The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science- and Reality
Bestselling author Chris Mooney uses cutting-edge research to explain the psychology behind why today's Republicans reject reality-it's just part of who they are.From climate change to evolution, the rejection of mainstream science among Republicans is growing, as is the denial of expert consensus on the economy, American history, foreign policy and much more. Why won't Republicans accept things that most experts agree on? Why are they constantly fighting against the facts?Science writer Chris Mooney explores brain scans, polls, and psychology experiments to explain why conservatives today believe more wrong things; appear more likely than Democrats to oppose new ideas and less likely to change their beliefs in the face of new facts; and sometimes respond to compelling evidence by doubling down on their current beliefs.
- Goes beyond the standard claims about ignorance or corporate malfeasance to discover the real, scientific reasons why Republicans reject the widely accepted findings of mainstream science, economics, and history--as well as many undeniable policy facts (e.g., there were no "death panels" in the health care bill).
- Explains that the political parties reflect personality traits and psychological needs--with Republicans more wedded to certainty, Democrats to novelty--and this is the root of our divide over reality.
- Written by the author of The Republican War on Science, which was the first and still the most influential book to look at conservative rejection of scientific evidence. But the rejection of science is just the beginning...
Certain to spark discussion and debate, The Republican Brain also promises to add to the lengthy list of persuasive scientific findings that Republicans reject and deny.
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Community Reviews
What is this book?
One thing to keep in mind is that this is pretty much yet another hit-job on Republicans among about 10.000 other such social science books. There is a reason I was very hesitant about reading this book, the title. There is nothing new here. If you have watched or read CNN, MSNBC, Vox, NYT, Washington Post or other left-leaning media you already know what the main idea in this book is: Republicans are clearly stupid and wrong and left-wingers are clearly very clever and nearly always right. Most journalists are left-leaning and this author is no exception. So this is the agenda of the book. It's not a neutral standpoint and he readily admits to being liberal maybe 10 times in this book. Just know what you are getting into here.
So does this bias doom the book? Well, for one he is a truly amazing writer. He has a natural gift for creating nearly perfect sentences and explaining complicated concepts in simple terms. Furthermore, he avoids most pseudoscience on the area. While you may expect some pseudoscience to appear among left-leaning pundits this book, in most parts, is scientific and follows most modern social science. Of course he picks and chooses the evidence he needs to prove his point. But he doesn't invent stories to prove his points and he doesn't try to trick the reader with bad studies either. He does understand basic psychology to a higher degree than pretty much all other journalists. Left or right alike. Only a few journalist names like Robert Wright and Sam Harris have a deeper understanding of the science.
But then there is the issue of him clearly defending a biased standpoint. Now, social scientists, just like journalists, are not neutral. Most are left-leaning. In some fields 15-20% professors are Communist and many fields have under 1% conservative professors. The difference is that scientists don't call their books Republican Brain if they plan to attack Republicans head-on. They mostly try to hide their ideological biases. The social scientist Dan Ariely also writes books about politics for example yet he doesn't reveal his agenda this on-the-nose. In those books you clearly understand the liberal bias as the author criticises conservatives for 90% of the book and then only takes some small jabs at radical Communists at the end. But Ariely at least forces himself to somewhat hold back to appear neutral. And this makes him more willing to look for counter-evidence too as he needs something to hide behind to not reveal his ideology. The Republican Brain does no such thing. It's a head-on attack with no backtracking or in-depth criticism of its own theory.
Assumptions in this book - do they hold up to scrutiny?
The book's main assumptions are not fully supported in my opinion. Republicans being bigger scientific deniers? In a way. But that's only if you ignore all of social science knowledge like the author does in this book. Because on IQ, sex and heritability left-wingers are by far the biggest science denier group in academia. Ignoring those areas leaves the answer largely inconclusive. There are plenty of studies showing how left-wingers fail at answering scientific answers correctly while right-wingers or centrists get them right. For some reason the author decided to not include any of them but instead focus on old-school evolution and global warming understanding studies only. You know, the same scientific understanding stuff we already finished debating in the 80s. There is no need to be this selective in a book about science deniers when you could have discussed many more modern topics. These modern studies are found on Google Scholar for free.
He also does use some soft pseudoscience at times. But he always holds back. In one part he applies group selection thinking to explain why people lie. But then he hurriedly backtracks a bit on this line of thinking and we don't see him go into that area again. That's acceptable in my view. As long as he is critical he may mention some unproven theories too. And I won't really fault him for this as group selection is one of those unproven theories one is allowed to mention in scientific writing just like larmackism.
