vax meme, at least in my neck of the woods, is primarily championed by Boulder’s affluent, highly educated society wives and overprotective soccer moms.

Perhaps due to the fuzziness of how opposing vaccinations fits into the Randian economic worldview, denial of well-established science in this case has not split along familiar partisan lines (though it would be an obvious choice for the GOP to glom onto to claim they are not anti-science.)

Trump himself is an odd egg who had given more money to Democrats and switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in 2009, so I had almost become convinced his run for the GOP nomination had been a committed piece of performance art meant to toy with the blind loyalties of the conservative base. He showed questions about Obama’s birth certificate are all it takes to become a frontrunner in today’s GOP.

Trump has talked about his suspicions about vaccines before he switched parties, so it is unclear if this is evidence Trump always possessed the magical thinking that makes him a welcome addition to the GOP, or is yet another Trump anomaly. What is clear is unlike playing the rubes with his birth certificate nonsense, there’s nothing funny about discouraging vaccinations. Our collective safety depends on herd immunity, and a small minority of anti-vaccination zealots is all it takes to put us all in danger.

When celebrities get duped, they are one of the forces behind the zombie lies that just won’t die that keep skeptics and fact-checkers employed playing whack-a-mole. That means the pro-reality contingent needs to join the crusade to minimize celebrities’ sway, or find some celebrity skeptics and scientists of our own.

Here’s part of what he says:

Conservatives will be angry, of course. But perhaps they needn’t be. Chris is not saying conservatives are unintelligent. Read the book if you don’t believe me. That claim won’t be in there. Chris simply collects in one place the wide research about the differences in cognitive style that give rise to different kinds of ideological thinking, and argues that these differences might help explain why conservatives in this day and age seem to reject empirical evidence on the major issues more readily than liberals do, and hold political beliefs in strong contravention of such evidence.

Much evidence is in, as this book details. Seeing the world in more black-and-white terms IS associated with conservatism. Less curiosity is also. This needn’t make conservatives inferior. In fact, such a cognitive style can have advantages, especially where decisiveness is required. But it’s certainly plausible that a quickly decisive cognitive style is also less interested in updating its internal map of the outside world to comport with EVIDENCE. That’s kind of where Chris is headed here.

I wanted to highlight Everett’s response before flagging the first seriously engaged critique I’ve yet received–from science writer Kenneth Silber, over at David Frum’s blog. Mostly Silber is very fair, and mostly where he does criticize me he is fully entitled to his opinions. But there is one thing that he gets factually wrong, in my opinion:

The central weakness is that the science involved is rather provisional. To say “the science isn’t settled” may be a misleading cliché in the global warming debate, but it’s true enough with regard to scientific understanding of ideological differences, and particularly for efforts to analyze such differences in neurobiological terms.

This isn’t really true. As Everett Young notes above, there is a large body of consistent psychological research on the differences between left and right, across countries. What’s much newer is extending this research into other domains–cognitive neuroscience, physiology, genetics. But even here, the new results are consistent with the preexisting psychology studies.

In other words, a large body of evidence was accumulated in psychology, and is now being re-confirmed in new fields by new scientists. It’s hard to see how this situation could exist unless there was something real that all the different researchers were detecting, albeit in different ways and with different methodologies. So I agree, this is not physics or climate science. But I disagree with the idea that the science involved is “rather provisional.” Rather, I would submit that the more you dig into and read this research, the more you’ll see how extensive it is.

Neither, incidentally, is the burden of proof here particularly high. The research largely reaffirms what has always been folk wisdom about liberals and conservatives anyway; in my book talk, I note that Gilbert and Sullivan were cracking jokes about this kind of thing back in the late 1800s. So it is not as if we are dealing with an extraordinary claim here, requiring extraordinary evidence.

So I appreciate Silber’s engagement with the text, but I would ask him to reconsider this part of his assessment.

