This
essay is adapted from Chris Mooney’s forthcoming book, The
Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and
Reality,
due out in April from Wiley.
I can still remember when I first
realized how naïve I was in thinking—hoping—that laying out the
“facts” would suffice to change politicized minds, and
especially Republican ones. It was a typically wonkish,
liberal revelation: One based on statistics and data. Only this
time, the data were showing, rather awkwardly, that people
ignore data and evidence—and often, knowledge and education only
make the problem worse.
Someone had sent me a
2008 Pew report
documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the
reality of global warming.. It’s a divide that,
maddeningly for scientists, has shown a paradoxical tendency to
widen even as the basic facts about global warming have become
more firmly established.
Those facts are these: Humans,
since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more
fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a
steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon
dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics
takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists
refer to as the “radiative” properties of carbon dioxide
molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation that would
otherwise escape to space), to have a warming planet. Since
about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming
is taking place, but have also grown confident that it has, like
the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural
fluctuations, although they exist, can’t explain what we’re
seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in
the atmosphere, with their cars and their smokestacks.
Such is what is known to
science--what is true (no matter what Rick Santorum might
say). But the Pew data 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 cleaved over the facts stated above, like a
divorcing couple. One side bought into them, one side didn’t—and
if anything, knowledge and intelligence seemed to be worsening
matters.
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 appear to 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,
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 was my first encounter with
what I now like to call the “smart idiots” effect: The fact that
politically sophisticated or knowledgeable people are often
more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant. It’s a
reality that generates endless frustration for many
scientists—and indeed, for many well-educated, reasonable
people.
And most of all,
for many liberals.
Let’s face it: We liberals and
progressives are absolutely outraged by partisan misinformation.
Lies about “death panels.” People seriously thinking that
President Obama is a Muslim, not born in the United States.
Climate-change denial. Debt ceiling denial. These things drive
us crazy, in large part because we can’t comprehend how such
intellectual abominations could possibly exist.
And not only are we enraged by
lies and misinformation; we want to refute them—to argue, argue,
argue about why we’re right and Republicans are wrong. Indeed,
we often act as though right-wing misinformation’s defeat is
nigh, if we could only make people wiser and more educated (just
like us) and get them the medicine that is correct information.
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 our mainstream scientific
understanding of climate change, that it’s an “
education
problem.”
But the facts,
the scientific data, say otherwise.
Indeed, the rapidly growing
social scientific literature on the resistance to global warming
(see for examples
here
and
here) says
so pretty unequivocally. Again and again, Republicans or
conservatives who say they know more about the topic, or are
more educated, are shown to be more in denial, and often
more sure of themselves as well—and are confident they don’t
need any more information on the issue.
Tea Party members appear to be
the worst of all. In a
recent survey
by Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, they rejected
the science of global warming even more strongly than average
Republicans did. For instance, considerably more Tea Party
members than Republicans incorrectly thought there was a lot of
scientific disagreement about global warming (69 percent to 56
percent). Most strikingly, the Tea Party members were very sure
of themselves—they considered themselves “very well-informed”
about global warming and were more likely than other groups to
say they “do not need any more information” to make up their
minds on the issue.
But it’s not just
global warming where the “smart idiot” effect occurs. It also
emerges 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.
The same effect has also been
captured in relation to the myth that the healthcare reform bill
empowered government “death panels.” According to
research
by Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, Republicans who
thought they knew more about the Obama healthcare 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.
The idealistic, liberal,
Enlightenment notion that knowledge will save us, or unite us,
was even put to a scientific test last year—and it failed badly.
Yale researcher Dan Kahan and his
colleagues set out to study the relationship between political
views, scientific knowledge or reasoning abilities, and opinions
on contested scientific issues like global warming. In
their study,
more than 1,500 randomly selected Americans were asked about
their political worldviews and their opinions about how
dangerous global warming and nuclear power are. But that’s not
all: 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 10 years, and person B’s
risk is double that of A, what is B’s risk?”).
The result was 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 political conservative or
“hierarchical-individualist”—then more science knowledge and
more skill in mathematical reasoning tended to make you even
more dismissive. Precisely the opposite happened with the other
group—“egalitarian-communitarians” or liberals—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—which, of course, is precisely what we see in the polls.
So much for education serving as
an antidote to politically biased reasoning.
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. And they’re ready to argue.
What this suggests, critically,
is that sophisticated conservatives 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.