Later he claims that conservatives have always been less scientific than liberals, but that now they are less scientific than ever. I'm not sure if the second point is valid. He also points out that there are fewer conservatives at colleges than ever. But what if we assume one causes the other? You could assume liberals took over the universities and then made sure conservatives could not get a place to explore knowledge as effectively as they themselves could. I don't have proof of this whatsoever. It's just a theory people like Noah Carl support and there is quite an intellectual fight in academia on this issue. At any rate one could explore why conservatives avoid modern colleges to such a high degree and then look into if it's related to the knowledge gap on some scientific issues. It's not fully fair to use it to criticize conservatives as we don't know for sure why they are avoiding universities. Or if rather the universities are avoiding them.
Where Mooney truly reveals his confirmation bias is when he talks about fact-checking sites. He uses one single wrong fact-check to "prove" that PolitiFact are biased pro Republicans - even though they are not Republican. He implies that even left-leaning sites are pro Republican when fact-checking as they want to appear neutral. But he never proves this theory besides this one PolitiFact example and then another small Obama lie he felt shouldn't have been fact-checked by Washington Post. At any rate, he felt PolitiFact were too pro Republican, so he instead used Washington Post Pinocchio ratings to look into which political group lies the most. The problem here is of course that by avoiding the "pro Republican" source he picked Washington Post which is as left-leaning as he is. Would he trust Fox News with fact-checks? If not then why trust a source that has in fact picked a political ideology to support? Their fact-checks do show that Republicans lie more, but yet again this is not conclusive proof of anything as the very source is known for confirmation bias pro Democrats. I wish Mooney at least would use a source that tried to appear neutral. I'm sure Republicans lie more on many areas of science, but maybe a neutral source could have revealed some anti-Democrat effects too.
After the fact-check stuff he "disproves" the hypothesis of gay parents being worse than straight parents by referring to a claim made by the American Psychologist Association where they claim that gay parents are not markedly different. Yet again he makes his ideological confirmation bias error. APA is well-known for being progressive. So why would that quote from them tell us anything about the full scope of research on this topic? They don't try to stay neutral. They have clear progressive goals. He could easily have found that out by looking up stuff on APA he knows progressives are factually wrong about and then spotted that APA gets that awfully wrong. Such examples, freely found on their site, should have told him to avoid using the site as a source. Just as he should have avoided using other liberal media as sources for huge claims.
Another point he makes is his claim that liberals are more open to research as they score higher on the Openness personality trait in OCEAN. He concludes that this makes them more scientific as they are more open to new findings. Yet he doesn't tell the readers that some of the questions on the Openness scale are "did you vote for a liberal candidate in the last election?" and then the negative point question "did you vote for a conservative candidate in the last election?" Of course a trait that measures politics will correlate with political leaning. It's not a big issue though as these questions correlate with the other questions in O so they are not unfair. But it's just something to note. The trait itself measures political leaning!
At the end of the book he describes a study he helped design. Here he tries to do a fair study as he besides having the global warming question also includes a nuclear power question as he wants to see if Republicans are more correct on a scientific area they support but liberals fear.
There is a big issue with this conclusion. Conservatives don't have nuclear power as a core value the same way liberals have green energy as a core value. Nuclear power is just yet another energy source for them that's neither good nor evil. They don't hate nor love it which his study also ends up showing. Yet again he should have looked into social science knowledge questions to find science knowledge differences in the other direction. But somehow he completely overlooks this possibility to disprove himself - yet again - as is being led astray by his ideological biases. This time he even helped design the study! So you can't even claim he just randomly overlooked some of the many studies out there showing the opposite effect. He literally had the chance to investigate the claim himself but failed to even look for an alternative effect. Now, maybe it's not that easy to be a good social scientist and know how to design a study or look for an effect. It's also not easy to make yourself search for studies that disprove your basic assumptions. But no one should just excuse him for not doing this work when he's writing a book attacking the out-group. If you attack someone you are supposed to be fair. This book is not a completely fair attack and everyone who reads it can see that. The least he could do is give the alternative point of view a fair chance.
Conclusion
He did a good job with attacking Republicans. It's fair and direct science for most parts. He did a spectacular job at describing basic psychology! Mindblow that a journalist understands psychology this deep. Unfortunately he did a horrible job at being critical towards liberals. Every time he criticizes liberals even just a little he backtracks and instead attacks Republicans. He does that maybe 20 times in this book. Starts exploring the alternative point of view and then falls into the trap yet again. Obviously I'm not a Republican so for me it's not inexcusable that he seems this mean towards them. But being this ideologically biased in a book and refusing to look at any faults in your own ideology is surely not acceptable as he has plenty of time to go into that instead of repeating the same point 10 times over.
It's a weird book. It's both great and bad at the same time for various reasons. I'm not sure who the ideal reader is either. Maybe a Republican? Probably. Liberals should read this to understand the science but surely even liberals will feel like the narcissistic look at their own ideology here is too much even for them? Surely no one has a need to pat their own back this many times over?
