Enchanted America

How Intuition and Reason Divide Our Politics

J. Eric Oliver, Thomas J. Wood

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780226578507, 9780226578477
• eBook ISBN: 9780226578644
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

America is in civic chaos, its politics rife with conspiracy theories and false information.  Nationalism and authoritarianism are on the rise, while scientists, universities, and news organizations are viewed with increasing mistrust. Its citizens reject scientific evidence on climate change and vaccinations while embracing myths of impending apocalypse. And then there is Donald Trump, a presidential candidate who won the support of millions of conservative Christians despite having no moral or political convictions. What is going on?

The answer, according to J. Eric Oliver and Thomas J. Wood, can be found in the most important force shaping American politics today: human intuition. Much of what seems to be irrational in American politics arises from the growing divide in how its citizens make sense of the world. On one side are rationalists. They use science and reason to understand reality. On the other side are intuitionists. They rely on gut feelings and instincts as their guide to the world. Intuitionists believe in ghosts and End Times prophecies. They embrace conspiracy theories, disbelieve experts, and distrust the media.  They are stridently nationalistic and deeply authoritarian in their outlook. And they are the most enthusiastic supporters of Donald Trump. The primary reason why Trump captured the presidency was that he spoke about politics in a way that resonated with how Intuitionists perceive the world. The Intuitionist divide has also become a threat to the American way of life. A generation ago, intuitionists were dispersed across the political spectrum, when most Americans believed in both God and science. Today, intuitionism is ideologically tilted toward the political right. Modern conservatism has become an Intuitionist movement, defined by conspiracy theories, strident nationalism, and hostility to basic civic norms. 

Enchanted America is a clarion call to rationalists of all political persuasions to reach beyond the minority and speak to intuitionists in a way they understand.  The values and principles that define American democracy are at stake. 
 

CHAPTER ONE

If There’s No Monster in the Closet, Then Why Am I Afraid?

How do we comprehend the world?

If you’re reading this book, it’s likely that your worldview is informed by empirical observations and logical deductions. You probably believe, for example, that the earth is round. This is not an idea that came naturally to you but is rather something you were taught. And this teaching, in turn, was based on earlier formulations and experiments from scientists and other thinkers.1 And you probably accept it because of how the roundness of the earth has been demonstrated, through either photos from satellites or other proofs. Many of our beliefs, however, are not based on such deductions. Instead, they come from a different source: our intuitions. Whether we call them gut feelings, instinct, or common sense, our judgments often arise from nondeliberative sources. These visceral notions often serve us well, but they don’t always give us an accurate picture of the world. Our intuitions generally tell us that the earth is flat, that vaccines are dangerous, and that attractive people are smarter than the rest of us.2

Intuitions also present us with a quandary—it’s not clear how they work. Scientific thinking is easy to comprehend, because scientific beliefs are explicit in their logic and assumptions. When a scientist tells you the earth is round, she will point to observable facts and logical deductions to demonstrate this point. Intuitions, by contrast, arise from the opaque depths of the mind. And this murky origin raises a host of difficult questions: What exactly do we mean when we say “go with our gut”? Where does an intuition come from? Who or what defines common sense?

The answers can be found in a seemingly unlikely place: our magical beliefs. Such beliefs are excellent windows on the workings of our intuitive minds because they exist as alternatives to empirical facts. Recall that by our definition, a belief is magical precisely when it invokes an invisible force and contradicts an alternative, empirical explanation. When we believe that a drought is a sign of God’s displeasure or that a lucky ring will help us win at blackjack, we are doing so despite scientific explanations based in meteorology or conditional probability. This is magical thinking. And why do we choose to adopt such beliefs? Because they coincide with our natural inferences, how we make sense of the world when we don’t have a lot of information about it. Magical beliefs are appealing because they reflect our inborn ways of perceiving reality.

In this chapter, we examine a host of anthropological and psychological investigations into the sources of our magical beliefs. Together, this research reveals two important facets of the intuitive mind. First, intuitive thinking is emotional thinking. Our intuitions are motivated often by feelings of apprehension or anxiety. Moreover, these feelings typically serve as clues to the state of the world. If we feel scared, we look for threats; if we are elated, we look for sources of wonder. This emotional primacy of our intuitions is evident in magical beliefs. Myths, superstitions, and other magical notions are accepted not because they provide rational explanations but because of how they make us feel. In providing explanations for why we get sick or what happens when we die, magical beliefs give order to the universe and assuage our fears of the unknown. Our magical beliefs also reflect our feelings—because we feel afraid, we therefore assume that some evil force is out to get us. In short, intuitions both draw from and rationalize our emotional states.

Second, intuitions have a “grammar,” a set of rules that constrain their forms. When we are trying to make sense of the unknown, we rely on a suite of innate mental shortcuts to guide our perceptions. Absent any other information, these heuristics help us understand the world. The ideas or notions that seem intuitive conform to these heuristics, while counterintuitive ones violate them. For example, our innate heuristics tell us that something that looks like a turd will be gross, even if in fact that gooey brown mass is a yummy piece of chocolate. This intuitive “grammar” pervades our magical beliefs. For example, nearly all religions will claim that holy people have special powers, that natural phenomena are caused by intentional gods, or that ancient prophesies are always about to come true. These commonalities occur because they all reflect the same innate heuristics, the inborn ways we make judgments when we are otherwise uncertain.

