Mooney Tunes
This afternoon I finished reading The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality by Chris Mooney. I thought I would really like the book, especially since one of the first things I ever read by Chris Mooney was his debunking of PolitiFact's "deeply misguided attempt to correct Jon Stewart on the topic of…misinformation and Fox News." Long story short, Stewart called Fox viewers more misinformed than consumers of other TV news. And he was right. But PolitiFact claimed he was wrong, making a sloppy argument to the contrary that confounded being misinformed (as in thinking falsehoods are correct) with being uninformed (as in simply not knowing information). Mooney fact-checked the fact-checkers and came out ahead.
For the most part The Republican Brain is good, perhaps just not as good as I hoped it would be. It does a good job of making the case, using recent research in political psychology and political neuroscience, that conservatives tend to be more misinformed, tend to be less interested in being factually correct, are more averse to information that contradicts their views, and are less comfortable with uncertainty. I like this kind of information, because I have little patience with false balancing--that idea that you have to counter a liberal argument with a conservative one, no matter how illogical and empirically bankrupt the latter is. In that regard, Mooney delivers some good writing, albeit with arguments that often didn't seem to be developed to their full potential. (He acknowledges that he wrote the book in one year, with a very busy schedule...and it shows.)
Conservative critics have tried to discredit Mooney by saying that he's not a scientist himself--he has an English degree. I'm not a scientist either (the most I can claim is a few years of experience supporting SAMHSA- and NIH-funded research), but from what I can tell Mooney seems to be a fairly good science journalist who has demonstrated his competence at gauging the scientific consensus on various topics, and reading and interpreting scientific writing. In terms of how he covered science topics in his book, the only one that made me skeptical of his conclusions was his take on nuclear energy. In defending it (and making the case that nuclear energy is one area of exception where conservatives are often better informed than liberals), he focuses almost entirely on the issues of ionizing radiation and greenhouse gas emissions. He argues that the former is an overblown risk and the absence of the latter should be a home-run selling point for nuclear energy. Conveniently, though, he makes only passing reference to the issue of nuclear waste and completely ignores other issues pertaining to nuclear energy: the energy consumption and pollution associated with uranium mining, the prospect of peak uranium, and the safety of aging nuclear facilities. I was underwhelmed.
But if Mooney oversteps the boundaries of his credentials, perhaps it's when he writes about history--not science. In the chapter "The Republican War on History" he takes Howard Zinn to task, arguing that Zinn is the left-wing counterpart to the hack historians on the Right who, among other things, minimize the realities of slavery or the importance of the separation of church and state to the Founding Fathers. But his criticisms of Zinn fall flat. He makes the bizarre argument that since it wasn't written from a liberals-versus-conservatives frame, Zinn's A People's History of the United States shows a lack of understanding of America--as if America can only be understood through that one frame of reference. So Zinn didn't use that frame, instead opting to use others: labor versus industrialists, minorities versus majorities, war resisters versus militarists--and that magically invalidates all of Zinn's historical research. Tellingly, Mooney doesn't offer any examples of factual inaccuracies in Zinn's work; we're just supposed to trust him that Zinn doesn't understand America. (Never mind that in writing a "people's history," using the liberals-versus-conservatives frame would come with semantic problems, since the liberal elite are often out of sync with the liberal masses.)
If that petty stab at Zinn wasn't enough, there was also this gem, which was so stupid it almost made my head explode: "That's not the only problem with Zinn: His book even goes so far as to suggest that the U.S. entered World War II out of questionable motives: racism (against the Japanese), imperialism, business interests. Never mind, uh, Hitler's racist quest for world dominance." Unless Mooney has a fondness for non sequiturs that I must have missed, I can only guess that the reasoning behind that last sentence goes something like this: Germany was racist, and the U.S. fought Germany, so the U.S. wasn't racist (in the same sense that if Eminem beat up Mel Gibson, it would mean Eminem isn't sexist). If Mooney wanted to rebut Zinn's claims, he should have done so with contradictory facts, not this crap reasoning. I don't know why it's so difficult for Mooney to wrap his head around the possibility that even while the U.S. was fighting a nation that had embraced racism, the U.S. was itself very racist. The U.S. fought World War II with a segregated army, turned away Jewish refugees, and churned out racist caricatures of "Japs" ad nauseam (and also carried out genocidal bombings in Japan and put Japanese Americans into concentration camps)--and, incidentally, shared a lot of common ground with Nazi Germany when it came to eugenics laws. The U.S. was hardly a paragon of virtue back then. But while acknowledging the unsavory things about the U.S., it's not as if Zinn was simultaneously denying "Hitler's racist quest for world dominance." Mooney's vacuousness on these points is incredible. I could go on about the other points, but I've already ranted about the "Good War" myth enough times already.
