The Science, It Burns

Comes another study explaining the existence of conservatism:

The authors test the hypothesis that low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. In Study 1, alcohol intoxication was measured among bar patrons; as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism (controlling for sex, education, and political identification). In Study 2, participants under cognitive load reported more conservative attitudes than their no-load counterparts. In Study 3, time pressure increased participants’ endorsement of conservative terms. In Study 4, participants considering political terms in a cursory manner endorsed conservative terms more than those asked to cogitate; an indicator of effortful thought (recognition memory) partially mediated the relationship between processing effort and conservatism. Together these data suggest that political conservatism may be a process consequence of low-effort thought; when effortful, deliberate thought is disengaged, endorsement of conservative ideology increases.

Add it to the list, I guess. Not long ago, there was this:

Despite their important implications for interpersonal behaviors and relations, cognitive abilities have been largely ignored as explanations of prejudice. ... In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, ... All analyses controlled for education and socioeconomic status. Our results suggest that cognitive abilities play a critical, albeit underappreciated, role in prejudice. Consequently, we recommend a heightened focus on cognitive ability in research on prejudice and a better integration of cognitive ability into prejudice models.

And I've written here (so often that there are links within links within links) of many other studies confirming inborn neurophysiological difference between liberals and conservatives.

So we should accept that, barring the advent of forward-thinking eugenics, they'll always be around; and that it's not their fault. If their defects were just a harmless curiosity, like two-headed cows or polydactyly, we could cherish conservatives as a sort of colorful part of an often grey political landscape. But we keep letting them take charge of things, even after they've screwed it all up.

What does that say about the rest of us???

Brain Grains

Regarding the many data that suggest inborn differences between liberals and conservatives and how they process information, here's another bit; an article about an article.

Here, we present the first genome-wide analysis of Conservative-Liberal attitudes from a sample of 13,000 respondents whose DNA was collected in conjunction with a 50-item sociopolitical attitude questionnaire. Several significant linkage peaks were identified and potential candidate genes discussed.

[...]

The rather amazing result–for any of us who stops to think about the incredibly vast distance between the genes we are born with and our political attitudes as adults–was that three regions were found to be linked in a way that was “significant” (one reaching the most stringent test of it) and one was linked in a way that was “suggestive.” (The technical stuff on all of this is in the paper.)

What could this mean? Well, as the authors write:

As we identified four regions of interest, and one that meets the strictest criteria, our findings are consistent with what might be expected if the genetic component of variation in Conservatism-Liberalism resembles any other polygenic human trait, for which the genetic resemblance between relatives can only be resolved reliably into the effects of a large number of genes with small effects that typically cannot be identified by linkage.

In other words, no gene is acting directly to determine our political views–there is no “liberal” or “conservative” gene–but there might be a combination of genes acting together that somehow predispose us to have particular politics... The authors couldn't resist speculating here:

Thought organization, information processing, capacity for abstract thought, learning, and performance are related to blockage of NMDA. Of particular interest to political ideology is the relationship between NMDA and performance on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST). The WCST is a neuropsychological test of the ability to display flexibility in the face of changing schedules of reinforcement. By definition Conservatism and Liberalism have much to do with flexibility of opinion in the face of a changing world. (emphasis mine)

Though the accumulation of this stuff tends to support my own perceptions that liberals and conservatives are different animals (and that when it comes to the above-mentioned flexibility in facing a changing world, liberals are far better suited and more committed to factuality), in the end it's pretty bad news.

I'd like to believe that the thought processes demonstrated by the occasional and fleeting conservative commenters here don't represent the best that conservatism has to offer; our problems are too serious to be ignored in the way commenters ignore what I say, only to make asinine and unrelated retorts that they presumably consider highly effective counters. (In the name of preventing their own embarrassment, and bleeding eyes in the rest of us, I've rejected many.) I'd like to believe that in a fast-fading future, as even conservatives are forced to realize there are facts out there that demand serious attention, it's still somehow possible to work together on solutions. But evidence is against me; and I'm nothing if not evidence-based.

No, it's not easy to be optimistic. If the comments here from conservatives are particularly vapid, there's no evidence in the halls of congress or in the polling places of teabaggers that they're very much beyond the mean. Nor does it help in any way to recognize that it might not be their fault, that they were born this way. If half our country is genetically and anatomically unwilling and unable to address issues logically, cooperatively, with our common future in mind, it really doesn't matter what their excuse is. We're screwed either way.

