Hidden Brain - Episode 44: Our Politics, Our Parenting

Episode Date: September 13, 2016

In the midst of a rancorous election, we present a new theory to explain why the two sides of the aisle seem irreconcilable sometimes.

To many people, our election season sounds like this. You know people are badly watching this. You don't know what's happening. Gentlemen, gentlemen. Well, if I'm going to ask them, I cannot not be the death of a single colleague of the government. The Coffinay and the Squad. No! What the shunna!

They are sitting in clusters of Bernie delegates and Hillary delegates. You're kidding! But beneath the rancor, something else is at work. Deep inside the brain, hidden assumptions and frames are shaping the way we think about politics. To understand these forces, we need to step away from the daily barrage of punches and counter punches. We begin 30 miles from the White House on a small farm in Dunkirk, Maryland. Tom Barnes is finishing up for the day. There was one horse I used to do named Refugee. small farm in Dunkirk, Maryland. Tom Barnes is finishing up for the day. He's a

farrier, which means he trims and shoots horses hooves all day long. Tom likes to be outside, be his own boss, shape his own future. He believes in hard work, self-reliance, personal responsibility, and these qualities have shaped his political views. Fiscally and internationally conservative, not hard right, but conservative. Tom would never take on too much household debt, and he wants his country to run like his home. I'm real simple when it comes to these kinds of things, and I don't think people should take on more debt than they would be able to repay. And if they can't, I think that there should be consequences

for that. And I think that the country is no different, that we should not take on debt, that we can't repay. When he thinks of what ails America, Tom returns to a model of how a family should operate. It's something I've been saying for the last seven what ails America, Tom returns to a model of how a family should operate. It's something I've been saying for the last seven and a half years is that America needs stricter parents, and I truly do feel that way.

It goes back to my example earlier of the household budget not getting to a point where they can no longer service their debt. Well, as a country, it's the same type of values that we need to get back to. We need to start being stricter parents. Hundreds of miles away in an urban school district in Indiana, a young high school English teacher has a different perspective shaped by her own values. The school district that I'm in, the specific school that I teach at, is a 73% free and reduced lunch school.

And also, we are a minority majority school where we are 34% white students. Kate Borkat doesn't just think government supported lunch programs are useful. She knows it. I think I've just seen what can be done with government money kind of putting a face to you know you hear all these statistics about oh it's a free and reduced lunch school but I don't think about it like that I know these kids and I've known them for years and I've seen the good that they go on to do in the world and it's worth it it's worth the investment. Tom and Kate have

good reasons to believe what they do. They're reasonable people with deeply held convictions. But put millions of TARMS and millions of KATES together, and what you see isn't reasonable disagreement. Increasingly, Democrats and Republicans can't comprehend the others point of view. It's not just the current campaign. Beyond the noise of the contest between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton,

lies a gulf of distrust and misunderstanding. How do we get to a divide that feels so unbridgeable? Here's one theory. What if a driving force behind our political preferences is something we're not even aware of? They're like unconscious ideologies in a way that is their beliefs or convictions that we hold that are non-consciously hell but nonetheless influence the way we interpret the world. Today's show the hidden moral frameworks that shape our politics. Stay with us. One night, decades ago, George Lekov began a quest. He was listening to speeches from a gathering of conservative politicians. They were blasting the idea that people

who worked hard to earn more money should pay more in taxes. And everybody there clapped and waved their arms, waved their signs, etc. The conservatives were making a moral argument. To George, it seemed self-evidently wrong. But to the cheering conservatives, it seemed self-evidently wrong. But to the cheering conservatives, it seems self-evidently right. George has to himself how two people could look at the same issue and draw such radically different conclusions. In 1994, it happened again. George had a sense that the people on the other side of the aisle were from another planet.