UPDATE: On Twitter, the prominent UCLA neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni weighs in on the left-right brain studies cited in the book (Iacoboni is also quoted several times in the book):

That stuff is as valid as your average, well done cognitive neuroscience study. You either indict a whole field, or you drop criticizing only one tiny slice of it.

Tweets here, then here, then here.

This is really just an error emerging from a cliched understanding of genes and how they contribute to making us who we are, and you find it popping up everywhere. So I needed to set the record straight, but it is not as if I’m the first one have to respond to this kind of faulty thinking.

Today, I want to take up a more involved misunderstanding—once again, from someone who had not read my book.

On February 9, well before the book was out, Jerry Coyne criticized it based on an item at HuffingtonPost. His words:

Note, though, that I haven’t read the book yet—it hasn’t been released—so my comments are based on Mooney’s summary of its thesis at HuffPo (in theScience section!): an essay called “Want to understand Republicans? First understand evolution.”

At Huffington Post, I was discussing a new study about the physiology of political differences. The article was not in any way a “summary” of my “thesis.”  And indeed, when Coyne described that thesis, he got it wrong: “Mooney’s thesis is that the difference between conservatives and liberals is based on differences in their genes, and that those differences are reflected in physiology.” That is incorrect.

Later, Coyne went further and suggested I was an evolutionary “adaptationist” when it comes to the reason that we have a political left and right, writing: “Mooney suggests that those differences, to the extent that they’re genetic, arose by natural selection.” This is also incorrect. So let’s take these two claims in sequence.

First: There do appear to be some genetic differences between left and right, but they hardly explain everything. It is not as if genes account for 100 percent of the variance here, or even close to it. Furthermore, it is important to note that the divergent physiological responses discussed at Huffington Post may not be caused solely by genes. But most important, none of this is the book’s thesis or even close to it. The book’s thesis is about how the left and right differ psychologically, and how this fuels a divide over reality and what’s true. Genetics only comes up when I begin to discuss some of the possible causes of the underlying psychological differences. It is not the central thrust and takes up about  4 pages of the book in total.

And then there’s the question of whether politics is an evolutionary adaptation, and arose by natural selection. Fascinating question, but not what the book is about. My discussion of this matter takes up about 3 pages, wherein I say that we don’t know why there appears to be a partly genetic basis for political difference. There is, to be sure, an adaptationist account, according to which evolution by natural selection brought about these differences because they were somehow advantageous to survival and reproduction. And there is another account, according to which this is accidental, a by-product or spandrel. I don’t take a side on that, because I’m neither an expert nor convinced that one particular side is right.  Coyne should take up the whole adaptation/group selection thing with Jonathan Haidt, who really does make pretty strong claims about this—and also goes into detail about the role of genetics in political ideology.

Indeed—and I want to stress this–everybody criticizing me on genes and evolution is also criticizing Haidt on this point, whether they know it or not. Frankly, Haidt goes farther than me on this stuff, because it is much more central to what he is arguing than it is to what I am arguing.

Later, in comments to his post, Coyne make the misunderstanding worse by trying to break my argument, which he hasn’t read, into four theses (!). I can affirmatively say that, as stated, I do not agree with any of those theses–except possibly the last one, which is really just a prescriptive statement about how to go about achieving political toleration; in other words, just an opinion. So once again, Coyne’s got me wrong.

I know Coyne disagrees with me about a lot of things, going back three years to arguments over my last book, Unscientific America, and particularly its critique of the “New Atheism.” But the new book is really about a vastly different thing, going back to the ground tilled by my first book, The Republican War on Science. There’s no criticism of atheism in here. Frankly, I don’t think there’s much that secularists across the board would disagree with.

Anyway, long before they could read the book in any way, a number of people unfortunately misrepresented its contents. So I’ve decided to set the record straight–although, given what the book explains about the human brain, that is a probably a pretty foolish hope.

I’m going to do a series of posts on this, but let’s take one misconception to start:

Silly Claims about Genetic “Wiring.” Over at the Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media on March 7–well before the book was available–Keith Kloor wrote: “Mooney, whose new book argues that Republicans are genetically wired to be anti-science…” The link is to a piece about the book that doesn’t even mention genetics.

