6

The Psychology of the Left and the Right

The Psychology of Aesthetic Preferences

When it comes to artwork, my friend Amy enjoys abstract designs with blended colors and blurred lines. Annie on the other hand likes paintings that look like photographs: realistic and true to life. People like to think of such preferences as stemming from a highly personal, almost spiritual place. (“This painting just speaks to me.”) Yet research indicates that these preferences reflect deep psychological characteristics. Psychologists and philosophers have tackled the question of aesthetic preferences for centuries, dating back to Gustav Fechner in the late 1800s.¹ These scholars sought to understand how people’s preferences for images, shapes, and artwork reflect their underlying psychological traits, which make some aesthetic forms more appealing than others to them. As Stephen Palmer, Karen Schloss, and Jonathan Sammartino summarize it: “aesthetics is the study of those mental processes that underlie disinterested evaluative experiences that are anchored at the positive end by feelings that would accompany verbal expressions such as “Oh wow! That’s wonderful! I love it!” and at the negative end by “Oh yuck! That’s awful! I hate it!”² But people’s preferences for art are not the only preferences these underlying mental processes shape. In fact, aesthetic preferences “occur anywhere in response to seeing any sort of object, scene, or event.”³

Could this mean that these aesthetic preferences shape how we respond to humorous incongruities? Political satire? Or even in response to the genre known as outrage?

Yes.

And might these preferences be driven by “underlying mental processes” that derive from people’s psychological—even physiological, biological, or genetic—predispositions?

Indeed.

Recall the psychological trait need for cognition—how much some people enjoy thinking—and how it contributes to their appreciation for complex jokes. People high in need for cognition are more appreciative of humor in general, likely because it requires cognitive work to reconcile the incongruity.⁴ Need for cognition also shapes how people process different forms of information and hence what kinds of information or aesthetic forms they appreciate, seek out, and enjoy. When consumers respond to advertisements, for example, people who enjoy thinking (that is, are high in need for cognition) tend to evaluate the arguments in the ads more extensively than people who don’t. Among people high in need for cognition, the strength of the arguments made in an advertisement tends to be a stronger determinant of their overall opinion of the ad and of the product it is advertising than it is among those who are lower in need for cognition. Meanwhile, among those lower in need for cognition, their opinion of the ad and its product will be determined more by surface-level characteristics, like the attractiveness of the message source, music, and visual cues.⁵ This means that different kinds of people end up liking—and being persuaded by—very different kinds of ads.

Need for cognition also shapes aesthetic preferences captured through people’s recreational habits—like reading. It turns out that how much people enjoy thinking plays a role in influencing the kinds of books they read. Those higher in need for cognition are more likely to report reading complex works of fiction than those lower in need for cognition.⁶ Mia Stokmans, a professor at Tilburg University, found that the participants who were lowest in need for cognition reported the highest proportion of pleasure reading in the genres of romance (least complex) and mystery (moderately complex), while those high in need for cognition were the most likely to report the highest proportion of pleasure reading in the genre of complex works of literature. These relationships are undoubtedly shaped and reinforced by social cues and context. People who think of themselves as intellectually curious and thoughtful will gravitate toward the kinds of books they think people like them ought to be reading. But at least some of these patterns stem from psychological characteristics.

Need for cognition also tends to be high among people who are tolerant of ambiguity. Tolerance for ambiguity is another key trait that contributes to artistic and aesthetic preferences. Tolerance for ambiguity, also known in association with its converse, need for closure, refers to how comfortable an individual is with novelty and uncertainty.⁷ People who are high in tolerance for ambiguity adapt easily to new situations, are open to new experiences, and tend to reject structure, order, and predictability. Those low in tolerance for ambiguity, who are high in need for closure, are less comfortable with new experiences and tend to prefer routines, order, structure, and predictability.

The psychological battery of questions used to measure need for closure includes 47 items relating to one’s comfort with and preference for certain kinds of experiences over others.⁸ Developed by Arie Kruglanski and his colleagues, the measure involves asking respondents to what extent they agree or disagree with statements such as these: I don’t like situations that are uncertain. I dislike questions which could be answered in many different ways. I find that a well-ordered life with regular hours suits my temperament. I usually make important decisions quickly and confidently. The measure also includes agreement with items which denotes lower need for closure: I tend to struggle with most decisions. When considering most conflict situations, I can usually see how both sides could be right.⁹

As is clear from the items listed here, the need for closure scale includes several different underlying dimensions, including need for order, need for predictability, need for decisiveness, intolerance for ambiguity, and closed-mindedness. In spite of these unique underlying dimensions, people who score high in one tend to also score higher in the others. This means that need for order, predictability, decisiveness, and intolerance for ambiguity tend to work together. They coexist. Which explains how and why this trait—which seems mostly about one’s comfort with social situations and life routines—also shapes people’s preferences for certain kinds of information and art.

