Why Conservatives Make Good Cavemen
"I know what I believe and I believe what I believe is right."
-George W. Bush, 2002
"All people are born alike - except Republicans and Democrats."
-Groucho Marx, 1953
Ah, Thanksgiving. That time of year when families get together to feast and fest and celebrate the genocide that made this country great. Nothing beats grannies cranberry sauce from a can. And aunt Marge's sweet potatoes with roasted marshmallows? Simply to die for. This is America, where we have traditions. Where we celebrate family, freedom and genocide with processed canned foods and copious quantities of wine and whiskey. Which brings us to your crazy drunk uncle. You know, the Fox News watching conspiracy theorist who thinks Obama hates America and ISIS is a CIA plot to take away your guns? Yeah, that one. We all have at least one.
It's tempting to think you can engage your drunk uncle's kind of lunacy, that with sound reasoning and rationale you can convince this crazy conservative crank that Obama isn't trying to take his guns and that Fox isn't an actual news organization. Alas, science may be telling us something different, and trying to convince your crazy uncle that Fox "News" and Alex Jones' fearful fantasies are a complete nutjob waste of time, may in fact be a complete waste of your time.
For a while, studying the biology of ideology was a bit taboo. We'd all like to think that how we think is rational, that our beliefs are reasonable and grounded in the world of experience, that our ideologies are the product of our upbringing, our friends and families, our own personal economic and social interests; That our politics are the product of the real world and our environment. No one wants to think that their ideas and politics may be more a product of their biology and less a product of their intelligence and experience. Unfortunately, sometimes a body of work comes along that utterly destroys our optimism and shows that most people are going to believe what they're going to believe, facts be damned. That it may be impossible to change some peoples minds, no matter what the facts are, is a hard pill to swallow. More distressing still, is the fact that some people rely more on irrational beliefs to shape their reality than others. And I'll give you one guess as to which end of the political spectrum the irrational thinkers tend to congregate.
Conservatives Have Special Needs
In 2003 researcher Jon Jost of New York University, published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on political ideology, drawing from a number of studies at the time suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Conservatives don't do nuance:
"There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that... conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemological concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety."
Conservatives have a biological need for everything to be neat and tidy, orderly, simple and predictable. Anything that is new, complicated or ambiguous they treat as an existential threat. Predictably, Republicans went apeshit, with lawmakers trying to take away their funding, The National Review referring to Jost's study as the "Republicans Are Crazy Study," and the likes of Ann Coulter and George Will twisting themselves into intellectual knots trying to dismiss the study's findings (simply calling the study "phony"). And for a decade or so the idea of studying the biology of political ideology was a bit taboo. Because Republicans shit their pants when facts intrude on their narrative. Reality has a liberal bias it seems.
Negativity Bias
Enter John Hibbing, professor and researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In a series of papers in the Journal Science and the Journal Brain and Behavioral Science, he and his collegues studied the involuntary physiological responses of self described 'liberals' and 'conservatives', and what they found is kind of depressing. Building on decades of research, Hibbing and his team conducted a number of experiments to measure the involuntary responses of self described partisans (liberals and conservatives) to different kinds of stimulus; sudden noises, different types of images (scary, happy, distusting, neutral), living environments, etc. In one experiment (with Clockwork Orange undertones) the researchers used eye tracking software to measure a persons involuntary response to different sets of images. Turns out conservatives respond much more rapidly and for prolonged periods to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of "a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody
face, and an open wound with maggots in it," as one of their papers puts it). Conservatives are physiologically primed for fear, they are biologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. What the researchers call a "negativity bias".
From the abstract in the Journal Science:
"Individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats."
Is it any wonder then, that an ideology grounded in a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, and the widespread availability of guns is ultimately the result of a physiology that is inherently biased towards fear of the unknown and a dangerous environment? And there is nothing you can do about it.
