Andrew Sullivan called attention to this article - written by a cognitive scientist - that attempts to get to the root of our ability to reason. Remember that our collective capacity to reason was part of John Locke's theory about why human choose to leave the state of nature and what allows us to provide - or deny - consent to what governments do.
It's a long article, but the last few paragraphs are especially important for our subject matter this semester since it touches on the factors that influence the decisions we make. Notable the influence that our identification with political parties has on what policies we favor and oppose.
- Click here for the article.
It's a long article, but the last few paragraphs are especially important for our subject matter this semester since it touches on the factors that influence the decisions we make. Notable the influence that our identification with political parties has on what policies we favor and oppose.
- Click here for the article.
We’re at our worst when it comes to politics. This helps explain why recent attacks on rationality have captured the imagination of the scientific community and the public at large. Politics forces us to confront those who disagree with us, and we’re not naturally inclined to see those on the other side of an issue as rational beings. Why, for instance, do so many Republicans think Obama’s health-care plan violates the Constitution? Writing in The New Yorker in June 2012, Ezra Klein used the research of Haidt and others to argue that Republicans despise the plan on political, not rational, grounds. Initially, he notes, they objected to what the Democrats had to offer out of a kind of tribal sense of loyalty. Only once they had established that position did they turn to reason to try to justify their views.
But notice that Klein doesn’t reach for a social-psychology journal when articulating why he and his Democratic allies are so confident that Obamacare is constitutional. He’s not inclined to understand his own perspective as the product of reflexive loyalty to the ideology of his own group. This lack of interest in the source of one’s views is typical. Because most academics are politically left of center, they generally use their theories of irrationality to explain the beliefs of the politically right of center. They like to explore how psychological biases shape the decisions people make to support Republicans, reject affirmative-action policies, and disapprove of homosexuality. But they don’t spend much time investigating how such biases might shape their own decisions to support Democrats, endorse affirmative action, and approve of gay marriage.
None of this is to say that Klein is mistaken. Irrational processes do exist, and they can ground political and moral decisions; sometimes the right explanation is groupthink or cognitive dissonance or prejudice. Irrationality is unlikely to be perfectly proportioned across political parties, and it’s possible, as the journalist Chris Mooney and others have suggested, that the part of the population that chose Obama in the most recent presidential election is more reasonable than the almost equal part that chose Romney.
But even if this were so, it would tell us little about the human condition. Most of us know nothing about constitutional law, so it’s hardly surprising that we take sides in the Obamacare debate the way we root for the Red Sox or the Yankees. Loyalty to the team is what matters. A set of experiments run by the Stanford psychologist Geoffrey Cohen illustrates this principle perfectly. Subjects were told about a proposed welfare program, which was described as being endorsed by either Republicans or Democrats, and were asked whether they approved of it. Some subjects were told about an extremely generous program, others about an extremely stingy program, but this made little difference. What mattered was party: Democrats approved of the Democratic program, and Republicans, the Republican program. When asked to justify their decision, however, participants insisted that party considerations were irrelevant; they felt they were responding to the program’s objective merits. This appears to be the norm. The Brown psychologist Steven Sloman and his colleagues have found that when people are called upon to justify their political positions, even those that they feel strongly about, many are unable to point to specifics. For instance, many people who claim to believe deeply in cap and trade or a flat tax have little idea what these policies actually mean.
So, yes, if you want to see people at their worst, press them on the details of those complex political issues that correspond to political identity and that cleave the country almost perfectly in half. But if this sort of irrational dogmatism reflected how our minds generally work, we wouldn’t even make it out of bed each morning. Such scattered and selected instances of irrationality shouldn’t cloud our view of the rational foundations of our everyday life. That would be like saying the most interesting thing about medicine isn’t the discovery of antibiotics and anesthesia, or the construction of large-scale programs for the distribution of health care, but the fact that people sometimes forget to take their pills.
