Per this conversation I was thinking about another different paper I came across a while ago, that was blogged about here. Now I’m not so interested in the ramblings of Paul Craig Roberts, who will hang his argument on just about any coat peg he thinks will support it, but the paper, “There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification.” looks interesting. It’s another on my reading list to absorb and see if there’s anything to relate to the topic, but does seems to fit with Altemeyer’s discussion.

In my quick perusal of it, the most interesting thing to jump out was the section on “Strategies for Resisting Information.” The interesting thing about this study is that people adhering to a propagandistic line do seem able to hold entirely contrary viewpoints and justify them through mental strategies. “The first surprise in our findings is that several interview respondents denied believing Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda, even though they had indicated such a belief on the survey.” 10.2 percent knew “that no evidence had currently been found linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 but must have been involved in 9/11 because his general antipathy toward the United States propels his support for terrorism in general.” 1/3rd of the respondents switched topics to other reasons that the war in Iraq was justified when pressed on the 9/11 connection they had made in the survey.

More interesting was the strategy of “Selective Exposure” in which respondents in this category were either unwilling to put their knowledge of the state of evidence up to the interviewer’s scrutiny, or were generally puzzled about events, though I sort of like this one because Kurt Vonnegut describes a similar process really well in Mother Night when discussing how people willingly file down the teeth of gears on their own logic. 10.2 percent dismissed out of hand any evidence showing Saddam wasn’t involved in 9/11 but were unwilling or unable to offer a reason why the evidence wasn’t any good. One respondent was quoted in a way that reminds me of everyone from Holocaust denialists to intelligent design advocates: “Well, I bet they say that the Commission didn’t have any proof of it but I guess we still can have our opinions and feel that way even though they say that. ”

The above mentioned study is a qualitative look at the issue. But using the neuroscience angle would, I think be able to tie some brain regions to response in ways that have been done before. There’s a set of standardized images used to measure emotional responses, and they’ve been used for people wired up to measure which areas of the brain are activated. I would imagine a similar study could be done here, but I don’t know how much the wiring of one of these people’s brains in and of itself would actually throw off the study.

The amygdala is known to process and keep the memory of emotional reaction. You might see something there. In the amygdala, cells called intercalated (ITC) neurons fight off fear and anxiety. During the questions in the above study, it would have been interesting to see at what level (if any) the ITC neurons were firing at when the defense mechanisms were employed. If anything, it would indicate a fear response which could be tied to a heritable, biological tendency. You could then measure for people with a higher tendency of this and see how impervious they were all to evidence-based arguments. It could be in the ITC neurons that the only direct connections between modern luddites, anti-intellectuals and anti-empiricists might be made, but that’s a pretty far-out hypothesis without knowing more about how this all works.

An aspect in evolutionary psychology that interests me quite a bit is the idea of lag time; the notion that we have 10,000 year-old tendencies firing off in a vastly different world from the one that molded them. At some point in prehistory an over-active amygdala with hair-trigger ITC neurons popping off at the slightest challenge might have come in mighty handy. These days it could be potentially dangerous.

I’m not savvy enough to know what exactly detects a specific neuron firing. I think fMRI would just highlight the part of the brain undergoing a drastic change in blood flow. Though blood flow would be related, I’m not sure if it would necessarily single out a specific neuron. Hopefully one day I’ll be at the controls of some such machine and can find out!

I haven’t read his whole work for a few years now. You mention the word regime and how he defines it. This is sort of where he gets in trouble with the use of the acronym RWA (right-wing authoritarian) everywhere. So, if I remember correctly, in the beginning of the book he talks about why he uses RWA. So he states that the Soviet Union was founded on left-wing economic principles. But once these left-wingers got into power their supporters (the authoritarian followers) became RWAs because they were now supporting the status quo or the power structure as it existed. And over time the support of this regime was support for the traditional regime. Then left wingers, in this type of definition, are those who are interested in changing the status quo.

So he defines his use of language early on, but its still a mistake. It sort of the process we went through with your use of the word Luddite. I claimed it was an emotionally loaded word and that it probably didn’t speak best to what you were trying to describe. You basically had to tack new meanings on it in order to fit, but this didn’t remove the prior baggage that the word carries and how that baggage didn’t seem to fit to well with certain technological savvy creationist and such.

