Scientific analysis has been able to solve the mysteries of polio and smallpox, heavier-than-air flight, the structure of atoms, and millions of other longstanding puzzles of nature. Could it now be used to diagnose and perhaps even solve our nation’s political dysfunction?
There are grounds for some optimism. A new generation of university researchers, many with backgrounds in psychology, are tackling the question, armed with new findings involving behavioral genetics.
The leaders include John T. Jost, a professor of psychology at New York University who has found that aversion to ambiguity, a sense of threats, and disgust are often traits of conservatives, and John R. Hibbing, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln who has connected those traits to genetic origins.
A key development was a 2005 paper in the American Political Science Review, written by John R. Alford of Rice University, Carolyn L. Funk of Virginia Commonwealth University, and Mr. Hibbing, which estimated that genetic factors account for about 32 percent of a person’s political ideology. Heredity had previously been considered a minor factor.
“That article got folks thinking there was a lot of hereditary factors,” said Christopher M. Federico, an associate professor of psychology and political science at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis who studies links between personality traits and politics.
The differences between political left and right are now being recognized as “very deep and psychological, such that they connect with very basic personality tendencies that don’t really have anything in particular to do with politics,” Mr. Federico said.
Research into those tendencies aims to refine the Alford-Funk-Hibbing estimate and to get a better understanding of the pathways that lead from biology to brainwaves to ballots.
One practitioner is Darren M. Schreiber, an assistant professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, who is putting final touches on a paper that claims an 82-percent accuracy rate in identifying a person’s partisan orientation by looking at scans of his or her brain activity.
“We’ve just recently entered this era where our models are accounting for stuff that we simply couldn’t have predicted before,” Mr. Schreiber said.
Policy Applications
Such knowledge could be useful in crafting public policies and messages that promote greater political unity, researchers said. Still, many researchers acknowledge they have far to go before brain scans and genetic maps might be used effectively to help heal the nation’s partisan divisions.
“In terms of policy responses,” Mr. Federico said, “I don’t know if there’s any clear answers there.”
The need is certainly there. Last year’s downgrade of U.S. government bonds after a drawn-out fight in Congress over a routine increase in the debt ceiling offers a jarring example of the nation’s current political paralysis. There’s also the prolonged failure to tackle major problems like climate change, health-care affordability, and economic malaise.
One of the biggest obstacles for university researchers studying the origins of partisan affiliations may be the toxic political environment itself. Scott H. Eidelman, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, got a taste of that recently after he published a study suggesting that “low-effort thought” appears to lead people to adopt conservative positions.
Mr. Eidelman’s report involved four separate studies of people in various situations, with the results showing that those who take or are given less time to consider a question of public policy tend to support a more conservative approach. He described the finding as similar to a 1974 study, led by Robert O. Hansson of the University of Tulsa, that found that people given less time to answer a series of referendum questions tended to select the more conservative options.
Mr. Eidelman has emphasized that the results largely reflect the wide recognition that—similar to the findings of Mr. Jost—conservatives generally crave closure, prefer to act quickly, and choose instinctive solutions. It’s not necessarily a vindication of liberals, who can be faulted as too indecisive and morally ambiguous, he said.
The report nevertheless garnered Mr. Eidelman several dozen harassing e-mails and at least two death threats.
Many researchers in this field tend to be careful in characterizing their findings, with some even limiting the kinds of questions they study.
Mr. Hibbing said that in studying perceptions of policy questions, he makes a point of avoiding assessments of people’s objective accuracy or the validity of their beliefs.
Still, his reports on political perceptions have drawn sharp criticisms from both sides of the partisan divide, Mr. Hibbing said. “We’re doing our best not to give them any more ammunition,” he said.
That doesn’t sit well with others in the field. Riley E. Dunlap, a professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University who studies political attitudes about climate change, said he sees researchers trying too hard to treat partisan behaviors even-handedly.
“Out in the real world,” Mr. Dunlap said, “I’m not personally convinced that there is an equal balance of bias. I believe that we see things like authoritarianism, dogmatism, closed-mindedness, to be distributed currently more on the right than on the left, but researchers seem kind of reluctant to talk about this, just like most political pundits do.”
Unclear Genetic Influences
Researchers also need to confront overlapping uncertainties about the origins of partisan alignments. The Alford-Funk-Hibbing estimate, and other work in which studies of twins showed that as much as 40 percent of a person’s political orientation can be explained by genes, still leaves many unanswered questions about how the genetic component leads to a particular political outcome, Mr. Schreiber said.
Genes are understood to lead to behavioral tendencies such as a willingness to try new things and an alertness to threats. And Mr. Jost has shown that behaviors like those are linked to certain political orientations. But, Mr. Federico said, much more study is needed to track how directly a certain set of genes might lead to a specific political outlook, given all the intervening influences in an individual life.
Then there are researchers who see as flawed virtually any effort to characterize political orientation through analyses of genetics and brain structures. Dan M. Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale University, said his studies had found that people who are on the same side of the ideological spectrum take similar positions on a wide variety of policy issues that are unrelated, like climate change, abortion, and taxes. That, he said, suggests that partisan identities drive ideological positions, not the reverse.
Partisan adherence to or dismissal of a scientific consensus—such as conservatives’ tendency to reject the science of climate change but accept the safety of nuclear power—is more directly and simply explained by the well-established concept of “motivated reasoning,” Mr. Kahan said. That’s borne out by studies showing that conservatives and liberals alike are inclined to cling even more tightly to their beliefs, rather than consider alternatives, when confronted with factual counterarguments, he said.
The determination of some researchers to find a biological basis for political orientation suggests perhaps something about the political motivation of the researchers, Mr. Kahan said. “What exactly are they trying to explain, why is what they’re trying to explain important?” he said.
Toward Common Ground?
Either way, Mr. Kahan and other researchers see their work as possibly charting a way out of the nation’s divisive political environment, even if some of the solutions they suggest have already been tried with only limited effect.
For instance, given the general understanding that people react negatively to arguments that challenge their political orientation, researchers have proposed that one clear path toward common ground might involve the avoidance of phrases and concepts known to arouse partisan associations.
The need-for-closure finding suggests that one way of making social-welfare programs more palatable to conservatives would be to sell them as “income security” or “social insurance,” meaning a protection for all individuals against negative events that are beyond their control, Mr. Federico said.
When it comes to wooing conservatives on an issue, he said, “you want to sell them on the idea that it would avoid negative consequences rather than gain positives.”
The researchers nevertheless recognize the obstacles to the advent of calmer political times. Mr. Schreiber draws an analogy between the difficulty of assessing personal political motivations and the complexity of studying the formation of clouds. Clouds do manage to take regular and often predictable forms, yet they’re still made up of molecules drifting in seemingly random directions. The underlying personal behaviors that form the nation’s now-predictable partisan alignments may be no easier to decipher, he said.
“Any time I see an answer that is simplistic, facile,” he said, “it just screams to me that it is likely to be wrong.”
