There’s a chance you’ve found some of the studies in this book quite surprising. I certainly have. In looking at the wide range of research that is revealing more and more about the ‘political animal’, I’ve gained a new sense of perspective on why I vote the way I do. That’s how I felt, for example, when I first learnt about the relationship between Openness and political views; it seemed consistent with my own choices, and went some way towards explaining why I favour certain policies that others find so problematic.
Over the last century psychologists have found that we aren’t always aware of the reasons why we act the way we do, or make one decision rather than another, especially when those reasons involve complex and subtle factors like differences in our personalities and moral values.
Once you become aware of some of the factors at play, you might also find they help make sense of your experiences and beliefs – both in relation to yourself and to people you know. Of course, most of the findings are only true on average, and there are many reasons why we make certain decisions. But perhaps some of the studies in this book have inspired you to question what your beliefs and ideas are based on – and even whether you want to reassess any of your political choices.
That is all entirely up to you to decide.
The research certainly doesn’t tell us whether a particular viewpoint is right or wrong – it can only offer a deeper understanding of ourselves and others.
Take nationalism, for example. Many people believe, quite rationally, that the nation state is a critical part of how the modern world works, and we should each support our nation in the interests of political stability and social cohesion. Others consider in-group loyalty to be an important aspect of morality, shaping their political opinions on issues such as the primacy of their own country and their own people.
There is not one reason why a person believes strongly in the nation state. Perhaps, as a nationalist, you think that your views have nothing to do with in-group loyalty, and that the research on moral psychology could detract from more important reasons for supporting nationalism. However, you might find the research on in-group loyalty gives you some ideas for how to communicate with those who don’t share your outlook.
Likewise, if you disagree with the concept of nationalism, this research might give you a better understanding of those who do, and inspire you to find a way of engaging with them. Or it might give you greater confidence to challenge them, and to argue that we shouldn’t be guided by a moral intuition that may have evolved in the past and which you don’t think is useful today.
Again, that’s up to you.
I suspect, however, that many of us would rather not be prone to some of the unconscious biases described in this book. Do we really want a politician’s looks to influence our vote? Or to find out that our support for a particular policy depends only on which political party proposes it? Do we want to pay attention only to information that agrees with our outlook, dismissing any evidence to the contrary, no matter how valid? If these were choices we made consciously, then there might be ways we could justify them; but it’s the idea that our decisions are being influenced without us even being aware of it that probably makes us feel uncomfortable.
Nevertheless, sometimes these biases do affect our choices. In fact, they are arguably so powerful that you might question how (or whether) democracy can ever really function at all. If you started this book worried about the current political climate, you might now be even more concerned by the way humans can make such a mess of the process. Or maybe you’ll now have a little more hope that you can understand those you disagree with.
Whatever your view, we are probably stuck with democracy for the foreseeable future. As Churchill said: ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.’ So perhaps we need to think about how the system can function best, given the many biases to which we humans seem to be susceptible.
Political scientists have become increasingly concerned about this. One aspect they have considered important when assessing the health of our democracies is the amount of ‘correct voting’1 that takes place – a ‘correct’ vote being one that matches the values and beliefs of the voter in question. They conclude that actually, most people do vote ‘correctly’ (although there are various differences across countries and personality types).
Personally, I find the concept of ‘correct voting’ very problematic; I’m not convinced that academics have a strong enough grasp of the complex interplay of character traits and beliefs that we have explored in this book to be able to judge whether someone has voted ‘correctly’. I think the whole approach neglects some of the complications involved in how people’s views and beliefs are formed in the first place, and doesn’t adequately account for the way people can hold an array of different – and sometimes contradictory – views. It also overlooks the role of the media, especially the way in which it can shape our priorities. And it doesn’t address the role of confirmation biases, which can make us cling to our beliefs, even in the face of solid evidence against them.