One is left to wonder how it came to this: what accounts for the evolution of the conservative brain? There must have been, at some point in our development, a use for people whose certainty in their own rectitude was unmoved by contrary evidence. In simpler times, when survival was about not being eaten alive, ultra-concrete thinking, lack of subtlety, might well have been determinative: stay or run; friend or foe; wind in the willows or tiger in the trees. Nowadays, though, the tigers in the tall grass are of a different stripe. Nothing in the evolution of the conservative brain came from or prepared for dealing with such complexities as anthropogenic climate change or globally-connected economies; in bygone eons, selfishness meant hoarding stones for throwing, which was probably a good thing. But now it's become derivatives trading and insufficient tax revenue, xenophobia and religious fundamentalism. Selection for reactionary thinking stopped being useful when we moved out of caves. But by then, it was too late. The advent of civilization meant the time for deselection had passed.

Perhaps we should acknowledge conservative thinking for getting us safely to the stone age. I know I, for one, will always be grateful. So, thanks for that.

But these times demand more of us. Like the advent of rational medicine, which has removed survival pressure to make appendices extinct, conservatism remains from a pre-sapiens era. Now, the problems of modernity have come upon us too fast for the pace of evolution, with the only possibility of genetic elimination of such a dysfunctional cerebral subset being extinction of us all.

Oh well. Whacha gonna do?

There are darkly amusing ironies, however: it's only evolutionary theory that can explain the development and persistence of the grouping of mind-behavior that subsumes all evolution deniers. The need to reject the evidence that sexual preference is inborn is inborn. And it's the very liberal thought that today's conservatives so vehemently reject, which assures their continued ability to walk among us, tolerated, relics and reminders of a time which most of them claim never existed.

[Okay, yeah, a certain amount of tongue. In cheek. But people with more credibility than mine also see the descent of the Republican party away from reality, and wonder how it happened.]

Still, Small

Several times on this blog I've wondered out loud if there are any thoughtful conservatives left, ones who'd call out their own. Certainly there are none among those who leave their droppings here. But, it turns out, there's at least one more, after David Stockman, which is practically a crowd. I've never heard of him, but still. And he pretty much says everything I've been saying.

These days it's getting increasingly embarrassing to publicly identify oneself as a conservative. It was bad enough when George Bush 43, the K Street Gang, and the neo-cons were running up spending, fighting an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq, incurring massive deficits, expanding entitlements, and all the rest of the nonsense I cataloged over the years in posts like Bush 43 has been a disaster for conservatives.

These days, however, the most prominent so-called conservatives are increasingly fit only to be cast for the next Dumb and Dumber sequel. They're dumb and crazy.

He goes on, to provide a list:

Let's tick off ten things that make this conservative embarrassed by the modern conservative movement:

1. A poorly educated ex-sportwriter who served half of one term of an minor state governorship is prominently featured as a -- if not the -- leading prospect for the GOP's 2012 Presidential nomination.
2. Tom Tancredo calling President Obama “the greatest threat to the United States today" and arguing that he be impeached. Bad public policy is not a high crime nor a misdemeanor, and the casual assertion that pursuing liberal policies--however misguided--is an impeachable offense is just nuts.
3. Similar nonsense from former Ford-Reagan treasury department officials Ernest Christian and Gary Robbins, who IBD column was, as Doug Marconisobserved, "a wildly exaggerated attack on President Obama’s record in office." Actually, it's more foaming at the mouth.
4. As Doug also observed, "The GOP controlled Congress from 1994 to 2006: Combine neocon warfare spending with entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects and you end up with a GOP welfare/warfare state driving the federal spending machine." Indeed, "when the GOP took control of Congress in 1994, and the White House in 2000, the desire to use the levers of power to create “compassionate conservatism” won our over any semblance of fiscal conservatism. Instead of tax cuts and spending cuts, we got tax cuts along with a trillion dollar entitlement program, a massive expansion of the Federal Government’s role in education, and two wars. That’s not fiscal conservatism it is, as others have said, fiscal insanity." Yet, today's GOP still has not articulated a message of real fiscal conservatism.
5. Thanks to the Tea Party, the Nevada GOP has probably pissed away a historic chance to out=st Harry Reid. See also Charlie Crist in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, and so on. Whatever happened to not letting perfection be the enemy of the good?
6. The anti-science and anti-intellectualism that pervade the movement.
7. Trying to pretend Afghanistan is Obama's war.
8. Birthers.
9. Nativists.
10. The substitution of mouth-foaming, spittle-blasting, rabble-rousing talk radio for reasoned debate. Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, and even Rush Limbaugh are not exactly putting on Firing Line. Whatever happened to smart, well-read, articulate leaders like Buckley, Neuhaus, Kirk, Jack Kent, Goldwater, and, yes, even Ronald Reagan?

