Hidden Brain - Red Brain, Blue Brain

Episode Date: October 9, 2018

We often assume our life experiences are the root of our political ideologies. But what if there is something deeper at play?

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. We start today with an account of two communities. One is liberal, the other conservative. I want you to guess which is which. The schools would stress patriotism and respect, and it would be a very rules-based educational system. The houses would be fairly similar. The lawns would be very nicely kept

and beautifully green and moored. The town would be quiet with lots of churches. That's town one. Here's town two. The schools would be based more on experiential kinds of things rather than then wrote memory. People would prefer older houses with wooden floors rather than wall-to-wall carpeting. They would keep the yard's natural. Lots of bars and community theaters and foreign films, more of those than churches. That was easy, right? Conservatives like order, liberals embrace ambiguity. Now, you may be rolling your eyes or even getting angry at these stereotypes.

But we all know there's more than a grain of truth to them. So how did these two towns, which our guests today refers to as liberalville and conservaton, get this way? When most of us think about how we came to our political views, we tend to have a straight forward explanation. We use our upbringing and life experiences as the basis for our political beliefs. We imagine that our parents, teachers, and friends shape our views on everything from taxes and the

economy to immigration and national security. But what if I told you there is something deeper to those attitudes? Drives that shape the music we listen to, the food we eat, the politicians we elect. This week on Hidden Brain, how the partisan divide in our country might arise not just from our upbringing and lived experiences, but from biology. On a regular basis, right before an election, someone will share an article with me about how science proves that the brains of liberals are stunted. Or a post on Twitter will say, Republicans are less intelligent than Democrats. These claims obscure something far more interesting and far more accurate.

There are genuine psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. Understanding these differences can give us fresh insight into our political conflicts. John Hibbing is a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has spent many years studying the psychological and neurological differences between liberals and conservatives. He is co-author of the book, predisposed, liberals, conservatives, and the biology of political differences. John, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you, Shanakaar. Pleasure to be with you. When most of us think about how we came to our political views, John, we have a relatively

straightforward explanation that has to do with our upbringing and background. How does that theory go? Well, whenever I ask my students where their political views come from, the first thing I say is their parents. And I think we have this sense that those views that our parents have passed along are supplemented by those, you know, from a clergy member or a trusted relative, a close friend. But we sort those through our own view of the world and we come to a very rational understanding of the world and an understanding of what social policies are best to make the world better. are best to make the world better. So we're going to look in depth at some of the psychological and brain differences that do exist between liberals and conservatives, but I want to start by looking at how differences

between partisans are not limited to politics. These differences show up in many domains that have nothing to do with politics. Republican President George H.W. Bush once spoke about an issue that had bothered him for many years. us about liberals and conservatives. Well, we tend to see that there are differences in taste. Conservatives do like meat potatoes more, liberals are more likely to prefer ethnic food. So you see that and that we think is part of a deeper pattern of conservatives are a little bit fond of kind of predictability, of standard kinds of things, and liberals are a little bit more willing to experiment in this come through and food taste in a variety of other things. Here's another example.

Researchers once went into the living spaces of people, offices, and dorm rooms, and they recorded the items that they saw. What was different about the living and work spaces of liberals and conservatives? Well, conservatives tended to have lots of things like sports, memorabilia, whereas liberals tended to have more experiential things, lots of books, lots of CDs, especially diverse CDs, whereas conservatives were more likely to have things that organized their lives, calendars, clothes baskets. Also, the researchers suggested the liberals' rooms were not quite as tidy tidy or as well-lighted as the conservative rooms and offices.

There's even been some research looking at differences in our preferences for different kinds of pets. I understand Jonathan Height and others have explored that Liberals and Conservatives gravitated different kinds of dogs. Different kinds of dogs, it tends to be the case that conservatives prefer purebreds, and liberals will go with mixed breed dogs. There are some studies that suggest how you view pets. There isn't that much difference in how many have pets.

Both liberals and conservatives like to have pets at a body equal level, but they might view them somewhat differently. Liberals are a little bit more likely to view them as part of the family, rather than, you know, just a pet. So you have those kinds of very interesting things, not just in pet ownership, but kind of in orientation to the pet. The patterns that John and others have identified are more than just curious. These patterns suggest that our model of political differences is wrong in an important way. Liberals and conservatives don't just

have different political preferences, they have different temperaments. Conservatives don't just care about low-attacks, they also care about where the poetry rhymes. That's right. Should poetry rhyme, we also ask, are you more comfortable with novels that end with clear resolution? Those kinds of things. And, you know, you can start to see a pattern already, I think, in our discussion that it is the case that liberals are more like that is they say,

