The Republican Brain and The Righteous Mind

Up with Chris Hayes includes an episode in which Hayes discusses the science of ideology with Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality, and Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.  Both of these authors have some very interesting things to say about political polarization in the United States. The episode is here: The May 5, 2012, episode of Up with Chris Hayes: The Psychology of Political Polarization." The episode serves as a brief introduction to the current research on politics and personality.

In his New York Times review of Jonathan Haidt's book The Righteous Mind, William Saletan writes:

[Haidt] sees the left and right as yin and yang, each contributing insights to which the other should listen. In his view, for instance, liberals can teach conservatives to recognize and constrain predation by entrenched interests. Haidt believes in the power of reason, but the reasoning has to be interactive. It has to be other people’s reason engaging yours. We’re lousy at challenging our own beliefs, but we’re good at challenging each other’s. Haidt compares us to neurons in a giant brain, capable of “producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system.”

However, there can be no interaction where one group is demonizing the other, and at this time, demonizing Democrats and liberals has become mainstream in the Republican Party [see Newt Gingrich's advice to call one's Democratic opponents "traitors"]. But I have also been repelled by the smugness I've often observed in liberals  (and that I have sometimes been guilty of myself).  Haidt's book can serve as a useful check on that smugness.

James Wilson reviews Haidt's book and Mooney's book in his Financial Times article : "Political Animals: How Psychology and Biology Can Help Explain the Conservative-Liberal Divide." He ends his review with this advice:

As psychology and biology encroach on politics, there is perhaps a danger that those on opposing sides will decide there is no point in attempting to overcome these intrinsic differences. Haidt and Mooney reject such pessimism: both end with impassioned pleas for tolerance and engagement, for a culture that values difference, recognises limits and learns to disagree more constructively. These are arguments with obvious relevance in a US election year, but they deserve a wide readership among all those who care about the quality and civility of our politics.

So say we all.