Read The Republican Brain Online
Authors: is Mooney
The Republican Brain (45 page)
For instance, if study subjects told us they were fans of the New Orleans Saints (and many LSU students are), they might have read an essay from a “sports writer” citing bogus statistics to put down ace quarterback Drew Brees:
A little known statistic kept by the NFL is the frequency of interceptions in crucial situations. “Crucial situations” are defined as drives where a failure to score essentially either rules out the possibility of winning the game, or hands the other team an opportunity to come from behind. So it includes last-minute comeback drives, and drives that run out the clock when your team has a narrow lead.
This statistic shows that Brees has one of the worst five interceptions-during-clutch-drives numbers in the HISTORY of the league since they started keeping the statistic. I know it sounds incredible, but those are the facts. Basically, if the game is on the line, you
don't
want the ball in this guy's hands.
And if any of the students said they liked the singer Lady Gaga, they might have read a phony music journalism “expose,” channeling the gripes of two anonymous studio recording engineers:
According to B.T., Lady Gaga has serious trouble singing in tune. “We used more auto-tune on her than I've ever used. And we not only fixed tunings, but we fixed timing using Pro-Tools.” (Pro Tools is a digital recording program that makes manipulating music in many ways possible.) “We âPro-Tooled' pretty much every note.”
The studio horror stories go beyond the disasters that happen when the talent gets behind the microphone. One of B.T.'s colleagues, A.G., another engineer who also asked to remain unnamed, was hovering nearby during some songwriting sessions in the studio. According to A.G., listening to Lady Gaga composing was a painful experience. “I heard her playing the piano and trying to write a song. She knew like two chords.” So what about the songwriting? “Let's just say if the album credits her with writing any of the songs, that's a lie. I know the guy who pretty much wrote all those songs. It's called show business. That's just how it's done.”
Needless to say, Everettâwho happens to be both a musician, and a diehard football fanâhad a lot of fun writing these items. I was personally most amused by the one in which the James Randi Educational Foundation, which offers $ 1 million for anyone who can show the existence of paranormal abilities in a controlled experiment, is forced to actually pay up because ESP is shown to be real (yeah, right).
Unbeknownst to the subjects, as they read the essays the computer program was timing them, measuring how many secondsâindeed, how many millisecondsâthey spent per page of essay. Most of the essays required several onscreen “pages” to complete, where one page corresponded to a computer screen containing one or more paragraphs of text.
As it happened, this measurement of time-spent-reading yielded an unexpected and strong
political
result.
So what did we learn?
1. Openness to Experience is Still Strongly Related to Political Liberalism.
First, we were able to reconfirm a key relationship between personality and politics discussed earlier in this book. In our study, Openness to Experience was linked with liberalism of
every
type, no matter how we measured itâthat is, with social or moral liberalism, economic liberalism, liberalism based on self-identification and by party affiliation (with Democrats versus Republicans), and a couple of other measures.
But what do we mean by “linked”?
In a popular book like this one, it would be off-putting to get too deep into the statistical nature of the relationships that we found. And yet at the same time, we know many readers will want some details. So let us briefly try to make everybody happy, with one sweeping explanation of what these kinds of findings
mean.
(Warning: we are entering wonk land again.)
For the most part, our study was correlational, not causal. That means we detected a variety of correlations, which are statistical measures of associations between two variables that range from â1 to +1. A correlation of 1 or â1 means the two variables are
perfectly associated
, either positively or negatively. In other words, if you know a person's measure on one variable, you know precisely the person's measure on the other. A correlation of 0 means that knowing a person's measure on the first variable gives you no clue whatsoever as to his measure on the second.
Stated in these terms, Openness correlated at 0.25 with fiscal liberalism, and negatively at â0.28 with authoritarianism (among other findings). So what does a correlation of .25 mean?