Sure, I'm okay with free verse. Whereas conservatives say, now, you know, we really think there should be a pattern. Music should come back to a recognizable melody. Poetry should rhyme and novels should wrap up in a way that we are comfortable with. To be clear, the differences John identifies are averages. So you can certainly have a Republican who likes free verse and a Democrat who hates jazz. The point of this research isn't to stereotype liberals and conservatives, but to show that our political choices flow from deeply ingrained psychological differences. Many of us don't realize how our choices as consumers, the cars we buy, the food we eat,

the music we listen to, that these choices inadvertently reveal our political preferences. So I'm happy to tell people on Facebook what kind of music I listen to, but I imagine that they wouldn't be able to tell from that whether I was a Democrat or a Republican. I asked John about research that suggests you can tell whether someone's a conservative or a liberal, if you know what kind of movies they watch, what kind of food they eat, what kind of vacations they take. It's very reasonable that people would not resonate with that line of argument because to them, it's not like they say, well, you know, in order to be a good conservative, I need

to do this or in order to be a good liberal. So you know, they're just being themselves. And I think that's the real message here is that our political beliefs are part and parcel of our entire being. You know, it's not like they're completely separate. And it's just a natural outgrowth of these larger psychological and even physiological tendencies that we've been talking about. When we come back, the psychological traits and brain differences that shape our political

choices and preferences. Stay with us. I want to start with one of the most important differences you and others have identified when it comes to politics, liberals and conservatives differ when it comes to how they see threats and danger. Here's Wayne Lapierre of the National Rifle Association. We know, in the world that surrounds us. There are terrorists and there are home invaders,

drug cartels, carjacquers, knockout gamers, and rapers, and haters, and campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers. So talk about this difference, John. When liberals hear this, what do they hear? When conservatives hear this, what do they hear? Yeah, it really is a remarkable quote. I remember John Stewart played this once on the daily show,

and after the clip, they shan't pan back to Stewart. What the hell you left? And he was hiding behind his desk. So you get the sense that if you listen to this very long, you're scared of everything. The message that I take from this is that you play this to liberals and they say, this guy's nuts. Others have told me he's just doing it because he makes millions

of dollars from the NRA and he doesn't really believe it. I think he does. These threats are very real to him and we're not going to get anywhere unless people who don't feel that way understand that some people do. Likewise, the Wayne Lopiers of the world need to understand that for some people, they just, they don't see the world as threatening as he does, and they don't think we need to build our society around mitigating those threats. So you know, when a liberal like John Stuart hides behind the desk, partly what he's doing is he's mocking Wayne Lopierry, right? He's sort of saying, this is ridiculous.

It's beyond ridiculous to imagine that all these threats are basically around us. We live in a relatively safe society. And basically what John Stuart is communicating is, you know, what you're saying doesn't make any sense. And what you're saying is, it might not make sense to you, but it makes sense to weigh in the peer. Exactly. You know, one of the favorite things for conservatives to say about liberals is that they just don't get it, meaning that, you know, they don't appreciate that it's a dangerous world. And I think that is absolutely true. But it's not that they don't appreciate that it's a dangerous world. And I think that is absolutely true. But it's not that they don't get it because they're being obtuse or they're not informed.

They read about events in the world and they just don't respond to them in the same way. And likewise liberals rather need to recognize that while this may seem silly and you're right about John Stuart mocking us, how can you live your life, worried, and whatever. But to them, this is very real, and a good citizen is vigilant and is prepared to do battle, to protect himself, his family, and society from those threats. What's interesting about both groups here is that there is a very powerful illusion that we have that the rest of the world sees the world the way that we see the world.

And if they come to a different conclusion, it must be because they're being deliberately obtuse or somehow deliberately biased, as opposed to the idea that people are actually, they might be seeing the world the same way, but their reactions to the world might actually be very different. Yeah, I'm really glad you brought that up. Psychologists talk about false consensus. So it turns out that if your favorite color is blue, you grossly overstate the percent of the population whose favorite color is blue.