Let’s briefly contemplate the silliness of the assertion that Republicans are “genetically wired to be anti-science.” First: The genetic studies that I have highlighted, and also mention in the book, are about genes influencing political ideology in general, not views of science! And even here, there is no “wiring”: Politics is not like sickle-cell anemia! Nor is it like height, or eye color.

Political ideology is a complex social trait, and while many complex social traits (like politics and religiosity) have been shown to have a partial genetic component, it is only partial and the “environment” is constantly interacting with the brain, the genes, etc, and even changing gene expression (epigenetics).

All of which is, of course, explained in the book.

The “hardwiring” misconception is a disturbingly common one when you talk about the brain and genes. And I expect I will have to rebut this misconception constantly. Citing this post will be handy for that purpose.

A number of other errors and misrepresentations have also been made of the book, by people who haven’t read it. I’ll blog more on those in coming days.

UPDATE: Keith Kloor doubles down on his misreading, as expected! He literally writes, “Chris doesn’t want readers to think his argument is based on genetics, which would be as reductionistic as it gets”–thereby showing serious confusion about both reductionism, and genetics.

Last week, I blogged on this study–showing that drinking alcohol shifts liberals and conservatives alike to the political right–and promised to provide “a longer piece…explaining what it *actually* means.”

I’ve now done so–at Rolling Stone online. It starts out like this:

So, a group of political psychologists walks into a bar …

… and no, I’m not going to finish the joke. Enough of them have been told already (even in German) about a provocative study in the latest issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin – the conservatism-and-alcohol study.

Let’s get the record straight here: The researchers were actually outside the bar – a bar in New England – where they flagged down exiting patrons with quite the request: Would they get their blood alcohol level tested and fill out a short questionnaire on their political views? Eighty-five of them consented to share their level of agreement with statements like “Production and trade should be free of government interference” and “Ultimately, privately property should be abolished.” Then came the breathalyzer.

When the scientists collated the results, it turned out that, on average, the higher the subject’s blood alcohol level, the more likely he or she was to express conservative opinions. This was true of liberals and conservatives alike; both groups appeared to shift to the right. (Study here.)

Now, I already know what some people are thinking: This is what our scientists are up to now? This is what liberal academics are wasting time and money on?

You can read more here.

First, my friends at Thirst, D.C. have released a video of my book preview talk there. We had a lot of fun with it, as you’ll see; there is even a successful experiment in which I “read” the political views of an audience member based on the person’s personality traits.

Chris Mooney on The Republican Brain

In addition, I’ve run early pieces about the book at AlterNet (on conservative “morality”), HuffingtonPost (on conservatism from a physiological-response perspective), and Salon.com (on conservatism and the “smart idiot” effect). I’ve also posted a talk I gave at the Tucson Festival of Books, which aired on CSPAN, about why conservatives deny global warming in particular. It’s entitled “The Science of Truthiness.”

And there are more items like these coming.

I’m going to be releasing the first chapter soon, through another publication ( it looks like). And in the next post, I’m going to share the full table of contents.

Finally, and unfortunately–a number of people have misrepresented the book, and gotten its arguments wrong, without even reading it. I’m going to have more on that soon.

Have a great weekend!

So if you wanted to find an irony…well, you could hardly do better than people reasoning in a motivated, emotional way about Haidt’s arguments!

Alas, humans being what they are, you do find such things. Look at some of the responses to my interview with Haidt at the Point of Inquiry website. I’m posting three below, and highlighting the emotional language, which really gives it all away:

How does Jonathan Haidt, who claims to be an authority on morality and ethics, find it possible to make the shockingly ignorant claim that, in America, religion “can’t be too nasty” because it has to “compete for members.”

How can he simply ignore religion’s role in justifying slavery, homophobia, and the oppression of women?

He creates a false equivalency by equating religion to moral order; when he should be aware that moral behavior exists independently from religion, and in most cases as a directly opposing force to the divisive, arbitrary, and capricious dogmas of religion.