There was a commenter on the boingboing thread who mentioned that motorcycle helmet laws would be authoritarian. I thought this was interesting. I didn’t disagree with the point. The argument that someone is being forced to wear a helmet by the government makes sense. And people who support such laws could possibly be called authoritarian too. There is no end to this type of argument. So the question to me, and you are asking it to in terms of how you define ”regimes”, is what people think of when they think of an authoritarian regime. Well the first thing my memory pops into my mind is Nazi Germany. Now let’s take the motorcycle thing and apply it to Nazi Germany. Was Nazi Germany bad because they had motorcycle helmet laws? I don’t even know if Nazi Germany had them or not, but the question and answer seem almost absurd in context of what Nazi Germany did. We have this problem in America now where certain political demagogues define Obama’s health care plan as “national socialist” and that’s what Nazi means in English and Germany had a national health care plan. Pure demagoguery. So then you have people of a certain political persuasion equating Obama with Hitler and the Nazis and that we are on this road and this is how this stuff gets started. And of course this fits in with the language of big government liberals who are going to take control of your life. Here’s the thing though. Most people don’t recognize Nazi Germany as evil (the emotional baggage evoked by the words Nazi, fascism, Hitler, and even authoritarianism) because of their health care system (and I don’t even know if this was something Hitler actually put in place). They recognize it as evil from images of concentration camp graves full of the dead bodies of bone thin Jews who were starved and used as slave labor. They recognize it as evil for enslaving an entire group of people based on ethic and religious identity. They recognize it as evil for the violent and brutal wars it initiated in the name of self defense and historical claims to land for to build a greater Germany. They saw it as evil for having a secret police that jailed and executed political opponents.

So how did Hitler come to absolute power in a democracy to carry out things like mass genocide and war? From what I can tell, Hitler’s main rhetorical strategy was appeals to German patriotism\nationalism, German ethnic\racial pride, and demonization of certain groups of people – mostly the Jewish people. So he established a strong in and out group tendency and used the Jews as a scapegoat for Germany’s problems (including what Hitler and other nationalist felt was a premature surrender in WWI and a very bad economy). I believe he was also able to exploit class tensions (hence the socialist label) of Germany’s working poor and project the cause of their financial ruin on rich Jewish bankers and such. So this is the type of themes he is using in to create political power and support for himself. And I have read that after these political gatherings Hitler’s brownshirts would go around and trash Jewish businesses and get into fights with Jewish people and communist. Its a political movement that fed off hate and fear and one should not be surprised that it ended in war and death camps.

So in this type of authoritarian regime and politics (as opposed to motorcycle helmet laws or universal health care) I see an rhetorical style, by authoritarian leader\politicians, to one of the most base instincts in the human animals – fear and anger and hate. Could you not begin tying this into neuroscience? This is the politics of the amygdala as opposed to a politics that appeals to say the prefrontal cortex. I think of the anti-intellectualism that tends to go along with these movements. Book burnings and hostilities to academics and universities and scientist. What is more beneficial to the amygdala’s control of the mental environment than shunning intellectualism that slows one down in drawing quick and reactive solutions? Its a politics that would succeed mostly by exploiting differences between people, forming in\out groups as easily as possible. Paradoxically we are forming our own new grouping here, but we are a bit more cautious and analytical about it as opposed to the instant reactions someone has against someone of a different skin color or religion.

Could one use fMRI to determine authoritarian and political tendencies? The more reactive\reactionary brain being subject to amygdala hijacks more often than the non-reactive. A lot of things fit into this model. First off the success in emotional appeals to the political base as opposed to intellectual appeals. Second the general hostility to intellectualism, which potentially, via neuroplasticity causes the prefrontal cortext to become more developed and thus exert more control and restraint on amygdala hijacks. Third a tendency to prefer more violent solutions to problems (i.e. preemptive wars), Fourth a morality that does not extend to all human groups but human groups that have a closer impact on one’s immediate survival. I’m thinking of how some of these mechanisms might have evolved. So evolution favored those human beings who could develop love and kinship with their own tribe since those forming groups had a higher chance of survival than those doing it on their own. However, this love and kinship (which could be defined as morality) that worked within the group stopped with the group and saw other tribes of humans as competition for resources. Competition for resources led to conflicts and wars (at a small scale). So those who learned to distrust the “other” while maintaining strong love within their own group had a better chance of surviving since the “other” was likely to kill them.

It seems like a very good parsimonious explanation to me too. I know that regions within the brain sort of compete for control over the whole organism. Compete to get their contents into consciousness. I understood this, from a cognitive psychology class many years ago to occur even at a much smaller level, that different neurons within the visual cortex would metaphorically yell as loud as possible to say this visual input is a line – I’m picking it up – that is what is – while another neuron that was set to handle a different shape wouldn’t “yell” as loud. Maybe the amygdala, as a much larger collection of neurons with a specialized survival function, is yelling over the more controlled and rational prefrontal cortext. And it does so more in some people and that people would begin to take on more sophisticated cognitive and behavioral traits from this dominance of one over the other? And its not that the amygdala is bad. We want it to hijack us when a tiger shows up so we run away and don’t sit there and ponder our situation. Its just bad for other domains.

