Mismatch Stuff

Are we well suited to politics?

Aristotle famously said that human beings are political animals.  He was right about this.  We are.  Consider the things that come naturally to us.  We are curious.  We are generally good at reading people.  We highly value the truth.  And we have a tremendous capacity for empathy.  These are important qualities every ideal voter should posses.

But look around.  Everywhere there’s evidence we are actually pretty bad at politics.  Neither politicians nor voters deserve a gold star for the way they fulfill their responsibilities.  Politicians are constantly misbehaving, as evidenced by the debut of the Trump campaign in the spring of 2015.  Just minutes into his announcement Donald Trump, stooping to bigoted demagoguery, demonized immigrants as murderers and rapists.

For their part, voters frequently display stunning ignorance of basic facts. A majority of Americans don’t know which party is in control of Congress.  A majority don’t know we have three branches of government.  A majority don’t know we have a hundred United States senators.  On the eve of the Iraq War, in the face of hard evidence implicating Osama bin Laden, a majority thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11.

So the answer to the question – “Are we well suited to politics?” – has to be no, sadly.

Why do you think we fail to measure up? What accounts for the disconnect between our natural abilities and our performance?

It was to answer this question that I wrote Political Animals. 

In my last book, Just How Stupid Are We?  Facing the Truth About the American Voter (Basic Books, 2008), I laid out the damning facts about public opinion. The book comes to the disturbing conclusion that we can’t really trust voters to get things right.  After all, if the ordinary voter couldn’t get the basic facts right about 9-11, the most important event of our time, what hope do we have that they can get much of anything right?

After the book appeared a commenter on the Amazon discussion boards chided me for failing to explain why so many millions of voters are so ignorant. Specifically, he thought I had made a mistake in overlooking research by scientists. I thought this was a fair criticism.  While I had accounted for changes in politics in the last sixty years that explained the marked decline in our political culture, a decline I mostly blamed on television, I didn’t take into account anything science has to say about voters.  Frankly, as a historian it didn’t occur to me to that science could help explain our situation.   

This was a woeful error.  When I began studying up on the subject I found that science gives us an answer. But it took me four years to develop a sufficient understanding of the scientific concepts to be able to write the book.

So what did you discover?

Early in my research, after reading scores of relevant scientific studies, I came across a lecture one day by David Pizarro, a Cornell psychologist.  It was a turning point.  In the course of his talk he noted that we humans are not necessarily designed to excel in the modern world at tasks we were good at in the Pleistocene.  This intrigued me.  It wasn’t something I’d considered, though it’s a familiar trope in evolutionary psychology  (EP, for short).  It embarrasses me to admit this now, but I knew nothing of EP back then. David’s lecture came as a revelation.

But his argument made sense.  Surely our brain evolved to meet the demands of the Stone Age, a critical period in human development that lasted more than three million years.  And if that was the case, it stands to reason that humans naturally wouldn’t be very good at politics today since the demands the modern era makes on us are vastly different from those of hundreds of thousands of years ago.  Cave men, like us, surely played politics.  But politics isn’t the same when you live in a small community of illiterate hunter-gatherers. 

As a historian I was leery at first of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology Historians relish complexity.  Anything that smacks of simplicity is immediately suspect. And EP sounded too simple.  I came to learn that in science explanations like EP are actually considered elegant, assuming they are based in evidence.  In science any explanation is considered elegant if it can parsimoniously account for a significant phenomenon.

As it happens there is no direct evidence backing up EP.  After all, we can’t go back in time to verify how humans actually evolved.  And what physical evidence we have is less than ideal.  What we need is physical evidence of behavior.  But behavior doesn’t leave physical clues.  So it behooves us to be skeptical.  But the more I learned of the indirect evidence scientists have developed for EP the more respect I developed for this new science, which is only a few decades old.

Is the book wholly rooted in the perspective of evolutionary psychology?

What EP provided me was a framework for the book.  It helped me account for our obvious political inadequacies.  We are simply better equipped, to sum up my findings, to deal with the challenges of a small community of a few hundred people than a large one consisting of millions whose leaders we only glimpse fleetingly on television.

But the book rests on the findings of a host of sciences:  political psychology, social psychology, political science, neuroscience, anthropology, behavioral economics, game theory, and on and on.  This is important.  As E. O. Wilson points out, we are more likely to be close to the truth when the findings of a variety of disciplines converge.  This is called consilience and it’s based on the idea of the unity of knowledge.  The more evidence I could find from different disciplines for the claims in the book the more confident I was that I was on the right track.  And this kept happening.