He also uses the same fallacious arguments against rational thinking that we’ve heard a million times from religious apologists, such as: “When reason runs amuck, the results are ugly.” No social movement in history has ever suffered from practicing too much reason. In all cases, when a group starts out with reason-based goals and then runs off the rails, the common denominators are greed and ignorance, and usually megalomania in leadership.

There are numerous other problems in this man’s claims, but I don’t exactly want to write a book here…

And:

RE: March 12: Look who calls the kettle black. A onesided podcast that is happy to silence and mislead listeners to other viewpoints. Nothing more than a biased hit peice.

And:

No wonder this guy has problems with scientific reasoning. He rejects one ridiculous just-so-story for the evolution of religion for his own pet theory that he states as true. It would be nice if he had some evidence to support his position. He cites no data to demonstrate his pan-selectionist view point.

Just because some people do not reason well, does not mean that reason is not the best way to ascertain natural truth.

Also, I disagree strongly with the characterization of scientists as thinkers impelled to define all natural phenomena under grand unifying theories. Scientists, as well as anyone, understand the limits of human understanding and the complexity of natural phenomena and human behavior.

His rejection of parsimony is flawed. The use of parsimony is valuable in reasoning when the reasoner acknowledges the limits of his/her understanding of the underlying natural processes. Parsimony is not meant to model the actual process.

So who’s really doing the flawed reasoning?

Having read his book and interviewed him, I find some clear of misrepresentations of Haidt here: “It would be nice if he had some evidence to support his position” (as if he doesn’t), “his rejection of parsimony is flawed” (he doesn’t reject parsimony), “How can he simply ignore religion’s role in justifying slavery, homophobia, and the oppression of women?” (he doesn’t), etc.

And misrepresentations of his views are exactly what we would expect to find, if defensive emotions are motivating people to criticize Haidt.

I have differences with Haidt myself. Most importantly, I think the research he’s surveying–and the research he himself has done–adds up to a much tougher conclusion about political conservatism than he is willing to lead with (if you read between the lines, though…). But the responses above are simply cases of people doing exactly what Haidt himself warns us against.

Some people seriously need to read Haidt’s book…

It starts out like this:

So the question before us on this panel is, “Will the Planet Survive the Age of Humans?” And I want to focus on one particularly aspect of humans that makes them very problematic in a planetary sense—namely, their brains.

What I’ve spent the last year or more trying to understand is what it is about our brains that makes facts such odd and threatening things; why we sometimes double down on false beliefs when they’re refuted; and maybe, even, why some of us do it more than others.

And of course, the new book homes in on the brains—really, the psychologies—ofpolitically conservative homo sapiens in particular. You know, Stephen Colbert once said that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” And essentially what I’m arguing is that, not only is that a funny statement, it’s factually true, and perhaps even part of the nature of things.

Colbert also talked about the phenomenon of “truthiness,” and as it turns out, we can actually give a scientific explanation of truthiness—which is what I’m going to sketch in the next ten minutes, with respect to global warming in particular.

I almost called the book “The Science of Truthiness”—but “The Republican Brain” turns out to be a better title.

Read on here.

It’ll be the second time I’ve had him on Point of Inquiry, and we’ll be focusing on space policy and his new book Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier.

(Last time we covered all the “why scientists must communicate” stuff.)

If there are questions you think Dr. Tyson ought to be asked, post them here–in the next two hours!!

Legislatively, it appears that there still has to be a reconciliation between the two houses, and the Republican governor, Bill Haslam, has to sign, before this is a bonafide law. But both houses have already passed versions the bill–which really leaves the governor, it sounds like. Although a Republican, he doesn’t sound all that keen–so perhaps he will wisely step in and stop this folly before it goes any further.

I don’t know any more about the politics of the situation, or about Haslam.

I do know that if this bill becomes law, evolution defenders will very likely go to court–and very likely win, just as we have always won before. Expect quite the legal circus, though.