Imagine that there is some great, unobserved “source” of commonality between two variables. When this source pushes a person toward the positive side of variable A, it also pushes that person, in exactly the same amount, toward the positive side of variable B. If two variables both drew 25 percent of their variability from this common source (and, obviously, each variable drew 75 percent of its variability from other unobserved sources that were unrelated to the sources of the correspondingly unexplained 75 percent of the other variable) then the two variables would be correlated at 0.25.
That might not sound like much. But in this kind of research, which involves huge amounts of purely random measurement error as we try to gauge a person's “level of Openness” or “level of liberalism,” correlations verging on .3 are quite convincing, and, we think, easy to detect in the “real world.” In other words, it's relatively easy to meet 10 average conservatives and 10 average liberals and intuitively pick up personality differences that make for a correlation with ideology of .25 or .3. (We'll bet you agree.) And our study picked up just such differences.
In fact, not only did we find a positive correlation between Openness and fiscal liberalism (among other measures of liberalism) and a negative correlation with authoritarianism, but these findings were strongly statistically significant. In terminology familiar to scientists, we might say that Openness was correlated with liberal fiscal ideology at a significance level of p = 0.002, and negatively with authoritarianism at p = 0.0006.
For the non-pros, what that means is that, if these two variables actually somehow aren't related (if their correlation is
truly
zero, so that we could only have found these correlations in our unique sample by accident), then we would expect to have to collect 1000 samples of similar size to get two additional findings of an association that strong or stronger for Openness. And for authoritarianism, we'd have to collect 10,000 samples of similar size to “find” 6 more associations that strong or stronger.
That gives us good confidence that the finding is
not
accidental, but is a result of real differences between liberals and conservatives. (Please note that we will report results in this same formatâproviding first a correlation, and then a level of significanceâthroughout this chapter. When we say “r = .2” that means the correlation between two variables was .2, on that scale of â1 to 1.)
Thus, the idea that conservativesâeconomic ones included, and maybe even especiallyâare less Open or flexible in their cognitive style, continues to receive strong support.
2. On Nuclear Power, Conservatives Were More Biased Than Liberals.
As noted in the last chapter, nuclear power is an issue often cited in order to suggest that liberals have their own anti-science biases. But this book argued, to the contrary, that liberals are actually quite flexible on this topicâand our data lend this idea new and surprisingly strong support.
On our first measure of motivated reasoning, we found that all kinds of conservatives (social, fiscal, authoritarian, self-identifying, and so on) engaged in
more
motivated thinking about nuclear power. In other words, conservatives perceived a bigger difference between the persuasiveness of pro- and counter-attitudinal nuclear power essays than did liberals. These correlations (of MR with various kinds of conservatism) were all positive, but they were not uniformly largeâand only the correlations with self-identified fiscal conservatism (r = .26, p = .06) and party identification (r = .23, p = .055) approached statistical significance at the conventional level of p < .05. So we shouldn't make
too
much of this finding.
However, on the second measure of motivated reasoning, conservatives across the board were harder to persuade about nuclear power when given counter-attitudinal evidence. Here, correlations between conservatism and motivated reasoning ranged from 0.25 to 0.38, and most of them were statistically significant at conventional levels. Here are a few of the stronger and more significant relationships: self-identified conservatism (r = .35, p = .02), Republican party identification (r = .32, p = .03), self-identified fiscal conservatism (r = .38, p = .04), and issue-based moral conservatism (r = .36, p = .016).
Let's unpack a little more what this means, focusing on the last finding in particular. You might think of it like this: As a person went from being very morally liberal to being very morally conservative in our study, his willingness to be persuaded by an unfriendly essay about nuclear power
decreased
by about .6 points on a 2 point scale (from â1 to +1)âin other words, by about 30 percent!
Conservatives might argue that this result is just a reflection of their being “right”: Since conservatives favor nuclear power, and since, they might claim, the facts support the safety of nuclear power, this is just a case of their “knowing they're right.” The problem with this interpretation is that liberals and conservatives did
not
differ in their initial support for nuclear power. Instead, liberals were about as likely as conservatives to enter the survey with positive feelings about nuclear power. It's just that they were more willing to consider essays that opposed their pre-existing point of viewâwhether that view was for
or
against nukes.