That’s probably a pretty unsophisticated explanation and probably wrong in some ways. As a current psychology student your knowledge should be fresher on these matters from my decades old memory. It does seems like it leads down a useful path to some of your earlier concerns about reactivity and rejection of evidence and my comments regarding anti-intellectualism and anti-empiricism.

The whole chapter is 31 pages, but here is a good summary quote:
“But research reveals that authoritarian followers drive through life under the influence of impaired thinking a lot more than most people do, exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness, a profound ethnocentrism, and–to top it all off–a ferocious dogmatism that makes it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence or logic.”

He goes through some research actually performed to test these things. Hate throwing out something that large. Sometimes I get in conversations and here something that reminds me of a concept hashed out in a 400 page book and there generally is no easy way to summarize it. I keep thinking I’m going to reply to the Dennett video you posted, but its hard to even get started there is so much there.

The biggest problem with this Altemeyer, who is a psychology professor, is that he ties it to much into American political parties. And thus its easily tossed aside as a partisan piece. If he had left this out, and kept it as straight piece on personality studies than I think it would be more valuable. I’m always curious to see how things would fare under the close scrutiny of other psychologist like you get in the peer review journal process. Sort of like I’m doing for you with your initial neo-Luddite label. It allows you to redefine until the concept of what you are getting at is more accurately communicated. In a similar vain, I do feel the word “authoritarian” packs a certain emotional punch to it that can close people off from reading his research. When we have people running around calling other people authoritarians, we aren’t probably going to have much intellectual dialogue about the research.

As far as your take on the social constructionist aspect I have to say I couldn’t agree more. I have a friend who, until a few years ago, lived in a very small town in red state America. His social life suffered for several reasons. At one point he had taken a class with someone and ended up enjoying this person and found out she was a “Christian”. So he began to hang out with her and her friends and ended up going to church with them. I would describe him, before this point, as a non-religious person. He just didn’t give much thought to religion and wasn’t hostile to it in any way like some atheist would be. It was interesting to watch some of the changes in his belief systems. For example, homosexuality wasn’t a neutral thing to him anymore it was a bad thing. He expressed that he was worried that he was going to be separated from his parents because they wouldn’t be going to the same destination in the afterlife. He insisted I meet these friends and that they were really open minded. He sent me some emails from them to show how intellectual they were in talking about religious matters. One of the emails basically started off with one of them criticizing some Hare Krishna or something and than bashing Eastern metaphysics in general. It was as I expected. Then there was an interesting tidbit in there if this stuff isn’t true (Christianity) then I’ve wasted my life. That’s another angle to this whole thing beyond social acceptance, that a person has made so much of an investment in something historically that there is an incentive to want to believe its still true. I did not get involved in these email discussions, but it was quite clear to me my friend, in his social isolation in this small town, was willing to adapt his beliefs however he needed to in order to fit in. Eventually life took him out of that town and he’s back to being a non-religious type person. Not an atheist, but just someone for who church and reading the Bible and such is not really where he is at. To me, I saw his brief journey into a more Christian fundamentalist mindset, as a way for him to feel part of some community. These are powerful forces.

The “not always” issue needs to be resolved by being more specific about who we are talking about and we can look at the climate change denialists about this again. If I were to use it as an example, I wouldn’t likely focus on the oil or coal industry types who are lobbying heavily against it. There reasons for doing so are compromised by economics. There’s a tangeable fiscal loss potential for admitting they contribute to climate change. An oil drilling CEO may actually beleive his company does harm the envireonment and endanger people to some extent but still publicly deny it because of the fincancial rewards he personally receives for doing so. There are other people, though, with no clear economic incentive to deny the science behind it, and these (to me) are more interesting. Working against climate change might change their lives moderately (new training for jobs or using different methods for energy consumption) but they’re basically in the same boat as the rest of us. Still, they go out and whether they understand climate models or not, argue against htem and try to point out gaps in the evidence to hang their arguments on. They start blogs and troll internet forums.

Similarly in religion and fundementalists, I don’t know that I’d focus on the clergy, but the flock. It’s the receivers of information who are more interesting in how they process it and why the reject an overwhelmingly provable thing in favor of smoke and mirrors.

