lol. martin to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture why do republicans keep denying manmade global warming is happening well as chris mooney that question among others as we look into the minds of conservatives or republicans in tonight's conversations with great minds also is mahmoud ahmadinejad bankrolling the republican party and will be the executives ever face punishment for destroying the gulf those questions and more and tonight's big picture rumble and what did clint eastwood john wayne and paul newman and to do with america's gun loving trigger happy culture i'll tell you in tonight's daily take.

for tonight's conversations with great minds i'm joined by chris mooney hers is a science and political journalist and blogger and an experienced trainer of scientists in the our communication he works of the national science foundation trained scientists to better communicate the research and blogs regularly for science progress the website of the center for american progress has been a visiting associate in the center for collaborative history at princeton university and knight science journalism fellow at mit and templeton cambridge fellow in science and religion is a graduate of yale university and the author of several books books including his latest republican brain science of why they deny science and reality joins me now in the studio of course so you could be here thanks for joining us. one of the most interesting things throughout my life i've noticed that. i mean all the way back to my dirty hippie days i've noticed that the republicans always seem clean cut and

their their house is usually really really neat and the democrat. you know the old west yes people you know. where they have these exactly is there are like a brain wiring explanation for that it's a personality trait you're tapping into is one of the big personality traits that differ liberals from conservatives called conscientiousness and it doesn't mean you know just being ethical it means actually liking order and structure in your life and i think that goes all the way down to sort of being more clean cut versus being sort of. it's interesting one of the characteristics of children who have experienced abuse or trauma in their childhood you know parent who dies or pain right now one of the things we're seen you know two million kids have been in homes that were foreclosed on and one of the consequences of that is that they as adults are total control freaks and constantly try to organize the environment around them

and so we have trying to give back some sense of safety is that the kind of thing that you're talking about the this might be a psychological nuance or is this more near a watcher i think we all have this straight to a varying degree i think of it is i'm not ok and we're all turned out i'm actually turned up pretty high on this tree this trait tends towards more conservatism but you know liberals can have it i have liberals that have their traits to measure tend toward more liberal like openness to experience actually i'm a liberal who's high open high conscientiousness what does that make you but turns out to make you a liberal in my case so it's complicated but we can measure the differences in political views based on differences and personalities so you said that there are these big five what are they open this new experience wanting to try new what new things including new ideas conscientiousness order and structure new a lot of agreeableness politeness empathy extroversion introversion that's one of the big ones and then the rada system or not or the lack thereof ok so let's let's go through the run of the time. actually i'd like

a job we'll come back to some of the other ones but i'd like to go to the extroversion introduction that do you mean in the classic a young in sense you know probably. notion of what is the extroverts are people who identify themselves or do find themselves by their perception of other people's perception of that so they're constantly looking for other people to tell them who they are their interests are people who define themselves internally as on the stand yeah i mean one of the martyrs brigades these days i mean this is the big myers briggs these are some of the popular ones the big five is i think really scientifically established and you know actually more friends you know they're the life of the party they don't feel awkward in a room where they don't know lots of people there's only a slight political difference in this one and the conservatives time a little bit toward more extroversion and some of the research that i've seen and liberals are more interested a little you know it's not it's not one of the big differences you know i've always described myself as an introvert who has no sort of pretend he's an extrovert i do media i you know it's. done in most of my life but i. basically i'm a shy person and say here yeah that's interesting and what ok so let's let's go

through the list the first was openness openness new experiences and this is the one that i make the biggest deal about in the book because it really really divides people politically i mean if you want to strong prediction of liberalism try openness open this is wanting to try new things new ideas traveling to new places but it also has to do with you know comfort with abstract ideas being artistic being creative being curious all these go along with the so the flip side of openness is close to this it's essential and there's and there's traits that go along with it or don't like need for closure need for cognitive closure that's a big research program at university of maryland in this and so if you're close you want to have a fixed belief a fixed view and you limit your information search to find enough information to support your view and then that's ok you know no thank you no so one of the things that i've noticed from nine years now i've been doing a press of talk radio show so i'm interacting with people three hours a day five days

a week for nine years is that both sides there is this sense of. this is who we are this is what we're about i mean it's often i in fact have a comment on this it seems like the main reasons why people listen to political talk radio farda validate their worldview and get the talking points they need to be able to win a water cooler waters and not to be challenged so much although i try to bring consumerism and show constantly to challenge but in a way it's doing those two things. how is that different on the right and the left because i'm certainly seen on the left as well i think that what you're talking about is now selective exposure to information sources and there's a lot of political science and political psychology research on this and it's clear that everybody does this ok we organize the information we consume based upon things that we like it's very natural and it isn't just political you know but that said there is some there are some studies and suggest that a certain kind of going to. called an authoritarian conservative engages in more

