The Republican Brain (9 page)

The Pew data, however, showed that humans aren't as predictable as carbon dioxide molecules. Despite a growing scientific consensus about global warming, as of 2008 Democrats and Republicans had, like a couple in a divorce, cleaved over the facts stated above, so that only 29 percent of Republicans accepted the core reality about our planet (centrally, that humans are causing global warming), compared with 58 percent of Democrats. (The divide is, if anything, even bigger nowadays.)

But that's not all. Buried in the Pew report was a little chart showing the relationship between one's political party affiliation, one's acceptance that humans are causing global warming, and one's level of education. And here's the mind-blowing surprise: For Republicans, having a college degree didn't make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better educated Republicans were
more skeptical
of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.

For Democrats and Independents, precisely the opposite was the case. More education correlated with being more accepting of climate science—among Democrats, dramatically so. The difference in acceptance between more and less educated Democrats was 23 percentage points.

This finding recurs, in a variety of incarnations, throughout the rapidly growing social science literature on the resistance to climate science. Again and again, Republicans or conservatives who know more about the issue, or are more educated, are shown to be
more
in denial, and often more sure of themselves too—and are confident they don't need any more information on the issue.

The same “smart idiots” effect also occurs on nonscientific but factually contested issues, like the claim that President Obama is a Muslim. Belief in this falsehood actually increased
more
among better educated Republicans from 2009 to 2010 than it did among less educated Republicans, according to research by George Washington University political scientist John Sides.

Finally, the same effect has been captured in relation to the myth that the healthcare reform bill empowered government “death panels.” According to research by Brendan Nyhan, Republicans who thought they knew more about the Obama health care plan were “paradoxically more likely to endorse the misperception than those who did not.” Well informed Democrats were the opposite—quite certain there were no “death panels” in the bill. (The Democrats also happened to be right, by the way.)

What accounts for the “smart idiot” effect? For one thing, well informed or well educated conservatives probably consume more conservative news and opinion, such as by watching Fox News. Thus, they are more likely to know what they're supposed to think about the issues—what people like them think—and to be familiar with the arguments or reasons for holding these views. If challenged, they can then recall and reiterate these arguments. They've made them a part of their identities, a part of their brains, and in doing so, they've drawn a strong emotional connection between certain “facts” or claims, and their deeply held political values.

What this suggests, critically, is that sophisticated conservatives, like Andrew Schlafly, may be very different from unsophisticated or less-informed ones. Paradoxically, we would expect
less
informed conservatives to be
easier
to persuade, and
more
responsive to new and challenging information.

The “smart idiots” effect generates endless frustration for many scientists—and indeed, for many well-educated, reasonable people.

These people—and I know many of them—want to believe that the solution to the problem of resistance to science, or to accurate information in general, is more and better education—leading, presumably, to greater public Enlightenment (capital E). No less than President Obama's science adviser John Holdren (a man whom I greatly admire, but disagree with in this instance) has stated, when asked how to get Republicans in Congress to accept the science of climate change, that it's an “education problem.”

But scientists must now acknowledge that
science
itself refutes this idea. In fact, Dan Kahan's research team at Yale found a clever way to test it, and it failed badly.

In another study, Kahan and his colleagues once again surveyed how the four cultural groups—egalitarians, communitarians, hierarchs, and individualists—respond to the issue of climate change. Only this time, they included two revealing new measurements in the analysis—ones that caught the smart idiots red handed (or, red-brained, if you'd prefer).

This time, people weren't just asked about their cultural worldviews and their views on how dangerous global warming is. They were also asked standard questions to determine their degree of scientific literacy (e.g., “Antibiotics kill viruses as well as bacteria—true or false?”) as well as their
numeracy
or capacity for mathematical reasoning (e.g., “If Person A's chance of getting a disease is 1 in 100 in ten years, and person B's risk is double that of A, what is B's risk?”). The latter attribute is particularly significant in light of what we've already said about the brain, because aptitude in mathematical reasoning requires the use of calmer and more deliberative “System 2” cognition. You can't intuit or emote your answer to a math problem using “System 1.”

Kahan's group now had four sets of information, for over 1,500 randomly selected Americans: Their views on global warming, their political values, their degree of scientific literacy, and their capacity for mathematical reasoning. The relationships between them were stunning and alarming. The standard view that knowing more science, or being better at mathematical reasoning, ought to make you more accepting of mainstream climate science simply crashed and burned.

Instead, here was the result: If you were already part of a cultural group predisposed to distrust climate science—e.g., a hierarchical-individualist—then more science knowledge and more skill in mathematical reasoning tended to make you even more dismissive, not more open to the science. Precisely the opposite happened with the other group—egalitarian-communitarians—who tended to worry
more
as they knew more science and math. The result was that, overall, more scientific literacy and mathematical ability led to greater political polarization over climate change.