In studies of people’s artistic preferences, people low in tolerance for ambiguity have been found to reject abstract art in favor of more realistic work.¹⁰ Justin Ostrofsky and Elizabeth Shobe, for example, found that when it came to highly realistic paintings, people with varying levels of need for closure showed little variance in how much they understood them or liked them.¹¹ But in the case of nonrealistic paintings (more abstract work), people high in tolerance for ambiguity liked them more than people lower in tolerance for ambiguity. Ostrofsky and Shobe explain that participants who were less tolerant of ambiguity didn’t want to look at the nonrealistic paintings for very long, so they cut their time short compared to people without such need for closure. In a massive study of artistic preferences using over 91,000 participants from the United Kingdom, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and his colleagues found that openness to experience (a dimension of tolerance for ambiguity) was “the strongest and only consistent personality correlate of artistic preferences, affecting both overall and specific preferences, as well as visits to galleries, and artistic (rather than scientific) self-perception.”¹²

Tolerance for ambiguity shapes preferences for the performing arts as well. Daphne Weirsema and her colleagues at the University of Amsterdam examined the link between need for closure and aesthetic preferences in the context of abstract paintings and theatrical productions featuring plots that remain unresolved at the end.¹³ Appreciation for both the abstract paintings and the open-ended plays was highest among those who scored highest in tolerance for ambiguity. The people who needed cognitive closure preferred realistic art and plays that resolved all of their plot points at the end. Again, these findings support the idea that those high in need for closure have less appreciation of ideas that do not provide explicit conclusions. As the authors write, “individuals high in need for closure are less attracted to art forms that do not satisfy their need for clarity, meaning, and quick answers.”¹⁴

For Some People, an Ellipsis Is Not OK

In 2004, I sat in a Philadelphia movie theater to watch the romantic indie movie Garden State with my husband. In the film, Andrew (portrayed by Zach Braff) returns from his life as an aspiring actor in Los Angeles to his hometown in New Jersey to attend his mother’s funeral. For two hours, we watch a traumatized and neurotic Zach Braff and a quirky and beautiful Natalie Portman spend four strange, intense, and oddly romantic days together. Against the backdrop of a familiar and angst-inducing suburbia, and set to the melancholy music of The Shins and Coldplay, the film is a portrait of two flawed people, Braff and Portman, falling in love.

Spoiler alert (although if you haven’t seen a 2004 film by now, chances are, you’re safe). In the final scene of the film, Braff is scheduled to return to his life in Los Angeles. Portman escorts him to the airport to see him off.

So, will they stay together? Are they breaking up?

They sit at the bottom of a stairway, and Portman asks Braff pointedly, “You’re not coming back are you?”

He then delivers the most frustrating line in the history of movie lines:

“Look, this isn’t a conversation about this being over. It’s … I’m not, like, putting a period at the end of this, you know? I’m putting, like, an ellipsis on it …”

An ellipsis?

I remember turning to my husband at this very moment in the theater, tears streaming down my face, and angrily whispering,

“An ellipsis is not OK.”

As Braff leaves Portman and runs away to his gate, audiences fully expect him to turn around and run back to her. After all, that’s what happens in romantic movies. But he keeps running. He gets on the plane. We see him sitting on the plane. And then we see Portman sobbing in a phone booth in the airport.

At this point, I was ready to demand a refund. Because not only am I already someone who is relatively high in need for closure … I was also six months pregnant with our son. I didn’t go to the theater to get jerked around and left not knowing what was going to happen next as I was about to bring a child into the world and was especially high in need for order, closure, certainty, and predictability.

But then … all of a sudden … Braff barges into the phone booth where Portman is sobbing! He came back!

He pulls Portman out of the phone booth. “You remember that idea I had about working stuff out on my own and then finding you once I figured that stuff out?” he breathlessly asks her.

“The ellipsis?” she wipes her tears away.

“Yeah, the ellipsis. It’s dumb. It’s dumb. It’s an awful idea, I’m not going to do it, OK? And like you said, this is it. This is life. And I’m in love with you, Samantha.”

Need for closure, indeed.

The Psychology of Political Ideology

Where all of this is heading, of course, is to a discussion of the unique psychological profiles of liberals and conservatives—unique psychological profiles that contribute to people’s aesthetic preferences and so might help explain the abundance of satire on the left and the lack of it on the right. Dating back to Theodor Adorno and others’ work on The Authoritarian Personality,¹⁵ written in the wake of World War II, political psychologists have explored how psychological and personality traits are correlated with political attitudes. More recent work in neuroscience and cognitive psychology has helped to establish these important links, explaining how and why people’s psychological profiles relate to their political preferences.