And as for Tennessee? If this goes forward, the state may once again inherit the wind–in the sense of being widely mocked; and also in the sense of having kids who are not at all prepared to compete in today’s global economy because they’ve had rotten, ideological science education.

It seems to me that this is the sort of paper that is virtually guaranteed to be misunderstood. So I’m going to do a longer piece, probably at Huffington Post, explaining what it *actually* means. For now, the abstract:

Low-Effort Thought Promotes Political Conservatism

1. Scott Eidelman
2. Christian S. Crandall
3. Jeffrey A. Goodman
4. John C. Blanchar

Abstract
The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants’ endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

Paper here. Please note, lest you misunderstand: The effect in the first study described above worked for both liberals and conservatives. Both shifted to the right in the study.

But I’m back and I wanted to direct your attention to two related endeavors of mine that touch on our growing scientific understanding of why conservatives and liberals differ.

First, my latest Point of Inquiry interview is with the University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose new book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion is just out. Haidt’s book and my own, the forthcoming Republican Brain, have some notable overlaps–indeed, he gets into even more controversial territory in some ways when it comes to the role that evolutionary group selection may have played in making us who we are. I don’t take up that particular argument in any depth.

Most important, Haidt is laying out a science of political morality–of why the left and right differ, automatically, in their responses to situations and events. He’s not the first to do so–George Lakoff, who I also had on Point of Inquiry, has done the same. So do Haidt and Lakoff agree about what makes conservatives, versus liberals, tick?

My answer is: “mostly, yes.” Over at AlterNet, I’ve got a long piece explaining the new science of left-right morality and noting the many common themes shared by Haidt, Lakoff, and even Yale’s Dan Kahan. It starts like this:

If you’re a liberal or a progressive these days, you could be forgiven for being baffled and frustrated by conservatives. Their views and actions seem completely alien to us—or worse. Fromcheering at executions, to wanting to “throw up” over church-state separation, to seeking to “drown” government “in the bathtub” (except when it is cracking down on porn, apparently) conservatives not only seem very different, but also very inconsistent.

Even the most well-read liberals and progressives can be forgiven for being confused, because the experts themselves—George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt and others–have different ways of explaining what they call conservatives’ “morality” or “moral systems.” Are we dealing with a bunch of die-hard anti-government types in their bunkers, or the strict father family? Are our intellectual adversaries free-market libertarians, or right-wing authoritarians—and do they even know the difference?

To borrow from Wallace Stevens, it seems like there are quite a lot of ways of looking at an elephant.

But to all you liberals I say, have hope: It’s not nearly so baffling as it may at first appear. Having interviewed many of these experts over the course of the last year, my sense is that despite coming from different fields and using different terminologies, they are saying many of the same things.

You can read the full piece here.

The upshot of all this: We’re really coming to a scientific understanding of why we differ over ideology–and also over reality. It isn’t just about morality, but morality is a crucial component.

Haidt naturally focuses on morality, because this is his field; in The Republican Brain, I really synthesize, as a reporter, all of the research. But  now that I’ve read Haidt’s new book and also interviewed him, I really don’t see any major disagreement or divergence. We are pretty much completely on the same page.

Here’s the first panel, today:

4:30 PM ET–Politics Panel

Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

Tom Zoellner, A Safeway in Arizona: What the Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Tells Us About the Grand Canyon State and Life in America

Chris Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Don’t Believe in Science

And here’s the second, tomorrow:

1 PM ET–Environment Panel

William deBuys, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest

Dyana Furmansky, Rosalie Edge – Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature From the Conservationists

Chris Mooney, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future

More info on the festival here. Come out, or if you’re not in Tucson, tune in!

Finally, I’m also going to be speaking at the Tucson chapter of Drinking Liberally Sunday night. Info here!

At the root of the problem, I think, is the image at right–bigger here. Here’s what I have to say about it:

I heard a lot of impressive stuff yesterday. But what I didn’t hear—not yet anyway—was an idea that seems capable of getting past the vast and potentially “intractable” problem of information-stream fragmentation along ideological lines. The problem, I think, is captured powerfully in this image from a recent New America Foundation report on “The Fact-Checking Universe”; the image itself was originally created by a firm calledMorningside Analytics.