This time it was Republican- Newt Gingrich talking. Think of America as a giant family of 260 million people of extraordinarily diverse backgrounds, riding in a huge car down the highway. Newt Gingrich was hawking his contract with America. He warned that the tires of the family car were blowing out. America is in trouble, and our trouble extends beyond the White House.

Newt Gingrich offered an ambitious package of policies that covered a range of traditional conservative issues. As he listened, George started thinking about the whole Republican platform. He decided it was an incoherent mess. What does the flat tax have to do with environmental regulations? What does that have to do with environmental regulations? What does that have to do with owning guns?

And what does the death penalty have to do with being pro-life? All of those things seem strange to me. Republicans looking at the democratic platform might say the very same thing. George looked at his own bewilderment with curiosity. This feeling of utter incomprehension is an experience widely shared by people on both sides of the aisle. How could it be, he asked himself, that millions of Americans firmly believe that the views of millions of other Americans are incoherent? As George tried to figure out what was going on, something popped in his head. It seemed tangential, but he thought it might be a clue.

We heard it in something Newt Gingrich just said. Think of America as a giant family of 260 million people. That's a metaphor. George Lekoff, as it happens, is a cognitive linguist and an expert on metaphors. One of the things he's discovered is that metaphors are far more powerful than most people think. They aren't just figures of speech, but ways to organize how we see the world. George started to wonder about this metaphor of the country as a family. Did it have something to do with the mutual incomprehension that Democrats and Republicans feel toward one another?

The moment this notion occurred to him, he started seeing examples everywhere. We have a metaphor that the nation is a family. We have founding fathers. We send our sons and daughters to war. We have homeland security. We don't want missiles in our backyard and so on and so on. And the idea that occurred to me, that if that's the case,

if you have two different views of the nation, you may have two different views of the family. So I worked backwards. I took the two different views of the nation, worked backwards through the metaphor, and out popped two different views of the family. In other words, if both Republicans and Democrats think of the nation as a kind of family, but

have very different assumptions on how a family ought to work, could those assumptions be behind our seemingly irreconcilable differences? On its surface, the idea that the way we think about family can shape the way we think about politics is crazy. This is where George Lekop's earlier work on metaphors comes in. Metaphors are powerful precisely because they operate on a largely unconscious level. They are the lens through which we see the world, but most of the time we don't realize they're even there. Think again about our

failure, Tom Barnes, and Woody Wands for the Country. America needs stricter parents. They're like unconscious ideologies in a way. That is their beliefs or convictions that we hold that are non-consciously hell, but nonetheless influence the way we interpret the world. This is Marty Gonzalez. She's a psychologist who's done her own research on George Leakoff's theories

about how the way we think about families can shape our political views. George and Marty think that most Americans embrace one of two different models of family. Now, these are generalizations and they have lots of exceptions, but let's start with the basic models. One is what they call the strict father model. The strict father family, the parents in that family, tend to view the world as a really complex,

and dangerous, and unfriendly place. It's tough love. In the strict father family, the father knows best. The father knows right from wrong, and the job of the father is not just the support and protect the family, but also with respect to children, is to teach them right from wrong

so that they have their right moral views. Competition, of course, is a good thing from the point of view of strict father families. Because success at competition rewards people for the strength and the tenacity, the self-discipline, and the self-reliance that enable the person to succeed. Now I think the term strict father feels a little outdated. I might call it a strict parent family, since one or both parents might have this parenting style.

Strict parents who love their children believe it would be wrong to send them out into a dangerous world unprepared for what it has in store for them. Strict parents believe they need to make that children tough and self-reliant. So the central metaphor of the strict father family is, what is good is what is strong. Again, a farrier, Tom Barnes. I'm a firm believer that when America is strong,

the world is a safe place. And I don't think in the last seven and a half years we've we've really stood by that. I think we've tried to be more of one of the gang than someone that our allies can count on and that our enemies respect and I don't want to see that going any further than it already has. that going further than it already has. There is another model of how to be a good parent. George and Marty call this style, notchurant.