Before getting too deep into the psychological correlates of political ideology, let me first be clear that these correlations are about probabilities, not deterministic relationships. Research on the “psychology of the left and right” does not assert that “conservatives are always this way” and “liberals are always that way.” Rather, it explores the probability that people will have certain traits given their political preferences and, conversely, the probability that people will have certain political preferences given their psychological traits. Social science never involves propositions in the form “If this is true then that is necessarily also true.” If it did, then studying social science would be a lot easier that it actually is. Instead, that pesky phenomenon known as “free will” gets in the way. People can choose to believe whatever they want, do whatever they want, and respond to external stimuli however they want.

People can choose to do any of these things. … However, people tend to organize their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors in patterns, making them somewhat predictable.

And this is the underlying logic of social science.

So, what are some of the psychological traits that correlate with political ideology? Conveniently, for the purposes of the argument I’m crafting here, they are the exact same traits that shape information processing and aesthetic preferences: chief among them being need for cognition and tolerance for ambiguity (and its converse, need for closure). A number of surveys and experiments have demonstrated that need for cognition (enjoyment of thinking) tends to be higher among political liberals than among political conservatives.¹⁶ These studies show that individuals who enjoy thinking also tend to be more politically liberal, both when measured as self-described political ideology and when measured in terms of policy preferences. Several studies have sought to understand how this link between ideology and psychology plays out in the context of specific political judgments. For example, Michael Sargent explored people’s opinions on the use of harsh responses to criminal acts and confirmed that people high in need for cognition “were less supportive of punitive measures.”¹⁷ This phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that low need for cognition contributes to judgments that are made based on gut reactions and heuristics: cues that do not involve as much effortful processing and hence lead to quick, reflexive, and often emotional responses.¹⁸ Another study, by Chadly Stern and his colleagues, used gender cues to assess how liberals and conservatives determined someone’s sexual orientation—that is, how do people decide if they think a person is gay or straight?¹⁹ Conservatives were more likely than liberals to make determinations of strangers’ sexual orientations based on existing stereotypes about gays and lesbians.²⁰ Such findings are consistent with a model in which conservatives’ lower need for cognition drives a reliance on heuristic cues that lead to quick, emotional responses.

Second, across numerous studies and various methodologies, conservatives have been found to be higher in need for closure than liberals.²¹ This association is especially pronounced when examining the link between need for closure and social/cultural conservatism, in contrast to economic conservatism.²² Strong cultural conservatives demonstrate lower tolerance for aspects of social change that may present uncertainty or pose a threat to the existing social order.²³ A recent study I conducted with my colleagues at the University of Delaware examined the link between need for closure and opinions about transgender people and transgender rights.²⁴ Our results confirmed our suspicions that need for closure would predict more negative feelings toward transgender people and rights. Thus, we argued that “individuals with a high need for cognitive closure [will] be uncomfortable with the ambiguity inherent in the concept of a gender identity that does not match the sex assigned at birth.”²⁵ Indeed, this lack of comfort with ambiguity correlated with more negative opinions of transgender people and lower support for transgender rights.

John Jost and his colleagues at New York University completed a metaanalysis of 88 unique samples that explored this link between political conservatism and various dimensions of need for closure.²⁶ This mammoth “study of other studies” included over 22,000 respondents in data sets from 12 countries. All told, the analyses confirmed a strong consistent relationship between political conservatism and measures of tolerance for ambiguity. The authors conclude: “conservative ideologies, like virtually all other belief systems, are adopted in part because they satisfy various psychological needs. … We regard political conservatism as an ideological belief system that is significantly (but not completely) related to motivational concerns having to do with the psychological management of uncertainty and fear. Specifically, the avoidance of uncertainty (and the striving for certainty) may be particularly tied to one core dimension of conservative thought, resistance to change.”²⁷ In recent years, some political psychologists have been publicly critical of this so-called rigidity-of-the-right literature, arguing that some of the studies have methodological and conceptual flaws.²⁸ Of concern to scholars like Ariel Malka and Yphtach Lelkes is the fact that the questions sometimes included in the need for closure scales may contain subtle political themes, hence making it all but certain that researchers will find that these “psychological traits” correlate with political conservatism. Another critique is that scholars in this area have not gone far enough to highlight how these linkages are less pronounced in the context of economic or fiscal conservatism. While the link between need for closure and social and cultural conservatism (immigration attitudes, beliefs about gay marriage and abortion) are robust and consistent, the connections between need for closure and attitudes toward taxation and regulation, for example, are less clear. I highlight these critiques simply to say that the literature is not without its critics. For my purposes, though, the consistent finding that the psychological profile of social/cultural conservatives is distinct from that of social/cultural liberals is most important. And while individual studies may have used psychological items that conflate political ideology with need for closure or openness, I remain convinced that, taken as a whole, the unique psychological profiles of the left and the right are not wholly attributable to an artifact of measurement.