Chris C. Mooney is very close to the psychology greats in basic science understanding. If he wanted to he could be among the very best intellectual psychologists. Yet he is enormously far away too. Because what stops him is an ideology that is just so powerful that it makes him fail to see the full reality of life. Republicans, libertarians, right-wingers and centrists can easily spot his bad logic and ideological arguments and then correct them. But if he doesn't do that himself he will remain a great intellectual voice among his in-group only while being mostly overlooked by experts in psychology who strive for a greater truth still. I'm not sure there is a pill or cure against ideology bias. But if there was Mooney could become one of the biggest names in the field. That's the case for most psychologists though. The bias seems to be a way bigger issue than the lack of knowledge. Maybe Mooney could write a book about that. But I'm sure it will yet again put liberals on an impossibly high pedestal.
One thing to keep in mind is that this is pretty much yet another hit-job on Republicans among about 10.000 other such social science books. There is a reason I was very hesitant about reading this book, the title. There is nothing new here. If you have watched or read CNN, MSNBC, Vox, NYT, Washington Post or other left-leaning media you already know what the main idea in this book is: Republicans are clearly stupid and wrong and left-wingers are clearly very clever and nearly always right. Most journalists are left-leaning and this author is no exception. So this is the agenda of the book. It's not a neutral standpoint and he readily admits to being liberal maybe 10 times in this book. Just know what you are getting into here.
So does this bias doom the book? Well, for one he is a truly amazing writer. He has a natural gift for creating nearly perfect sentences and explaining complicated concepts in simple terms. Furthermore, he avoids most pseudoscience on the area. While you may expect some pseudoscience to appear among left-leaning pundits this book, in most parts, is scientific and follows most modern social science. Of course he picks and chooses the evidence he needs to prove his point. But he doesn't invent stories to prove his points and he doesn't try to trick the reader with bad studies either. He does understand basic psychology to a higher degree than pretty much all other journalists. Left or right alike. Only a few journalist names like Robert Wright and Sam Harris have a deeper understanding of the science.
But then there is the issue of him clearly defending a biased standpoint. Now, social scientists, just like journalists, are not neutral. Most are left-leaning. In some fields 15-20% professors are Communist and many fields have under 1% conservative professors. The difference is that scientists don't call their books Republican Brain if they plan to attack Republicans head-on. They mostly try to hide their ideological biases. The social scientist Dan Ariely also writes books about politics for example yet he doesn't reveal his agenda this on-the-nose. In those books you clearly understand the liberal bias as the author criticises conservatives for 90% of the book and then only takes some small jabs at radical Communists at the end. But Ariely at least forces himself to somewhat hold back to appear neutral. And this makes him more willing to look for counter-evidence too as he needs something to hide behind to not reveal his ideology. The Republican Brain does no such thing. It's a head-on attack with no backtracking or in-depth criticism of its own theory.
Assumptions in this book - do they hold up to scrutiny?
The book's main assumptions are not fully supported in my opinion. Republicans being bigger scientific deniers? In a way. But that's only if you ignore all of social science knowledge like the author does in this book. Because on IQ, sex and heritability left-wingers are by far the biggest science denier group in academia. Ignoring those areas leaves the answer largely inconclusive. There are plenty of studies showing how left-wingers fail at answering scientific answers correctly while right-wingers or centrists get them right. For some reason the author decided to not include any of them but instead focus on old-school evolution and global warming understanding studies only. You know, the same scientific understanding stuff we already finished debating in the 80s. There is no need to be this selective in a book about science deniers when you could have discussed many more modern topics. These modern studies are found on Google Scholar for free.
He also does use some soft pseudoscience at times. But he always holds back. In one part he applies group selection thinking to explain why people lie. But then he hurriedly backtracks a bit on this line of thinking and we don't see him go into that area again. That's acceptable in my view. As long as he is critical he may mention some unproven theories too. And I won't really fault him for this as group selection is one of those unproven theories one is allowed to mention in scientific writing just like larmackism.
Later he claims that conservatives have always been less scientific than liberals, but that now they are less scientific than ever. I'm not sure if the second point is valid. He also points out that there are fewer conservatives at colleges than ever. But what if we assume one causes the other? You could assume liberals took over the universities and then made sure conservatives could not get a place to explore knowledge as effectively as they themselves could. I don't have proof of this whatsoever. It's just a theory people like Noah Carl support and there is quite an intellectual fight in academia on this issue. At any rate one could explore why conservatives avoid modern colleges to such a high degree and then look into if it's related to the knowledge gap on some scientific issues. It's not fully fair to use it to criticize conservatives as we don't know for sure why they are avoiding universities. Or if rather the universities are avoiding them.