Then there’s the bias that academics themselves bring to the question of ‘correct voting’. For a start, many fields in academia are dominated by people with left-wing views. In the 1950s, particularly in psychology, there was a reasonable balance, but nowadays, for every conservative psychology professor in the USA, there are fifteen liberal ones. In fact there is currently some debate over whether or not this poses a fundamental problem for psychology as a field.2
Our perspective and biases will inevitably influence everything we do. And that includes the way I have written this book. In this respect, I follow the advice of Ric Bailey, the BBC’s chief political adviser, who encourages his journalists to try to become aware of their own biases.
In that spirit, one of the areas in which my own personal interests might bias my thinking revolves around the question of ‘perceived control’. I’ve probably emphasised it more than other researchers might, but (in my opinion) there is a lot of good evidence for its importance. We looked at a few examples in Chapter 8, but here’s another one. In a huge study (involving over 3,000 participants) Margie Lachman and Suzanne Weaver looked at how people of different social classes varied in terms of their perceived control, wellbeing and health.3 Unsurprisingly they found that participants with higher incomes scored highly on all three measures; however, they then showed that low-income participants could have just as high levels of health and wellbeing if they also had a high sense of perceived control.
In other words, if you were a countess ruling the roost in Downton Abbey, you would be likely to enjoy a good measure of control, and high levels of health and well-being. But you might feel no more satisfied than the head butler, as long as he felt, as butlers tend to do, that he had the run of things.
I think this idea of control is often neglected when discussing politics and democracy in society. Democracy isn’t just about ‘crowd sourcing’ opinions on how we should be governed; critically, it offers everybody in society the chance to have some sense of control over the process. And, as we have seen, it is when people feel their vote doesn’t make a difference that they can start to feel cynical or disengaged.
It is troubling to think that a third of the electorate in the UK don’t vote, and that many of those who do will make their decision based on startlingly little knowledge of the political system. If we want to reverse this trend, education is the most obvious place to start. In the USA, the Civics Education Initiative has been campaigning to make it a requirement in every state for students to pass a civics exam before they can graduate from high school. Of course, teaching politics without bias is a genuine challenge, but there are clearly basic facts about the mechanics of how our democracy works that can be taught – and some of those at least have formed part of the citizenship classes that were introduced to Britain’s state secondary schools in 2002. In many places, however, students still finish school knowing very little about how their democracy works, while at the same time being exposed to all sorts of fake news across the internet.
Knowing what or who to trust is probably one of the biggest challenges facing future generations. I think therefore that it isn’t enough to teach people how to exercise their democratic right; we must also teach them about the biases that might affect their decisions. (Of course, all academics think that their discipline is the most important and should be prioritised in education – the difference is, psychology really is the most important!) All of us should be aware, for example, that we have a tendency to focus on evidence that supports our views, or that we can start to believe something just because we’ve have heard it multiple times.
In his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker argues that over the course of human history, conditions have been steadily improving, with, for example, decreasing levels of violence, poverty and child mortality.4 But most of us don’t seem to have that impression – generally because of what we hear in the media. As we saw in Chapter 5, newspapers and broadcasts tend to focus on negative stories and events (‘If it bleeds, it leads’, as the old adage goes).
Pinker also argues that there have been particular times in human history where things have improved more rapidly than others, and that one of these was thanks, in part, to the development of the printing press, which made literature much more accessible. As literacy levels rose over the course of the next few centuries, people didn’t just have access to more knowledge, but also to other perspectives – with significant results. For example, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, a number of autobiographies and novels were written from the point of view of black slaves, which many argue were highly influential in challenging the prejudice of white Americans, and helped build some of the popular momentum behind the eventual abolition of slavery.
Nowadays, it is even easier to access what other people say, and to see how other people live – but we still find it a challenge to really appreciate other people’s outlooks.
I think moral psychology and personality psychology offer a genuine opportunity to better understand the perspective of those we disagree with politically. As I’ve said already, I don’t think this means we will suddenly all start agreeing with each other, but it could help us grasp a little more clearly the points on which we disagree and, perhaps, help us focus instead on areas where we can find some common ground.
I know a lot of people say they dislike talking politics, because the exchanges often become very heated or opinionated. Perhaps the little bit of political psychology in this book will help to make your conversations more constructive – or even more enjoyable. And perhaps we might all find the time to pause every once in a while and ask ourselves: what’s my bias?