Mounting evidence suggests that these psychological differences are real and that they stem from distinct physiological characteristics. Studies conducted in the emerging field of political neuroscience point to differences in brain structures between liberals and conservatives—differences that map onto their unique psychological traits and orientations to the world. For instance, studies of the neurological structures of conservatives’ brains indicate that conservative individuals have larger amygdalas—the region of the brain that responds to threat.²⁹ The size and activity in your amygdala predicts your likeliness to react in a more emotionally charged way when responding to threatening situations.³⁰ This evidence from brain science fits with the finding that conservatives report high “mortality salience,” that is, they are significantly more cognizant of their own deaths. They also report greater fear of threat and loss than liberals do.³¹

In contrast, liberals have bigger anterior cingulates—the region of the brain involved in conflict monitoring.³² Conflict monitoring is the process through which you determine whether your automatic response matches with the response that would be most appropriate for the situation at hand.³³ Hence, with a larger anterior cingulate, liberals are more likely to change how they react to certain events, as they tend to devote cognitive resources to choosing the most suitable responses to various situations.³⁴ Whereas conservatives are commonly monitoring their environments for threats, liberals are evaluating information and verifying that the data coming in matches their attitudes and judgments. Jost and Amodio conclude: “given that the ACC [anterior cingulate] is associated with conflict monitoring and the amygdala is centrally involved in physiological and behavioral responses to threat, this neuroanatomical evidence appears to lend further support to the notion that political ideology is linked to basic neurocognitive orientations toward uncertainty and threat.”³⁵ Over the past decade, Jost has worked to develop a thorough account of the cognitive psychology and neuropsychology behind political ideology. His work is rooted in the premise that people are guided by social cognitive motives—socially related motivations that are shaped by people’s psychological traits.³⁶ In other words, people are motivated to engage with the world and the people in it in ways that are shaped by their own psychological profiles. These motivations then affect the kinds of things they see as correct, appropriate, or desirable in their society and around the globe. By thinking of political ideology as motivated social cognition, Jost suggests, political preferences can be viewed as just an outcome of people’s underlying psychological tendencies.

According to this logic, we humans have innate psychological traits—maybe we are open to new experiences and enjoy thinking, or maybe we prefer certainty and structure and do not enjoy thinking—and these traits inform the ways we approach the world around us. People who prefer to rely on heuristics (mental shortcuts), rather than cognitively investing in the processing of new information, will be more likely to resist change and will continue to support existing policies and social practices. Indeed, the two traits of need for cognition and tolerance for ambiguity are very closely related. People who enjoy thinking are, on average, more likely to be open to new experiences, particularly in the realm of aesthetics, actions, ideas, and values.³⁷ And these people, based on their underlying orientations to the world, tend to be politically liberal.

In Prius or Pickup, political scientists Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler summarize the distinct psychological profiles of the right and left as “fixed” (signaling a high need for closure and order) and “fluid” (signaling a high tolerance for ambiguity), respectively. Using four parenting-related questions, Hetherington and Weiler measure “how people impose order on a dangerous and potentially chaotic world.”³⁸ The questions are framed as follows.

Although there are a number of qualities that people feel children should have, every person thinks that some are more important than others. I am going to read you pairs of desirable qualities. Please tell me which one you think is more important for a child to have.

Hetherington and Weiler present a detailed empirical case that the two different worldviews captured by these items relate not only to political ideology, party, attitudes, and beliefs but also to seemingly apolitical aspects of lifestyle and consumer behavior. Everything from people’s choice of occupation and where to raise a family to brand allegiance and the types of cars they drive are related to whether they fall into a “fixed” or “fluid” worldview.

And these tendencies go deeper than people’s value systems and even deeper than their cognitive motivations. Research from political psychology points to the existence of a “behavioral immune system”⁴⁰ that guides people’s interactions with the world through the lens of disease-avoidance and hygiene. Laboratory research shows stronger and more visceral physiological reactions from conservatives (compared to liberals) in the face of threatening nonpolitical stimuli.⁴¹ In a controlled experiment, Douglas Oxley and his colleagues prescreened people via telephone to identify 46 adults who held particularly strong political attitudes.⁴² These participants completed questionnaires about their attitudes and beliefs on a range of political issues. Two months later, the same people were brought into a laboratory where they were hooked up to physiological equipment to measure their heart rates, blink rates, and skin conductance (sweating) in response to various images and sounds. Participants were exposed to nonpolitical pictures and sounds of varying threat potential—that is, some were deliberately peaceful and pleasant and some were deliberately threatening (e.g., an image of a large spider sitting on a frightened person’s face; an image of an injured individual with a bloody face; an image of an open wound with maggots in it; unexpected unpleasant loud noises). The researchers found that those participants who supported capital punishment, patriotism, defense spending, and the Iraq War (conservative positions) were significantly more physiologically aroused (sweating and blinking) by the threatening stimuli than those who favored liberal policies (e.g., liberal immigration policies, foreign aid, pacifism, and gun control). In addition to these experimental studies, large-scale survey research has also confirmed the link between disgust sensitivity and conservatism.⁴³