So I think we need to recognize that. We did a study once as a substance and drostinone. It turns out that people smell it very differently, just because our olfactory systems are structured differently. Some people smell it very favorably, it smells like kind of cookies or incense. Others smell it unfavorably, it'll smell like sweat or even urine. And some don't smell it at all. And it's a genetically-based difference, so we had a bunch of our graduate students smell

this. And I remember one fellow and he smelled it and it just smelled awful to him. And it didn't smell awful to many of the other graduate students. And he was convinced that this was some kind of psychological trick that we were trying to, you know, get him to say, well, yeah, it doesn't smell bad. It was one of those studies. When, in fact, he just couldn't believe that people were that different in the way they smelled this substance. And I think the same thing applies to political beliefs and to the way we experience threats in the world. I remember one of the things that broke the internet recently was the big controversy about whether people heard the word

laurel or heard the word yanny. But this idea that the way that we see here something must be the way everyone else sees it and there's just this feeling of utter disbelief that other people might not see in here the world the same way. Yeah, it's just what we're used to. It makes sense to us. So I do think that's something we need to continue to pound away on that, that we really are wired up quite differently. Let's look at how this plays out when it comes to the subject of immigration. Here is Republican Donald Trump. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists, and some I assume are good people.

And here is Democrat Nancy Pelosi. We are constantly re-indigrated by immigrants coming to our country. Their commitment and courage and commitment to the American dream, which drew them here in the first place, strengthened the American dream. Now it's important to stipulate here, John, that it's entirely possible these are politicians. They might indeed be saying things that are just politically strategic, but how might differences in threat perception

shape the way liberals and conservatives in general think about the subject of immigration? Yeah, I really think immigration, defense, police, law, and order, I think this is really at the core of who we are and at the core of political differences. So, you know, if I am a person like Wayne LaPierre who feels these threats and thinks they're all around us, then it seems to me I would want a set of policies

put forward by our government that helped to reduce those threats and how am I gonna do this? I'm going to do it by allowing people to be well armed. I'm going to do it by spending a lot on defense. I'm going to do it by allowing people to be well-armed. I'm going to do it by spending a lot on defense. I'm going to empower police. I'm going to have the death penalty. I'm going to not allow immigrants to come here. Or if they do, they're going to be extremely vetted,

as the president once said. So, you know, those, I think, to a threat-sensitive mindset are steps that, you know, they only make sense. They just can't really understand why anybody would be a post of those kinds of things, because this would help us to be a safer place. Now, there are all kinds of confounding factors when it comes to studying how politicians speak in the actual world.

Political considerations that are difficult to disentangle from psychological and biological traits. But John and others have studied these differences in experimental settings. John once showed liberals and conservatives positive and negative pictures, and he found they reacted very differently. A positive picture would be something like a beautiful sunset or somebody enjoying themselves on a ski slope, a happy child. A negative picture would be things like a house that had just been leveled by a hurricane, or a guy eating worms, or children who are malnourished. We had people hooked up to some physiological devices.

The most obvious one is electoral-dermal activity or skin conductance, which is a common way of seeing if somebody is just having a reaction, having a physiological arousal to that stimulus. And what we found is that people do have arousals when they see these kinds of images, because they have some emotional content. But we tended to find that liberals were more reactive to the positive images, and conservatives are more reactive to the negative images. I understand that in one brain imaging study that you conducted, volunteers were shown disgusting images, and brain activation from even a single image was actually pretty good

at being able to tell who was liberal and who was conservative. That's true. There have been three or four studies that attempt to see if the brain activation patterns of liberals and conservatives is different. And the one that we did goes back to kind of our favorite thing, which just showed them these these different kinds of pictures. Actually, we had the most luck with pictures of mutilations. And you're right. When we did that, it was very easy to categorize people, you know, without knowing anything about them. All we would look at was the brain scan results. And

we could be incredibly accurate knowing whether they're a liberal or without knowing anything about them. All we would look at was the brain scan results. And we could be incredibly accurate knowing whether they're a liberal or conservative just on the basis of that. Liberals brains, when they looked at mutilation images were much more active in a part of the brain called the S2, somatosensory 2. And this is part of the brain that will be activated if you suffer pain.

So if I kick you in the shin, your somatosensory too would be active. But it's also active if you see pain in others. And so if you would see a movie of somebody stepping on a rusty nail, it goes right through their foot. Your somatosensory too would be active. And what we saw in these brain scans

was that liberals were more likely to have activation in somatosensory too than conservatives. Doesn't mean that conservatives are hard-hearted. It just means that things are happening differently when they see these different images. Now you could argue that a lot of this research is correlational. You could also argue that a lot of the patterns

that John and others find are consistent with the power of upbringing in shaping political preferences. Here's how. Let's say I'm raised in shaping political preferences. Here's how. Let's say I'm raised in a conservative home. I learn to be politically conservative from my parents, but my family also influences all kinds of other things about me that have nothing to do with politics. They shape the kind of food I like to eat, the kind of movies I like to watch, the kind of sports I enjoy.

