From the looks of things, it appears to be conservative journalists.
Being an election year, heated debates and dramatic name-calling are to be expected on both sides of the political fence. However, two political writers, Hank Campbell and Alex Berezow, have sunk to a new low in their recent article, “Are Republicans Genetically Inferior?”, a grossly inaccurate analysis of Chris Mooney’s new book, The Republican Brain.
Being unjustifiably critical and misinterpreting the entire point of the book is irritating, but calling the author a “eugenecist” for merely discussing the scientific data that suggests psychological differences between liberals and conservatives is completely unwarranted, and deserving of both a retraction and an apology.
There is an overwhelming body of evidence to support that there indeed are some differences between the two parties–completely without bias–yet for some reason, many conservatives vehemently reject this scientific data and take it as a personal insult. People like Berezow and Campbell are only making things worse, showing their absolute lack of journalistic integrity by purposely stirring the hornet’s nest with huge exaggerations and outright falsehoods, just to drum up a little publicity of their own. They come marching with pitchforks and torches in a Nazi-esque hysteria, screaming about group extermination, trying to convince the public that liberals have some secret plan to create a uber-race of political Aryans. This is, of course, absurd. Ironically, their irrational behavior and rejection of any scientific data that goes against their previously held beliefs is only making a better case for the very ideas they are rejecting. (more…)
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.”
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. (more…)
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): (more…)
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).
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. (more…)
James Wilsdon, a professor of science and democracy at Sussex University who formerly directed the Science Policy Centre at the Royal Society, reviewed The Republican Brain in the Financial Times over the weekend. It is a very positive review. And because Wilsdon has actually read the book, he gets the nuances involved:
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.
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.
Most people who don’t like my new book The Republican Brainshow little evidence of having read it. So it has naturally been hard to find intellectually serious critics—critics who don’t misrepresent the argument in order to attack a strawman.
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. (more…)
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). Chris Mooney is on book tour.
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: (more…)
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. (more…)
Yesterday I was on MSNBC to discuss the book–video pasted here:
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.
