The Republican Brain (31 page)

151
an NBC survey
NBC News Health Care Survey, August 2009. Questions available online at
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/MSNBC/Sections/NEWS/NBC-WSJ_Poll.pdf
. However, this does not break down the responses by media viewership. Instead, that interpretation can be found here from NBC:
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2009/08/19/4431138-first-thoughts-obamas-good-bad-news
.

151
another survey on public misperceptions about health care
Kaiser Family Foundation, “Pop Quiz: Assessing Americans' Familiarity With the New Health Care Law,” February 2011. Available online at
http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/8148.pdf
.

152
“Ground Zero Mosque”
Erik Nisbet and Kelley Garrett, “Fox News Contributes to Spread of Rumors About Proposed NYC Mosque,” October 14, 2010. Available online at
http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/MediaMosqueRumors.pdf
.

152
misinformation during the 2010 election
Program on International Policy Attitudes, “Misinformation and the 2010 Election,” December 2010. Available online at
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/dec10/Misinformation_Dec10_rpt.pdf
.

153 “
People said, here's how I would rank that as an influence on my vote”
Interview with Steven Kull and Clay Ramsay of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, July 7, 2011.

153
“half-true”
PolitiFact, “President Obama says foreign money coming in to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce may be helping to fund attack ads,” October 7, 2011. Available online at
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2010/oct/11/barack-obama/president-barack-obama-says-foreign-money-coming-u/
.

154
“It's one thing not to be informed”
Interview with David Barker, July 7, 2011.

154
“They can tell you who the members of the Supreme Court are”
Interview with David Barker, July 7, 2011.

155
after I refuted its analysis
Chris Mooney, “Jon Stewart 1, PolitiFact 0: Fox News Viewers Are the Most Misinformed,”
DeSmogBlog
, June 22, 2010. Available online at
http://www.desmogblog.com/jon-stewart-1-politifact-0-fox-news-viewers-are-most-misinformed
.

155
PolitiFact failed to correct its error
In fairness, PolitiFact received overwhelming criticism on this matter—not surprisingly, since PolitiFact was clearly wrong—and ran a follow up item acknowledging the criticism. But
not
changing its rating. See Louis Jacobson, “Readers say we were uninformed about Jon Stewart's claim,” June 21, 2011. Available online
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/jun/21/readers-sound-about-our-false-jon-stewart/
.

155
his 1957 book
Leon Festinger,
A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957. See chapters 6 and 7, “Voluntary and Involuntary Exposure to Information: Theory,” and “Voluntary and Involuntary Exposure to Information: Data.”

156
“high tariff walls against alien notions”
Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Bernard, R. Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet. 1948.
The People's Choice.
New York: Columbia University Press.

156
confirmation biases . . . and disconfirmation biases
Charles Taber, email communication, July 7, 2011.

157
findings are often described as mixed
Shanto Iyengar and Kyu S. Hahn, “Red Media, Blue Media: Evidence of Ideological Selectivity in Media Use,”
Journal of Communication
, Vol. 59, 2009, 19–39.

157
“Everybody knows this happens”
Interview with William Hart, July 11, 2011.

157
selective exposure might be de facto
Shanto Iyengar et al, “Selective Exposure to Campaign Communication: The Role of Anticipated Agreement and Issue Public Membership,”
The Journal of Politics,
Vol. 70, No. 1, 2008, pp. 186–200.

157
statistically rigorous overview of published studies on selective exposure
William Hart et al, “Feeling Validated Versus Being Correct: A Meta-Analysis of Selective Exposure to Information,”
Psychological Bulletin
, 2009, Vol. 135, No. 4, 555–588.

158
often they do [seek out counter-attitudinal information]
See R. Kelly Garrett and Paul Resnick, “Resisting Political Fragmentation on the Internet,”
Daedalus
, Fall 2011. Available online at
http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/Assets/GarrettResnick-ResistingPoliticalFragmentation-prepress.pdf
.

158
Democrats and liberals didn't show the same bias
Shanto Iyengar et al, “Selective Exposure to Campaign Communication: The Role of Anticipated Agreement and Issue Public Membership,”
The Journal of Politics,
Vol. 70, No. 1, 2008, pp. 186–200.

159
“highly authoritarian individuals, when threatened . . .”
Howard Lavine et al, “Threat, Authoritarianism, and Selective Exposure to Information,”
Political Psychology
, Vol. 26, No. 2, 2005.

159
an above average amount of selective exposure in right-wing authoritarians
For these two studies, see Robert Altemeyer,
The Authoritarian Specter
, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 139–142.

160
“maintain their beliefs against challenges by limiting their experiences
” Ibid, p. 111.

160
powerful motivated reasoning study
Taber & Lodge, “Motivated Skepticism in the Evaluation of Political Beliefs,”
American Journal of Political Science
, Vol. 50, Number 3, July 2006, pp. 755–769.

161
“You grab your coffee and you turn on Fox”
Interview with William Hart, July 11, 2011.

162
“the subjective sense of choosing to watch some media and avoid others”
Charles Taber, email communication, July 6, 2011.