selective exposure and so there are several papers in the book i actually lay those out and i say ok you know it only tested them in a couple of circumstances but they are doing more selective exposure. in these studies these are the people i forget who wrote the book authoritarians that's robert alter my idea this ideology and then john dean actually wrote it or based on the tickets to actually measure it differently now in a lot of cases than they measured it in actually now it's a simpler kind of question where they just ask about child rearing styles and authoritarians tend to tend to want children who are obedient sure and you know non authoritarian is the extreme opposite i'm a very not authoritarian person they want children who are creative so that that i have turns out to be a giant political divide right there and politically. in the book the authoritarians and dean's book they both talked about how there are third terry and leaders who are demanding obedience and then there are authoritarian followers who are demanding leaders who want leaders to tell them to do this and that that seems

to be something that is predominately on the right. so the left do we predominantly have incoherent leaders or kind of all over the place and incoherent incoherence the wrong word but we're not as obedient make that would be fair to say and in some ways that hurts us right because if our style of communicating to people who don't agree with us is kind of wishy washy disorganized they're looking for that sometimes to really direct really decisive people who seem sure of themselves and sometimes liberals will come off like a lot it's absolutely sure come out that way well yeah i think a lot of liberals of it are open to new experience by definition you're not certain of everything and it sounds weird to us when someone comes off that way i mean i remember when i was really just really starting to write about politics and watching george w. bush and al gore presidential debates and there the style was so incredibly different and if you're open chords got all this nuance and he's so informed. but all the details of the bills and bush is just sort of very very decisive and

america's split i was always amazed that anyone could watch those debates and see a different bush than i saw but i didn't know anything about psychology and personality now it makes perfect sense that we bifurcate well it makes perfect sense for the twenty or thirty percent who identify themselves as liberal or conservative democratic or republican what about the thirty or forty percent who identify themselves as independents and who actually do swing back and forth you know who voted for linda johnson and then voted for ronald reagan for example so there's there's a bunch of different people in there and they're both people who just don't know much about politics so if you're not informed a lot about politics you probably don't know really what you are but you could be psychologically a strong liberal but you haven't you know gotten engaged with the issues in a way that activates you so that you get emotionally connected to them and so that some of those people might actually fit on the polls but they just haven't gotten there so these are the people that are constantly calling in to my shows and i

always thought i was a conservative i always voted republican i've been listening to your show for a year and i know that i'm a progressive democrat they really were all while they just never heard the talking points but there's also probably some real moderates who are really blended in this and they have liberal and conservative attributes and some kind of mix in the probably a lot of people that are so that was openness and then the second was was the cleanliness or use the word you use conscientious conscientious i said yeah because you know just as clearly predicts conservatism although not quite as strong as openness predicts liberalism right and then the next one was agreeableness and that was really interesting there's one psychology paper that breaks agreeableness into different components and one of the components is politeness and one of them's empathy and it turns out that when they broke it up you got conservatives doing better on politeness and liberals doing better on empathy but when you didn't break it up you ended up having not a big difference on agreeableness when you wrote what broken agreeableness into the components politeness and empathy then you saw conservatives be more polite

liberals being more empathetic well being more polite or conforming to the conventions of society and. but empathy doesn't seem like that it's a key liberal emotion but not for conservatives i will mean i'm not saying they don't have empathy i'm saying that they're just not scoring quite as high on the questions that are designed to test them so basically what this is providing and then extroversion introversion and the fifth one. that's neuroticism or the lack there of stability versus neuroticism and on one of the big studies this was actually quite striking it was about thirteen thousand people done by political scientists at yale just what are your political beliefs how do you identify and what are your personality traits can serve as we're doing better on stability traditionally so because there's the world he would you would think well it's an advantage because their offices i'm certainly taken for you know you worry all the time but it would be alan is the architect right exactly. the the the

difference between college educated republicans and non-college educated republicans on global warming we just have a minute before the break here if i'm sure this this maybe we can start this conversation here we have college graduates who believe that global warming is happening because of human activity and. look at the republicans first one thousand percent versus thirty one percent by this is the figure that got me started on this whole quest this is two thousand and eight so yet amazingly if you're a republican the higher love of your level of education the less likely you are to believe in me right right where is if you're a democrat or independent the opposite thank you so what's going on there i mean these people are probably more attuned to politics because they're more educated so you're partly detecting that but i say i want to go into the republican brain to understand this kind of effect how can they so distrust and part of it is you know the people at universities are they distrust are all these open people. are going