In fact, there is even research
suggesting that the most rigid and inflexible breed of
conservatives—so-called authoritarians—do not really become
their ideological selves until they actually learn something
about politics first. A kind of “
authoritarian
activation”
needs to occur, and it happens through the development of
political “expertise.” Consuming a lot of political information
seems to help authoritarians feel who they are—whereupon
they become more accepting of inequality, more dogmatically
traditionalist, and more resistant to change.
So now the big
question: Are liberals also “smart idiots”?
There’s no doubt that more
knowledge—or more political engagement—can produce more bias on
either side of the aisle. That’s because it forges a stronger
bond between our emotions and identities on the one hand, and a
particular body of facts on the other.
But there are also reason to
think that, with liberals, there is something else going on.
Liberals, to quote George Lakoff, subscribe to a view that might
be dubbed “
Old
Enlightenment reason.”
They really do seem to like facts; it seems to be part of who
they are. And fascinatingly, in Kahan’s study liberals did
not act like smart idiots when the question posed was about
the safety of nuclear power.
Nuclear power is a classic test
case for liberal biases—kind of the flipside of the global
warming issue--for the following reason. It’s well known that
liberals tend to start out distrustful of nuclear energy:
There’s a long history of this on the left. But this impulse
puts them at odds with the views of the scientific community on
the matter (scientists tend to think nuclear power risks are
overblown, especially in light of the dangers of other energy
sources, like coal).
So are liberals “smart idiots” on
nukes? Not in Kahan’s study. As members of the “egalitarian
communitarian” group in the study—people with more liberal
values--knew more science and math, they did not become more
worried, overall, about the risks of nuclear power. Rather,
they moved in the opposite direction from where these
initial impulses would have taken them. They become less
worried—and, I might add, closer to the opinion of the
scientific community on the matter.
You may or may not support
nuclear power personally, but let’s face it: This is not the
“smart idiot” effect. It looks a lot more like open-mindedness.
What does all of
this mean?
First, these findings are just
one small slice an emerging body of science on liberal and
conservative psychological differences, which I discuss in
detail in my
forthcoming book. An
overall result is definitely that liberals tend to be more
flexible and open to new ideas—so that’s a possible factor lying
behind these data. In fact,
recent evidence
suggests that wanting to explore the world and try new things,
as opposed to viewing the world as threatening, may subtly push
people towards liberal ideologies (and vice versa).
Politically and strategically,
meanwhile, the evidence presented here leaves liberals and
progressives in a rather awkward situation. We like evidence—but
evidence also suggests that politics doesn’t work in the way we
want it to work, or think it should. We may be the children of
the Enlightenment—convinced that you need good facts to make
good policies—but that doesn’t mean this is equally true for all
of humanity, or that it is as true of our political opponents as
it is of us.
Nevertheless, this knowledge
ought to be welcomed, for it offers a learning opportunity and,
frankly, a better way of understanding politics and our
opponents alike. For instance, it can help us see through the
scientific-sounding arguments of someone like Rick Santorum, who
has been talking a lot about climate science lately—if only in
order to bash it.
On global warming, Santorum
definitely has an argument, and he has “facts” to cite. And he
is obviously intelligent and capable—but not, apparently,
able to see past his ideological biases. Santorum’s argument
ultimately comes down to a dismissal of climate science and
climate scientists, and even the embrace of a conspiracy theory,
one in which the scientists of the world are conspiring to
subvert economic growth (yeah, right).
Viewing all this as an
ideologically defensive maneuver not only explains a lot, it
helps us realize that refuting Santorum probably serves little
purpose. He’d just come up with another argument and response,
probably even cleverer than the last, and certainly just as
appealing to his audience. We’d be much better concentrating our
energies elsewhere, where people are more persuadable.
A more scientific understanding
of persuasion, then, should not be seen as threatening. It’s
actually an opportunity to do better—to be more effective and
politically successful.
Indeed, if we believe in evidence
then we should also welcome the evidence showing its limited
power to persuade--especially in politicized areas where deep
emotions are involved. Before you start off your next argument
with a fact, then, first think about what the facts say about
that strategy. If you’re a liberal who is emotionally wedded to
the idea that rationality wins the day—well, then, it’s high
time to listen to reason.
Chris Mooney is the author of
four books, including "The Republican War on Science"
(2005). His next book,
"The Republican Brain: The Science of
Why They Deny Science—and Reality,"
is due out in April.