For example, the theory of evolution posits that family members will sacrifice to help one another.  When social scientists examined the records of the Donner Party they discovered that it wasn’t the single young men who fared best even though they appeared to be in a uniquely strong position – they didn’t have to make sacrifices for others, after all.  Rather, it was the members of close-knit families who had the greatest chance of survival.  This confirmed the predictions of EP about family cohesiveness:  families stick together through thick and thin because our brain is wired in such a way as to favor our own kin.  This is known as kin selection.

Researching the book took me far afield from history, my natural home, to worlds I’d never explored.  I often felt like an intergalactic traveller on a mission to distant planets in a strange universe I scarcely knew existed before I began my voyage.

I knew so little about these disciplines when I began that sometimes it would take me several days to get through a single scholarly article.  I know this sounds ridiculous.  But here’s what would happen.  In a typical article I’d encounter jargon that needed to be explained, so I’d have to check dictionaries, textbooks, and online resources.  But that was just the beginning.  Often, to figure out what the author was saying I had to comb the footnotes for supportive material.  This required pausing my reading of the article I’d started with to check out another, whose language was also frequently full of jargon that needed deciphering and footnotes that cried out to be followed.  This pattern would go on for some time, sometimes in such a convoluted way that I’d forget where I began.

But each day was very exciting.  Frankly, I hadn’t felt this kind of intellectual exhilaration since I was seventeen and stumbled one day upon Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform in Trilby’s bookstore in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where I went to high school. That discovery set me on my course to become a historian.  And now, in my late fifties, I was on a new intellectual quest.

Let’s get down to specifics.  Does your research help explain why millions of Americans believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya?

This was one of the questions that drove me.  I really wanted to understand this phenomenon, which sounds crazy to academics and mainstream journalists.  How on earth can intelligent people believe this nonsense?

The broad answer is the one offered by EP.  These folks, knowing little about politics, generally rely on their instincts when political questions arise.  And their instincts (our human instincts) tell them to be wary of people who don’t look like they do.  Obama, as a black man, doesn’t look like them.  So they find it believable when they hear from a friend or some talking head on TV that Obama’s a Muslim from Kenya. 

It’s possible to be educated out of this wrong-headed opinion.  But most Americans aren’t well tutored in politics.  So they go on instinct.  This leads to a lot of mischief. 

What’s the chief lesson of the book?

I want to state this very clearly.  The overriding lesson of the book is that in politics we can’t go on instinct.  Clarity is needed because it’s easy to infer, falsely, that I believe it’s impossible for us to do politics well since we are burdened with a Stone-Age brain.   But I don’t say that and don’t believe it.  We’ve succeeded after all in building stunning skyscrapers, landing a man on the moon, and developing super fast computers, all of which are a testament to the ability of humans to exercise higher order cognition.   What we have not been very good at is overcoming our instincts in politics and our instincts often undermine us.  As I state baldly in the opening pages of the book, “when it comes to politics, the times when we can unquestioningly go with our instincts are almost nil.” And yet we do it all the time. 

Culture, to be sure, can shape our instincts in a constructive way.  It’s because of culture that we no longer take pleasure throwing live cats into open fires, as both kings and peasants once did with relish for entertainment. Were we to witness such a thing I am confident we’d be filled with the feeling of instant revulsion.

But in politics we are frequently thrown back on our human instincts, the ones we are born with, and it is these with which I’m concerned.  They include a deep suspicion of outsiders, blind loyalty to our tribe, and biased thinking in favor of our own opinions.  When we let these instincts drive our politics, as we frequently do, the consequences are often adverse, as I try to demonstrate.

I am hardly a pessimist, however.  As I show science is helping us understand our instincts.  And once you understand them you can take preemptive measures to sidestep dangerous habits of thinking.  We aren’t the prisoners of our instincts, however much we rely on them.

All animals are born with certain instincts.  Other animals have to blindly follow theirs.  We don’t. We alone possess the capacity to think about our behavior and, upon reflection, change it. That is one of the things that make us human.  Sometimes people conclude that our instincts are what is most human about human beings – that that’s who we really are.  But this isn’t the case at all.  What is most human about us is our possession of reason operating in tandem with instinct.  It’s our reasoning abilities that distinguish us from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Paul Krugman frequently expresses bewilderment at the broad ignorance of basic theories about economics.  Can you account for the phenomenon?