By this line of reasoning, the fact that liberals and conservatives are different on all manner of things isn't about biology. It just shows you how your family environment can affect lots of things about you. There's a really interesting way to separate the effects of biology from the environment. Think about fraternal and identical twins. Identical twins have identical genes. Fraternal twins have similar but not identical genes. If you follow a group of fraternal and identical twins, each twin pair is raised in the same

household. Each pair eats the same food, listens to the same conversations, watches the same movies. Now, if you find differences between identical twins as a group and fraternal twins as a group, that suggests that biology, non-environment, is the driver. I asked John what SAT studies reveal about political preferences. We were fortunate to have access to a data set. It was very large, includes thousands and thousands of twin pairs collected by a guy named Lyndon Eves. A long ago, it's fairly data data set, but it was a valuable one for us because it included

lots of information about their political views. And when we subjected these data to the standard twin design approach, we did indeed find that the political views were quite heritable. Although people oftentimes misread this, our results suggested that maybe 30 or 40 percent of our political views come from genetics. But that bothered a lot of people, and this was quite a controversial study in political science. Many people didn't like that at all. And they tended to over-interpret those results and make it sound like we were saying that everything was genetic. But if it's 34% genetic, that obviously is 50, 60, 70% that comes from the environment. So all we're saying is that that genetic component is not zero, but apparently that was enough

that some people were upset about that. And so you basically, you're able to tell in some ways that there is a closer link in the political orientation of identical twins, then in the political orientation of fraternal twins, and that tells you that there is some element of the biology, some element of genetics that is driving political preferences. Exactly, now that's well put. And again, it's nice to compare political views with other kinds of things. Height, for example, turns out to be about 80% heritable when you see these, when you subjective the same kind of design, personality traits are about 50% to 60% political views, 30% to 40% I would say. One of the big implications of all of this work, besides just being interesting in and itself, is that it helps us, helps us think think about the political conflicts we have with fresh insight. And you've made the case

that in many ways the more we're able to see the differences between groups of people as inherent or biological, in some ways it changes the way we think about those differences. Talk to me about that idea, John. Yes. When other traits have been understood to be biological, I'm thinking of something like handiness. We used to think that if you were left handed, that was just because you got into a lazy habit.

My father was left handed, and the teacher, this was long ago, would beat him on the hand with a ruler whenever he wrote with his left hand, trained him to write with his right hand. So we viewed that as a flaw, something that need to be driven out. Of course, now we understand that being left handed is very biological. This is something much deeper than just a lazy habit. Or of course, you know, the big one today would be sexual orientation. When people realize that sexual orientation is indeed biologically driven and not something that they just have decided to do, then people are much more tolerant of that. So we were wondering if perhaps the same thing might happen with regard to politics.

If we realize that our political opponents were not simply being lazy, but rather, we're oriented to the world in a different fashion, that maybe we would be a little bit more tolerant of them, that this is the only way we're going to get anywhere, if we at least understand where they're coming from, even if we still might deeply disagree with their conclusions. What would you say to critics who would say, the argument that psychological traits and biological differences are beneath our deep political conflicts doesn't make sense, because we didn't always have this deep divide in our country between liberals and conservatives. There was a time when we had many, many more people in the center, the most liberal Republican

was often to the left of the more most conservative Democrat, and there really has been a sorting of the political parties in recent years. What explains this change, especially over the last 20, 30 years? What I would say to that argument is that I believe we have always had this very same division. This very basic difference between people who are fairly sensitive to threats and think we need to be vigilant in those people who are more into experimentation and trying new things. Ralph Waldo Emerson has a great quote, I'm sorry I can't give it to you verbatim, but it's basically that the division between those people who are supporters of tradition

and those people who are supportive of innovation is very old and has structured the world since time began. John Hibbing is a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has spent years studying the psychological and neurological differences between liberals and conservatives. Along with Kevin Smith and John Alfred, he's the co-author of the book, predisposed, liberals, conservatives, and the biology of political differences. John, thanks for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you, Shankar.

It was a pleasure to be with you. This episode of Hidden Brain was produced by Thomas Liu, and edited by Tara Boyle and Camilla Vargas Restrepo. Our team includes Raina Cohen, Jenny Schmidt, Parth Shah and Laura Quarelle. Our unsung hero this week is Alex Yang. Alex works with our IT team at NPR. He recently helped us update our archiving systems throughout the

process and this was a massive undertaking involving more than a hundred hidden brain episodes. He answered all our endless questions without once rolling his eyes. Thank you Alex. You can find more hidden brain on Facebook and Twitter. If you like the show, please tell one friend about us today. Again, if you love Hidden Brain, take one moment, think of one friend, and spread the word. I'm Shankar Vedantum, and this is NPR. you