There's another thing that's disengenuous about comparing Zinn to the aforementioned hack historians of the Right. Zinn never claimed to be objective. In fact, he repeatedly stated that he considered historical objectivity a fantasy, and that it's better for a historian to simply disclose her ideology or other biases to the reader, rather than make any claim to objectivity. That's a far cry from writing authoritatively that the Founding Fathers wanted church and state to be BFFs.
My only other complaint is that Mooney devoted precious little time to offering practical advice, in light of his research, on how to make arguments that will persuade conservatives. (The take-away can be summed up like this: first, stroke their egos so that they let down their guard, then make an argument that speaks in terms of values; facts aren't as important.) In fact, in lieu of providing such advice, Mooney uses his final words to argue that liberals should be a little more like conservatives--putting more faith in their leaders, speaking more authoratitively, and so on. That doesn't sit well with me, but for reasons I won't delve into right now.
Those complaints aside, I had a couple of things I wanted to copy from it before returning it.In a series of studies, Tetlock has shown that prompting people to feel accountable--in other words, letting them know they will have to justify a decision, potentially to a hostile or critical audience--makes them more integratively complex in making that decision, more careful and self-critical and less prone to overconfidence. They then commit less errors--which shouldn't be surprising. Integrative complexity, after all, involves weighing viewpoints other than one's own and integrating them into your perspective. The more you do that, the less sure of your own beliefs you tend to become, and the less challenged you'll be by potential contradiction (74).
In an early study (published in the year 2000) on the prevalence of falsehoods in American politics--one that stressed the then-novel distinction between being uninformed and believing strongly in misinformation--political scientist James Kuklinski and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign examined contrasting public views about the facts on [the issue of welfare]. Sure enough, they found that conservatives (or at any rate, those who held strongly anti-welfare views) tended to be both more misinformed about welfare, and also more confident they were right in their (wrong) beliefs. In particular, welfare opponents tended to greatly exaggerate the cost of the program, the number of families on welfare, how many of them were African-American, and so on. For instance, only 7 percent of the public was on welfare at the time of the study; but those who exaggerated by answering up to 18 or 25 percent in Kuklinski's survey were highly confident they were right. Just 1 percent of the federal budget went to welfare, but those who dramatically exaggerated the number--answering up to 11 or 15 percent--were highly confident they were right (163-164).
For the most part The Republican Brain is good, perhaps just not as good as I hoped it would be. It does a good job of making the case, using recent research in political psychology and political neuroscience, that conservatives tend to be more misinformed, tend to be less interested in being factually correct, are more averse to information that contradicts their views, and are less comfortable with uncertainty. I like this kind of information, because I have little patience with false balancing--that idea that you have to counter a liberal argument with a conservative one, no matter how illogical and empirically bankrupt the latter is. In that regard, Mooney delivers some good writing, albeit with arguments that often didn't seem to be developed to their full potential. (He acknowledges that he wrote the book in one year, with a very busy schedule...and it shows.)
Conservative critics have tried to discredit Mooney by saying that he's not a scientist himself--he has an English degree. I'm not a scientist either (the most I can claim is a few years of experience supporting SAMHSA- and NIH-funded research), but from what I can tell Mooney seems to be a fairly good science journalist who has demonstrated his competence at gauging the scientific consensus on various topics, and reading and interpreting scientific writing. In terms of how he covered science topics in his book, the only one that made me skeptical of his conclusions was his take on nuclear energy. In defending it (and making the case that nuclear energy is one area of exception where conservatives are often better informed than liberals), he focuses almost entirely on the issues of ionizing radiation and greenhouse gas emissions. He argues that the former is an overblown risk and the absence of the latter should be a home-run selling point for nuclear energy. Conveniently, though, he makes only passing reference to the issue of nuclear waste and completely ignores other issues pertaining to nuclear energy: the energy consumption and pollution associated with uranium mining, the prospect of peak uranium, and the safety of aging nuclear facilities. I was underwhelmed.