You have some interesting thoughts here on cognitive dissonance. I think ambiguity can be really upsetting for some people, and answers that promise both certainty and the status quo have a distinct advantage. There are people who will — no matter what you show them — deny a thing to keep ambiguity at bay, and the argument “it’s a matter of faith” is one of the strongest arguments some of these people have. It’s a debate stopper because what do you come back with after that. They’ve just claimed that they’ll go on beleiving it because they believe it.

I also think social construction may limit people from being able to undergo radical shifts in opinion. If you set yourself up as a conservative, for example, you decide for yourself what that means and associate with others who have decided similarly and all your social interactions build on that. Perhaps part of that is that humans inherited the earth and are the masters of it. Thus, someone saying we’re doing ourselves in would have a tough sell. Similar with the belief in other beings in the world. You can show that, mathmatically, life somewhere else in the universe is nearly guaranteed. But the gap between here and there is still enough to deny it. Someone who has built their social being on that idea and has invested in it would have to redifine themselves to themselves and others. This relates also somewhat to evolutionary psychology, because what’s the loss of respect and possible associated resources that comes with making a 180 degree turn on something you’ve fundementally endorsed? A person may not be consciously thinking this, but sense an underlying danger in heading too far along an opposing argument no matter what evidence it has going for it.

Not sure I understand this sentence?

“Rejection Reflex Theory? There does seem to be a reflexive nature to it. ”

We get into the problem of “not always” again. We’ve had a couple of players that you have wanted to build this idea around: Russell\new agers, global warming deniers, and young earth creationist.

Lets take the global warming deniers. Not it is my belief, not really based on evidence as much as logical reasoning and understanding of the business world, that the head of the resistance to global warming are the oil and coal industries. They stand to lose a lot of money and power if society adopts policies that limit carbon emissions. This is not really reflexive on their part. Its a calculated business strategy to put money into PR to persuade the public otherwise.

“Next up is figuring out the unifying psychological drivers behind it I think there are some explanations to be found in evolutionary psychology, but also in social constructionist theory as well.”

There are explanations in evolutionary psychology for how religion arises. See Robert Wright. But we aren’t always just talking about traditional religion. We’ve got global warming and people like Russell.

One of the fundamental forces at work, to me, seems to be cognitive dissonance. The tolerance for ambiguity within each individual’s psyche will be spread randomly throughout the population. A person with a low tolerance will tend to exhibit a closed-minded dogmatism about their beliefs and will quickly challenge, sometimes with the most absurd arguments, anyone who dares unsettle them. A person with a high tolerance can actually hold conflicting ideas in their head long enough to really make a judgement on which one has more evidence to back it up. Someone with exceptional tolerance may not need to make a judgement at all if none of the evidence is convincing enough. This is easier in some areas than others. A person can state a belief that there is life on other planets and another person can say no. The former can argue about the size of the universe, the latter may say we are unique, maybe for religious reasons. Yet there is a middle ground here – “we just don’t know”. The more dogmatic or fundamentalist person is likely to perceive “we don’t know” as a rejection of their worldview because it introduces ambiguity. It suggest the other belief they don’t agree with may be true and this dissonance is enough for them to reject the agnostic position as an unsettling threat too. Degrees of tolerance for ambiguity lead to persons that appear to be doubters\skeptics vs. those who look more certain\dogmatic\fundamentalist.

You are using this word “rejectionism”. Seems fitting for what you are getting at. Or how about anti-empirical or anti-empiricist? This could be defined as someone uninterested in evidence and\or denies it.

In terms of liberal and conservative politics in America, the tendency is used to scare people in much the way you indicate: Liberals are trying to control your life (to what end, they never say) and rob you of your freedoms. there are a lot of arguments that feed off the fear of a change of the status quo: climate, immigration, etc.

I guess, in terms of psychology, there’s an underlying common trait in a lot of what I guess could be described as absurd rejectionism, or possibly a phrase less condescending. Willfully turning your back on an avalanche of evidence and willing yourself to believe it’s somehow not real. I think anti-inellectualism doesn’t quite fit the bill entirely, but is a subset of it, like the luddite.

The different views of science by different clergy is another good example, and again, it could be parted out as those who see the holy texts as something to be engaged and studied and debated about, and there are those who want it to simply be a set of rules to go by, full stop. Both can be people of faith. The latter would be anti-inellectual, but they also have to adopt more and more rejectionism to hold on to it, and eventually this can lead to luddite tendencies. In the US we see it in the Amish lifestyle. In other religions, we see it in those who refuse medical treatment for themselves and their children on the basis of holy grounds.

Anyway, much food for thought. Thanks!