Disgust captures one’s physical and emotional aversion to potentially harmful substances, environments, and people.⁴⁴ People experience it in response to rotting foods and human excrement, but also in response to perceived violations of social and moral contracts.⁴⁵ Conservatives are significantly more easily disgusted than liberals and significantly more concerned about pathogens and communicable disease than are liberals. Lest you think these linkages are isolated or spurious, Yoel Inbar, David Pizarro, and Ravi Iyer looked at the link between conservatism and disgust in a sample that included participants from 121 countries.⁴⁶ Their work, and the work of others, confirms that people who report the highest concern with pathogens and communicable diseases tend to be socially and culturally conservative.⁴⁷ This certainly sheds new light on the classic conservative insult “dirty hippy,” doesn’t it? Or Trump’s 2014 tweet (fig. 6.1) insisting that Americans who had contracted Ebola abroad should not be allowed to return to the United States?

In an effort to isolate the causal mechanism linking conservatism and disgust, scholars have even sought to artificially manipulate disgust to understand how it shapes subsequent political beliefs, and how this link can be altered. The results are startling. Researchers can manipulate disgust by introducing a small (but disgusting) informational prompt. Once people experience the feeling of disgust, more conservative political beliefs follow—among those who were more politically conservative from the start. In other words, if you expose people to something disgusting, the conservative people in the group will become more conservative in their social and cultural beliefs (hence the term “disgust sensitivity”).

In a study of attitudes toward gays and lesbians, for example, John Terrizzi, Jr., and his colleagues manipulated disgust by randomly assigning participants to write essays about one of two hypothetical experiences, either “eating lettuce” or “eating maggots.”⁴⁸ After writing the essay, participants were asked questions about political and social beliefs, including their attitudes toward gays and lesbians. Results showed that writing the “eating maggots” essay didn’t cause all of those participants to become more conservative in their beliefs compared to the “eating lettuce” assignment. Rather, the results varied with the political ideology of the participant. The authors write: “inducing disgust in more conservative participants led to more prejudice compared to the control.”⁴⁹ It seems that conservatives who experienced the disgust prime (writing the maggot essay), due to their higher disgust sensitivity, were more affected in their political beliefs than liberals who experienced the same prime.

A recent experiment by Lene Aarøe, Michael Petersen, and Kevin Arceneaux sought to introduce a disease protection prime prior to asking about attitudes toward immigration.⁵⁰ Here, the researchers wanted to see if providing disease protection information would lessen the effects of conservatives’ physiological disgust response, thereby reducing hostile attitudes toward immigrants. Here again, participants experienced a (really) gross “disgust” prime—in this case they read a hospital orderly’s first-person description of the process of cleaning up vomit. The story included graphic details such as “I had to get on my knees and clean it up with my hands. I do not think I will ever get used to feeling bile, half-digested food, and, in this case, a bit of blood cover my fingers as I remove everything from the floor. It is absolutely revolting.” In the more disgusting version, participants stopped here. In the “disease protection” version, respondents read about how the orderly was then relieved to enter a “freshly cleaned” washroom, use “heavy-duty soap,” and “finish by putting on a refreshing disinfecting lotion.”⁵¹ After reading the essay, the participants completed a questionnaire about their attitudes toward immigration. Again, the findings revealed that just with the introduction of this small handwashing cue, people’s antiimmigration attitudes were 47 percent lower than those who read the “just cleaning vomit without washing hands” version. The authors conclude that disgust sensitivity “plays a causal role in the formation of immigration attitudes. … Because hand washing is not logically connected with immigration attitudes, it ostensibly does so outside of one’s conscious awareness.”⁵²

Similarly, studies of the role of certain “safety and security” informational cues indicate that inducing feelings of safety and creating the illusion of the absence of physical threats minimizes the influence of people’s core psychological traits on their political attitudes.⁵³ Researchers at Yale asked participants to imagine themselves as superheroes who were invulnerable to physical harm (versus the control group, who were told to imagine having the ability to fly). Participants in the “invulnerability” group felt significantly safer than those in the “flight” group. Following this manipulation, the participants were asked about various political beliefs. Among conservative participants who had experienced the “invulnerability” visualization exercise, socially conservative beliefs decreased more than they did among the conservatives who had experienced the flight condition.⁵⁴ Imagining that they were invulnerable superheroes caused conservative participants to become more liberal on policy issues and less resistant to social change.

