Right wingers increasingly appear to be operating in an alternate reality where facts don't matter and truth is dictated by those with the most money and the biggest mouths. Thus we have birthers, death panels, global warming denial, anti-evolutionism, the belief that abstinence only education works, that the president is a Muslim, and Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein (who also supposedly had weapons of mass destruction) were in league together to cause 911, and a host of other ideas that would otherwise qualify one to admittance to a mental asylum if they weren't so widely believed. In The Republican Brain Chris Mooney sets out to explain why the right is detached from reality and why patently proven facts have no sway on their outlook. He also examines why this psychological phenomenon almost exclusively occurs in those who brand themselves as conservative. Multiple scientific studies are converging on a consensus of the psychological traits of conservatives, the main characteristics of which include a lack of openness to new experience, less tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity, need for closure and a lack of integrative complexity. With the formation of closed-minded opinions, conservatives are less likely to investigate alternative viewpoints and accommodate additional evidence, while at the same time the individual is unable to see nuance, complexity or appreciate differing viewpoints. In addition, conservatives are more rigidly hierarchical which leads to group-think and intolerance of dissent. This vast and growing body of scientific evidence explaining conservative behavior fits remarkably consistently with events that play out in American culture and Im sure conservatives would agree 100% except for the fact that the research presented by Mooney shows that they wont and also explains exactly why.While people of all political stripes engage in motivated reasoning (the act of starting with a conclusion that one hoped to reach and then selectively evaluating evidence in order to reach that conclusion), studies show that conservatives (especially authoritarians) are far more likely than liberals to cling tenaciously to wrong ideas and argue fiercely on their behalf. These tendencies are reinforced by individuals who select news and information that confirms (rather than dis-confirms) their mistaken ideas resulting in Republicans consistently being more misinformed than Democrats about key political issues and that Fox News viewers are the least informed of all (even more poorly informed than those who watch no news at all). Mooney did a great job with this book, and I consider it to be a tremendous improvement over his earlier works. Though Ive found each of his books to be well researched and that he does a good job explaining the science, in the past I felt that he didnt do a very good job maintaining his readers interest (or at least my own). The Republican Brain remains fascinating throughout.

I challenged some of the claims in another book that an author made about the actual differences in brains of people with conservative and liberal ideologies, and in the references, this book was heavily cited. I wanted to dig deeper and learn more about the actual studies. Mooney cited all of the studies, which appear in peer-reviewed journals, and I even checked to verify a few to make sure that they were legitimate. I didn't really expect to read this whole book, but it was amazing. I learned a LOT about conservative and liberal minds, values, and why people deny science, and why I feel like liberals are the only ones who care about facts, evidence, and truth. The good news is that I learned about the strengths and weaknesses in personality of both groups and am full of hope that we can eventually, some day, hopefully after WWIII or something, work with those strengths to make the ultimate team. I no longer dream of an America where everyone thinks a certain way (shares my values!), but rather one in which liberals are tempered by conservatives and vice versa. Mooney could have easily titled this book "The Brain Science Behind Political Ideology" as I feel both liberals and conservatives were adequately explored, but it wouldn't have sold as many copies, I imagine. My absolute favorite takeaway is more understanding of what I previously considered insanity and stupidity, and some tips on how to have an actual conversation and work together with someone whom I would previously have dismissed as uninformed. (I learned that evidence and information will never change a person's mind if they hold a belief firmly and it's what their "team" believes). The key is to first establish common ground--what do we have in common--and then frame information in a way that fits with their personality and values. I have hope. I wish that everyone would read this, and I wish that a truce could be made based on the science. It killed me that this was a library copy and I couldn't underline and post-it...ordered my own copy to keep for future reference. I loved this. Please read it.

