Don't Drink and Vote

Occasionally research brings what seemed to be separate topics together in an interesting way. I've previously noted that one purpose of this blog is to encourage thinking slowly—deliberate, effortful processing of information—in the hope of responding rationally to difficult social and political problems. A recent article by Scott Eidelman and three colleagues suggests that the opposite of slow thought—rapid, low effort processing of information—encourages political conservatism. They present four studies to support this claim.

As most of us know, alcohol consumption interferes with deliberative thought while leaving automatic responding largely intact. The first study was done as people were leaving a bar. Participants were asked to answer some questions and exhale into a breathalyzer, which measured their blood alcohol level. The questions included a ten item measure of liberalism-conservatism, as well as whether they considered themselves a liberal or a conservative. Statistically controlling for gender, education and political ideology, the authors found that the higher the participants' blood alcohol level, the more they scored toward the conservative end of the scale. Both self-identified liberals and conservatives were more conservative when they were more intoxicated. (In case you're wondering, liberals and conservatives were equally likely to get drunk.)

The other three studies were laboratory experiments. In the second, students responded to another opinion scale which measured liberalism and conservatism independently of one another. Cognitive load was manipulated by requiring some participants to perform a secondary task (counting tones of different pitches) while filling out the questionnaire. The others merely filled out the scale. Distraction was expected to interfere with their ability to think about the opinion items. As predicted, the participants with the higher cognitive load scored higher in conservatism and lower in liberalism.

In a third study, participants rated the favorability of liberal and conservative concepts such as “civil rights” and “law and order.” Opportunity to think was manipulated by giving some participants only 1.5 seconds to respond to each item, while the others could take as long as they wanted. The high time pressure subjects rated the conservative terms more favorably. They also rated the liberal terms less favorably, but the difference was not statistically significant.

Finally, in the last study, participants rated the liberal and conservative concepts under instructions to think quickly or slowly. In the low effort condition, they were told to “give your first, immediate response to the terms” and to not “think too hard.” In the high effort condition, the instructions were to “think hard about each term,” to “take your time and give a careful and thoughtful response.” The task was followed by a pop quiz—a recognition memory test. Participants were shown many concepts and asked to identify the ones they had previously rated. The low effort participants rated the conservative terms more favorably than the high effort participants. (As before, the effect on liberal terms was not significant.) The recognition memory task served as a measure of depth of thought and, as predicted, it partially accounted for the relationship between low effort thinking and conservatism. (That is, if you statistically eliminate the effect of recognition memory scores, the relationship between low effort and conservatism is reduced, but still statistically significant.)

How do the authors explain these results? First of all, they are not saying that conservatives are less intelligent than liberals (although there is some evidence that this is the case). Both liberals and conservatives were affected by these manipulations. They are also not saying that conservative ideology is cognitively simpler than liberalism (althought there is quite a bit of evidence that this is true). In these studies, independent samples rated the complexity of the liberal and conservative statements and concepts to ensure that they were equally difficult to understand.

Here's their argument: There are three aspects of the content of conservative ideology, all of which we are more likely to believe when processing information automatically, but which we question when we engage in deliberate, effortful thought. They are:

• a tendency to see people as personally responsible for their outcomes, rather than acknowledging that their behavior could be situationally caused.
• an acceptance of heirarchy—inequality between people and groups (such as the rich and the poor).
• a preference for the status quo rather than social change.

Since there is evidence that these three bulwarks of conservative thought are more likely to occur when we are operating on automatic pilot, distracting people, forcing them to respond in a hurry, asking them not to think too hard, or getting them drunk all will make them more conservative. It appears that conservative thinking comes more easily to us. To avoid being reflexive right wingers, we have to put down the beer, turn off the TV, and think about it. That could be a sobering message.