Free The Republican Brain by is Mooney

constructed for the study:
    George W. Bush: “First of all, Ken Lay is a supporter of mine. I love the man. I got to know Ken Lay years ago, and he has given generously to my campaign. When I’m President, I plan to run the government like a CEO runs a country. Ken Lay and Enron are a model of how I’ll do that.”
    Contradictory: Mr. Bush now avoids any mention of Ken Lay and is critical of Enron when asked.
    John Kerry: During the 1996 campaign, Kerry told a Boston Globe reporter that the Social Security system should be overhauled. He said Congress should consider raising the retirement age and means testing benefits. “I know it’s going to be unpopular,” he said. “But we have a generational responsibility to fix this problem.”
    Contradictory: This year, on Meet the Press , Kerry pledged that he will never tax or cut benefits to seniors or raise the age for eligibility for Social Security.
    Encountering these contradictions, the subjects were then asked to consider whether the “statements and actions are inconsistent with each other,” and to rate how much inconsistency (or, we might say, hypocrisy) they felt they’d seen. The result was predictable, but powerful: Republicans tended to see hypocrisy in Kerry (but not Bush), and Democrats tended to see the opposite. Both groups, though, were much more in agreement about whether they’d seen hypocrisy in politically neutral figures.
    This study also provides our first tantalizing piece of evidence that Republicans may be more biased, overall, in defense of their political beliefs or their party. While members of both groups in the study saw more hypocrisy or contradiction in the candidate they opposed, Democrats were more likely to see hypocrisy in their own candidate, Kerry, as well. But Republicans were less likely to see it in Bush. Thus, the authors concluded that Republicans showed “a small but significant tendency to reason to more biased conclusions regarding Bush than Democrats did toward Kerry.”
    While all this was happening, the research subjects were also having their brains scanned. Sure enough, the results showed that when engaged in biased political reasoning, partisans were not using parts of the brain associated with “cold,” logical thinking. Rather, they were using a variety of regions associated with emotional processing and psychological defense. Instead of listing all the regions here—there are too many, you’d be drowning in words like “ventral”—let me instead underscore the key conclusion.
    Westen captured the activation of what appeared to be emotionally oriented brain circuits when subjects were faced with a logical contradiction that activated their partisan impulses. He did not capture calm, rational deliberation. These people weren’t solving math problems. They were committing the mental equivalent of beating their chests.
    Notes
    26 “A man with a conviction . . .” My account of the Seekers is based on Festinger’s classic book (with Henry W. Riecken and Stanley Schacter), When Prophecy Fails , first published by the University of Minnesota Press in 1956. My edition is published by Pinter& Martin, 2008. All quotations are from this text.
    28 how smokers rationalize For a highly readable overview of “cognitive dissonance” theory and the many different phenomena it explains, see Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007. The smoking example is provide by Aronson in his foreword to When Prophecy Fails , Pinter & Martin, 2008.
    29 motivated reasoning For an overview see Ziva Kunda, “The Case for Motivated Reasoning,” Psychological Bulletin , November 1990, Vol. 108, No. 3, pp. 480–498.
    29 Thinking and reasoning are actually suffused with emotion See Antonio Damasio,