Conservative and Liberal Brain Function

On Monday, my local paper, the Colorado Springs Gazette, carried a story from the L.A. Times asserting that a psychological study had found that liberals and conservatives achieved differing results in a simple test of brain function. First, I would urge anyone who has not seen some version of this story to read it, so that you may judge for yourself the importance of it, and so that you can assess whether I'm making too much of it. I could, myself, raise a number of methodological questions. (For example, there isn't a lot of detail about the protocol used to identify the "conservatives" and the "liberals.") But that's not my intent here.

I have said this before, and now that this bit of research has come out, I have the opportunity to say it again: Underlying a lot of the reasoned arguments, and the impassioned concerns, driving the contest between liberals and conservatives in this country (and in others, as well), are deep-seated personal preferences which are not accessible to evidence, to argument, to persuasion of any form. Liberals, very broadly speaking, like change. They expect good things to happen when circumstances change. This bespeaks a certain confidence, even arrogance, about their ability to read the trends and to control their destinies. Conservatives, on the other hand, distrust change. They like the "tried and true". They like systems that inhibit change.

What did the psychological test find? Well, they asked the subjects to press a button whenever they saw a "W" after a sequence of "M"s. MMMMWMMWMMMW. Something like that. Previously identified (and probably somewhat self-identified) liberals made many fewer errors than the conservative subjects. Why? The interpretation is that conservatives readily fall into a mindset in which they anticipate the next letter to be the same as the last, and so they are more likely not to perceive the change. Does that really tell us that conservatives resist change? I'm not sure. But it does seem to find a readier acceptance of the occurence of change among liberals than among conservatives.

By the way, for the rest of this article, I am going to use the term "conservative" in an attitudinal, not in a programmatic sense. I don't believe that everyone who opposes abortion is a conservative, for example. I tend to think that, the law of the land having allowed abortion for over 30 years, the conservative position is to support the status quo. Be that as it may, my use of "conservative" is about resistance to change, reluctance to adopt new ideas or practices, and a tendency to oppose "change for change's sake."

One way to look at the difference between conservative and liberal positions is to consider an analogy from evolutionary biology. (If you prefer, you can just think of this as an example from ecological biology. In that case, you'll probably want to substitute individuals for species, and changes in behavior for speciation events.) I'm talking about the so-called adaptive landscape. Let us visualize a perfectly flat terrain. All species are capable of surviving in this domain with a same degree of ease or difficulty; there are no advantaged species and no part of the terrain advantages one species more than another. But things begin to change. Just as erosion cuts a flat valley floor into ridges and gullies, so the abundance of food species changes the adaptive landscape.

In one area, a particular plant drives out rival vegetation; this becomes low country for those species that lived on the unsuccessful plants, but it becomes a pleasant upland for those which can use the successful species. In another area, a predator finds the climate unfriendly, and the prey begin to thrive and multiply.

In the end, we have a rugged landscape, with peaks on which live well-adapted species which enjoy an abundance of food, water, and whatever other goods are needed for the purpose of life: reproduction, and, on the lower slopes, species struggling against scarcity, competition, and predation, barely able to sustain themselves. (Down in the gullies are the remains of extinct and near-extinct species.)

Similarly, I would argue, conservatives tend to view themselves as in one of two conditions: Either they are living on an adaptive peak, so that any change will be for the worse, or - notably among contemporary religious conservatives, they have left such a peak for the lower slopes (dragged down by illusory progress), and their most desperate need is to struggle back to the top of the hill. Liberals, on the other hand, view themselves as moving toward a new, better, peak, and have little reluctance to abandon their current post, having convinced themselves that it is far enough down the slope to be barely tolerable.

One of the reasons for the impassioned defense put up by the conservatives is, in this view, that they see any move away from the present situation as a perilous descent into a steeper and steeper trough, with only the abyss of destruction at the end of this path. What the liberals discard as discounted through prior use, the conservatives cling to as a symbol of enduring happiness.

One reason I mention the second conservative position is the tendency, throughout history, for conservative thinkers to disguise innovation as a return to old, golden principles. I would note that, for example, a number of bills introduced in Congress which would, in the view of many, destroy the traditional barrier between church and state, are labelled as "restoration acts". One such bill, passed in the Clinton administration, was the "Religious Rights Restoration Act," which, in fact, gave religious practitioners privileges they had never enjoyed before. Putting new wine in old bottles is always more acceptable to conservatives than the admission that they enjoy the new vintage.