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quarterback conversations of great minds with chris mooney he's a graduate of yale university and the author of several books including his latest republican brain science why science and reality let's get back to it if we can bring this graphic back up here and in the plasma we started with this question of why is the republicans but the more well educated republican is. your estate the higher level education as a republican and many studies have found this the less likely you are to accept the science of global warming which is essentially scientific reality you're rejecting it so why and i call the people over here the educated republicans who reject it smart idiots because clearly it's not that they are not knowledgeable it's not they're not educated something else going on so what is that well it's probably many things right it's probably paying attention to conservative news and opinion

fox news getting that kind of information that'll make you doubt it it's probably skepticism about. europe with a question that's that's a subset of the whole thing of selective sure data so i give exposure to probably sort of expose exposing the you know they've not they've learned to distrust academia because the conservative movement has been attacking academia for a long time so they don't have trust in scientists but but these are these are more environmental factors that are part of the political ecosystem we live in but i think there's also psychology here and so i you know it's up in the book about how republicans on average tend to be less open tend to have more explicit more need for closure and i think that that's also what brought this one sure why the attack . oh gosh it's been the it's been the story of the conservative movement basically the idea is and rick santorum said this about the idea is that somehow little johnny goes off to college and you know starts to grow his hair long and gets brain washed and comes back you know not believing gardening. it doesn't actually really

work like that all the research shows that but academia is more like people select in academia who are already sort of open people rather than rather than being a brainwashing factory the kind of person who wants to be a college professor who wants to work in that environment for the rest of their lives is probably more progressive so they're right that universities are a liberal because they're a haven for people who are open to experience but they're wrong the brainwashing is going on it's probably people selecting this sounds like a great place for them just like conservatives are selecting in the business you know but is there a generator of component. you've got. a machine a liberal or a conservative machine that attacks academia and academia. which and then you've also got conservatives who are distrustful of academe. which came first that's a good question and can they exist independent of each other i mean is it is the attack in academia maybe just completely unnecessary for conservatives to distrust

academia and distrust facts and it's just kind of thrown in as as savory you know it's really hard to say which came first because i'd have to go back and think about the beginning of modern conservatism in america and figure out you know i think that's. right but spiral agnew was you know it's happening in other cities for example there's just a long history of it i think it i think it probably feels natural you know because you define yourself your whole life as either one of them or not one of them you know and we all do this i define myself life is a kind of person who wanted to be to go off to college i mean that's that was kind of crucial you know and and wanted to stay and increasingly you know sort of felt like that was a nice place to be so i think you kind of feel it i think you kind of feel that on the left and on the right you know. belief in fact i mean this is we've been kind of dancing around this actually and let's just now that we've. laid the table. get

right into it why is it that republicans were part of the republican brain here republicans don't believe things that are right in front of them and to what extent by liberals be afflicted with the same condition so both sides are capable of bias no doubt about that but and this is really why did this project is you know i wrote the book the republican war on science and i tried to use rational arguments to refute misinformation didn't work so coming back as republicans read your book and . come up with it i was naive in thinking that there are so so i think i think you look at openness and you look at the traits that go along with openness you know the opposite of openness of authoritarianism you know wanting to defend your beliefs is really part of that and not not really being tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity is part of that whereas the open personal is more tolerant of these i mean science is shot through with ambiguity shot through with

uncertainty as a scholarship it's the nature of since the very unusual you know you would never say i mean yeah ok let's just drop it we don't know why i mean gravity has been around since what's his name we're still debating as you're straying yes resident now that you know well yeah exactly what is going on there exactly and and you know so when scientists sort of express their views about the science of global warming which will do with all these saying you know it's likely that humans are causing most of the warming it's very likely that most of the warming i mean that doesn't sound very convincing but the scientists that's very likely we're never very likely this is a big deal but but so i think i think that suicides are proceeding and certainly different i think that's a huge part of it well and. in this case exploited by people who have an agenda and you get these think tanks that are funded by big oil and by you know companies

billionaires who want. they do a lot of pollution like the koch brothers and the think tanks put the front people out there to come on programs like mine and say oh but the you know the scientist in east anglia university said it's only probable you know or possible as you as you said and then and then that feeds so so which takes us back to the question of are. the republicans who are denying science not at the higher levels ok you know the average person shows up and says you have a vote for george bush are those republicans who are denied science doing so because they are. load tolerance for ambiguity their need for certainty is being exploited by people who are programming their beliefs for it or is it because that beliefs that conforms with their particular neurology or psychology i think a lot of first i mean if you take global warming if global warming had never been politicized let's spin out an alternative reality where that never happened it was