162
“The more information people are given”
Interview with William Hart, July 11, 2011.

162
a particularly ripe environment for selective exposure
For a more optimistic take on selective exposure on the Internet, see Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse M. Shapiro, “Ideological Segregation Online and Offline,” available online at
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/matthew.gentzkow/research/echo_chambers.pdf
.

163
political sophisticates
David C. Barker,
Rushed to Judgment: Talk Radio, Persuasion, and American Political Behavior
, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. For this study see Chapter 7.

163
more misinformed about welfare, and also more confident they were right
James Kuklinski et al, “Misinformation and the Currency of American Citizenship,”
The Journal of Politics
, Vol. 62, No. 3, August 2000, pp. 790–816.

164
“they've become the same people”
Interview with David Barker, July 7, 2011.

164
“refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed”
Media Matters, “FOXLEAKS: Fox boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science,” December 15, 2010. Available online at
http://mediamatters.org/blog/201012150004
.

165
“strongly suggests they were actually getting the information from Fox”
Interview with Steven Kull and Clay Ramsay of the Program on International Policy Attitudes, July 7, 2011.

165
annual TV News Trust Poll
Public Policy Polling, “PBS the most trusted name in news,” January 19, 2011. Available online at
http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_National_0119930.pdf

166
‘Fox-only” behavior among conservatives
Shanto Iyengar and Kyu S. Hahn, “Red Media, Blue Media: Evidence of Ideological Selectivity in Media Use,”
Journal of Communication
, Vol. 59, 2009, 19–39. See also Shanto Iyengar and Richard Morin, “Red Media, Blue Media,”
The Washington Post
, May 3, 2006. Available online at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/03/AR2006050300865_pf.html
.

Part Four

The Truth: Who's Right, Who's Wrong, and Who Updates

Chapter Nine

The Reality Gap

It was precisely the opposite of how science-based decision-making, by elected representatives, is supposed to go.

In February of 2010, while onlookers wore badges reading “Abortion Hurts!” two scientists appeared before the Nebraska legislature to testify in favor of the “Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act.” It was a bill to restrict a woman's right to have an abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, thus pushing well past prior abortion limits, which have been based on a standard of fetal viability.

Both of the scientists were from out-of-state. Both of them testified in support of a position that is contrary to medical consensus—that fetuses are capable of experiencing pain at about 20 weeks into their gestation and development.

One of the scientists, Dr. Ferdinand Salvacion, is an associate professor at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. He has now testified in at least two states, Nebraska and Idaho, in favor of the same piece of pro-life legislation. The other, Dr. Thomas Grissom, works at the Advanced Pain Centers of Alaska. As he put it when pressed about his personal beliefs: “I am pro-life from the perception that I do not know when life begins and I have chosen that it begins at fertilization because, from my religious viewpoint, that does not put me at odds with my maker.”

Both Salvacion and Grissom testified that by 20 weeks of gestation, fetuses have developed the physical structures involved in pain sensation: specialized nerve endings, the brain stem, the cortex. They therefore inferred that fetuses could likely feel pain at this stage. But that's misleading. What's
not
fully developed at 20 weeks are the connections between regions of the sub-cortex, which relay sensory information, and the cortex, which interpret and experience it. And without those connections, conscious awareness of pain could not exist.

Scientific reviews conducted in the U.K. and at the University of California-San Francisco concur in this conclusion. These find that the neural connections necessary to the experience of pain are not present before about 24 weeks of gestation, and the pain experience as we know it probably arrives considerably after that. So the testimony delivered by Drs. Salvacion and Grissom was, at minimum selective—but it was, nonetheless, critical to ensuring that the Nebraska bill sailed through and became law.

We don't live in the universe the Christian Right seems to think we do. But if you live in Nebraska—and, more recently, Kansas and Idaho, where “fetal pain” bills became law in 2011—there's a partial exception. These states didn't change the laws of nature; but they did legally codify their delusions about them.

The fetal pain story is just one tiny example of today's American right rallying behind incorrect information—whether about science, economics, history, the law, or simple policy facts like whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and whether the health care bill created “death panels.” The examples of this occurring are so numerous that they are, effectively, uncountable. I filled a whole book with case studies in 2005—
The Republican War on Science
—but those were only about science, and even then I had to leave many out. And since that time, I've seen many new cases arise and none really vanish (though for some issues, like embryonic stem cell research, the political salience of the subject has certainly declined).

There is no precise way to quantify how
wrong
the right is today. There's no standard measurement, no meter or angstrom or hectopascal for error or delusion.

There is, however, such a thing as a
consilience
of evidence. Consilience is a word originally coined by the 19th century British scientist and philosopher William Whewell, who defined it thus:

The Consilience of Inductions
takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.

That's a bit of a musty read, so let's bring Whewell up-to-date. What I mean in invoking him is that even if there is no single accepted measure or approach that proves a point definitively—in this case, that U.S. conservatives are uniquely misaligned with reality—the compilation of evidence in support of this idea, using a variety of approaches, adds confidence to the validity of the overall conclusion. How does it do so? By building an impressive weight of evidence across domains (or areas) and approaches. By showing that no matter how you slice it, you get the same answer.