Reality has a well-known liberal bias.-Stephen ColbertThat's the opening quote to this book, and probably the best once-sentence summary of its contents.I was originally thinking of giving it four stars, based on its somewhat limited scope--it mentions conservatives and authoritarians in other cultures occasionally, but not in any real depth--but the title is, after all, the Republican Brain. That wasn't the real reason that tipped me over, however.The real reason was the behavior of the conservative establishment over the election and its aftermath. Many conservatives were absolutely convinced that Mitt Romney would win the election, and a significant faction believed he would win in a landslide. Even though Romney never led in the aggregated polls in enough states to win, they clung to their belief, fed by the news media and especially by places like Fox News, that the race was "too close to call" and that after Obama's lackluster (to say the least) perform at the first debate, Romney had "momentum." Polls that said otherwise were "skewed," leading to the now-infamous Unskewed Polls which at one point claimed that Romney would receive more than 340 electoral votes, though in his defense he did lower it to a much narrower margin before election day.Well, we know where that led. Karl Rove melted down live on Fox News when they called Ohio for Obama, leading to them sending another newscaster down to their statisticians to explain why they had made the call. Romney himself was so confident of his impending victory that he did not even have a concession speech ready and had to scramble to write one. It's one of the few times we've been able to observe the Ship of Conservatism crash into the Rocks of Reality (if you will), and the results are both hilarious (to me as a liberal) and kind of sad. If you read various far-right conservative sites, you get the impression that this is the death of the republic, that an economic collapse is imminent, that the "job creators" are all going to go Galt and let everyone else collapse into barbarism, that socialism and the moochers have conquered the country, that whites are now a political minority and doomed to inevitable oppression, and plenty of other conspiracy theories and prophecies of doom I haven't gotten to. If you really want a microcosm of everything this book discusses, the election demonstrated it.What does it discuss? Well, it's mostly about how Democrats and Republicans (the book uses "liberal" and "conservative", but it takes place almost entirely in an American political context, so I'll use the party names throughout) process information about the world differently and have different psychological strategies for processing the world. More educated Republicans were more like to ignorant about the true causes of anthropogenic climate change, for example, while education made Democrats less likely to believe misinformation, and the same on other topics. Both engaged in motivated reasoning (seeking out information that confirms your point of view and arguing not to seek the truth but to reaffirm your pre-existing beliefs), but the Republicans did it more often than the Democrats did. Republicans are more likely to be xenophobic, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, and authoritarian and less likely to seek out contradictory information than Democrats are.Perhaps most damaging to Democrats' cherished beliefs, research indicates that people--everyone to some extent, but especially Republicans--are actually more likely to believe misinformation after being confronted with proof that they are wrong, precisely because of motivated reasoning. The grand traditions of the Enlightenment, of pure reason, scientific debate, and the search for truth, are not universal and do not work nearly as well as we'd like them to.Some of this is rooted in the brain. Research indicates that Republicans have larger right (heh) amygdalas, the part of the brain that deals with flight-or-flight response and phobias, and indeed, fear tends to make people act in a more conservative fashion. Democrats, in their turn, have a larger anterior cingulated cortex, which deals with detecting errors we make and fixing them--sometimes called "conflict monitoring." The brain is too plastic to say that this is an inborn hereditary difference, but it certainly exists.Now, reading this, you might get the impression that we should ban Republicans from government and strip them of the franchise, but the author takes pains to point out that their particular psychological profile has value. Democrats are better at dealing with nuance, more accepting of differences, and better able to think complex problems through. Republicans, however, are better at loyalty, at taking decisive action when called for, and at persevering in the face of adversity--clearly useful qualities to have in a leader. Anyone who deals with groups of Democrats has probably run into the herding cats problem, and indeed, the author points out the Occupy movement as something that would probably have been far more successful with a centralized leadership structure to keep it on message, even though that would have been antithetical to the philosophy on which it was founded. To be extremely reductionist, then, the ideal society is one where Democrats debate and formulate plans and then Republicans implement them and make sure they work out properly.Despite what it seems, it's not a polemic and it doesn't bash Republicans except for being egregiously, demonstrably wrong on several scientific issues, which they unambiguously are. Unfortunately, the title and the very personality traits this book documents means that the people who would get the most out of reading this never well. As a die-hard liberal, this was good for my own motivated reasoning, but didn't really tell me anything I didn't know or that wasn't demonstrated so schadenfreudeliciously this week. Nonetheless, for people bashing their head against the wall at family gatherings or over Facebook, or for anyone wondering why the same ludicrous arguments get repeatedly trotted out against evolution or climate change or sex education, etc., this book tells you why.