Thus, the idea that liberals are extremely motivated thinkers on nuclear power seems questionable. Perhaps in a more politically knowledgeable sample, one in which both the liberals and the conservatives were strongly committed to opposing positions on the issue, you'd find the liberals more motivated, yielding equivalent levels of MR on both sides. But the idea that conservatives are flexible in considering the dangers of nukes, while liberals are relatively inflexible in considering the benefits? The evidence here says it's very likely the other way around.
Indeed, the evidence clearly suggests that there was something about our nuclear power item that tickled conservatives emotionallyâperhaps drawing a negative reaction to what they perceived as environmental “alarmism”?âand so triggered significant motivated reasoning.
3.
On Global Warming, Science Deniers Appear Less Cognitively Flexible Than Those Who Accept What Scientists Know.
We had hypothesized that less Openness would cause conservatives to engage in more motivated reasoning. And on our two purely political items, the results did indeed seem to lend support to our idea. In fact, the findings are quite consistent with results described earlier in this book. We've already seen as much for nuclear power, but now consider global warming.
First of all, on this issue we found that those who spent more time reading our essays (which could be considered a measure of curiosity, and therefore related to Openness), as well as those who were more Open to Experience by our standard measure, were more likely to accept from the outset that global warming is caused by humans. The first result was statistically significant across the board (r = .18, p = 0.027). The second result was only significant in the more politically knowledgeable quarter of the sample, where it became quite strong (r = .37, p = .04). So taken as a whole, it does appear that the more curious or Open people in our study started out from the position of being more scientifically correct about human-caused global warming.
On top of that, it's also possible that global warming “deniers” reason in a more motivated way on this issue than the “accepters” do, although our data on this point are not as conclusive as they were on nuclear power. What's clear is that after reading our essaysâessays that either supported or opposed our subjects' initial views about whether global warming is real and caused by humansâthe two groups did indeed respond differently.
On our first measure of motivated reasoningâremember, this was the “spread” between how persuasive a friendly essay was and how unpersuasive an unfriendly essay wasâthose who denied climate science appeared to show a larger gap (thinking the global-warming-is-bunk essay was persuasive and the global-warming-is-real essay was unpersuasive) than the accepters did (thinking the global-warming-is-real essay was persuasive while the global-warming-is-bunk essay was unpersuasive).
This finding was not very strong or statistically significant for all participants in the study. But it became increasingly strong, and increasingly significant, as our subjects' political knowledge increased. Thus for instance, global warming believers who answered one political knowledge question right were about 10 percent more likely to call a view different from their own persuasive (p = .03), and those who answered two political knowledge questions right were 15 percent more likely (p = .006). Thus, you might say that as global warming deniers' level of political knowledge increased, so did their bias, leaving the more knowledgeable deniers considerably more motivated than the more knowledgeable believers on our first measure. And this result was statistically significant.
On our second measure of motivated reasoningâwhether your opinion changed after reading an essay that challenged your preexisting beliefsâthe result is more complicated. First, we found that those who
accepted
human-caused global warming were more resistant to the (bogus) essay we created trying to debunk it. However, this result was not statistically significant.
As political knowledge increased, however, deniers were just as resistant to changing their minds after reading warming-is-real essays as accepters were after encountering warming-is-a-hoax essays. (And note: This means the smarter deniers were getting more and more convinced about a factually
wrong
belief.) Here again, however, the finding did not reach statistical significance.
So on our first motivated reasoning item (but not our second), increasing political knowledge is significantly associated with increasing motivated reasoning for global-warming deniersâbut not for global-warming accepters. And this is consistent with what Chris likes to call the “smart idiot” effectâconservatives who are more knowledgeable, or more politically engaged, becoming more biased.