Scientists in a lab inspect a readout from the Conservatometer

As a modern, intellectually engaged American, there’s nothing I like better than a study that shows something. Granted, some studies show better stuff than others. When studies show that certain organic compounds affect the reaction rate of ATP synthase, for example, I get extremely bored. But when studies show stuff that I kind of knew anyway—like people in sweatpants are less likely to know where their kids are, or coffee is good for you—I perk right up. Luckily for me, the Huffington Post exists. Yesterday they observed their bimonthly tradition of linking to a scientific study that suggests conservatives are dumber than progressives. The study in question is right here, and it’s worth reading to understand the methodology researchers used to correlate increasingly conservative views with “low-effort thinking.”

Before we go any further, I should say that I want to believe the results of this study. It is a known fact* that people who do not think much about politics are much more likely to suggest that we nuke Iran or cut off welfare so everyone has to get a job. Less well-known is how these positions are conservative in a scientifically measurable way. Which is more conservative: an across-the-board reduction in the income tax or increased border control? By what percentage? And are these positions low-effort because they are conservative, or because they coincide with the prevailing mood?

Such questions of precision are what drive people away from nuclear physics. At CERN, you always have to worry about gravitational lensing and incidental electromagnetic fields and stuff. In the social sciences, you just go to the bar and start talking to people. That’s what our scientists did in phase one of their experiment:

Mixed-sex groups of 3 to 4 experimenters obtained permission to stand outside the bar’s busiest exit and approach potential participants as they left. Participants were asked to complete a short survey about social attitudes in exchange for learning their BAC. Before collecting data, experimenters verified that each participant was at least 21 years of age and not driving.

These impaired people willing to answer an elaborate survey beginning with questions that might put them in legal jeopardy turned out to have more conservative views. Already we encounter a problem of selection. If I were leaving a bar and someone with a clipboard asked me how old I was and whether I was driving, I would immediately invoke the Nice Try, Narc defense. The people who don’t—those people whose instinctive response to an official-seeming person is to cooperate fully—are probably more likely to embrace the hierarchy-and-order thinking that is essentially conservative.

Or maybe that’s liberal. Conservatives like institutions and the authority of status, but they also like rugged individualism and decentralization of power. Liberals like big government, but they also like civil rights and defending the little guy against established structures. Deciding which ideas are fundamentally conservative and which are liberal is not like distinguishing between frequencies of light, particularly in the face of statements like “production and trade should be free of government influence” or “eventually, private property should be abolished.” I consider myself politically liberal. I oppose the abolition of private property, though, and I would disagree with that second statement. Am I conservative for doing so? If I also disagreed with the government should play no part in the redistribution of wealth, would that be liberal?

This study appears to measure degrees of moderation with binary terms running from radical to reactionary. The water is further muddied by the experimenters’ designated elements of conservatism: perceptions of individual responsibility, acceptance of hierarchy and preference for the status quo. In terms of precision, the last one is not exactly the freezing point of nitrogen. If we’re measuring how comparatively conservative getting drunk or being distracted makes you, shouldn’t the status quo be our zero point? The general state of things should be the position against which liberal and conservative differences are measured, unless we accept the premise that now is a fundamentally conservative moment. If that’s the case, the title of the study should be “low-effort thought promotes current state of nation.”

That’s a conclusion I can get behind. I like an evidentiary argument confirming my prejudices as much as the next guy, but  studies like this one are not science. They’re surveys with experimental conditions, and they rely on facile understandings of “conservative” and “liberal” that are themselves products of low-effort thinking. It says something about our knee-jerk polarity that we are producing scientific studies to justify political stereotypes. Also, the Huffington Post is not a real newspaper, and I should stop reading it.

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