Central to this conversation about how such proclivities might shape political beliefs is the concept of “epistemic motivation.” The term “epistemology” simply refers to how we come to know what we know. Underlying people’s epistemological orientations to the world are different kinds of motivations that might lead to different styles of sense-making.⁵⁵ If I am someone who is naturally high in need for closure, for example, I will tend to be motivated by efficiency and heuristics when I process information. This will guide how I form judgments when watching the news or even when meeting a new person at a party. If I am someone who is tolerant of ambiguity and high in need for cognition, I will be especially interested in getting to the truth of a given situation with little interest in efficiency. I will also be less likely to rely on heuristics and more likely to exhaustively search the information environment to be sure that I am correct in my judgment. If I am someone who is especially conscious of infectious pathogens in my environment, I will operate from a place of self-protection, processing information in a way that privileges the survival (and isolation) of myself and my in-group.

Genes: The Big Elephant (or Donkey) in the Room

Increasingly, political scientists are acknowledging the role of genetics in shaping people’s political ideologies and their individual political beliefs.⁵⁶ In a recent study of the link between political ideology, need for cognition, and need for closure, Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz and his colleagues at the University of Illinois looked at these tendencies through the lens of genetics.⁵⁷ These researchers studied the genetic basis for both need for cognition and need for closure and found that both traits are linked directly to political ideology (measured three different ways) through genetic factors. The results of this research suggest that while environmental factors certainly contribute to people’s political identities and outlooks, biology—basic genetic predispositions—play a role as well. The authors conclude simply: “genes link political ideology to cognitive style.”⁵⁸

Drawing on traditional genetic research methodologies, John Alford, Carolyn Funk, and John Hibbing completed an enormous study of “twin pairs” to try to understand to what extent political attitudes are heritable.⁵⁹ Given that monozygotic (identical) twins and dizygotic (fraternal) twins vary in the extent of the genetic material they share, examining various monozygotic and dizygotic twins’ attitudinal and behavioral similarities helps to explain the extent to which such attitudes and beliefs stem from one’s inherited genetic material. The twin participants in these studies completed an extensive questionnaire about their thoughts on everything from pajama parties, nudist camps, and horoscopes to disarmament, patriotism, and the death penalty. Results indicated that the monozygotic twins (sharing 100 percent of their DNA) were significantly closer in their beliefs on political and social issues than were the dizygotic twins (sharing only 50 percent of their DNA). In other words, among twin siblings raised in the same environments, genes predict political, social, and cultural beliefs. As the authors describe it, “the substantive findings we present here offer a direct challenge to common assumptions and interpretations that political attitudes and behavioral tendencies are shaped primarily or even exclusively by environmental, especially familial, factors.”⁶⁰

Of course, as Alford and his colleagues concede, humans’ genetic makeup also contributes to what environment they choose for themselves, what friends they have, and what information they seek, all of which then go on to shape political beliefs. So the way people’s genes interact with their environment and their culture is crucial to understanding how they come to believe what they believe. And in an effort to quell fears that these findings should be read as evidence that our politics are “completely determined from birth,” the authors offer this primer in probabilistic relationships: “it is not biological determinism to posit the existence of complex collections of genes that increase the probability that certain people will display heightened or deadened response patterns to given environmental cues.”⁶¹ Remember, in the studies of how conservatives and liberals responded differently to cues like writing about “eating maggots” or imagining they were “invincible,” certain kinds of people displayed “heightened” or “deadened” response patterns to “given environmental cues.”

So what is the mechanism through which genes shape political beliefs? Scholars at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln have offered a theoretical account of how and why genes shape political attitudes.⁶² Their work explores political ideology as a translation of our “dispositional preferences for mass-scale social rules, order, and conduct.”⁶³ The way that I think of my place as an individual organism within a system (like my society or community) is affected by my genetic predispositions. In this model, proposed by Kevin B. Smith and his colleagues, genetics determine humans’ biology and physiology, which then naturally contributes to their emotional and cognitive processes.⁶⁴ These processes then shape how you interact with your environment, hence shaping your personality and values. Your personality and values then make up your ideology and resulting political issue positions.

Smith and his colleagues argue that at the fifth stage of this model, where personality and values shape ideology, multiple dimensions are at play. Personality and values contribute not only to your political ideology, but also to your religious preferences, educational preferences, occupational preferences, child-rearing preferences, recreational preferences, and finally … your musical, artistic, and even humor preferences.

And there it is.