I like that he seems to get a little self-induced embarrassment as he includes Ronnie in that last one.

The guy is a law professor, so maybe in addition to embarrassment he feels a bit threatened by the aggressive anti-intellectualism of his party. Whatever the reason, he's saying, practically verbatim, the things I've been saying for years. Would that people like him would regain prominence in the Republican party. Because, as I've also said many times, we need two strong parties in this country, each able to function as intelligent, thoughtful, loyal, and reasonable opposition when the other is in power. We're so far away from that now that it's impossible to imagine finding our way back.

Ah HA!... Wait. What?

Revealing once again the difference between liberal and conservative brains, or thinking, or discursive production, or something, comes this bit of research:

... Notably, we find evidence of an association between ideological affiliation and the technologies, institutions, and practices of participation across political blogs. Sites on the left adopt more participatory technical platforms; are comprised of significantly fewer sole-authored sites; include user blogs; maintain more fluid boundaries between secondary and primary content; include longer narrative and discussion posts; and (among the top half of the blogs in our sample) more often use blogs as platforms for mobilization as well as discursive production.

[...]

[O]ur study suggests that the prevailing techniques of domain-based link analysis used to study the political blogosphere to date may have fundamental limitations. The fact that we find evidence of significant cross-ideological variation when we compare intra-domain attributes of political blogs demonstrates that link analysis studies have obscured both the diversity of participatory affordances online as well as the primary mechanisms by which the networked public sphere alters democratic participation relative to the mass mediated public sphere.

So, there you go. Couldn't be clearer.

Explanation

I've written before about testable differences between the brains of liberals and conservatives. It explains some things; maybe even excuses the poor folks: they can't help it. But then I read something like this, and I think, nope, there are some things that they should be able to control, no matter their cross-wiring. Maybe it's just that they're assholes.

UCLA economists Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn analyzed the impact of an energy-conservation program in California that informed households about how their energy use compared with that of their neighbors. While the program succeeded in encouraging Democrats and environmentalists to lower their consumption, Republicans had the opposite reaction. When told of their relative thrift, they started cranking up the thermostat and leaving the lights on more often.

It may well be futile to attempt reasoning with those for whom facts don't matter, and who lack even a basic sense of shared future. I think there's a word for people like that...

Shiny Object Lesson

The above image should be emblazoned everywhere. It says everything we need to know about where we are and where, unless reason returns to our politics, we're inevitably headed.

In case you hadn't heard, the image is the new logo of the Missile Defense Agency. It's hard to escape the horrible truth: not only is it DELIBERATELY created to echo Barack Obama's campaign emblem, it's an unmistakable -- if subtly coded -- reference and homage to Islam, based, as it is, on the STAR AND CRESCENT!!!!!!! To say it's evidence of a nefarious plot, a subliminal message to the Islamic world, encoding President Obama's plan to establish Sharia law in the US, to cry out to anyone who is listening, to awaken from slumber our country in its darkest hour, as our very existence is threatened, is merely to establish what's obvious...

.....TO THE IDIOTS WHO READ DRUDGE, LISTEN TO FOX "news," AND WHO GIVE CREDENCE TO SUCH ABSOLUTE AND PATHETIC NONSENSE.

I read the most laughable disquisition on the matter here, where "nefarious" is actually in print.

...A just-unveiled symbolic action suggests, however, that something even more nefarious is afoot...

...[Obama's missile policies] seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah...What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo...

...Watch this space as we identify and consider various, ominous and far more clear-cut acts of submission to Shariah by President Obama and his team..."

And here's the thing: the author is a regular commentator on cable news, a respected (by the crazed class) talking head on Fox "news" and is among the conniest of the neo-cons, an enthusiastic defender of the Iraq invasion and of torture. That people believe such crap: entirely unsurprising. Even in the comments on this blog, we see daily evidence. But that such a guy gets to micturate his stuff into the mainstream; that he is considered --by anyone -- credible; that listeners believe it, is why we're so clearly and truly screwed.

