Free The Republican Brain by is Mooney Page B

generally and how it operates in a legal context, see Dan M. Kahan, “The Supreme Court 2010 Term—Foreword: Neutral Principles, Motivated Cognition, and Some Problems for Constitutional Law,” 125 Harvard Law Review, p. 1–77.
    36 the more powerful it becomes George Lakoff, The Political Mind: A Cognitive Scientist’s Guide to Your Brain and Its Politics , New York: Penguin, 2008.
    36 “change brains” George Lakoff, The Political Mind , New York: Penguin, 2008.
    40 Drew Westen Drew Westen et al, “Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience , Vol. 18, No. 11, pp. 1947–1958.

Chapter Two
    Smart Idiots
    I’m convinced that in most cases in which people (especially today’s political conservatives) deny inconvenient facts, resist contrary evidence, and sometimes come up with elaborate counterarguments, motivated reasoning is a key part of the process. In other words, it is all around us. Our political discourse is choking on it—even though very few of us seem to notice or admit it.
    One reason for this is that while the arguments we hear may be impelled by automatic emotional reactions, that doesn’t make them any less clever-sounding or persuasive. Some can be crafty indeed. And that’s perhaps never more true than when they become technical and involve “expertise.”
    In debates over scientific or technical matters with partisan implications—is global warming happening, did Iraq have weapons of mass destruction, and so on—the same game recurs. Let’s call it “My expert is better than yours.” It’s very simple: In a dispute where neither participant is actually an expert, the two debaters cite different experts, with different views, to bolster their beliefs. Both believe their expert is right and reliable, and that the other guy’s isn’t.
    Motivated reasoning explains this phenomenon too. According to intriguing research by Yale Law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues, people’s deep-seated views about morality, and about the way society should be ordered, strongly predict who they consider to be a legitimate scientific expert in the first place—and where they consider “scientific consensus” to lie on contested issues. These same views also lead them to reject the expertise of experts who don’t agree with them. They simply assume they’re not really experts at all.
    In Kahan’s research individuals are classified, based on their political and moral values, as either individualists or communitarians , and as either hierarchical in outlook or egalitarian . To conceptualize this, picture a simple Cartesian plane with two axes, of the sort that we all remember from algebra class. One axis runs from very hierarchical in outlook (believing that society should be highly structured and ordered, including based on gender, class, and racial differences) to very egalitarian in outlook (the opposite). The other runs from very individualistic in outlook (believing that we all are responsible for our own fates in life and people should be rewarded for their choices and punished for their faults, and that government should not step in to prevent this) to very communitarian in outlook (the opposite).
    This creates four ideological quadrants, with each of us located in one of them. And though sometimes the picture grows more complicated, broadly speaking, hierarchical-individuals correspond to U.S. conservatives, whereas egalitarian-communitarians correspond to U.S. liberals. The two groups will largely be found occupying different quadrants—although in reality, individuals are scattered all over the place and may change quadrants depending on the issue at hand.
    In the next section, I will say more about Kahan’s scheme—and others—that divide up the