These same mechanisms (that is, emotions and heuristics) also shape our political thinking, especially among people who rely heavily on their intuitions. Such Intuitionists are more likely to base their political opinions on visceral reactions than abstract values. They will take their elations or anxieties as proof that something is right or wrong in the world. They will accept metaphors and symbols as literal embodiments of truth. They will employ gross stereotypes, blatant dichotomies, and crude generalizations. They will assume that a single intentional purpose is behind complex social phenomena. They are highly suspicious of outsiders or “unnatural” contaminants. In short, they view the political world through the same mental framework that animates their beliefs in angels and demons, healing crystals and secret prophecies. But before we get to this in further detail, it is helpful to first explain how our intuitions operate. And there is no better place to start than at a baseball game.

Finding Solace: The Emotional Roots of Magical Thinking

Baseball players and fans are famous for their superstitions. Wade Boggs, one of the greatest hitters of all time, ate fried chicken before each game. Pitcher Turk Wendell always made colossal leaps over foul lines and insisted that umpires roll him the ball when he was on the mound.3 The New York Yankees spent thousands of dollars to dig out a Red Sox jersey that a treacherous worker had buried under their new stadium. Many players wear twisted rope necklaces containing tiny flecks of titanium that supposedly “realign the body’s energy field.”4 Fans have innumerable rites and take all manner of lucky objects to the games help their team win.5

Why does baseball, of all sports, attract so many superstitions? A good answer comes from one of the founders of modern anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski. According to Malinowski, magical thinking is a way we cope with the stress of uncertainty.6 While studying tribes in the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski observed that magical thinking was mostly prevalent in those instances where uncertainty was great and stakes were high. A good example was fishing. Sometimes the Trobianders fished in lagoons and ponds. This kind of fishing posed few risks and so triggered few superstitions or magical beliefs—when fishing in shallow water, the Trobrianders did not use many special amulets or say a lot of “magic” words. They just fished. But when fishing in deep ocean waters, where the risks are great and the outcomes unpredictable, magical thinking was rampant. Just like American deep-sea fishermen today, the Trobriand ocean fishermen used all kinds of particular superstitions to “ward off” danger.7

Malinowski realized that superstitions and other magical beliefs are not signs of mental deficiency or cultural poverty; rather, they are tools for alleviating fear.8 In other words, the primary function of magical beliefs is to make us feel better. This is clearly the case with baseball. Much like deep-sea fishing, baseball is a game of inescapable uncertainty. It is a game with a high number of probabilistic events, any of which can be decisive. And, as with soldiers, gamblers, or anyone else who deals with meaningful risks, baseball players and fans look for ways to cope. Their superstitions, rituals, and myths are the tools they use. The same logic holds with other magical beliefs. While we may believe that our lucky charm is helping us win the poker game, it’s actually doing something altogether different: it’s giving us the illusion of control.9 Religions may not accurately describe the cosmos or the cause of disease, but they can provide emotional comfort or a sense of moral coherence.10 Conspiracy theories may not be true, but they can rationalize the inexplicable. In short, our magical beliefs are very instrumental, even if their actual functions are often not what they purport to be.

Which leads us to our first insight about intuitions: intuitive thinking is emotional thinking. To appreciate this, let us briefly consider exactly how our brains think and feel. Most of the time, our minds operate in a state of rough emotional equilibrium. In this state, they are trying to optimize our energy output by following routinized, unconscious protocols. As our brains continually process the millions of pieces of sensory inputs, they aggregate them into larger perceptions and link them together into still larger recurring neural chains. As long as these neural signals conform to routinized pathways, our “thinking” will continue in a quick, impulsive, and largely unconscious way. This habitual, routinized neural processing is what psychologists often refer to as System 1 thinking.11

However, when something unexpected happens, our habitual information patterns get disrupted. Facing such uncertainty, our brains shift gears and move into a different way of thinking. Our attention gets focused, we become more inquisitive, and our thinking becomes more effortful and conscious. In this more animated state, we are trying to comprehend these new neural signals and integrate them into our habitual chains of association. This is what psychologists call System 2 thinking. System 2 thinking is what happens when we’re thinking “hard.” It’s intentional, slow, and taxing. Because such thinking is so effortful, we only move from System 1 to System 2 when motivated to do so.12

Uncertainty, surprise, fear, and exhilaration are some of the emotions that trigger the move from System 1 to System 2 thinking. When something upsets our normal patterns of information association, we become emotional.13 This affective state then motivates us to focus our attention on an immediate problem at hand. We can describe this with a simple example. Say you are hiking in a forest, happily strolling along. System 1 is processing the information around you, taking in the sights and smells of the forest, directing you to step unconsciously over rocks and to duck under low-hanging branches. Suddenly, you hear an unexpected growling in the bushes. You freeze and listen. Your heart rate rises and adrenaline starts pumping. You feel alarmed and your brain moves from System 1 to System 2 thinking. You try to identify the source of the noise. At one level, your brain is trying to determine if the noise is a threat. But, more fundamentally, what your brain is really trying to do is to reduce your uncertainty. Apprehension is an uncomfortable state, and it is there for a reason—to motivate your System 2 thinking until the uncertainty is resolved.