I think of these parents as empathetic parents. They believe that notchur, empathy, and trust, these are the tools that help children grow into their fullest cells. The goal of this kind of parent is to rear children who are happy and self-fulfilled. Their job is to empathize with their child to know what their child needs, to have an open two-way discussions with their child. They have to develop a set of kind of values along the way or beliefs along the way, among them them, as a society benefit, when people are willing to care for, support, and nurture other people.

Our teacher, Kate Borkat, exemplifies this thinking when it comes to the children in her care. I think it's the right thing to take care of people. I just do. I don't, maybe that's the Catholic upbringing in me, but it's right to take care of people that need it. We'll get to the evidence for George and Marty's theory about how our views of the family can shape our political outlook, but I have to say this idea has immense intuitive appeal. The earliest experience all of us have with authority and leadership is within the family. You're first governed in your family. And so we arrive at metaphors in which we are unconscious metaphors, in which governing institutions are families. This was a pivotal moment in Georgia's search for understanding.

If people see families as governing bodies and governing bodies playing the role of parents, isn't it possible they use their own family and upbringing families as governing bodies and governing bodies playing the role of parents. Isn't it possible they use their own family and upbringing as an unconscious model of how government ought to work? Marty decided to test Georgia's hypothesis that unconscious parenting models show up all the time in our nation's politics. She and her team analyzed all the presidential political ads that have played on daytime and prime time TV,

going all the way back to 1980. She had research assistants listen to the ads and code them, according to whether they had underlying metaphors that spoke to the idea of the strict parent and the empathetic parent. The bottom line is, Professor George Lackoff was right. Now, to be clear, lots of the ads were simply one candidate attacking the other. Many of them talked about issues in the news, but a significant number made appeals to voters unconscious moral frameworks drawing on the themes of the strict and empathetic parent. Jimmy Carter still doesn't know that it takes strong leadership to keep the peace.

I believe we need to encourage personal responsibility so people are accountable for their actions. Republicans were much more likely to rely on strict father ideas to make their points to persuade voters. Democrats were much more likely to use nurtured parent ideas. I don't think Reagan showed enough compassion for the people of California. Told the insurance company don't do this, don't cut this child's coverage. Al Gore got the Malone family, the help they needed. We believe in a solid, just compassionate, hopeful future. Now these are broad archetypes, of course.

Parents can be both strict and empathetic. Parents can disagree with one another about the importance of rules and structure. But as we grow up, these models, both based on love, both based on the certainty that this is the best way to raise kids, shape the way many of us see the world. From the moment Georgian Marty described how Republicans and Democrats draw on different parenting models, I started to see examples of this everywhere. Here's an ad from the Trump campaign featuring the voice of his son Donald Trump Jr. deals with China and Mexico. It's that toughness that I want keeping me and my family and your family safe. My father will make an incredible president. And here's an ad from Hillary Clinton. When I think about why I'm doing this,

I think about my mother Dorothy. She was abandoned by her parents at the age of eight, sent from Chicago to LA to live with grandparents who didn't want her. But people showed her kindness, gave her a chance. Like the teacher who saw my mother had no money for food and started bringing her extra from home whispering,

you know Dorothy, I just brought too much food today. She went to work in somebody else's home at age 14 and it opened her eyes. For the first time, she saw parents who loved and cared for their children. And that's the kind of loving family she provided for us. When she needed a champion, someone was there. I think about all the Dorothy's, all over America,

who fight for their families, who never give up. That's why I'm doing this. That's why I've always done this. For all the dorthies. Are you feeling a lump in your throat? If so, it might be because you have an empathetic model of parenting at the back of your head. On the other hand, if the ad sounded like sentimental coddling and you are drawn more to the trump ad, it might be because your model of the family is built around the idea of a strict parent. I asked Marty to play a little game with me and

imagine how people who disagree with Trump and Clinton might see an ad put out by the other side. How would a strict parent view that Clinton add about her mother? Here's all this mushy stuff about feelings and taking care of people and when you take care of people, of course, you know you're undermining their self-reliance and you're not doing them any good. And in this dangerous world, we don't need a person who can empathize with our enemies or find common ground with our enemies.