But if Mooney oversteps the boundaries of his credentials, perhaps it's when he writes about history--not science. In the chapter "The Republican War on History" he takes Howard Zinn to task, arguing that Zinn is the left-wing counterpart to the hack historians on the Right who, among other things, minimize the realities of slavery or the importance of the separation of church and state to the Founding Fathers. But his criticisms of Zinn fall flat. He makes the bizarre argument that since it wasn't written from a liberals-versus-conservatives frame, Zinn's A People's History of the United States shows a lack of understanding of America--as if America can only be understood through that one frame of reference. So Zinn didn't use that frame, instead opting to use others: labor versus industrialists, minorities versus majorities, war resisters versus militarists--and that magically invalidates all of Zinn's historical research. Tellingly, Mooney doesn't offer any examples of factual inaccuracies in Zinn's work; we're just supposed to trust him that Zinn doesn't understand America. (Never mind that in writing a "people's history," using the liberals-versus-conservatives frame would come with semantic problems, since the liberal elite are often out of sync with the liberal masses.)
If that petty stab at Zinn wasn't enough, there was also this gem, which was so stupid it almost made my head explode: "That's not the only problem with Zinn: His book even goes so far as to suggest that the U.S. entered World War II out of questionable motives: racism (against the Japanese), imperialism, business interests. Never mind, uh, Hitler's racist quest for world dominance." Unless Mooney has a fondness for non sequiturs that I must have missed, I can only guess that the reasoning behind that last sentence goes something like this: Germany was racist, and the U.S. fought Germany, so the U.S. wasn't racist (in the same sense that if Eminem beat up Mel Gibson, it would mean Eminem isn't sexist). If Mooney wanted to rebut Zinn's claims, he should have done so with contradictory facts, not this crap reasoning. I don't know why it's so difficult for Mooney to wrap his head around the possibility that even while the U.S. was fighting a nation that had embraced racism, the U.S. was itself very racist. The U.S. fought World War II with a segregated army, turned away Jewish refugees, and churned out racist caricatures of "Japs" ad nauseam (and also carried out genocidal bombings in Japan and put Japanese Americans into concentration camps)--and, incidentally, shared a lot of common ground with Nazi Germany when it came to eugenics laws. The U.S. was hardly a paragon of virtue back then. But while acknowledging the unsavory things about the U.S., it's not as if Zinn was simultaneously denying "Hitler's racist quest for world dominance." Mooney's vacuousness on these points is incredible. I could go on about the other points, but I've already ranted about the "Good War" myth enough times already.
There's another thing that's disengenuous about comparing Zinn to the aforementioned hack historians of the Right. Zinn never claimed to be objective. In fact, he repeatedly stated that he considered historical objectivity a fantasy, and that it's better for a historian to simply disclose her ideology or other biases to the reader, rather than make any claim to objectivity. That's a far cry from writing authoritatively that the Founding Fathers wanted church and state to be BFFs.
My only other complaint is that Mooney devoted precious little time to offering practical advice, in light of his research, on how to make arguments that will persuade conservatives. (The take-away can be summed up like this: first, stroke their egos so that they let down their guard, then make an argument that speaks in terms of values; facts aren't as important.) In fact, in lieu of providing such advice, Mooney uses his final words to argue that liberals should be a little more like conservatives--putting more faith in their leaders, speaking more authoratitively, and so on. That doesn't sit well with me, but for reasons I won't delve into right now.
Those complaints aside, I had a couple of things I wanted to copy from it before returning it.In a series of studies, Tetlock has shown that prompting people to feel accountable--in other words, letting them know they will have to justify a decision, potentially to a hostile or critical audience--makes them more integratively complex in making that decision, more careful and self-critical and less prone to overconfidence. They then commit less errors--which shouldn't be surprising. Integrative complexity, after all, involves weighing viewpoints other than one's own and integrating them into your perspective. The more you do that, the less sure of your own beliefs you tend to become, and the less challenged you'll be by potential contradiction (74).
In an early study (published in the year 2000) on the prevalence of falsehoods in American politics--one that stressed the then-novel distinction between being uninformed and believing strongly in misinformation--political scientist James Kuklinski and his colleagues at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign examined contrasting public views about the facts on [the issue of welfare]. Sure enough, they found that conservatives (or at any rate, those who held strongly anti-welfare views) tended to be both more misinformed about welfare, and also more confident they were right in their (wrong) beliefs. In particular, welfare opponents tended to greatly exaggerate the cost of the program, the number of families on welfare, how many of them were African-American, and so on. For instance, only 7 percent of the public was on welfare at the time of the study; but those who exaggerated by answering up to 18 or 25 percent in Kuklinski's survey were highly confident they were right. Just 1 percent of the federal budget went to welfare, but those who dramatically exaggerated the number--answering up to 11 or 15 percent--were highly confident they were right (163-164).