Liberal Bullies (eBook)

Chapter 2

Intellectual Apathy: A Virus that Kills Rational Argument

– Jürgen Habermas,

German philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued for the importance of a public sphere – a place where groups could come together and argue rationally without fear of reprisal. If ever we came to devalue the truth exploration that happened in this sphere, we would be in danger of losing the essence of constructive democratic civilization. It would be a nightmare.

Left-wing authoritarians are currently making this nightmare dangerously close to a reality. You have likely heard of ‘cancel culture’. Conservatives have of course done their fair share of ‘canceling’ over the years, and it is still a primary tactic of American Republicans. But when it comes to canceling, conservatives have absolutely on modern liberals. Polling suggests that 50% of ‘strong liberals’ support the firing of Trump donors.1 Think about that for a second. Half of ‘strong liberals’ think it is OK to fire people, not for being incompetent, not for breaking the law, but for political disagreements that . And this isn’t just talk. Actresses,2 baseball personalities,3 and Google employees4 have all been fired for expressing conservative views.

The country has noticed. Polling data reveals that 62% of Americans (including 77% of Republicans and 52% of Democrats) are afraid to say what they think these days. They don’t want to get fired or canceled. In fact, the only group of people in the country who aren’t afraid to say what they think are the hard-line Marxist/progressives.5 Those progressives, despite making up a comparatively small percentage of the country, have been ceded enormous power.

This has horrible downstream consequences for society. Cancel culture doesn’t just cancel . It cancels rational debate. Yes, cancel culture causes people who disagree with the mob’s views to be silenced. But it emboldens people the mob to ignore reasonable arguments. The mind of an authoritarian isn’t a thoughtful mind. In fact, one of the hallmarks of the modern left-wing authoritarian movement is its .

As we’ll see in this chapter, authoritarians not only possess a unique intellectual laziness, they also tend to spread their intellectual apathy to those around them like a virus. The consequence of this is an inability to have serious debates. And if we can’t have serious debates, then – as Habermas predicted – we’re not going to make it.

Why People Believe the Moon Landing Wasn’t Real

I’ll start with a seemingly odd angle of approach: Why do people believe fake news? Let’s do a little experiment. Decide if you think each of the following six headlines represents something completely fake or something that really happened:

1. Because of the Lack of Men, Iceland Gives $5,000 Per Month to Immigrants Who Marry Icelandic Women!

2. Depression Symptoms Are Common Among Active Airline Pilots, International Survey Reveals

3. Gnarly! 6-Story Wave Is Revealed As Biggest Ever Recorded

4. Yahoo Suffers World’s Biggest Hack Affecting 1 Billion Users

5. Billionaire Founder of Corona Beer Brewery Makes EVERYONE in his village a MILLIONAIRE in His Will

6. The Controversial Files: Fake Cigarettes Are Being Sold and Killing People, Here’s How to Spot Counterfeit Packs

If you are scoring yourself, headlines 1, 5, and 6 are fake – they were news stories made up by researchers. Headlines 2, 3, and 4, however, represent real news headlines of events that really happened.

Now see if you can spot the bogus news in a different set of headlines:

1. Vladmir Putin ‘Personally Involved’ in US Hack, Report Claims

2. Sarah Palin Calls to Boycott Mall of America Because ‘Santa Was Always White in the Bible’

3. Donald Trump Strikes Conciliatory Tone in Meeting with Tech Executives

4. Election Night: Hillary Was Drunk, Got Physical with Mook and Podesta

5. Democrats Scramble to Prevent Their Own from Defecting to Trump

6. NYT David Brooks: ‘Trump Needs to Decide If He Prefers to Resign, Be Impeached or Get Assassinated’

7. Trump to Ban All TV Shows that Promote Gay Activity Starting with as President

8. Trump Lashes Out at , One Day after It Lambastes His Restaurant

Headlines 2, 4, 6, and 7 are fake. Headlines 1, 3, 5, and 8 are actual headlines from real stories.

The world is a complicated place, and thus nobody perfectly discerns fake from real news all the time. But what factors influence why you might believe (or disbelieve) these kinds of fake news stories? To answer that question, Cornell University researcher Gordon Pennycook and his colleagues gave people headlines like the ones above.6 Some of the headlines were true, some false. Further, some of the headlines were politically neutral (like the first set above), while some of them were politically loaded (like the second set).

Pennycook’s findings were startling. What makes people better or worse at distinguishing real news from fake news turns out to be nothing at all like what I would have guessed. Decades of research in my field revealed the gigantic biases people have in favor of their own political groups. Thus, without seeing the data, the average political psychologist such as myself would have predicted the following: You’d be better at accurately identifying the first (neutral) set of articles than the second (political) set. If things are neutral, the reasoning goes, you wouldn’t feel any special compunction to view them in a particular way. Because of that, you’d be an objective observer and would be more accurate.

The second set of political headlines, however, would have brought in your own political biases, making you more likely to believe what you wanted to see. So if you were a Democrat in the US, political-bias models would have said you’d be especially likely to believe fake news items 2 and 7 (because those make your political look bad) but especially unlikely to believe fake news items 4 and 6 (because those make your political group look bad). You’d also be especially likely to disbelieve true stories – such as about Trump striking a conciliatory tone with tech executives – that made your opponents look good.

As we’ll see in Chapter 4, those political biases are real, and they help us understand authoritarianism. Pennycook’s research, however, has smashed my pet political-bias theory of fake news to bits. In its place, it has substituted something else. This research suggests rather that what causes people to fall for fake news isn’t bias; it’s .

Pennycook’s team found that it didn’t matter very much whether or not participants wanted a headline to be true. It didn’t matter whether the headline was politically neutral or whether it supported or opposed participants’ own political views. Rather, what mattered was their propensity to think reflectively about things in general.

To understand this, Pennycook also gave participants a standard test, called the Cognitive Reflection Test, of their likelihood of engaging in intellectual apathy. One of the items on this test is illustrative: ‘A bat and ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?’ If you don’t think about it very much, you’ll say 10 cents. About 65% of respondents in fact give that answer. But the other 35% reflect briefly and realize that 10 cents must obviously be wrong, because if the ball cost 10 cents, the bat would have to cost $1.10 and together they would equal $1.20.

If you are the kind of person who gets the bat-and-ball problem right (the answer is 5 cents), you are especially unlikely to fall for fake news headlines. That is true of you whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, or whether you are evaluating news that is neutral, news that you want to be true, or news that you desperately wish was untrue. In the words of the authors of the study: ‘Our findings therefore suggest that susceptibility to fake news is driven more by lazy thinking than it is by partisan bias per se.’ This has huge implications for our understanding of authoritarianism. Because guess which kind of persons are especially likely to be intellectually lazy?

That’s right – authoritarian persons.

Authoritarians Are Intellectually Apathetic People

As we’ll see in Chapter 4, authoritarians of course have group-based political biases. Independent of that, however, they also simply don’t like to think very hard. This connection between authoritarianism and intellectual apathy is well established in scientific circles. For example, Becky Choma and her colleagues found that authoritarians do much worse on the Cognitive Reflection Test used by Pennycook.7 Authoritarians are especially unlikely to give that extra second of thought to figure out answers to questions, even for a task completely unrelated to politics.

Our lab ran a quick study to investigate if authoritarians’ unwillingness to think hard would make them especially vulnerable to believing fake news at higher rates. Using similar headlines to those in the Pennycook study above, we found that authoritarians were indeed especially likely to think fake news (relative to true news) was true – regardless of its political...