Conservatives Attack Scientific Findings About Why They Hate Science

http://blog.locustfork.net/2012/06/conservatives-attack-scientific-findings-about-why-they-hate-science/

Two months have passed since my new book, The Republican Brain, was published, and so far it has gotten a lot of media attention. However, the coverage has followed a noteworthy pattern: while progressives and liberals seem intrigued about what I’m saying, the so-called “mainstream” media — the CNNs of the world — have shied away from the subject.

What’s up with this? Well, a book with conclusions closely related to mine — Norman Ornstein’s and Thomas Mann’s It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism — seems as though it is being handled similarly by some in the press. And perhaps there’s a reason: Centrist (aka “mainstream”) journalists might well prefer that the findings of these books not be true.

.....

The evidence for my thesis — that liberals and conservatives differ by personality, psychological needs, moral intuitions, and numerous other traits; and that this is what is lurking behind our political battles over what is true, on issues ranging from global warming to whether President Obama was born in the U.S. — was lying in plain sight in the scientific literature. I simply compiled it and reported on it. Notably, this evidence is not dependent on the work of any one scientist or group of scientists, on any one methodology, or on any one discipline. It is cross-disciplinary, and it is growing.

No wonder that since the book came out, I’ve heard from a number of researchers whose work I’ve reported on, saying that I’ve done an accurate job. Indeed, there have been a number of public remarks from people of expertise, saying essentially the same thing.

Most prominent among these is Jonathan Haidt, the University of Virginia moral psychologist and the author of the much discussed book The Righteous Mind. Notably, Haidt defines himself as a “centrist,” not a liberal. On MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes, Haidt had this to say about my thesis:

Chris has done a great job of surveying the literature. I want to give him a stamp of approval. He is not cherry picking, he is representing the current state of thinking about politics and personality.

Haidt went further, adding that his own science casts additional light here:

I want to fully agree with Chris that the psychology does predispose liberals more to be receptive to science; my own research has found that conservatives are better at group-binding, at loyalty, and so if you put them in a group-versus-group conflict, yes the right is more prone, psychologically, to band around and sort of, circle the wagons.

.....

So what do conservatives have to say in response to this science? Honestly, the objections are quite weak, and frankly provide a wealth of new evidence in support of the book’s argument — that conservatives tend to simply reject science and evidence when it threatens their beliefs. The main conservative counterargument relies on little more than misrepresenting the book and its arguments. Jonah Goldberg claimed, in USA Today, that I was saying there is something wrong with conservatives; that they have “bad brains.” Nonsense, and I refuted Goldberg here.

.....

A lot of people are clearly threatened by what my book is saying. And no wonder, for the claims it makes are deeply inconvenient, both to conservatives but also to quite a lot of media centrists. (Liberals get a drubbing too in much of this research — for being indecisive and wishy-washy — but somehow they don’t seem particularly worried about that. Which itself is interesting, no?)

.....

Is it possible that, paradoxically, this is something conservatives could learn to accept or even respect? After all, it’s kind of a basic human tradition. Liberals push the envelope, and err on the side of too much open-mindedness; conservatives pull us back again, and err on the side of too much closure. It could be a productive relationship. It could be considered normal, and even necessary.

But that won’t happen until conservatives, and journalists, are willing to accept what the science of politics is now telling us.