From Mother Jones: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

In 2305's section on ideology I briefly touch on research that suggests that ideology in innate - meaning it is part of our nature. We are born either liberal or conservative. This article focuses on the research of a political scientist - who is trying to find out if this is true.

- click here for the article.

At the center of the research are many scholars working at the intersection of psychology, biology, and politics, but one leader in the field is John Hibbing, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln whose "Political Physiology Laboratory" has been producing some pretty stunning results.

"We know that liberals and conservatives are really deeply different on a variety of things," Hibbing explains on the latest episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast (stream above). "It runs from their tastes, to their cognitive patterns—how they think about things, what they pay attention to—to their physical reactions. We can measure their sympathetic nervous systems, which is the fight-or-flight system. And liberals and conservatives tend to respond very differently."

This is not fringe science: One of Hibbing's pioneering papers on the physiology of ideology was published in none other than the top-tier journal Science in 2008. It found that political partisans on the left and the right differ significantly in their bodily responses to threatening stimuli. For example, startle reflexes after hearing a loud noise were stronger in conservatives. And after being shown a variety of threatening images ("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," according to the study), conservatives also exhibited greater skin conductance—a moistening of the sweat glands that indicates arousal of the sympathetic nervous system, which manages the body's fight-or-flight response.

It all adds up, according to Hibbing, to what he calls a "negativity bias" on the right. Conservatives, Hibbing's research suggests, go through the world more attentive to negative, threatening, and disgusting stimuli—and then they adopt tough, defensive, and aversive ideologies to match that perceived reality.

. . . Hibbing and his colleagues showed that a higher level of disgust sensitivity is predictive not only of political conservatism but also disapproval of gay marriage. It is important to underscore that your disgust sensitivity is involuntary; it is not something under your control. It is a primal, gut emotion.That word, "primal," helps us begin to understand what Hibbing and his colleagues now think ideology actually is. They think that humans have core preferences for how societies ought to be structured: Some of us are more hierarchical, as opposed to egalitarian; some of us prefer harsher punishments for rule breakers, whereas some of us would be more inclined to forgive; some of us find outsiders or out-groups intriguing and enticing, whereas others find them threatening. Hibbing and his team have even found that preferences on such matters appear to have a genetic basis.

Thus, the idea seems to be that our physiology, who we are in our bodies, may lead us to experience the world in such a way that basic preferences about how to run society emerge naturally from more basic dispositions and habits of perception. So, if you have a negativity bias, and you focus more on the aversive and disgusting, then the world seems more threatening to you. And thus, policies like supporting a stronger military, or being tougher on immigration, might feel very natural.

Narcissistic Autocrats

Here's something for both 2301 and 2302 to chew on as we review basic terms and observe the pros and cons of different governing systems. Autocracy tends to be efficient - it can get things done - but is also arbitrary - there are no rules which guide its actions. The autocrat is unpredictable.

Add to that the tendency of autocrats to be narcissistic:

There is a school of thought in politics and international relations which holds that all the bluster from dictators under pressure is propaganda, in the sense that the leaders themselves realize it’s untrue. They are just trying to demoralize their opponents and rally their friends by intentionally overstating how well things are going. In their hearts, autocrats know the jig is up and that means a window for a negotiated settlement with them has opened.

That school of thought is usually wrong.

If you take a human being — particularly a male one — and for most or all of his life give him every material comfort while others are starving, encourage him to believe that other people are his inferior, and nurture a sense of entitlement in him through word and deed (e.g., letting him watch or participate in torture sessions), you will often produce what we shrinks call a malignant narcissist (or “A classic Cleckley psychopath” for those of my colleagues who may be scoring at home). I don’t mean “narcissist” in the colloquial sense of someone who worries too much about his looks and is a bit self-involved, I mean someone who literally believes that other human beings are merely objects for his self-gratification, and, that the usual constraints of human existence (e.g., everyone dies, no one gets everything he wants) do not apply to him.
A nice analysis of human nature and a great compliment to some of the material we will dig through during the first couple of weeks of class.

Is Ideology Genetic?

Political scientists have wondered for a while. A recently published paper may provide proof.

The paper is called A Genome Wide Analysis of Liberal and Conservative Political Attitudes.

Read commentary here and here, and of course Wikipedia is on it.

From The Lion in Winter

I showed this to a couple of classes today to give them an idea about how King John was portrayed in The Lion In Winter. I noticed that it also fits with our discussion of human nature. The Queen seems to wonder why her sons can't quell their ambitions. Possibly because it is against their natures to do so.

My Opinion: Empathy, Human Nature and the Federalist Papers

David Brooks weighs in on "empathy-gate" in a way that reminds me of the points we covered in the Federalist Papers:

The American legal system is based on a useful falsehood. It’s based on the falsehood that this is a nation of laws, not men; that in rendering decisions, disembodied, objective judges are able to put aside emotion and unruly passion and issue opinions on the basis of pure reason.

Most people know this is untrue. In reality, decisions are made by imperfect minds in ambiguous circumstances. It is incoherent to say that a judge should base an opinion on reason and not emotion because emotions are an inherent part of decision-making. Emotions are the processes we use to assign value to different possibilities. Emotions move us toward things and ideas that produce pleasure and away from things and ideas that produce pain.

Here to me is the question: Are we at root rational creatures, or emotional creatures? We have covered ground which tells us about the importance of reason (the influence of the enlightenment in America), and the degree to which reasonableness is a criteria in legal decision making (reasonable doubt, etc...) but the Federalist Papers are full of observations about human nature, how people actually behave versus how we might want them to behave. Aquinas argued that reason was the voice of God in man. To say this suggests that our infallibilities as humans do not negate our ability to hear that voice clearly. I think the founders would have argued that we cannot hear that voice, and if we could, we would not act on it.

#10 tells us the we are prone to form violent factions and vex and oppress each other. #51 reminds us that we are not angels, and that the entire enterprise of governmental formation is meant to correct for this deficiency. I'm betraying a point of view here, but isn't Sotomayor reminding us indirectly of this observation that is at the heart of the American Constitutional system?

We may wish for judges to decide objectively, but will they in fact do so? And if not, should we compensate for this, as we compensate for the ambitions we will naturally expect exhibited by individuals who control the three departments of government? Why shouldn't we expect that judges will be influenced by their backgrounds? Isn't it inevitable? Why shouldn't we compensate for it by ensuring that individuals from various backgrounds sit on the same court so that the totality of the various points of view about justice can check and balance each other?

I always thought the success of the American governing system was that the founders had no illusions about human fallibility, and designed a system to compensate for it. The danger, as I see it, is that opponents of Sotomayor seem to imply that the current occupants on the court are truly objective and free from the biased influence of their backgrounds. This is a dangerous notion. If we disregard the evidence that backgrounds matter, then we risk having a court composed of individuals from one background (that's the point about having all white males there) and justice will inevitably be biased in the direction of their shared background, and that becomes defined as the objective, just outcome. It will hardly be that.

On Peace

Is humanity becoming more peaceful? Despite well documented attrocities over the past century or so, Steven Pinker says that we are and offers proof.

Part of the reason is the development of governments that claim monopolies on the use of coercive power. Without it, you and I must rely on vigilante force and vendettas to solve disputes--often preemptive and homicidal.

Greater media coverage allows us to empathize with a larger group of people than just our own clan, making us less likely to act out violently than we may have in the past. We are less likely to want to kill those we recogize as human.

Maybe governments are justified after all.