What do I think of Mooney's "Republican Brain"? - Cultural Cognition of Health

Everyone knows that science journalist Chris Mooney has written a book entitled The Republican Brain . In it, he synthesizes a wealth of social science studies in support of the conclusion that having a conservative political outlook is associated with lack of reflection and closed-mindedness.

I read it. And I liked it a lot.

Mooney possess the signature craft skills of a first-rate science journalist, including the intelligence (and sheer determination) necessary to critically engage all manner of technical material, and the expositional skill required to simultaneously educate and entertain.

He’s also diligent and fair minded.

And of course he’s spirited: he has a point of view plus a strong desire to persuade—features that for me make the experience of reading Mooney’s articles and books a lot of fun, whether I agree with his conclusions (as often I do) or not.

As it turns out, I don’t feel persuaded of the central thesis of The Republican Brain . That is, I’m not convinced that the mass of studies that it draws on supports the inference that Republicans/conservatives reason in a manner that is different from and less reasoned than Democrats/liberals.

The problem, though, is with the studies, not Mooney’s synthesis.  Indeed, Mooney’s account of the studies enabled me to form a keener sense of exactly what I think the defects are in this body of work. That’s a testament to how good he is at what he does.

In this, the first of two ( additional ; this issue is impossible to get away from) posts, I’m going to discuss what I think the shortcomings in these studies are. In the next post, I’ll present some results from a new study of my own, the design of which was informed by this evaluation.

1. Validity of quality-of-reasoning measures

The studies Mooney assembles are not all of a piece but the ones that play the largest role in the book and in the literature correlate ideology or party affiliation with one or another measure of cognitive processing and conclude that conservativism is associated with “lower” quality reasoning or closed-mindedness.

These measures, though, are of questionable validity. Many are based on self-reporting; “need for cognition,” for example, literally just asks people whether the “notion of thinking abstractly is appealing to” them, etc. Others use various personality-style constructs like “authoritarian” personality that researchers believe are associated with dogmatism. Evidence that these sorts of scales actually measure what they say is spare.

Objective measures—ones that measure performance on specific cognitive tasks—are much better. The best  of these, in my view, are the “cognitive reflection test” (CRT) which measures the disposition to check intuition with conscious analytica reasoning, and “numeracy,” which measures quantatative reasoning capacity, and includes CRT as a subcomponent.

These measures have been validated. That is, they have been shown to predict—very strongly—the disposition of people either to fall prey to or avoid one or another form of cognitive bias.

As far as I know, CRT and numeracy don’t correlate in any clear way with ideology, cultural predispositions, or the like. Indeed, I myself have collected evidence showing they don’t (and have talked with other researchers who report the same).

2. Relationship between quality-of-reasoning measures and motivated cognition

Another problem: it’s not clear that the sorts of things that even a valid measure of reasoning quality gets at have any bearing on the phenomenon Mooney is trying to explain.

That phenomenon, I take it, is the persistence of cultural or ideological conflict over risks and other facts that admit of scientific evidence. Even if those quality-of-reasoning measures that figure in the studies Mooney cites are in fact valid, I don’t think they furnish any strong basis for inferring anything about the source of controversy over policy-relevant science.

Mooney believes, as do I, that such conflicts are likely the product of motivated reasoning—which refers to the tendency of people to fit their assessment of information (not just scientific evidence, but argument strength, source credibility, etc.) to some end or goal extrinsic to forming accurate beliefs. The end or goal in question here is promotion of one’s ideology or perhaps securing of one’s connection to others who share it.

There’s no convincing evidence I know of that the sorts of defects in cognition measured by quality of reasoning measures (of any sort) predict individuals’ vulnerability to motivated reasoning.

Indeed, there is strong evidence that motivated reasoning can infect or bias higher level processing—analytical or systematic, as it has been called traditionally; or “System 2” in Kahneman’s adaptation—as well as lower-level, heuristic or “System 1” reasoning.