Me conservative, me stupid: or at least rigid and habit-bound, says 'the science'

National Review, Oct 8, 2007 by Jonah Goldberg

'Back off, man, we're scientists!" That's Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, but it might as well be David Amodio of NYU. I appeared with him on a San Francisco public-radio program, Forum. His basic argument was, "I'm a scientist, I deal with facts," while Mr. Goldberg is a pundit who peddles "fictions." This scientific principle is also known as "I'm right, you're wrong! Nyah! Nyah!"

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Amodio is the lead author of a study that received the sort of coverage you'd expect if scientists discovered that embryonic stem cells can cure breast cancer, reverse global warming, and prove that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election.

Okay, not quite, but coverage of the study--"Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism," published in the journal Nature Neuroscience--was a fine example of the media's passing off a tiny crumb of evidence as a rich banquet of proof, simply because it conformed to their prejudices. Amodio and his co-authors rounded up 43 college students and asked them to peck at a keyboard when a series of "M"s and "W"s appeared on a computer screen. Half the students were told to make a "Go" signal when they saw an "M" and a "No go" when they saw a "W." The other half were told to do the reverse. The exercise took a total of 15 minutes.

From this, the authors claim that self-described conservatives--there were a grand total of seven in the study group--are more likely to make errors because they are conservatives. Right-wingers are more stubborn and closed-minded, while liberals are more cognitively flexible and able to adapt. "Liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty," the authors write. Amodio told the Daily Telegraph that "liberals tended to be more sensitive and responsive to information that might conflict with their habitual way of thinking."

Well, that's all the media needed to hear. Around the country and the world, news outlets reported that conservatives are as poorly wired as a Bulgarian toaster circa 1970. Agence France-Presse announced that conservatives in the study "were less flexible, refusing to deviate from old habits 'despite signals that this ... should be changed.'" The Los Angeles Times reported that the study "suggests that liberals are more adaptable than conservatives" and "might be better judges of the facts." It had already run an earlier article on the study in which two outside experts were consulted, both of them sympathetic to Amodio's findings. One of these experts, Frank Sulloway of UC-Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research, was a co-author of an infamous 2003 study that reviewed decades of social-science research and concluded that conservatives tend to be fear-driven dogmatists who are incapable of dealing with ambiguity. The press release for that study, which is all that most journalists read, asserted that Adolf Hitler, Ronald Reagan, Benito Mussolini, and--wait for it!--Rush Limbaugh were all conservatives because "they all preached a return to an idealized past." The Los Angeles Times cited Sulloway to argue that Amodio's study could explain why President Bush has been so "single-minded" in his effort to win in Iraq, and why John Kerry was "perceived" by "some people" to be a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the war.

If only they'd let the kids peck at letters on a keyboard for a full half-hour, they might have discovered why Edmund Burke supported the American Revolution but not the French one.

Now, some will say I'm proving the scientists right by so reflexively disputing their new idea. But that's the problem--it's not new. Ninety years ago, John Dewey--the philosophical founder of modern liberalism--decried the "stupidity of habit-bound minds." He aimed the phrase at critics of the effort to outlaw war, but it perfectly captured his own attitude--and the attitude of liberalism generally, then and now. As a debater's weapon, it is perhaps the greatest and most sinister barb ever forged. It makes skepticism of "new" ideas into a liability, even a mental defect, immediately putting those with millennia of evidence and trial-and-error behind them--i.e., conservatives--on the defensive. Small-"c" conservatives aren't wrong because their arguments are wrong; they're wrong because the conservative approach--measure (at least) twice, cut once--is the product of a malformed mind.

Meanwhile, when conservatives favor change--free-market reforms, the overthrow of hostile governments, entrepreneurialism, whatever--it's not because we are comfortable with new information, but because our brains crave a more comfortable order.

The New Deal intellectual Stuart Chase captured this spirit nicely when he proclaimed, "I speak in dispraise of dusty learning, and in disparagement of the historical technique." He continued, "Are our plans wrong? Who knows? Can we tell from reading history? Hardly."

A parallel argument can be found in Marxism. Recall how, according to "scientific socialism," the rulers of society are slaves to their classes, acting out of necessity. Class consciousness, according to Marxists of various stripes, is imprinted on the brain, which is why so many industrialists, "kulaks," bourgeois intellectuals, and the like had to be liquidated or "reeducated." Later, the Soviets saw psychiatry as a political tool, throwing those unwilling to see the "objective truth" of socialism into nuthouses. (One might well note that the Communists most committed to such policies were fear-driven dogmatists who were uncomfortable with ambiguity and no doubt unable to give a "Go" sign when they saw a "W" pop up on a screen.)