(Hibbing talks in detail about his research and findings on the Inquiring Minds podcast here)
It's Hard Out There For A Conservative
Have you ever tried to talk about guns with a conservative? It's like talking to an alien. You can list all of the facts and statistics you want; gun deaths and crime plummet in other countries when reasonable controls are introduced, over 90% of people support stronger background checks and stricter licensing, the first words of the 2nd amendment are "Well Regulated", 'reasonable controls' is not the same thing as 'taking away your guns' and so on. Yet they're having a completely different conversation about defending themselves from 'the man' and 'when the shit goes down' and 'stand your ground' and how they need to defend themselves from crime.... Conservative brains live in a much more fearful, dangerous and simplistic world than progressives and they are primed to be afraid of it. You are never going to convince your crazy drunk uncle with facts and statistics when he is literally afraid that someone is going to kill him.
However, it's not all doom and gloom for conservatives and happy happy joy joy for the liberals. Conservatives actually tend to be happier, more conscientious, make stronger familial connections and tend to live longer, whereas liberals, with their need for novelty and new experiences, tend to experience more depression, tend to be more lazy and less orderly, more prone to drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, and more prone to distraction (may be more prone to, say, ADHD). Conservatives sleep more soundly and have more mundane dreams, while liberals sleep more restlessly and have a more bizarre, active dream life.
Liberals however can take in new information and can think more objectively. Conservatives are far more likely to interpret new information as having a negative or dangerous effect on their lives. Conservatives make decisions from an emotional rather than rational perspective. But just because conservative brains are primed to respond to negative or threatening stimuli does not mean that liberal brains are primed to respond to positive stimuli. For instance, in the eye tracking experiments, liberals tended to respond to all images equally, spent an equal amount of time responding to different images, and tended to seek out larger patterns, displaying a willingness to change their perception when confronted with new information. The liberal novelty seeking, pattern recognition, tolerance of ambiguity and willingness to accept new ideas is in sharp contrast to the conservative need for order, certainty, simplicity and familiarity. This might explain why conservatives feel that science has a liberal bias, what with all of that tolerance of ambiguity and constant updating of ideas when presented with new information.
But Wait, There's More: Low IQ, Racism, Homophobia and Brain Abnormalities...
There are literally dozens of more studies that find the same (or similar) patterns and results:
One study found that conservative ideologies are the result of "low effort thought processes", stating in their conclusion:
"Political conservatism is promoted when people rely on low-effort thinking… low-effort thought might promote political conservatism because its concepts are easier to process..."
A paper in the Journal Psychological Science a few years ago made waves when the researchers found that conservative politics, racism and homophobia are linked to each other and are often the result of low IQ.
"Lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies and low levels of contact with out-groups. Lower general intelligence predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. Poor abstract-reasoning skills predicted antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritian conservatism and low levels of intergroup contact."
To be clear, it's not that conservatives are stupid, racist bigots. It's that stupid, racist bigots tend to be conservatives.
A study of brain morpology found that liberals tend to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex (associated with rational cognitive functions, empathy and impulse control) whereas conservatives tend to have an enlarged amygdala (associated with decision-making, fear and emotional reactions).
Another study found that conservatives and liberals interpret facial expressions differently, with (you guessed it) conservatives tending to interpret neutral faces as more angry or threatening, while liberals tended to interpret the same faces as more happy and inviting.
And there are literally dozens more.
Why are conservative brains so fucked up?
In science there's always the why of it. And in human biology it usually has something to do with evolving on the plains of Africa and avoiding lions...or something like that. Indeed for the vast majority of our evolution the world was a dangerous place. It was probably a selective advantage to see threats everywhere and be afraid of the tribe over the next hill, because they very likely might kill you. But at some point in the development of culture, it became a better idea to explore new lands and new ideas and learn to trade with the tribe over the next hill rather than kill them. As John Hibbing puts it:
"A strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene, when it would have been extremely helpful in preventing you from getting killed."
Fortunately we are no longer cave people and the overwhelming arc of history has been towards liberalism and progressivism. We live longer than any of our ancestors, crime is at an all time low (and getting lower all the time), there are less political upheavals and we have become far more accepting of outgroups and minorities.The need to be afraid of things we don't understand is no longer an advantage. And we are a better world for it.
So come Thanksgiving dinner and your crazy drunk, Fox News watching, conspiracy theorist uncle starts ranting about Obama and guns and any other of his fearfully held, deep-seated misconceptions, you may want to reconsider the urge to engage him rationally. Because it's not going to work, facts be damned. He is physiologically primed for a fear based emotional response. Because conservatives make good cavemen.
