There’s been plenty of evidence, in recent days, to support the popular liberal notion that conservatives have a uniquely weird relationship to the truth. Take the allegations that Bill O’Reilly lied about seeing combat in the Falkland Islands: lying is hardly an exclusively right-wing trait, of course, but there’s something brazen in the Fox host’s decision to fight back by simply asserting that he never claimed he was there – even though he did so, and in print. Then there’s the case of the climate researcher Willie Soon, whose doubt-mongering work turns out to have been funded by huge cash infusions from the fossil-fuel industry, a fact he didn’t bother making clear in most of his publications.
Oh, and let’s not forget Rudy Giuliani’s boast that he was raised a better American than Barack Obama – despite the fact that Giuliani’s father, in the resonant words of investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, “did time in Sing Sing for holding up a Harlem milkman and was the bat-wielding enforcer for the loan-sharking operation run out of a Brooklyn bar owned by Rudy’s uncle.” Little wonder that, before this week was a day old, Salon had published two pieces exploring the eccentricity of “right-wing brains” and the mysteries of the conservative mind.
Yet a new study by researchers at the Ohio State University ought to stop us liberals from getting overly smug. Focusing specifically on science as reported in the media, it concludes that liberals and conservatives alike are capable of subconsciously rejecting findings that don’t fit their preconceived views. In one sense, this is unsurprising: we’re all subject to biases – excusing, say, bad behavior by a member of the party we support more readily than when it’s those terrible people on the other side of the aisle, up to their usual tricks. Still, science is supposed to be a way of getting at the facts beyond those biases, and liberals tend to pride themselves on being open to its results. So it’s a little unsettling to encounter evidence that nobody’s immune from resisting findings they wish weren’t true.
Erik Nisbet, Kathryn Cooper and Kelly Garrett recruited more than 1,500 people to, purportedly, test out a new educational science website. First, they asked respondents to agree or disagree with various claims – for example, that there’s widespread disagreement among scientists about humanity’s role in climate change (there isn’t); or that people living near nuclear power stations are exposed to 20% more radiation than the rest of us (they aren’t). Then participants explored the site, which included the right answers to those questions. When people encountered “dissonant messages” – findings that challenged their views – they were more likely to rate the site negatively, to resist the implications of the information they read there and to express distrust of the scientific community in general. That happened whether they were right-wingers encountering facts about evolution and climate change, or left-wingers encountering facts about fracking and nuclear power.
There was one significant difference to make liberals feel better: the negative reaction to dissonant findings was four times greater among conservatives. Yet, as the researchers point out, this might just be because climate change has a higher media profile than nuclear power, and that conservative think-tanks spend millions providing denialists with off-the-rack arguments they can reach for when they wish to avoid the truth – not because one side of the political spectrum is inherently more prone to the bias than the other. (The anti-vaccine movement reinforces the point: it seems to be a largely left-wing phenomenon.)
Here’s one disastrously wrongheaded conclusion you could draw from this kind of work: that nobody knows anything, both sides are as bad as each other, and that the scientific consensus on climate change is probably just the result of a bunch of corrupt and biased liberal scientists intent on seeing only the facts they prefer. (If those are the lessons you draw from this study, perhaps you’re just exhibiting the phenomenon itself, and seeing what you want to see in the research?) There’s nothing in the study to support that, nor anything that favors the “on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand” style of false balance in journalism.
Instead, this is more evidence for how central a role emotions and subconscious motives play in our thinking processes – a phenomenon known as “motivated reasoning”. It’s tempting to think of psychological biases as relatively minor irritants that distort our otherwise reliable efforts to get at the truth. But what if our reasoning is shot through, from start to finish, with emotional considerations, such as the desire to feel a sense of group belonging, or an unwillingness to admit your previous judgments were flawed? (Or just a strong desire to pander to your chosen constituency for money?) As neuroscience has shown us, emotional judgments get made instantaneously; by the time reasoning cranks into action, it’s doing so in a pre-existing emotional soup. We may be, as Jonathan Haidt puts it, more like lawyers than scientists, concerned above all not with finding the truth but with shoring up our case. No wonder we respond to science that threatens our case not by changing our beliefs but doubting the science.
The scholars Dan Sperber and Hugo Mercier, among others, even argue that this might be why we’ve evolved to be reasoning creatures in the first place: not to get at facts, but because it’s evolutionarily adaptive to be able to win others to your cause.
These are troubling reflections. What if your most deeply held principles aren’t deeply held because they’re right, but because you’re really good at convincing yourself? But the most troubling aspect of the new study may be the following finding: encountering those “conservative-dissonant” facts about the truth of climate change and evolution, it turned out, led to a greater distrust of science across the board, among liberal as well as conservative participants. It seems, in other words, as if the very fact that climate change has become politicized makes everyone trust science a little less. There is no such thing as “just the facts”: every fact you encounter arrives in a mind that’s already full of emotional baggage. When it comes to sculpting reality to fit our preferences, few of us may rise to the level of a Fox News host – but all of us may be a little O’Reillyish inside.