The first installment of this diary, Persuading conservatives with appeals to facts and logic: Good luck with that., focused on the separation of conservatives from facts, science, and critical thinking.
This installment began as comments in response to a diary by DKos member AstroCook, which described efforts to engage a Trump voter in productive dialogue, and focuses on personality characteristics and other psychological attributes that interfere with efforts to shift their destructive worldview:
I wouldn’t tell you not to keep trying to ‘bring others to the light’, but I don’t share the view that such attempts at persuasion are generally useful. For the sake of context, my doctorate is in psychology.
The question is whether a particular person is likely to change their beliefs. The answer is never straightforward— as your account demonstrates. You went with facts. That didn’t work. You went with appeals to emotion and empathy. That didn’t work. Finally, you attempted to use her language— the language of faith— and that too didn’t work. FoF [the person AstoCook was trying to reason with] doubled down.
Among the factors that influence whether and in what context a person will change their beliefs are: a) how strongly connected the belief is to their sense of self, b) whether espousal of the beliefs offers kinship with a group that the person affiliates with (basically, the belief is a mark of tribal membership and allegiance, think of elements of Catholic catechism), c) whether there is an event (or events) that challenges the person’s fundamental views of themselves and the world.
That last factor I listed is crucial— if a person doesn’t directly experience something that cannot easily fit in their pre-existing worldview, they are unlikely to alter their beliefs. Experiences matter more than words. It is not a coincidence that large proportions of Trump voters remain in one community their whole lives:
According to the just-released PRRI/The Atlantic poll, 40 percent of Donald Trump’s likely voters live in the community where they spent their youth, compared with just 29 percent of Hillary Clinton voters. And of the 71 percent of Clinton voters who have left their hometowns, most—almost 60 percent of that group—now live more than two hours away.*
But this disparity involves more than the simple fact of encountering people different from the ones that share your views if you move away from your home town, it says something about the personality, and mindset of those that stay, and those that choose to leave.
There are personality traits that have been studied by psychologists for several decades (called the ‘Big Five’), that have been shown to play a role in many observed behaviors, choices we make, and attitudes. One of them, Openness to Experience, largely overlaps with worldview:
Personality and Political Attitudes: Relationships across Issue Domains and Political Contexts, Gerber, A. et. al. (2010) American Political Science Review
Our findings regarding Openness also comport with prior research that finds an association between this trait and liberal attitudes. Again, as predicted, we show that this trait is associated with support for liberal economic and social policies. These associations are quite strong: a two SD increase in Openness is associated with a 0.66 unit change in ideological self-placement (0.56 SD), a 0.48 SD increase in economic liberalism, and a 0.53 SD increase in social liberalism. The magnitudes of these effects are larger than the effects of either income or education. (pg 121, emphasis added).
You are liberal, and pursued a career in science. Both of these show a curiosity about the world, and other people. That is Openness to Experience. This characteristic also makes you receptive to alternative points of view. Someone who is not open to experience, will not be receptive to hearing other views.
They are not closed off intellectually because they are conservative, they are conservative because they are closed off intellectually, closed off to information and experiences that challenge beliefs that support their views of themselves, their place in the world, their self-worth.
Even if someone who is conservative does have an experience that challenges their worldview (for instance, having a child or sibling come out as LGBT, or receiving kindness from a bright, capable person of color or Muslim), it is more common for them to rationalize this information, than change their beliefs. They may in fact retreat from or deny that experience occurred at all— it sometimes provokes overwhelming cognitive dissonance, the state of possessing knowledge that contradicts fundamental beliefs (one aspect of my dissertation was about the effects of cognitive dissonance in psychotherapy, when it promotes, and when it inhibits, significant change in individuals’ self-perception).
You are welcome to try and persuade anyone you care to, in my personal experience it doesn’t work with anyone who doesn’t already have an open, receptive attitude, and I don’t find a lot of evidence that ‘planting a seed’ promotes change gradually over time in someone not receptive to the seed of information.
Epiphanies do happen, for a few people, when confronted with events of such magnitude it causes them to question everything about themselves, but even in the face of such events, most people retreat into what they have always believed.
******
Briefly continuing the point about Openness to Experience and worldview, I’d ask you to think about your family, friends and acquaintances in terms of the qualities eclectic tastes, non-conformity, tolerance for ambiguity, and comfort with difference in others. Consider who among them seem to possess each of these qualities in greater or lesser degrees, and then compare that to their political orientation.
These are qualities that are reflected in a person’s choices, their explicit attitudes and demeanor, what activities they engage in and enjoy, and whom they choose to associate with. In other words, they are elements of someone’s personality on public display. They are part of how we get a sense of who someone is, as a person. (Apply those concepts to yourself, and see whether you perceive yourself to have eclectic tastes (and open to trying new and different things, foods, music, etc.), whether you take satisfaction in being non-conformist in thought and manner, whether you are comfortable with ambiguity and complexity, and whether you have little discomfort with people who are substantially different than you in some notable way.)
After considering these qualities in those you know (and yourself), think about how these qualities overlap with ideology.
The main point about these qualities is that they are not something we decide to have, or not— they are largely intrinsic, emotionally based reactions. Nobody can decide what they enjoy or not, and so we cannot choose to one day enjoy a variety of things, if that’s not something we are already predisposed to. The same could be said for a preference for non-conformity, tolerance for ambiguity, and comfort with difference in others. These are felt experiences, not reasoned conclusions, and so they are not subject to reasoned appeals to change.
Further on that point, there is a substantial body of research about the role of the emotions fear and disgust in the formation of conservative attitudes. For example:
Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of LeftRight Political Orientations, Smith, K.B, et. al. (2011), PLOS One
the proper interpretation of the findings reported here is not that biology causes politics or that politics causes biology but that certain political orientations at some unspecified point become housed in our biology, with meaningful political consequences. (pg 8)
In short, conservatives tend to form judgments about others and the world out of the visceral reactions of fear and disgust. This is why conservative messages and policies are infused with the language of purity and contamination, threat, and self-defense. Inter-racial and gay marriages ‘contaminate’ and ‘threaten the existence’ of white heterosexual culture, and so people of color and LGBT individuals must be quarantined, or (in the case of hate crimes, eradicated).
We can ask why conservatives seem so comfortable with bigotry, and it’s because they feel they are protecting themselves from harm. In the extreme, this view leads one to view genocide as self-defense— it is an act akin to stopping a perceived plague.
These are not viewpoints susceptible to either empirical data or logical argumentation, they are in many ways reflexive responses.
To be clear, I view conservatism as the precursor to fascism, and conservatives as proto-fascists, as I’ve outlined in a series of diaries since the election, here in blog form.