George Rebane
The curious and inexplicable course of our polarized public discourse has been examined for some time in these pages, even to the extent that ‘The Liberal Mind’ is an RR category of collected posts on this issue. To a reasonable person on the so-called Right, the reasoning processes of the so-called Left are an enduring puzzle, even though the outcomes of such processes are relatively easy to predict. I don’t know whether people of the Left have similar problems understanding our reasoning processes, but I presume that they do.
These questions are neither idle nor unimportant as indicated by the increasing level of academic research devoted to the area. A landmark study done at University College London, reported here, discovered measurable differences in the active brain areas of conservatives and liberals when they considered socio-political issues informed by their separate ideologies. This research indicated that with appropriate brain imaging equipment in place, it is possible to tell from the resulting images whether the subject studied is a self-professed liberal or conservative.
Now Dr Jonathan Haidt, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, has documented his examination of how liberals and conservatives differ in The Righteous Mind (two reports on it here and here). The results from Haidt and his research team are both revealing and illuminating. Even the noted progressive NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof reports that these results “help demystify the right”.
Dr Haidt’s research indicates that Americans speak of social values in “six languages” (aka six dimensions). Kristof states that “Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three. And some (me included) mostly use just one, care for victims.” The liberals’ three languages of social discourse are in a manifold whose three dimensions are – caring for the weak, fairness, and liberty. The conservatives share these three, with a somewhat different view of fairness and liberty, and add to their manifold of thinking/expression three more – loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity. These three are also tagged as “binding values” that bind people together into larger groups.
That conservatives are able to view and frame social questions and solutions into a richer (more nuanced) environment may explain another conclusion from this research. It turns out that conservatives are much better at predicting how liberals will solve/decide a social issue, than liberals are at predicting how conservatives will react. This result is readily corroborated by reviewing the comment streams in Ruminations and similar commentary blogs. Redstate.com presents the following from a summary of the original research.
Our results go beyond previous studies, however, in finding and explaining an otherwise puzzling result: liberals were the least accurate. We presented three competing hypotheses about accuracy: 1) We found no support for the hypothesis that liberals would be most accurate; liberals were the least accurate about conservatives and about liberals. The largest inaccuracies were in liberals’ underestimations of conservatives’ Harm and Fairness concerns, and liberals further exaggerated the political differences by overestimating their own such concerns. 2) We found some support for the hypothesis that moderates would be most accurate, which they were in the case of the binding foundations. However, and most crucially, partisan inaccuracies were not mirror images of each other. On the contrary, liberals and conservatives both tended to exaggerate their binding foundation differences by underestimating the typical liberal and overestimating the typical conservative. 3) Finally, we found some support for the hypothesis that conservatives would be the most accurate, which they were in the case of the individualizing foundations. In line with Moral Foundations Theory, liberals dramatically underestimated the Harm and Fairness concerns of conservatives.
At this point it is important to remind ourselves that not being able to fathom the presumed reasoning processes in the liberal mind is independent of the ability to predict the contingent output from such a mind. In other words, I and others like me, cannot fit progressive thinking into our world frame, but we can treat that kind of thinking as a ‘black box’ that produces usefully predictable outputs from a given set of inputs. The University of Virginia’s research indicates that the progressive is doubly frustrated here – he not only cannot follow our reasoning, but is also saddled with a less reliable ‘black box’ model of our deliberations on social issues.
So as more studies are done and results roll in, the stark polarization of socio-political ideologies that gather around the collectivist and conservative/libertarian banners becomes apparent as being based on identifiable seminal differences in the workings of our brains and the minds that such brains are able to fashion. The interesting question of nature or nurture has yet to be addressed.
The research to date can be explained away by the ‘nurture’ side of development, especially in view of the University College London results – people changing ideologies did also change processing brain areas. And the Haidt study based itself on identifying right/left psychologies – i.e. mind instead of brain – which suggests that a differently nurtured brain might have adopted the opposite abilities to analyze and express themselves in the language manifolds identified. But we don’t know if there is something intrinsic in the nature (expressed physiological structure) of brains which make them more conducive to a collectivist vs classical liberal (a la Bastiat et al) ideology.
[7apr12 update] Since penning the above, the thesis that collectivists and classical liberals are fundamentally different in the make up of their intellects, including reasoning processes, is gaining traction among people who study our polarized ideologies. This coming Wednesday 11 April, the Levan Institute for Humanities and Ethics (University of Southern California) is sponsoring a seminar on the topic in which it asks "Do we choose our political views or do our brains choose them for us? If political preferences reflect differences in brain structure, what effect does this have on our ability to defend our political affiliations on rational grounds?'
RR's continuing reflections on this important proposition form an important foundation for understanding today's political divide and its possible evolution to the Great Divide (q.v.).
[10apr12 update] And here's an even later report on results that point to a biological difference between people of liberal and conservative persuasions that should be very complimentary to our progressive friends. The point to bear in mind is that the differences appear to be clinically observable, and therefore 'real' in a wider sense than people having arrived at disparate ideologies by dint of reasoning alone.
rebanesruminations.com 
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