Malfunctioning intuition in the modern world
by digby
Political scientists J. Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood have written a book called Enchanted America; How Intuition & Reason Divide Our Politics that looks to be a must read if you want to understand why our politics have gone batshit crazy. Jesse Singel's review in New York magazine explains that what these political scientists have found is that while all humans use intuition and heuristics, a large faction of voters is simply "magical thinkers" who reject reason (or are incapable of being rational) and make "causal attributions to unobservable forces." In other words, they would rather believe something absurd than what they can see with their own eyes.
The authors call them "intuitionists." And while there are some who exist on the left (anti-vaxxers for instance) They are mostly fundamentalist, conservative and Republican, and Trump's followers are more like this than any others. And they are also fearful pessimists. Singel writes:
But it’s the Trumpenvolk who are, relative to followers of other politicians, the most fearful and superstitious. It should come as no surprise that they were drawn to a man constantly raising fears of immigrant invasions, foreign terrorists, and globe-spanning conspiracies with anti-Semitic undertones.
Oliver and Wood make it clear that when it comes to the question of Rationalism versus Intuitionism, they are partisans. “The Intuitionist/Rationalist split is not like other political divisions in the United States,” they write. “Intuitionism poses an existential threat to democracy. It is neither benign nor temperate. It bristles against open inquiry, is intolerant of opposition, and chafes at the pluralism and compromise modern democracy requires. It is prone to conspiracy theory, drawn to simple generalizations, and quick to vilify the other.” But they acknowledge that this area of study is not far enough along for them to have all that many concrete suggestions.
Maybe the first step is for writers, pollsters, and all the other elites who remain confused about Trump’s appeal to better educate themselves about the Intuitionism scale, as well as other related constructs like conspiracism (what it sounds like) and need for cognitive closure (a preference for simple, straightforward thoughts without much ambiguity). Absent these insights from political psychology, it’s easy to get caught in an endless cycle of befuddlement: How could evangelical “values voters” be so unconcerned that Trump is a philanderer and former supporter of reproductive rights? How could down-on-their luck working-class whites have such enthusiasm for a brash mogul, born into a rich family, who has endlessly ripped off people like them, and who has openly stated he will cut the welfare benefits keeping many of them alive and housed? How could white, educated suburban women vote for a man who has been credibly accused of multiple sexual assaults?
We could at least acknowledge that these people are not voting based on rational analysis. Economic determinists interpret decisions as relating to some variant of economic status or distress and there's no doubt that plays into it. But humans are complex and as this analysis shows, many people are driven by complex "intuition", evolving over millennia that doesn't have a rational application to the modern world.