never seen as threatening to conservative values nobody nobody could make any money off they're not writing global right i mean or for some reason you know it was just dealt with early and wasn't a big deal like that's what happened with c.f.c.'s were for carbon so i mean we dealt with that in ronald reagan you know that and so it didn't end up exploding into this thing like we have all the science and that was the ozone hole i mean that science was unambiguous most of all this was. by the sea there was it wasn't politicized as much it was a little tiny industry or only two or three trump unease in the world that made clear authority. in in tonnage quantities and so it was easier there were there was an exxon mobile phone and you know millions of dollars into things but if it hadn't played out this way in some world i don't think conservatives would have had a reason to fight the science but they might have been gone over and fought over something else and you might have seen the same kind of traits in that context so it's both you know you need the cultural context in which this becomes an issue but

then you also you have you have nature and nurture so really this is an area where you know if you're if you're frank once i mean if you're a political strategist or or for that matter if you're a corporation and you want to you want to politicize something you know those nasty ph regulations or whatever so that you can make them this is an area where conservative republican. personality types can be easily manipulated or exploited and one of the liberal personality types is there or there has to be oh sure. you can you can trick liberals no doubt about it it's actually been done in studies i mean you know i look liberal emotions tend towards equality and fairness you know in taking care of people who are harmed so if you find an issue where you're pushing those emotional buttons but you're using bad information do it then you can trick liberals and so i talk about vaccination as an example of that and everybody

got really into the idea that vaccines were causing an epidemic of autism but the scientific community came in was like no no no no no and they published epidemiological study after it became a logical study showing in giant populations no relationship ok. that was i think tailor made for liberals because it's a big corporation making vaccines and so we distrust them equality because we distrust big corporations and then harm the children the innocent right so both of our emotions are pushed and that sets up that sets up a situation that's hard for liberals but the vaccine also is protect. true and so then you flip it and then you flip it and then so hopefully you kind of get to get the defense of vaccines back but i mean i'm just saying that that if you would straighten the quadrant essentially of emotions where you can you can you can find liberals getting their emotional buttons pushed so basically both sides have the ability to channel shift to construct political arguments or things that aren't or

shouldn't be or don't need to be political and make them political and then cause people to become firmly entrenched in their belief systems but they're going to do it differently they're going to do it i mean because of openness lack thereof and i say you know something like the vaccines tends to be fair if you know there's not it was a big deal about five years ago i mean to some extent there's been so much blowback of that that now it's i mean it's kind of hard to stand up for and i mean look at the evolutionism and look at this is this is over one hundred years old this is this is a picture this doesn't change because people are have fixed beliefs about this and they're going to have. their whole lives i mean liberals and we're deathly susceptible to fads you know because we're looking for new things all the time. so the theory of motivated reason tell me about this and what does this have to do with fight or flight oh well motivated reasoning is how you handle information that threatens you in the neuro science says that our emotions fire first before our

conscious self and the emotions feel the defensive reaction and so then depending on how much you know about the issue you'll retrieve from your memory the arguments that support yourself your belief and so you know you push someone's buttons and they start arguing loudly often emotional you can see it in people you know you can see when someone's doing this and they've been they've been attacked and they're going to give you all the reasons sometimes with voice raise i mean i think there's a lot of this in blogging you know people are just firing off their emotions that they think it's rational it's not rational it's not reasoning so it's all about the fending the self actually and i do say that both sides do this i think that we get some examples of the the educated conservative doing this a great deal. you have to know a lot about the issues to really argue with them to be educated liberals to yeah yeah but but i mean i don't know any case where you get more educated liberals having more you know how tradition of its correlation with education which you do have with the conservatives which is i mean i haven't found the parallel for them.

it is chris mooney it is the republican brain chris thanks so much for being with us through the talk it creates great talking to see this and other conversations of great minds at our website conversations and great minds dot com. coming up after the break karl rove the crossroads super pacs are raised one hundred twenty three million dollars it's twenty years against democrats nationwide but is the center for public integrity points out the majority of it comes from completely secret donors and all the secret money coming from mahmoud ahmadinejad or is it just plain old raw. and influence peddling money from romney rich oil tag tycoons and wall street fat cats that and more in france big picture rob.

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it's friday are you ready to rumble on the panel for tonight's big picture although our brian darling director of government studies at the heritage foundation and contributing columnist to the british daily mail us a quote was that karl first democratic strategist partner.