In the next three chapters, I will demonstrate by a
consilience
or weight-of-the-evidence approach that by any reasonable standard, the modern U.S. right is strongly misaligned with reality—and much worse in this respect than anything you will find today among Democrats or the “left.” Then, in chapter 12, I'll show you three issues where you might expect liberals or progressives to err with respect to reality—hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” the safety of nuclear power, and alleged connections between vaccines and autism. You do indeed find some delusions on these issues, but you also find something very different than what you find in cases of conservative reality denial.

But before proceeding, let me reiterate my present understanding of
why
the right now appears so disconnected from the truth.

The evidence already presented in these pages suggests that on average, conservatives—especially authoritarians—are probably less open to new information, more selective in heeding friendly media sources, and perhaps more defensive about their beliefs. So conservatives, more than liberals, should be expected to seek out ideologically friendly information and cling to it. And, especially if they are sophisticated, to engage in motivated reasoning when challenged so as to defend their positions.

But at the same time, conservatives would have a much harder time doing this without conservative institutions, and friendly media outlets, churning out congenial information and backing them up—and without sophisticated conservative elites egging the process on. In the past two chapters, I've shown that from the mobilization of the Christian Right, to the development of think tanks, talk radio, and Fox News, conservatives have created many ideologically reinforcing information sources. They have also fielded an army of experts like Drs. Salvacion and Grissom, who are more than equipped to tell them what they want to hear and to argue back against mainstream scientists and scholars.

This combination has produced a staggering amount of political misinformation. So let me now attempt to survey its true scope—proving that it is uniquely and squarely located on the right.

The first way of documenting the right's unreality involves canvassing the work of respected academic institutions, pollsters, and fact checkers—all of whom have consistently shown that conservatives today, much more than liberals, simply get it wrong.

I've already sampled one such strand of evidence, and a very powerful one at that: studies documenting the Fox News effect. As shown in chapter 8, Fox's viewers are much more misinformed than other news watchers about the Iraq war, about global warming, about health care, and about an array of other matters. No comparable media-misinformation effect has been documented on the other side of the aisle. So this is one powerful piece of evidence suggesting that conservatives today are simply much more
wrong
—often willfully so—than their ideological opponents.

But it isn't the only evidence. Another proof emerges from examining the leading public policy issues at a given point in time, and what liberals and conservatives believe about them. That's precisely what was done in the run up to the 2010 election by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).

I've already shown how PIPA's 2010 election study demonstrated that Fox News viewers believed more political misinformation on that election's leading issues. But not surprisingly, the study also showed the same of Republican voters. Out of eleven factual questions pertinent to the 2010 election, Republicans were more incorrect, by ten or more percentage points, about seven of them—including whether it was “clear” that President Obama was born in the U.S., whether most scientists agree that global warming is happening, whether economists think the health care law would increase the deficit (it would not), and whether “most economists” think the stimulus bill created or saved a few million of jobs (they do). (One question—whether the GM and Chrysler bailout occurred under both Bush and Obama; the answer was yes—was nearly a wash, with Republicans only slightly more wrong than Democrats.)

Once again, it's tough to argue that the eleven questions posed in this study were selected in a biased way, to yield this particular answer. Rather, the questions were picked because these were factual disputes about issues that voters said they most cared about, like health care and the economy. And identifying the issues that mattered most to voters was itself part of the study. What's more, the question in the poll that voters cared about the
least
was a rare case in which
Democrats
proved to be more misinformed (involving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its alleged receipt of foreign donations to run political ads). In other words, if PIPA had thrown this question out, it would have made Republicans look still worse.

Yet another survey examined in chapter 8 also supports this analysis. In early 2011, the Kaiser Family Foundation released an examination of mistaken beliefs about the newly passed healthcare law. Misperceptions were certainly rampant, and some of them were clearly politicized errors: Fifty-nine percent of citizens wrongly thought the law creates a government-run healthcare plan; 40 percent believed it creates “death panels” (another 15 percent were “unsure”); and 45 percent thought the law cuts benefits to those on Medicare. Not only were Fox News viewers more likely to believe these misperceptions—so were Republicans, and the last two falsehoods in particular. Indeed, just 18 percent of Republicans came up with the right answer for at least seven of the 10 factual questions the survey posed, compared to 32 percent of Democrats.

Thus, we have nationally representative survey evidence showing that 1) Conservatives are more misinformed when identified by the leading media outlet that they watch, especially on critical issues like the Iraq war and climate change; 2) Republican voters were more misinformed than Democratic voters about the leading policy issues in the last major election; and 3) this was especially true of health care. That's already enough to grab your attention. But to show that this finding is “robust,” so to speak—and to pursue my consilience strategy—I want to prove the point in as many different and overlapping ways as possible. So are there any other metrics that can document the right's wrongness?

The answer is that there certainly are.

I was rather hard on PolitiFact a few chapters back—and deservedly so. But I do respect fact-checkers, in general, for their dedication to accuracy. And I certainly believe that overall, their occasional quirks and failings notwithstanding, they are vastly more accurate than those they are checking!