What makes liberals

DOI: Nov 11, It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values. Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions. Pew Research Center now uses as the last birth year for Millennials in our work. President Michael Dimock explains why. The vast majority of U. Use this tool to compare the groups on some key topics and their demographics. About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world.

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This effect is so robust, we find it no matter how we ask the question. In a recent study, we asked people, suppose you're about to get a dog, you picked a particular breed, learned about the breed. Suppose you learn that this particular breed is independent-minded and relates to its owner as a friend and an equal. If you're a liberal, you say, "That's great! But if you're a conservative, that's not so attractive.

If you're conservative and learn that a dog's extremely loyal to its home and family and doesn't warm up to strangers, for conservatives, loyalty is good; dogs ought to be loyal. But to a liberal, it sounds like this dog is running for the Republican nomination. You might say, OK, there are differences between liberals and conservatives, but what makes the three other foundations moral?

Aren't they the foundations of xenophobia, authoritarianism and puritanism? What makes them moral? All is ordered, all is beautiful, all the people and animals are doing what they're supposed to be doing, are where they're supposed to be. But then, given the way of the world, things change. We get every person doing whatever he wants, with every aperture of every other person and every other animal. Some of you might recognize this as the '60s.

But the '60s inevitably gives way to the '70s, where the cuttings of the apertures hurt a little bit more. Of course, Bosch called this hell. So this triptych, these three panels, portray the timeless truth that order tends to decay. The truth of social entropy. So it's a nice analog for all sorts of environmental issues, where we're asking people to make a sacrifice and they don't really benefit from their own sacrifice.

You really want everybody else to sacrifice, but everybody has a temptation to free ride. What happens is that, at first, people start off reasonably cooperative. This is all played anonymously. On the first round, people give about half of the money that they can. But they quickly see other people aren't doing so much.

I won't cooperate. New rule. If you want to give some of your own money to punish people who aren't contributing, you can do that. It shoots up and it keeps going up.

Lots of research shows that to solve cooperative problems, it really helps. It's not enough to appeal to people's good motives. It helps to have some sort of punishment. Even if it's just shame or embarrassment or gossip, you need some sort of punishment to bring people, when they're in large groups, to cooperate. There's even some recent research suggesting that religion — priming God, making people think about God — often, in some situations, leads to more cooperative, more pro-social behavior.

Some people think that religion is an adaptation evolved both by cultural and biological evolution to make groups to cohere, in part for the purpose of trusting each other and being more effective at competing with other groups. That's probably right, although this is a controversial issue. But I'm particularly interested in religion and the origin of religion and in what it does to us and for us, because I think the greatest wonder in the world is not the Grand Canyon.

The Grand Canyon is really simple — a lot of rock and a lot of water and wind and a lot of time, and you get the Grand Canyon. It's not that complicated. This is what's complicated: that people lived in places like the Grand Canyon, cooperating with each other, or on the savannahs of Africa or the frozen shores of Alaska.

And some of these villages grew into the mighty cities of Babylon and Rome and Tenochtitlan. How did this happen? It's an absolute miracle, much harder to explain than the Grand Canyon. The answer, I think, is that they used every tool in the toolbox. It took all of our moral psychology to create these cooperative groups. Yes, you need to be concerned about harm, you need a psychology of justice. But it helps to organize a group if you have subgroups, and if those subgroups have some internal structure, and if you have some ideology that tells people to suppress their carnality — to pursue higher, nobler ends.

Now we get to the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives: liberals reject three of these foundations. They say, "Let's celebrate diversity, not common in-group membership," and, "Let's question authority," and, "Keep your laws off my body.

Liberals have very noble motives for doing this. Traditional authority and morality can be quite repressive and restrictive to those at the bottom, to women, to people who don't fit in. There is also an unresolved chicken-and-egg problem: Do brains start out processing the world differently or do they become increasingly different as our politics evolve?

So what can the study of neural activity suggest about political behavior? The still emerging field of political neuroscience has begun to move beyond describing basic structural and functional brain differences between people of different ideological persuasions—gauging who has the biggest amygdala—to more nuanced investigations of how certain cognitive processes underlie our political thinking and decision-making.

Partisanship does not just affect our vote; it influences our memory, reasoning and even our perception of truth. Knowing this will not magically bring us all together, but researchers hope that continuing to understand the way partisanship influences our brain might at least allow us to counter its worst effects: the divisiveness that can tear apart the shared values required to retain a sense of national unity.

Social scientists who observe behaviors in the political sphere can gain substantial insight into the hazards of errant partisanship. Political neuroscience, however, attempts to deepen these observations by supplying evidence that a belief or bias manifests as a measure of brain volume or activity—demonstrating that an attitude, conviction or misconception is, in fact, genuine.

Brain scans are also unlikely to be used as a biomarker for specific political results because the relationships between the brain and politics is not one-to-one. To study how we process political information in a paper , political psychologist Ingrid Haas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her colleagues created hypothetical candidates from both major parties and assigned each candidate a set of policy statements on issues such as school prayer, Medicare and defense spending.

Most statements were what you would expect: Republicans, for instance, usually favor increasing defense spending, and Democrats generally support expanding Medicare. But some statements were surprising, such as a conservative expressing a pro-choice position or a liberal arguing for invading Iran. Haas put 58 people with diverse political views in a brain scanner. On each trial, participants were asked whether it was good or bad that a candidate held a position on a particular issue and not whether they personally agreed or disagreed with it.

Framing the task that way allowed the researchers to look at neural processing as a function of whether the information was expected or unexpected—what they termed congruent or incongruent.

Liberals proved more attentive to incongruent information, especially for Democratic candidates. When they encountered such a position, it took them longer to make a decision about whether it was good or bad.

How do out-of-the-ordinary positions affect later voting? Haas suspects that engaging more with such information might make voters more likely to punish candidates for it later.