Where Mooney truly reveals his confirmation bias is when he talks about fact-checking sites. He uses one single wrong fact-check to "prove" that PolitiFact are biased pro Republicans - even though they are not Republican. He implies that even left-leaning sites are pro Republican when fact-checking as they want to appear neutral. But he never proves this theory besides this one PolitiFact example and then another small Obama lie he felt shouldn't have been fact-checked by Washington Post. At any rate, he felt PolitiFact were too pro Republican, so he instead used Washington Post Pinocchio ratings to look into which political group lies the most. The problem here is of course that by avoiding the "pro Republican" source he picked Washington Post which is as left-leaning as he is. Would he trust Fox News with fact-checks? If not then why trust a source that has in fact picked a political ideology to support? Their fact-checks do show that Republicans lie more, but yet again this is not conclusive proof of anything as the very source is known for confirmation bias pro Democrats. I wish Mooney at least would use a source that tried to appear neutral. I'm sure Republicans lie more on many areas of science, but maybe a neutral source could have revealed some anti-Democrat effects too.
After the fact-check stuff he "disproves" the hypothesis of gay parents being worse than straight parents by referring to a claim made by the American Psychologist Association where they claim that gay parents are not markedly different. Yet again he makes his ideological confirmation bias error. APA is well-known for being progressive. So why would that quote from them tell us anything about the full scope of research on this topic? They don't try to stay neutral. They have clear progressive goals. He could easily have found that out by looking up stuff on APA he knows progressives are factually wrong about and then spotted that APA gets that awfully wrong. Such examples, freely found on their site, should have told him to avoid using the site as a source. Just as he should have avoided using other liberal media as sources for huge claims.
Another point he makes is his claim that liberals are more open to research as they score higher on the Openness personality trait in OCEAN. He concludes that this makes them more scientific as they are more open to new findings. Yet he doesn't tell the readers that some of the questions on the Openness scale are "did you vote for a liberal candidate in the last election?" and then the negative point question "did you vote for a conservative candidate in the last election?" Of course a trait that measures politics will correlate with political leaning. It's not a big issue though as these questions correlate with the other questions in O so they are not unfair. But it's just something to note. The trait itself measures political leaning!
At the end of the book he describes a study he helped design. Here he tries to do a fair study as he besides having the global warming question also includes a nuclear power question as he wants to see if Republicans are more correct on a scientific area they support but liberals fear.
There is a big issue with this conclusion. Conservatives don't have nuclear power as a core value the same way liberals have green energy as a core value. Nuclear power is just yet another energy source for them that's neither good nor evil. They don't hate nor love it which his study also ends up showing. Yet again he should have looked into social science knowledge questions to find science knowledge differences in the other direction. But somehow he completely overlooks this possibility to disprove himself - yet again - as is being led astray by his ideological biases. This time he even helped design the study! So you can't even claim he just randomly overlooked some of the many studies out there showing the opposite effect. He literally had the chance to investigate the claim himself but failed to even look for an alternative effect. Now, maybe it's not that easy to be a good social scientist and know how to design a study or look for an effect. It's also not easy to make yourself search for studies that disprove your basic assumptions. But no one should just excuse him for not doing this work when he's writing a book attacking the out-group. If you attack someone you are supposed to be fair. This book is not a completely fair attack and everyone who reads it can see that. The least he could do is give the alternative point of view a fair chance.
Conclusion
He did a good job with attacking Republicans. It's fair and direct science for most parts. He did a spectacular job at describing basic psychology! Mindblow that a journalist understands psychology this deep. Unfortunately he did a horrible job at being critical towards liberals. Every time he criticizes liberals even just a little he backtracks and instead attacks Republicans. He does that maybe 20 times in this book. Starts exploring the alternative point of view and then falls into the trap yet again. Obviously I'm not a Republican so for me it's not inexcusable that he seems this mean towards them. But being this ideologically biased in a book and refusing to look at any faults in your own ideology is surely not acceptable as he has plenty of time to go into that instead of repeating the same point 10 times over.
It's a weird book. It's both great and bad at the same time for various reasons. I'm not sure who the ideal reader is either. Maybe a Republican? Probably. Liberals should read this to understand the science but surely even liberals will feel like the narcissistic look at their own ideology here is too much even for them? Surely no one has a need to pat their own back this many times over?
Chris C. Mooney is very close to the psychology greats in basic science understanding. If he wanted to he could be among the very best intellectual psychologists. Yet he is enormously far away too. Because what stops him is an ideology that is just so powerful that it makes him fail to see the full reality of life. Republicans, libertarians, right-wingers and centrists can easily spot his bad logic and ideological arguments and then correct them. But if he doesn't do that himself he will remain a great intellectual voice among his in-group only while being mostly overlooked by experts in psychology who strive for a greater truth still. I'm not sure there is a pill or cure against ideology bias. But if there was Mooney could become one of the biggest names in the field. That's the case for most psychologists though. The bias seems to be a way bigger issue than the lack of knowledge. Maybe Mooney could write a book about that. But I'm sure it will yet again put liberals on an impossibly high pedestal.