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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