I became a devoted reader of Krugman’s New York Times blog while writing the book.  The blog spurred me to think hard about this question.  As he shows on the blog it’s not just ordinary voters who get economics wrong, but elites, too.  Year in and year out Very Serious People (his wonderful, biting phrase) warned that the loose money policies of the Federal Reserve would bring on rampaging inflation and year in and year out inflation failed to rear its ugly head.  Yet almost without exception the Very Serious People failed to change their opinion.

There’s no single explanation.  But one of the most important factors is sheer stubbornness.  People generally dislike changing their mind.  Social psychology explains why.  We like to think well of our opinions and ourselves.  When we hear of evidence that raises doubts about our opinions we naturally try to discount it.  As the ever-useful theory of cognitive dissonance explains, we hate dissonance and will take extreme measures to reduce it. Ignoring evidence contrary to our own ideas is the tried and true method.  People who do often enjoy better physical health! Nature rewards stubbornness.

It’s possible to use higher order cognitive thinking to overcome our instinctive defense of an idea we adore that’s proven unworthy of our affection, but most of the time we don’t make the effort.  As Daniel Kahneman observes, our brain is lazy.  Rather than think hard about an issue we go with the flow and follow instinct.  And our instinct, as I’ve said, is to stick to ideas we have long held.

Have you ever caught yourself going on instinct?

Of course.  No one should indulge the fantasy that they are superior to the mortals who rely on instinct and I certainly don’t.  I am as susceptible as anybody.  As I relate in the book I have been haunted for decades by my decision as a young man to stick with Richard Nixon long after most of the country had abandoned him.  I wanted to understand why I had done this.  It made no sense.  It was particularly disturbing because I was a devoted student of Watergate.  My wrongheadedness wasn’t the result of inattentiveness.  I was a political junkie.  Fortunately, science offers an explanation.

You just admitted that public opinion did change in response to news reporting about Watergate.  Doesn’t that undermine your argument that people generally resist changing their opinions?

Thankfully public opinion does change!  I go on at length to account for the mechanism by which we change our opinions.  It involves the amygdala.  When evidence accumulates that we have gotten something very wrong our amygdala prompts an emotional response.  We become anxious. This feeling, which makes us uncomfortable, helps encourage a reappraisal of our convictions.  On occasion, when the evidence against us is overwhelming, triggering a massive anxiety attack, we actually change our mind. 

But this can take a very long time.  The American people declined to reconsider their opinion about Nixon for eleven months after Watergate.  During that period, despite the weekly disclosure of shocking headlines, they remained steadfast in their support.  That’s disheartening.  It undermines the confidence we have in democracy.  Facts matter less to us than we think – a major theme of the book.

And I was among those least willing to accept the evidence in front of my own eyes.  So I certainly don’t think I am exempt from the same tug of instinct that pulls at other people.  No one is.

Malcolm Gladwell urges us in his bestseller, Blink, to rely more on our instincts.  Is he wrong?  Did you intend your book to be a rebuke of his?

Malcolm Gladwell was one of my inspirations as I was writing Political Animals. I am in awe of his story-telling abilities.  And he influenced me more than anyone else in the way I structured the book.  I followed his example of marrying “stories and studies,” as he puts it.

That said, he has led a lot of people to believe they should follow their instincts.

But I think he has been misinterpreted.  Blink doesn’t say we should go with our instincts under all circumstances.  In the one chapter in his book in which he expressly deals with a political subject – the election of Warren Harding – he goes out of his way to observe that our instincts can’t always be trusted.  It was because of our instincts that we got saddled with a president like Harding.  He looked like a president so we made him one (though there’s more to the story than that, to be sure).

I may be wrong but I think Gladwell would actually like my book.  At least I hope so.  Nothing in it contradicts his main points in Blink.

How did your background as a historian affect the way you wrote the book?

You can take the historian out of the library and put him in the lab but in the end he’s still a historian.  Every page of the book reflects my training. It’s in the stories I tell, of course, which I picked up from years studying the history of politics and the presidency.  And it’s in the emphasis I place on context. 

The most constant refrain of the book is that context is everything.  Our goal as voters should be to make sure that we only go on instinct when the context is right. See a shadowy figure in the distance down a dark alley?  Follow your instincts and run!  That’s an example of a Stone Age instinct working to our advantage.  The context is right.  But if you catch a few sound bites of a politician on television don’t lull yourself into thinking you know him, though your brain will incline you to think that you do.  That’s evolution playing a trick on you.  The context is wrong.  We can only really read people well when we live with them in close surroundings over long periods of time.