15th
How liberal and conservative brains are wired differently. Liberals and conservatives don’t just vote differently, they think differently
“There’s now a large body of evidence showing that those who opt for the political left and those who opt for the political right tend to process information in divergent ways and to differ on any number of psychological traits.
Perhaps most important, liberals consistently score higher on a personality measure called “openness to experience,” one of the “Big Five” personality traits, which are easily assessed through standard questionnaires. That means liberals tend to be the kind of people who want to try new things, including new music, books, restaurants and vacation spots — and new ideas.
“Open people everywhere tend to have more liberal values,” said psychologist Robert McCrae, who conducted voluminous studies on personality while at the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health.
Conservatives, in contrast, tend to be less open — less exploratory, less in need of change — and more “conscientious,” a trait that indicates they appreciate order and structure in their lives. This gels nicely with the standard definition of conservatism as resistance to change — in the famous words of William F. Buckley Jr., a desire to stand “athwart history, yelling ‘Stop!’ ” (…)
We see the consequences of liberal openness and conservative conscientiousness everywhere — and especially in the political battle over facts. (…)
Compare this with a different irrationality: refusing to admit that humans are a product of evolution, a chief point of denial for the religious right. In a recent poll, just 43 percent of tea party adherents accepted the established science here. Yet unlike the vaccine issue, this denial is anything but new and trendy; it is well over 100 years old. The state of Tennessee is even hearkening back to the days of the Scopes “Monkey” Trial, more than 85 years ago. It just passed a bill that will weaken the teaching of evolution.
Such are some of the probable consequences of openness, or the lack thereof. (…)
Now consider another related trait implicated in our divide over reality: the “need for cognitive closure.” This describes discomfort with uncertainty and a desire to resolve it into a firm belief. Someone with a high need for closure tends to seize on a piece of information that dispels doubt or ambiguity, and then freeze, refusing to consider new information. Those who have this trait can also be expected to spend less time processing information than those who are driven by different motivations, such as achieving accuracy.
A number of studies show that conservatives tend to have a greater need for closure than do liberals, which is precisely what you would expect in light of the strong relationship between liberalism and openness. “The finding is very robust,” explained Arie Kruglanski, a University of Maryland psychologist who has pioneered research in this area and worked to develop a scale for measuring the need for closure.
The trait is assessed based on responses to survey statements such as “I dislike questions which could be answered in many different ways” and “In most social conflicts, I can easily see which side is right and which is wrong.” (…)
Anti-evolutionists have been found to score higher on the need for closure. And in the global-warming debate, tea party followers not only strongly deny the science but also tend to say that they “do not need any more information” about the issue.
I’m not saying that liberals have a monopoly on truth. Of course not. They aren’t always right; but when they’re wrong, they are wrong differently.
When you combine key psychological traits with divergent streams of information from the left and the right, you get a world where there is no truth that we all agree upon. We wield different facts, and hold them close, because we truly experience things differently. (…)”
— Chris Mooney, science and political journalist, author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality (April 2012), Liberals and conservatives don’t just vote differently. They think differently, The Washington Post, April 13, 2012. (Illustration: Koren Shadmi for The Washington Post)
See also:
☞ Political science: why rejecting expertise has become a campaign strategy, Lapidarium notes
☞ Cognitive and Social Consequences of the Need for Cognitive Closure, European Review of Social Psychology
☞ Antonio Chirumbolo, The relationship between need for cognitiveclosure and political orientation: the mediating role of authoritarianism, Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’
☞ Paul Nurse, Stamp out anti-science in US politics, New Scientist, 14 Sept 2011
☞ Chris Mooney, Why Republicans Deny Science: The Quest for a Scientific Explanation, The Huffington Post, Jan 11, 2012
☞ John Allen Paulos, Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?, NYTimes, Feb 13, 2012.
☞ Study: Conservatives’ Trust in Science Has Fallen Dramatically Since Mid-1970s, American Sociological Association, March 29, 2012.
☞ Why people believe in strange things, Lapidarium notes