When you start talking about genes and biology, there’s an assumption that this means that these are innate traits or are characteristics determined from birth. But none of this research says that these relationships are immutable, nor does it imply that they are deterministic. In fact, you can actually change people’s epistemic motivations (their informational and processing goals) by introducing a simple instruction; for instance, a prompt emphasizing accuracy over efficiency.⁶⁵ In one study exploring how people judged others, researchers artificially reduced the participants’ need for closure by instructing them: “I want you to form the most accurate impression of [this person] that you can because after you have given your impression of them, I will ask you to justify it to me and a clinical psychologist who is also involved in this project.”⁶⁶ When instructed to perform the task with this an emphasis on accuracy over efficiency, the study participants based their judgments far less on the primed features of the person in question and more on other available information. The authors conclude: “to avoid forming a hasty impression, [participants] considered other interpretations of [the person’s] behavior and were, therefore, less likely to characterize him in terms of the primed trait construct.”⁶⁷

What seems essential, then, is that despite the deep linkages between political ideology, psychology, physiology, and biology, the relationships between these characteristics are complex, affected by social and environmental context, and thus, still somewhat malleable. To explore this a bit, I give you my most readily available and overanalyzed human subject: me. I am relatively high in need for closure, as illustrated by my feeling of frustration when I thought Zach Braff was going to end the film Garden State with an ellipsis instead of a period. Left to my own devices, I am prone to efficient, heuristic judgments. I tend to judge people quickly on first meeting them.⁶⁸ My default response is to take some action—any action—rather than to explore the pros and cons of every possible avenue. I also like routine and order in my schedule and in my work, although my office and bedroom are always messy—with papers and clothing strewn about. So I am high in need for predictability but not necessarily in my need for order. I am also relatively low in tolerance of ambiguity and high in need for decisiveness.

Some of my tendencies have changed over time, which the research suggests is, in fact, possible. Need for closure can be altered by exposure to new experiences and information.⁶⁹ Rich and diverse life experiences as well as education can reduce your need for closure and render you more tolerant of ambiguity. Studying abroad, in particular, is associated with increased openness and tolerance for ambiguity.⁷⁰ One long-standing goal of a liberal arts education is to promote tolerance for ambiguity in order to foster a sense of openness, adaptability, and a willingness to change one’s point of view.⁷¹ Perhaps it shouldn’t be that surprising that after almost 22 years of liberal arts education and a year studying and living in France, I’ve become slightly more tolerant of ambiguity (though apparently not in my preferences for movie endings).

In spite of my high need for closure, and contrary to the work of Aleksander Ksiazkiewicz, I am also high in need for cognition and have been since I was a kid. I love puzzles, logic problems, and finding solutions to complex issues. When I think about the world, I want to know why things are the way they are—from the most minute observation (why is there heavy traffic on Route 70 at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday) to the most complex problem (why is there such abject poverty in Camden, New Jersey, and what can be done to fix it). I enjoy coming up with hypotheses that might account for things I observe and testing them against available information. (It’s probably good that I am in this line of work, or I would be even more insufferable than I already am.) So where do these traits put me in terms of my political ideology? Well, I’m liberal on social and cultural issues, but I’m slightly more conservative on issues related to crime. I’m liberal in my economic politics, yet I recognize the limits and dangers of overzealous entitlement programs. So, like my psychological profile, I’m sort of a mixed bag—but a mixed bag that leans to the left.

Also highlighting the fact that these linkages between personality, psychology, and ideology are tendencies and not necessarily fixed, I give you my dear friend Patrick (name changed to protect the innocent). Patrick is so routinized and averse to new situations that he eats the same foods almost every day, goes to the same restaurants, orders the same meal whenever he’s there, has the most tidy and spare home I’ve ever seen, and rotates through about four of his favorite T-shirts that are all various shades of heather gray. Once Patrick went to buy new glasses, since his lenses were scratched from three years of wear. He raved about the new frames he had picked out and swore that we would all love them for their novelty. Unbeknownst to Patrick, he had purchased the exact same frames he had been wearing for three years. Same name brand and everything. And he did the same with a “brand new” rain jacket he purchased to replace his “old” rain jacket the following month. It was the same damn jacket.

So Patrick is extremely high in need for predictability and order. He has low tolerance for ambiguity, and yet … Pat is a progressive vegan who drives a hybrid and supports LGBTQ rights. When you talk to him about the roots of his more progressive political belief system, you start to realize that his high need for cognition causes him to read. A lot. Like the books that most people only read if they are assigned for a class. And even then, they don’t read them. But Pat does. Meanwhile, he grew up with a relatively strict Catholic upbringing and with a vocal and opinionated father, whose conservative views were the source of many household debates throughout Pat’s oppositional and defiant teenage years. As Pat’s cousin said, “if your dad had been a Democrat, you would probably be a right-wing conservative right now.” Pat’s cousin may be right. When I talked to Pat about the hilarity of the “dirty hippy” insult in light of conservatives’ high disgust sensitivity, he replied: “come to think of it, maybe I actually am conservative … because when I see a Grateful Dead fan with dirty dreadlocks, I just want to tell them to trim that hair and take a shower.”