We need someone strong enough to stand up and protect us from them. And here's a hypothetical voter with the empathetic parent model on the Trump ad. Well, if Donald Trump thinks that to govern, the only thing he needs is toughness and strength were in for a bumpy ride. Once people start governing, being tough isn't going to be enough. You need to be open to new ideas. You need to be open to the idea of cooperating

with people across the aisle. It's interesting that this is the cartoon version that each side has of the other, that each side and separate from Clinton and Trump, sort of the division, the partisan division that we have in the country is very much this division where many progressives think of conservatives as being heartless cruel people. And then- It's not Neanderthals, you know? Yeah, and many conservatives think of progress as being heartless cruel people. And not meanderthals. Yeah, and many conservatives think of progressives as just being brained at. Right, right.

And the sad thing is these kinds of ads get people riled up and more willing to embrace more strongly the moral foundations of their political ideology such that when elections are over and the process of governing begins, you have citizens on the one hand who still can't pull together, you know, across the ideological divide, and you certainly have mandates from these citizens to send their representatives to Washington, not to negotiate, not to give in to the silly strict father or the silly nurturant parent orientations of our elected leaders. When people draw on moral frameworks that we don't share, what they say can seem incomprehensible.

And what happens when you hear things that don't make sense, there are various things you can do about it. One, you can just not hear it. It doesn't make any sense. You do about it. One, you can just not hear it. It doesn't make any sense. You can ignore it. You can ridicule it, saying, hey, this doesn't make any sense. There's stupid people, there dumb, there mean, there cruel, whatever. Or you can, if it's threatening, you can attack them. And very often there's an attack. So all of those things are happening in our politics right now. So, all of those things are happening in our politics right now. And they're normal, you'd expect them to happen, given the way that people's brains work

and given the fact that we have alternative worldviews. But the idea that we have alternative worldviews is not in our public discourse. To be sure, there are plenty of exceptions to this model of how we come to our political views. Race, religion, immigration, class, gender, all play a role in shaping our politics. George Lekoff and Marty Gonzalez' ideas don't displace everything else we know about how politics works, but it's a point of view you might not have considered. Even within this theory, this room for nuance and complexity, a person may have both strict

and empathetic parenting models to guide them. They can follow one model at home and another at work. You can certainly find Republican ads that feature empathy and Democratic ads that project strength. Unconscious moral frameworks don't explain everything, but they do explain some things that otherwise seem inexplicable. How you understand your world and what you're supposed to be doing and who you respect and who you don't respect and what you want to do in your life and so on, and how you understand everything around you. So here's one way to think about this political season. The nation is in the middle of a parenting dispute. Each side feels the other is on the wrong path, and so much is at stake.

Parents who adhere to one or another conception of the ideal family want what's good for their children, and they parent in ways that they believe, firmly believe, with love in their hearts that will most benefit their children in this complex world. Like two parents who love their child but can't get along with each other, our political parties each believe they have the right answer to what the country needs. All of us feel bewilder that policies that seem so self-evidently correct to us are rejected by the other side. Understandably, we explain these differences by pointing fingers and questioning each other's motives. The truth is much harder. What fuels our inflexible certainty isn't stupidity or callousness.

It's love. This episode of Hidden Brain was produced by Jenny Schmidt, Maggie Pennman and Chris Vendereff. It was edited by Tara Boyle. We had original music from Ramteen Arabloewing. You can find more Hidden Brain on Facebook and Twitter and listen to my stories each week on your local public radio station. If you liked this episode, please give us a review. It helps others find the show. I'm Shankar Vedantan and this is NPR.