What the image shows is an “attentive cluster” analysis of blogs that are interested in the topic of fact-checking—e.g., reality. Blogs that link to similar sites are grouped together in bubbles—or closer to each other—and the whole group of bubbles is organized on a left-to-right political dimension.

The image shows that although both profess to care about “facts,” progressive and conservative blogs tend to link to radically different things—e.g., to construct different realities. And that’s not all. “A striking feature of the map,” write the New America folks, “is that the main­stream progressive cluster is woven into [a] wider interest structure [of blogs that are interested in economics, law, taxes, policy, and so on], while political discourse on the right is both denser and more isolated.” In other words, conservatives interested in fact-checking are linking to their own “truths,” their own alternative “fact-checking” sites like NewsBusters.org.

What I haven’t yet heard are ideas that seem capable of breaking into hermetically sealed misinformation environments, where an endless cycle of falsehoods churns and churns—where global warming is still a hoax, and President Obama is still a Muslim, born in Kenya, and the health care bill still creates “death panels.”

You can read on here.

Then, very smart people will try to figure out what we can possibly do to, like, re-engineer cyberspace so that it is somewhat less conducive to letting human biases run amok.

It is not, let us admit, such an easy problem. I mean, Wikipedia is generally a den of truth (rather than truthiness), but those who can’t face reality can just go create, er, Conservapedia, where every day is factual opposite day.

And they have.

So I’m interested in the suggestions that will come up for how we can solve the seemingly un-solvable problem of online misinformation.

I’ll be doing a piece tomorrow that sums it all up.

Here’s how the piece begins:

Lately Rick Santorum has been singing every tune from the “Culture Wars: Greatest Hits” album. So of course he soon came around to attacking higher education, charging that going to college makes people less religious, that universities are “indoctrination mills,” and even that liberal Penn State profs docked his grades to punish his conservatism when he was a student there.

It didn’t take long for liberals to produce liberal academic social science to disprove Santorum’s claims about the secularizing influence of academia. How perfect: but don’t expect Santorum to change his mind upon being refuted. We have liberal academic social science on that, too–and it suggests he’s more likely to double down on his original assertion.

In truth, Santorum isn’t quite as off base here as he is on, say, his denial of global warming. He’s absolutely right that higher education is a liberal and secular force in our society at present. But he’s also highly simplistic in his view that it creates liberals, or atheists–or, that it intentionally discriminates against conservatives, or the devout.

If anything, when it comes to the liberalism of academia, much of the causation may well run in the opposite direction from the one that Santorum assumes. Rather than colleges making people liberal, liberals may instead make colleges the way they are by choosing to attend and, even more importantly, choosing to stay and pursue advanced degrees.

You can read on here.

Although not initially of his own choosing, Michael Mann has been the most important, resilient, and outspoken warrior in the climate battle–responding to threats and persecution with courage and resolve every step of the way. Anyone who cares about the climate issue must read his fascinating–and enraging–story.

My feeling is that climate scientists in general–but Mann most of all–have been unfairly attacked for ideological reasons. This has gone far beyond arguments over ideas, and has grown to involve lawsuits, congressional inquiries, and so on.

Mann has risen to the challenge in the face of this, and become a powerful science communicator, as he demonstrates in his new book and on the show. But it hasn’t been easy, and my sympathies go out to him and also to his family.

As Mann explains in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, he was a geek who started out programming computers to play the tic-tac-toe scenario from the movie War Games. He later got into climate science because it was intellectually interesting and stimulating, following his mind.

There shouldn’t be a personal penalty for that.

It is with this in mind that I want to draw your attention to a recent letter from the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, calling for support for Mann (see also here). I encourage you to to head over there and, if you believe in the cause, to make a donation. Check it out–and you should also buy Mann’s book, if you haven’t already.

Finally, see here for a statement from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in support of Mann.