Intuitions arise from this shift from System 1 to System 2 thinking. When we encounter something inexplicable yet consequential, we become emotionally activated. As long as the uncertainty persists, we are motivated to find an explanation and restore our emotional equilibrium. We move from a habitual mode of thinking into an effortful one. But what our brains are really trying to do is to restore the emotional equilibrium as quickly as possible. Although we’ll shortly explain how our intuitions do this, for now we simply want to stress that intuitions are a type of motivated reasoning, an effort to deal with the emotional consequences of our own indeterminacy. Magical thinking, like all our intuitions, is precisely that attempt to make sense of the incomprehensible, to find a signal in the noise. This in turn leads us to two other important insights into the emotional sources of our intuitions: (1) intuitions are expedient generalizations, and (2) our feelings inform our beliefs.

Intuitions Are Expedient Generalizations

Much of the time, our intuitions serve us well, but sometimes they are completely wrong—our first impressions of a stranger turned out to be completely unfounded, or a restaurant that looked so great from the outside had horrible food. The reason why our intuitions are often incorrect is because they are “lazy.”14 As noted earlier, we utilize our intuitions when we lack information. This uncertainty generates anxiety, and anxiety, like all our emotions, is there to motivate us; specifically, it moves us to resolve whatever is uncertain in our environment. But here is the problem: we will try to assuage our anxiety in the easiest way possible. If we’re feeling scared, we don’t necessarily want the correct answer, we simply want the quickest answer that will make our fear go away. When thrust into an emotional imbalance, we will look for the quickest explanation that will satisfy our emotional needs.15 System 2 thinking does this not by maximizing the accuracy of our judgments but by utilizing the habitual thought patterns that permeate our System 1 thinking. In other words, when faced with uncertainty, most people don’t become abstract logicians, they become expedient generalizers.

This was the crucial insight of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In many experiments, they demonstrated that people routinely use mental shortcuts, called heuristics, to make decisions when facing uncertainty. Heuristics are rules of judgment, inferential strategies our brains employ to make sense of the world.16 A simple example is what we might call a popularity heuristic. Say we are in a new town and trying to decide where to eat. We could spend a lot of time comparing menus, prices, reviews, and so on, or we could notice that one restaurant is crowded and the other is not. Using a popularity heuristic, we might decide that the crowded restaurant is the superior one. Or even more likely, we won’t even think that hard but just suddenly say, “Hey, that place looks good!”

Heuristics like this pervade our thinking. In everything from picking friends to judging book covers, we use inborn rules of thumb to help promote efficient decision making. Many of these heuristics are unconscious. Consider, for instance, how we see. While we may think intuitively that our eyes are processing our visual field as a whole, this is not happening. Instead, our retinal cells register distinct elements of light refraction, and upside down no less! These are then aggregated as nerve signals travel to our visual cortex. But in this creation of a unified visual field, our brains use many mental shortcuts. Actually, we have blind spots in our visual field that our brains paper over.17

This same process of visual aggregation also can make us “see” things that aren’t there. A graphic example of this can be seen with a Kanizsa triangle (see figure 1.1). Here, our visual perception creates a differentiation that has no material reality. Our brains take the corner images of the triangle and, based on these strong cues, register the sides. Since we are habituated to see triangles, our visual perception creates them, even when they don’t otherwise exist. This is an unconscious heuristic, a way we form a judgment about reality based on a limited amount of information. But it is a judgment that is not fully accurate.

FIGURE 1.1. The Kanizsa triangle. Image by Fibonacci, 15 March 2007; Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kanizsa_triangle.svg.

An analogous process happens with our intuitive thinking as well. When our brains link the chains of association that constitute our thoughts, we inevitably bring up elements to fill in the gaps. When we do this, we often make incorrect assessments or “see” things that aren’t there. For example, when we see a compelling advertisement, we assume that a product is good; if someone is overweight or unkempt, we assume that he is lazy; when something bad happens to someone else, we assume that it was her fault, but when something bad happens to us, we blame our circumstances. With nearly all our intuitions, we “fill in the gaps” by making assumptions based on just a few pieces of information. Kahneman and Tversky’s central insight was that because Sys...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: You Believe in Reason, and I Believe in the Bible
• chapter 1  If There’s No Monster in the Closet, Then Why Am I Afraid?
• chapter 2  Taking Measure of Our Intuitions
• chapter 3  Who Is an Intuitionist?
• chapter 4  Intuitionists and Ideologues
• chapter 5  Truthers and Trumpenvolk
• chapter 6  Feeling White and Hating Foreigners
• chapter 7  Scary Foods and Dangerous Medicine
• chapter 8  A Nation Divided by Magic
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index