So the link between psychology and ideology is flexible when examined on a case-by-case basis. However, the underlying trend—and logic—holds up. Conservatives (especially social or cultural ones) tend to be less tolerant of ambiguity and lower in need for cognition than liberals. This makes conservatives especially good at quick, efficient decision-making tasks and well-suited to certain leadership roles where taking quick action is needed. This also makes them not so good at changing their minds in light of new information and less than stellar at thinking about issues in terms of complex, systemic causes. Liberals, though, tend to be more tolerant of ambiguity and lower in need for closure, with a higher need for cognition. This makes them less efficient decision-makers, more likely to make use of various forms of information when making up their minds, and less likely to “go with their gut.” This makes liberals especially good at analytical thinking, scientific inquiry, and higher education, where thinking for the sake of thinking is an advantage, not a hindrance. It also makes them not as great at quick decisive judgments.

So if you’re looking for someone to diagnose your complicated medical condition, you probably want a liberal doctor. But if you get your arm cut off in an elevator door, you probably want a conservative.

A Note from Dear Ol’ Dad

After reading the above section detailing the psychological traits that map onto political ideology, my 78-year-old father suggested that my liberal bias was showing through: “you don’t make a strong enough case for the potential advantages of a conservative mind and the potential disadvantages of a liberal one,” he argued.

While I have acknowledged that there are situations, occupations, and contexts in which a high need for closure and low need for cognition lead to desirable outcomes, Dad thought I had not gone far enough in highlighting how both the conservative and the liberal minds have particular strengths and weaknesses. He was right. This book originated as an exploration of how and why satire leans to the left. As such, tolerance for ambiguity and need for cognition—which are related to successful humor production and appreciation—emerge as unequivocally positive traits.

But they are not unequivocally positive.

Dad’s critical eye stems in part from the fact that he is admittedly high in need for closure and driven to heuristic thinking. As a boy he had strict conservative inclinations, from belief in a strong military to “Don’t challenge those in positions of authority.” Following four years at the University of Massachusetts, he was drafted and spent three years in the US Army, from 1962 to 1964. In basic training he was a platoon leader, in charge of about 30 men. He scored at the top of his 120-man company, earning the highest marksmanship honor and the award for top soldier of the company. Military life—its order, structure, and hierarchies—played to Dad’s inherent strengths.

After the army, he worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service as a manager of several fish hatcheries across the country. My parents moved to a small Appalachian town with poverty unlike anything they had ever seen. On arriving, they both had clear notions of how the government should handle the largely uneducated, unemployed people of this town.

“We thought we knew everything,” Dad admits. “It only took about a month to realize that we didn’t know much. We just didn’t understand the complexity of the situations these families were in.”

As Mom and Dad moved into new communities and made new friends with new cultural norms, they found themselves becoming increasingly tolerant of ambiguity and increasingly cognizant of the need to stifle their impulses toward heuristic-driven first impressions. They did so not necessarily because they wanted to change but simply because they had to if they were going to find happiness and community in these new places.

Dad’s inherent needs for order, closure, and heuristic-based judgments were still there. But he came to see these as skills that he could employ strategically rather than as dominant traits that ruled his world. As he read my earlier draft’s description of tolerance for ambiguity and need for cognition, he reminded me of the tale of one of his professors at the University of Massachusetts. This professor of fishery science had worked for over a decade reorganizing all the genera and species of fish into a new typology based on new classification criteria. Dissatisfied with his first attempt, he undertook the project a second time.

Dissatisfied with his second attempt, he started over yet again.

Dissatisfied a third time, he gave up.

I have a distinct recollection of my dad telling me this story over the years as a sort of cautionary tale of the perils of endless tolerance for ambiguity and need for cognition. Of course Dad didn’t call it that, but that’s exactly what it was. It was a story about how too much thinking and not enough closure can be paralyzing.

“If you’re going to write a book that speaks to both the left and right,” Dad said, “You’ll need to be more honest about the advantages of a conservative mind, and the ways in which a high tolerance for ambiguity and a need for cognition can be problematic.”

I thought for a moment. … “Like how when you get twenty liberal university faculty members in a room for a meeting and everyone evaluates and ruminates and no decisions get made?”

“Exactly.”

In sum, people’s psychological and physiological traits interact with their environments and social contexts in ways that influence their political attitudes and beliefs. In the next chapter, I’ll begin to integrate this understanding of the psychological profiles of the left and right with a consideration of aesthetic preferences. If people’s political beliefs are shaped (directly and indirectly) by psychological traits, and those same traits inform people’s preferences for art, music, and even genres of political information, then of course researchers should find differences in the preferred aesthetics of the left and the right—and indeed they do.