By Chris Mooney
Earlier this week, yesterday's Republican primary champ Rick Santorum called global warming a "hoax." Yes, a hoax. In other words, apparently scientists are in a global cabal to needlessly alarm us about what's happening with the climate -- and why would they do such a thing?
Well, presumably to help advance an economy-choking agenda of global governance -- or perhaps, to line their own pockets with government research grants. Seriously.
Santorum's absurd global warming conspiracy theory is the kind of thing that absolutely outrages liberals -- but to my mind, they really ought to be getting used to it by now. From global warming denial to claims about "death panels" to baseless fears about inflation, it often seems there are so many factually wrong claims on the political right that those who make them live in a different reality.
So here's an idea: Maybe they actually do. And maybe we can look to science itself -- albeit, ironically, a body of science whose fundamental premise (the theory of evolution) most Republicans deny -- to help understand why it is that they view the world so differently.
In my last piece here, I commented on the growing body of research suggesting that the difference between liberals and conservatives is not merely ideological in nature. Rather, it seems more deeply rooted in psychology and the brain -- with ideology itself emerging as a kind of by-product of fundamentally different patterns of perceiving and responding to the world that spill over into many aspects of life, not just the political.
To back this up, I listed seven published studies showing a consistent set of physiological, brain, and "attentional" differences between liberals and conservatives. Later on my blog, I listed no less than eleven studies showing genetic differences as well.
Last month, yet another scientific paper on this subject came out -- from the National Science Foundation-supported political physiology laboratory at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The work, published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (free version here), goes further still in helping us understand how biological and physiological differences between liberals and conservatives may lead to very different patterns of political behavior.
As the new research suggests, conservatism is largely a defensive ideology -- and therefore, much more appealing to people who go through life sensitive and highly attuned to aversive or threatening aspects of their environments. By contrast, liberalism can be thought of as an exploratory ideology -- much more appealing to people who go through life trying things out and seeking the new.
All of this is reflected, in a measurable way, in the physiological responses that liberals and conservatives show to emotionally evocative but otherwise entirely apolitical images -- and also to images of politicians, either on their own side or from across the aisle.
Much More: Chris Mooney: Want to Understand Republicans? First Understand Evolution
Related Links
The Left and the Right: Physiology, Brain Structure and Function, and Attentional Differences
The Left and the Right, Part II: Eleven Genetic Studies
The Left Rolls with the Good; The Right Confronts the Bad Physiology and Cognition in Politics
PLoS ONE: The Automatic Conservative: Ideology-Based Attentional Asymmetries in the Processing of Valenced Information
The Left and the Right: Physiology, Brain Structure and Function, and Attentional Differences
The Left and the Right, Part II: Eleven Genetic Studies
The Left Rolls with the Good; The Right Confronts the Bad Physiology and Cognition in Politics
PLoS ONE: The Automatic Conservative: Ideology-Based Attentional Asymmetries in the Processing of Valenced Information