Political characterizations are always relative. It is often
said that if David Cameron, or another conservative European leader, were
plucked off Downing Street and dropped on Pennsylvania Avenue, he would
undoubtedly find his Conservative Party positions on healthcare, postsecondary
education, and fiscal stimulus somewhere in line with the leftmost wing of the
American Democrats. But if Mr. Cameron were made in America, the class of
political observers that believes ideology entails a combination of choice and
socialization would argue that it is impossible to guess what kind of American
political life a theoretical David Cameron might have had. An emerging
consensus within the field of social psychology, however, suggests a radical
revision of the traditional narrative on where ideology comes from.
“Most people,” psychologist Jamie Napier of Yale University
contends, “would think that their political attitudes come from a very
reasoned, rational perspective – and they decide what’s best.” But
drawing on a wealth of personality, lifestyle, and genetic surveys, social
science researchers have begun to argue that political ideology is the product
of basic dispositional and cognitive personality traits. The assertion that political
ideology is essentially innate has profound implications for how we understand
elite decisions, democratic outcomes, and the efficacy of our current system of
government.
The Psychology of Political
Disposition
In this vision of ideology, how someone identifies politically
is better predicted by what he keeps on his desk or where he likes to dine than
by what he was taught in seventh grade history class or on his mother’s knee.
It follows in this scheme that an American-born David Cameron would likely be a
Republican because the dispositional traits that make a conservative Briton are
almost certainly the same as those behind the making of a conservative
American. As Dana Carney, Assistant Professor of Management at Columbia
University, explained to the HPR, “What science picks up is that [political
ideology is] simply a set of beliefs and dispositions – a basic architecture
that the mind or brain brings to a moral decision or any decision-making
context.” Although the evidence from brain science is currently scant, the
argument for dispositional politics has been predicated on an extensive body of
research on the mind, focusing on correlations between personality and behavior
which are measured by both established and experimental psychological
evaluations.
More than any other psychometric trait, researchers have found
that scores on “openness to experience” are deeply predictive of political
ideology, at least in its social dimension. Surveying the range of
politically-correlated personality traits, Carney attested to the HPR that
“across studies, population, and time, openness to experience seems to be the
one,” characterizing it as a cognitive trait that runs a spectrum from “the
kind of mind that is able to tolerate ambiguity” to “the kind of mind that is literally
unable to move forward without certainty”.
A broader framework proposed by social psychologist Jon Haidt
and his colleagues at the University of Virginia considers political ideology
to be a reflection of innate moral principles, arguing to the HPR that “it
would be a mistake to think of morality and politics as separate.” Through an
extensive combination of conventional fieldwork and data collection by means of
YourMorals.org, Haidt has isolated five moral foundations: fairness, harm,
in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. Proposing an evolutionary
origin for these basic values, he concludes that liberals and conservatives
differ so irreconcilably because the two sides possess different visions of
what matters. While liberal morality is two-track, concerned almost exclusively
with fairness and harm, conservative morality is five-track, concerned with all
five moral foundations almost equally.
Consequences of Political Disposition
Perhaps most surprisingly, research from around the world
suggests an unintuitive conclusion: there exists a robust personality
correlation between social conservatism (which advocates government
intervention) and economic conservatism (which advocates government
nonintervention), as well as one between social liberalism (which advocates
government nonintervention) and economic liberalism (which advocates
nonintervention). What this suggests, more than anything else, is that
individuals’ political ideologies have little to do with items of philosophical
consistency (e.g. freedom is good) than with the more basic dimension of change
versus continuity, which translates quite directly into the left-right
spectrum. “The particular configuration of what the two parties stand for can
only be explained by historical oddities and quirks, but there is something
natural about the left-right distinction,” Haidt explained, reducing the
near-universal spectrum to variance in terms of openness to experience.
The recent emergence of a full-bodied research consensus on the
existence of “dispositional politics” has not been without controversy. Critics
of the field’s core conclusions address two main concerns: a tendency toward
simplistic reductionism and a bias against conservatives.
A prominent crowd of methodological critics concerned with
dispositional politics’ perceived tendency to oversimplify the factors behind
ideology. A political scientist with a corpus of work on political attitudes
stretching back through the 1980s, Stanley Feldman of Stony Brook University
criticizes the approach of social psychologists as too narrow, asserting that
“a lot of strong claims have been made – the evidence isn’t always quite as
strong as the conclusions. A lot of people have tried to make inferences about
their research that go beyond what the data supports.” Feldman argues that the
field, limited methodologically and intellectually, will have to develop for
some time longer until it can be treated as authoritative.
A Science of Politics?
Serving as an explanation for the basic unit of political
function, the field of “dispositional politics” cannot help but weigh in on the
fundamentals of the political system that the early American leaders designed
in the late 18th century. In one respect, the realization that people do not
freely or reasonably choose what they believe clashes with the spirit of the
law, calling its letter into doubt as well. But Haidt sees no such discordance,
reminding that “the founding fathers were very conscious of the effects of
factions and the irrationality of belief, and wanted protections against the
dangers of the mob” – well before those dangers could be studied for peer
review.
The broad conclusions of the field include the claim that
socialization is at best secondary to innate personality correlates of political
ideology – raising the dissonant prospect that what we teach our children and
peers about politics can only matter so much. Perhaps most jarring is the
conclusion that liberals and conservatives are at fundamental odds over how to
make decisions. In a strong version of the hypothesis on openness to experience
and conscientiousness, liberals gravitate toward compromise but are unable to
reach closure, while conservatives are able to judge decisively, but veer away
from compromise instinctively. If this is indeed the state of nature in any
democracy, it is hard to imagine gridlock as anything but inevitable when
politics becomes a matter of ideological alignment.
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