So much for education serving as an antidote to politically biased reasoning.

Kahan's studies, I should note, are presented in an entirely even-handed fashion. Like many motivated reasoning researchers, he does not postulate that any of his cultural groups are
more
biased than any other—just that they're biased in different directions.

Still, it is hard to miss that in his studies, one group in particular, the hierarchical-individualists—which includes not only Republicans and conservatives but also right-wing authoritarians, who are very hierarchical and religious, and very defensive of their beliefs—not only starts out highly disconnected from scientific reality on climate change, but also becomes even more out of touch with greater scientific literacy and mathematical ability.

By contrast, when I discuss the views of liberals concerning nuclear power, I will turn again to Kahan's results—because they are
not
the mirror image of these findings on conservatives and global warming.

By now, we've seen ample evidence of just how biased humans can be by their preexisting beliefs and convictions—and how this infects not only our relationships and our personal lives, but also our politics.

It all leads to an overwhelming question—and one that's very difficult to answer: How “irrational” is all this?

On the one hand, it surely makes sense not to discard an entire belief system, built up over a lifetime, because of some new snippet of information. “It is quite possible to say, ‘I reached this pro-capital punishment decision based on real information that I arrived at over my life,'” explains Stanford social psychologist Jon Krosnick. Indeed, there's a sense in which even right-wing science denial could be considered keenly “rational.” In certain conservative communities of the United States, explains Dan Kahan, “people who say, ‘I think there's something to climate change,' that's going to mark them out as a certain kind of person, and their life is going to go less well.”

Rational or otherwise, however, motivated reasoning poses a deep challenge to the ideal of Jeffersonian democracy, which assumes that voters will be informed about the issues—not deeply wedded to misinformation. We're divided enough about politics as it is, without adding irreconcilable views about the nature of reality on top of that.

And there's an even bigger question looming in the background. It's one we've already begun to consider:
How can evolution explain all of this?
But now it's time to go farther.

Even after what we've already learned about the brain and the emotions, it's still hard to imagine why evolution would create a creature that is capable of reason, and yet performs so badly at it. One might think there would have been an absolute premium on accurately perceiving our environments, and a survival advantage accompanying this capacity that would be preserved by natural selection and passed on to offspring.

Explaining why that is
not
the case is a fascinating question in evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology right now. And it is going to be a difficult one to definitively answer, since we can't reset the clock of evolution to see what actually occurred. Whatever its strengths or weaknesses, human reason has not yet given us the ability to create a time machine.

Still, a few considerations may cast some light.

First, from the perspective of an organism trying to keep itself alive, not all errors of perception or belief are equal. Some have much greater consequences. For instance, and as Michael Shermer argues in his recent book
The Believing Brain,
it is far better to be a little bit wrong and still alive—because you overreacted to defend yourself and ran the other way at the tiniest rustle in the leaves—than to be wrong and dead, because you didn't think there was anything to worry about and didn't run away fast enough.

This distinction between what are called “Type 1” and “Type 2” errors—erring on the side of credulous belief (“false positive”), versus erring on the side of too much skepticism (“false negative”)—surely helps to explain why we have quick-fire, emotional, and defensive reactions to begin with. Evolution won't let us commit the kinds of Type 2 errors that will rapidly get us killed. So it gave us the much touted fight or flight response, which we share with other animals.(For this same reason, Shermer suggests, we have a default design that inclines us to believe things rather than to question them.)

It's equally important to recognize that our brains evolved in a very different context from the one in which we now find ourselves. They evolved with
none
of the media that we now consume, and none of the cognitively dazzling and sometimes exploitive stimuli—from advertisements to movies to blogs. So it is not at all clear that they
should
be suited for being particularly rational in the current context.

None of this, though, explains our elaborate heights of rationalization—our argumentative
creativity
—and just how floridly idiotic we can be. We're not only capable of being wrong; we make quite the show of it. We go to elaborate lengths to defend wrong beliefs; we come up with bizarre doctrines like Christian Science and Theosophy; we even write equations to refute Einstein. How do you explain
that
?

One team of thinkers—philosopher Hugo Mercier of the University of Pennsylvania and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber of the Jean Nicod Institute in France—suggest an intriguing answer. They've proposed that we've been reasoning about reasoning all wrong—trying to fix what didn't need fixing, if we'd only understood what its original purpose was. “People have been trying to reform something that works perfectly well,” writes Mercier, “as if they had decided that hands were made for walking and that everybody should be taught that.”