Read Online The Republican Brain by is Mooney - Free Book Online

political parties. Our groups. In this context, an attack on one’s group, or on some view with which the group is associated, can effectively operate like an attack on the self.
    Nor does motivated reasoning suggest that we must all be equally biased. There are still checks one can put on the process. Other people, for instance, can help keep us honest—or, conversely, they can affirm our delusions, making us more confident in them. Societal institutions and norms—the norms of science, say, or the norms of good journalism, or the legal profession—can play the same role.
    There may also be “stages” of motivated reasoning. Having a quick emotional impulse and then defending one’s beliefs in a psychology study is one thing. Doing so repeatedly, when constantly confronted with challenging information over time, is something else. At some point, people may “cry uncle” and accept inconvenient facts, even if they don’t do so when first confronted with them.
    Finally, individuals may differ in their need to defend their beliefs, their internal desire to have unwavering convictions that do not and cannot change—to be absolutely convinced and certain about something, and never let it go. They may also differ in their need to be sure that their group is right, and the other group is wrong—in short, their need for solidarity and unity, or for having a strong in-group/out-group way of looking at the world. These are the areas, I will soon show, where liberals and conservatives often differ.
    But let’s table that for now. What counts here is that our political, ideological, partisan, and religious convictions—because they are deeply held enough to comprise core parts of our personal identities, and because they link us to the groups that bulwark those identities and give us meaning—can be key drivers of motivated reasoning. They can make us virtually impervious to facts, logic, and reason. Anyone in a politically split family who has tried to argue with her mother, or father, about politics or religion—and eventually decided “that’s a subject we just don’t talk about”—knows what this is like, and how painful it can be.
    And no wonder. If we have strong emotional convictions about something, then these convictions must be thought of as an actual physical part of our brains, residing not in any individual brain cell (or neuron) but rather in the complex connections between them, and the pattern of neural activation that has occurred so many times before, and will occur again. The more we activate a particular series of connections, the more powerful it becomes. It grows more and more a part of us, like the ability to play guitar or juggle a soccer ball.
    So to attack that “belief” through logical or reasoned argument, and thereby expect it to vanish and cease to exist in a brain, is really a rather naïve idea. Certainly, it is not the wisest or most effective way of trying to “change brains,” as Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff puts it.
    We’ve inherited an Enlightenment tradition of thinking of beliefs as if they’re somehow disembodied, suspended above us in the ether, and all you have to do is float up the right bit of correct information and wrong beliefs will dispel, like bursting a soap bubble. Nothing could be further from the truth. Beliefs are physical. To attack them is like attacking one part of a person’s anatomy, almost like pricking his or her skin (or worse). And motivated reasoning might perhaps best be thought of as a defensive mechanism that is triggered by a direct attack upon a belief system, physically embodied in a brain.
    I’ve still only begun to unpack this theory and its implications—and have barely drawn any meaningful distinctions between liberals and conservatives—but it is already apparent why Condorcet’s vision fails so badly. Condorcet believed