What's Wrong With 'What's Wrong With Conservatives?'

What's Wrong With 'What's Wrong With Conservatives?'
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From Futurama "The Farnsworth Paradox" written by Bill Odenkirk

As we endure this excruciating election cycle, in which the most vile and regressive impulses in our culture have found a champion, it is harder than ever to imagine constructive dialogue across partisan and ideological lines. Naturally, those of us who long for such dialogue are always on the lookout for insights and practical tools. But we need to be vigilant. It is far too easy, especially on social media, to be seduced by the comforting notion that our ideological opponents are simply irrational or ignorant.

I rarely take those online personality tests where you answer a bunch of odd questions in order to learn something inane about yourself, like which "Scooby-Doo" character or "Golden Girl" you are. But, nudged by my sister and my own curiosity, I took one that purports to tell you whether you have the brain of a liberal or a conservative. The quiz is based on a 2014 study that found, according to the press release, "the way a person's brain responds to a single disgusting image is enough to reliably predict whether he or she identifies politically as liberal or conservative." Some clever person then designed a quiz that asks you how grossed out you are by various things, such as maggots or puke, and uses your answers predict your brain's politics -- the stronger your self-reported disgust, the more conservative your brain supposedly is.

I'm not actually going to comment on the quiz, other than to note that it embodies all the rigor and reliability we've come to expect from online personality tests. I will, instead, focus on the original study, which, despite being published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, has serious problems of its own.

The biggest problem with the study is its apparent assumption that conservative ideology is an ahistorical universal. It is as if conservatives in every age, in every society, share the U.S. conservative movement's opposition to environmental regulations, same-sex marriage, and organized labor, and its unwavering support for personal gun rights and national defense. The absurdity of this, I hope, is self-evident.

Another, more subtle problem is what the study implies about causality. Though never explicitly saying that disgust-sensitivity causes people to be conservative, it seems to welcome that inference. According to the press release, the study shows that, "political ideologies ... have deep connections to the way our bodies respond to threats of contamination." Of course, everyone knows that correlation does not equal causation. And yet everyone forgets this all the time. Moreover, what makes the study interesting, the reason it was widely discussed in the press and blogosphere, is precisely because of what it seems to suggest about causality.

Had the authors consulted political historians, they might have learned other ways to think about the causal relation between disgust-sensitivity and politics. They might have discovered that conservative ideology in the U.S. is a product of a deliberate political strategy that exploits contamination anxiety for its own purposes. As Ian Haney Lopez and Thomas Frank document in their respective books, Dog Whistle Politics and What's the Matter with Kansas, the politics of race, gender, and religion have been used for decades to attract those who might not otherwise support the agenda of the 1%. In the 1960s, political strategists began, intentionally but implicitly, to associate crime and welfare with black people and to equate the weakening of straight male hegemony with moral decline. The main target of this strategy is aging white voters, of course, and its primary emotional weapons are fear and disgust.

2016-09-08-1473378159-7306789-Whitevote.pngUnfortunately, the study completely ignores the role of demographics other than sex. An earlier study, which at least recognized the significance of geography, made the obvious observation that "a resident of Utah is far more likely to be conservative than a resident of Massachusetts, but it seems unlikely that Utah residents are dramatically more disgust-sensitive than Massachusetts residents." Still, oddly, neither study mentions race, despite the fact that, in every presidential election since 1952, the Republican candidate has received the majority of the white vote (with the possible exception of 1996). It seems unlikely that white people are just more disgust-sensitive.

So I'm wondering who made up the (rather small) sample of 83 volunteers in the 2014 study. What were their class backgrounds? How much formal educational did they have? Was everyone white? It seems relevant to note that a recent meta-analysis of studies has shown that white undergraduate students in the U.S. make up the vast majority of all research subjects in the behavioral sciences. Since the authors of the present study mention nothing about race, class, or education, I can only assume they didn't give them much thought. This is sort of shocking in a study about political attitudes.

The press release states, rather optimistically, "perhaps the new findings can help us find a way to a less-polarized political future." I am definitely in favor of less polarization, but I fail to see how focusing on the irrational emotions that characterize only one pole of the polarity will accomplish this. The study purports to show that political ideology is influenced by emotions (does anyone still doubt this?), but the implicit message of this entire line of research on disgust-sensitivity is that conservatives are just too squeamish. This might be an interesting finding, but what about the emotions associated with liberal/left politics? Are we to conclude that liberalism is just the result of a lack of squeamishness?

I do not doubt that many of us liberals are reassured by studies that explain what's wrong with conservatives. But encouraging liberals to feel satisfied about our relative rationality does not seem like a very promising starting point for constructive political dialogue. Moreover, it seems profoundly naive to imagine that neuroscience is going to get us out of the political mess we're in.

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