When I first heard this breathless story, a couple of thoughts occurred to me, as well they might to anyone with a modicum of sense: how likely is it that the President of the United States would be involved in the design of military logeri, and, given how the military and government work, what are the chances this thing was in the works long before Obama was president, much less running for the office?

Well, to the surprise of no one with a brain, to no one who isn't bathed, broiled, and steeped in constant paranoid hatred of our president, guess what:

"This was a logo that was developed three years ago for our recruiting materials and our public Web site," MDA spokesman Rick Lehner told our colleague Ed O'Keefe. "It did not replace our official MDA logo, and of course it has no ties to any political campaign. It was done one year before the 2008 elections. So the whole thing is pretty ridiculous." Lehner said the insignia was chosen because it was "cheaper, because it's three colors as opposed to the five colors on the official logo."

Hey. Wait a damn minute. Three years ago??? That was during the BUSH ADMINISTRATION. Omigod. It's just as I've said: since Bush's invasion of Iraq gave Osama bin Laden everything he wanted and more, it's BUSH who's the secret Muslim.

Well, I guess since it's so stupid it should just be laughed off. Point out how crazy are the RWS™ and those who believe them, and move on. But the problem is, that's not tea in those tea bags: it's this sort of sh*t. Dipping it in their polluted water, over and over, screaming nonsense, certain of their victimhood, people drink this particular form of poison and take to the streets in the throes of their dance macabre.

It's a poison unique in its ability to kill those who don't even touch it to their lips. Which is exactly what it's doing, even as the above example -- only because it's more obvious than most -- ought to be more than enough to discredit the purveyors and to inoculate the sippers.

[Well, who'd've thunk: I wrote this post a couple of days ago, since which time it seems Mr Gaffney has found Jesus, as it were. Good for him. However, it doesn't change the fact that he believes, finds it entirely credible that President Obama is planning to place our country under Sharia law; his retraction was only about the symbol; he did nothing to back a way from the underlying claim. And, clearly, there are plenty of people only too happy to believe the crap they hear: in the interval between writing this and posting it I've gotten a classic (and anonymous, of course) comment on the previous post, claiming Obama is a "socialist" who "hates white people." So, like the dude, the crazy abides.]

Backfire Effect

I guess I'm obsessed with it. As in the previous post, about judicial temperament and selecting Supreme Court justices, I keep coming back to what appear to be inherent and unalterable differences between the conservative and the liberal mind. The implications are several, and serious. There is, it would seem, an extent to which the two are simply unable to find common ground. For reasons I don't think anyone knows (genetic wiring?, learned responses?) liberals and conservatives seem to process information differently.

In a near semi partially penultimate post on Surgeonsblog, I parenthetically mentioned this article about a study of what happens when people are presented with information that disproves a certain claim. A key finding:

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

.... Nyhan and Reifler found this "backfire" effect only among conservatives. Refutations had little effect on liberals, but it didn't cause them to actively believe the misleading information even more strongly.

I find it fascinating. Of course, it's not possible to make blanket statements: the numbers suggest that some conservatives were convinced by data, as well as that some liberals weren't. I know some open-minded conservatives, and some close-minded liberals. Still, the implication is clear: resistance to facts -- hardening one's erroneous view, in fact, when shown evidence to the contrary -- is a characteristic of the conservative mind more than it is of the liberal. So not only is it the case that, for many anyway, there's no hope of common purpose; it's also true that liberals are more likely to be right. Facts being what they are: facts.

It seems a fair assumption that people at the extremes are the ones most likely to fall into the refractory category. And, given the way gerrymandering has led to selecting the most partisan representatives of a given party, it's also logical to conclude that Congress is full of the 64/67 percenters; ie, that Congressional Republicans are simply incapable of being persuaded by facts, no matter the issue at hand. It's pretty discouraging; and it sort of puts the lie to the concept of bipartisanship. If the commentariat of this blog is any example, it's plainly impossible to have a meaningful discussion of serious issues with people congenitally (let's assume they can't help it) unable to process new information, especially information that contradicts their preferred beliefs.

Would that it weren't so. I'd like there to be a credible opposition to whatever party is in power. Especially, of course, if it's the party of backfire effect. But even when it's the good guys. Politicians of either party are wont to get carried away with themselves. As it is, the current party of opposition is constituted, in Congress anyway, of people literally incapable of dealing with reality, and studies prove it. It's not a good thing.
.