Some thoughts on ideology in politics, cognitive biology and pragmatic rationalism

Context

My ideology, pragmatic rationalism, is intended to function as an anti-biasing, anti-ideology ideology. The core concepts are based on what human social behavior and cognitive science tells us about sources of flawed politics and policy such as bias, error, irrational distrust, false beliefs and flawed reasoning (motivated reasoning). Political, religious and/or economic ideologies, constitute major sources of flawed politics. With the dominant ideology-based mindset, politics and policy are largely grounded in ideology and competition for ideological influence. In the pragmatic rationalist mindset, the hope is to shift politics and policy from mostly ideology-based to somewhat more empirical evidence and sound reason-based. Nothing can be perfect, but it's at least theoretically possible to do better. That's the hope. Some evidence supports this possibility for at least some people.

Ideologues of all flavors of ideology strenuously claim (1) they are empirical evidence and sound reason-based, and (2) political opposition and opposing groups and institutions are not. Evidence from social science convincingly shows that is simply not true most of the time for most issues. Politics usually significantly disconnected from evidence and sound reasoning is settled science. Like human-cause climate change, this not something that experts still dispute. 

A 2013 research paper 

The concept of ideology can be difficult to reconcile with empirical research on political knowledge and belief system organization. First, ideology is a construct that is used at multiple levels. Political ideologies exist as formal systems of political thought. Texts on Marxism, liberalism, conservatism, and fascism develop elaborate interpretations of social, economic, and political arrangements and offer prescriptions for political actions. In somewhat less structured ways, ideologies operate at the societal level to organize political debate by allowing political parties to offer more or less coherent policy platforms. And, in the primary focus of this chapter, ideology is also used to describe the ways in which people organize their political attitudes and beliefs. It is easy to introduce confusion into discussions of ideology by blurring the lines between these levels of analysis. Some connections between these levels should exist, but we must not make the mistake of assuming that there are straightforward relationships between these varied uses of ideology. While I will review a great deal of important research on the structure and determinants of political ideology in this chapter it is important not to lose sight of the implications of low levels of political knowledge, instability in measures of issues preferences, and multiple dimensions of issue preferences when evaluating research on individual-level political ideology. At a minimum, these findings encourage us to consider models of ideology that do not require a great deal of sophistication from most people and to be aware of the limits of ideology among nonelites. --- Feldman, S. (2013). Political ideology. In L. Huddy, D. O. Sears, & J. S. Levy (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of political psychology (pp. 591–626). Oxford University Press.

What that says is that average people generally do not apply ideology in sophisticated or consistent ways. My interpretation is that ideology can be used as a glue to help hold groups of people together, while at the same time be a framework lens to inform or misinform people and to divide societies by creating in-groups (e.g., Republicans) with credibility and trust and out-groups without (e.g., Democrats). 

Another 2013 research paper 

Decision scientists have identified various plausible sources of ideological polarization over climate change, gun violence, national security, and like issues that turn on empirical evidence. This paper describes a study of three of them: the predominance of heuristic-driven information processing by members of the public; ideologically motivated reasoning; and the cognitive-style correlates of political conservativism. The study generated both observational and experimental data inconsistent with the hypothesis that political conservatism is distinctively associated with either unreflective thinking or motivated reasoning. Conservatives did no better or worse than liberals on the Cognitive Reflection Test (Frederick, 2005), an objective measure of information-processing dispositions associated with cognitive biases. In addition, the study found that ideologically motivated reasoning is not a consequence of over-reliance on heuristic or intuitive forms of reasoning generally. On the contrary, subjects who scored highest in cognitive reflection were the most likely to display ideologically motivated cognition. These findings corroborated an alternative hypothesis, which identifies ideologically motivated cognition as a form of information processing that promotes individuals’ interests in forming and maintaining beliefs that signify their loyalty to important affinity groups. 

Much more perplexing, however, are the ubiquity and ferocity of ideological conflicts over facts that turn on empirical evidence. Democrats (by and large) fervently believe that human activity is responsible for global warming, Republicans (by and large) that it is not (Pew Research Center, 2012). --- Ideology, Motivated Reasoning, and Cognitive Reflection: An Experimental Study; Judgment and Decision Making, 8, 407-24 (2013) Cultural Cognition Lab Working Paper No. 107 Yale Law School, Public Law Research Paper No. 272

Clearly, even before the ex-president rose to power, researchers were well-aware of the phenomenon of people fighting over empirically true facts. Political observers had written on that years ago. The data here indicates that this does not have anything to do with differences in cognitive ability, roughly intelligence. It is grounded in psychological and social factors such as tribe and ideology.

A 2015 paper abstract

In this commentary, we embed the volume’s contributions on public beliefs about science in a broader theoretical discussion of motivated political reasoning. The studies presented in the preceding section of the volume consistently find evidence for hyperskepticism toward scientific evidence among ideologues, no matter the domain or context—and this skepticism seems to be stronger among conservatives than liberals. Here, we show that these patterns can be understood as part of a general tendency among individuals to defend their prior attitudes and actively challenge attitudinally incongruent arguments, a tendency that appears to be evident among liberals and conservatives alike. We integrate the empirical results reported in this volume into a broader theoretical discussion of the John Q. Public model of information processing and motivated reasoning, which posits that both affective and cognitive reactions to events are triggered unconsciously. We find that the work in this volume is largely consistent with our theories of affect-driven motivated reasoning and biased attitude formation. --- Why People “Don’t Trust the Evidence”: Motivated Reasoning and Scientific Beliefs, Patrick W. Kraft, Milton Lodge, Charles S. Taber,[1] The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2015

Here, the concept of motivated reasoning is seen as central to ideologue thinking when empirical evidence is rejected. Ideologues tend to treat their political and economic beliefs as as both sacred in a religious sense and correct and thus not open to question. Religious ideology, of course, is usually seen by the believer's mind as sacred and infallible.

Footnote: 

1. Lodge and Taber wrote the 2013 book, The Rationalizing Voter. A non-technical book review is here and a technical review is here. Lodge and Taber focused a lot on affect or feelings and how they influence perceptions of reality and thinking. This aspect of the how the human mind operates seems to be central to politics.

A 2009 research paper, Affect as a Psychological Primitive, described emotion and feelings like this:

Historically, “affect” referred to a simple feeling—to be affected is to feel something. In modern psychological usage, “affect” refers to the mental counterpart of internal bodily representations associated with emotions, actions that involve some degree of motivation, intensity, and force, or even personality dispositions. In the science of emotion, “affect” is a general term that has come to mean anything emotional. A cautious term, it allows reference to something’s effect or someone’s internal state without specifying exactly what kind of an effect or state it is. It allows researchers to talk about emotion in a theory-neutral way.

The phrase, 'internal bodily representations associated with emotions' reflects a belief that some or all of the human body can contribute to feelings in the mind. Some researchers occasionally refer to this as speaking directly to the gut, not the mind. The point is that there is evidence to believe human emotions and feelings are powerful influencers of perceptions of reality and thinking about whatever reality individuals think they see, including when the reality is false. Strong ideological beliefs tends to make it easier to deny, distort and/or downplay inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning.