Why Trump voters weren’t irrational

I doubt there’s anyone on this website who voted for Trump last November—or, if they did, they’re keeping it quiet.  And most of us, including me, think that those who did vote for The Donald were irrational. My take was that these people, blinded by their bigotry and nativism, simply voted against their own interests, thereby shooting themselves in the foot. In other words, their actions were irrational.

But Keith Stanovich, a professor emeritus of applied psychology and human development at the University of Toronto, disagrees. He says that there’s no obvious reason why Trump voters were irrational, and he’s an expert on rationality and cognitive science. (His last book, The Rationality Quotient, written with Richard West and Maggie Toplkak is an analysis of cognitive thinking and of how to construe “rationality”).  In a new article in Quillette, “Were Trump voters irrational?“, Stanovich, using several ways to conceive of “rationality”, says “no.” It’s a very good essay and one you should read, for it will make you reexamine your views and maybe even change them. It’s a Professor Ceiling Cat (Emeritus) Must-Read Recommendation™. Kudos to Stanovich for writing it and to Claire Lehmann, the editor of the financially  struggling Quillette, for continuing to find and commission articles discussing substantive issues for real progressives—articles that could never find homes on Regressive Leftist sites like Salon or PuffHo.

So why weren’t Trump voters irrational? Well, Stanovich approaches the issue from three directions, all looking at different meanings of “irrational”. I’ll summarize them briefly, but this is no substitute for reading the original piece.

1.) Instrumental rationality. Stanovich construes this as a way to behave: you’re instrumentally rational if you act in such a way that’s furthers your reaching your goals; you’re instrumentally irrational if you act in ways that are inimical to reaching your goals. Many of us think, as I did, that Trump voters were instrumentally irrational because they voted in a way that hurt their personal interests.

Stanovich’s response is simple: liberals do that all the time in service of a greater cause (for example, I’d vote for higher taxes on people in my income bracket), and they’re praised, not denigrated. The problem is that “rationality” doesn’t always mean “self interested”, and we liberals praise those who sacrifice their own well being for greater goods. But we’re unwilling to extend that courtesy that to Republicans (whether Trump is a greater good, of course, depends on what you want, and I’ll discuss that below). Stanovich thinks this accusation of Trumpites is demeaning:

In addition to being misplaced, leftists never seem to see how insulting this critique of Republican voters is. Their failure to see the insult illustrates precisely what they get wrong in evaluating the rationality of the Trump voters. Consider that these What’s the Matter with Kansas? critiques are written by highly educated left-wing pundits, professors, and advocates. Perhaps we should ask one of them whether their own vote is purely self-interested and for their own monetary benefit. They will say no, of course. And they will deny as well that their vote is irrational. Progressives will say that they often vote against their own monetary interests in order to do good for other people. Or they will say that their vote reflects their values and worldview—that they are concerned about the larger issues that are encompassed by that worldview (abortion legislation or climate change or gun restriction). Leftists seem unable to see that Republican voters—even lower income ones—may be just as attached to their own values and worldviews. The stance of the educated progressive making the What’s the Matter with Kansas? argument seems to be that: “no one else should vote against their monetary interests, but it’s not irrational for me to do so, because I am enlightened.”

The implicit insult in the Kansas argument often goes unrecognized, and, if I may use some cognitive science jargon here, it is a form of ‘myside’ bias. For example, leftists who work for nonprofit organizations are often choosing their values over monetary reward. And likewise, conservatives joining the military are often also choosing their values over monetary reward. The What’s the Matter with Kansas? argument seems to ignore or deny this symmetry. Many Republican voters with modest incomes cast a vote to help others rather than for their own monetary interests—precisely as do the progressive Democrats who find such Republican behavior puzzling. So no, neither the Kansas voters in Frank’s book, nor the Trump voters are voting against their interests, broadly—and correctly—defined. Even if part of the Kansas critique is correct (they are voting against their purely economic interests), these voters are not necessarily irrational because they may be sacrificing monetary gain in order to express their values or worldview.

Stanovich’s argument goes beyond this, discussing the argument about whether it’s irrational to vote for someone whose character makes them unfit for office. Here he makes an interesting argument, asking people to evaluate whether they’d vote for someone with a character making them unfit for office, but with Clinton’s worldviews, or for someone manifestly better suited for office, but with a more Trumpian worldview. I’ll let you see the real examples of each that Stanovich asks us to consider.

2.) Epistemic rationality. This form of rationality is about beliefs, not behavior. You’re epistemically rational if your beliefs are accurate or true, and irrational if they’re not. Were Trump voters irrational in this way?

Democrats use two arguments to show that Republican beliefs are epistemically irrational (remember, you have to judge this by correspondence of belief with fact, not whether you like Republicans’ views on immigration or abortion). The two areas are climate change and evolution, and in both cases Republicans are in general less accepting of the scientific truth than are Democrats. On these issues, the Republicans are epistemically irrational.

But wait! According to Stanovich, that argument is made by cherry-picking just two issues, and you could find others on which—and he says he has evidence for this—Democrats are more irrational. Have a gander, for I’m going to give a long excerpt:

However, there is a trap lying in wait for progressives here. It is very tempting for them to say: Well, the Democrats get climate science right, and Republicans get it wrong; the Democrats get evolution right, and conservative Republicans get it wrong; so therefore we liberal Democrats are getting everything factually right about all of the other charged topics that figure in political disputes—crime, immigration, poverty, parenting, sexuality, and so on. Such an argument is essentially the claim that Democrats are epistemically more rational than Republicans.

This type of thinking is what some years ago prompted the Democratic Party to declare itself the “party of science” and to label the Republican Party as the science deniers. That stance spawned a series of books with titles like Mooney’s The Republican War on Science (2005). As a political strategy, this “party of science” labelling might be effective, but epistemic superiority cannot simply be declared on the basis of a few examples. A cognitive scientist is forced to be pedantic here and rain on the progressive parade. In fact, any trained social scientist would be quick to point out the obvious selection effects that are operating. The issues in question (climate science and creationism/evolution) are cherry-picked for reasons of politics and media interest. In order to correctly call one party the party of science and the other the party of science deniers, one would of course have to have a representative sampling of scientific issues to see whether members of one party are more likely to accept scientific consensus.

In fact, it is not difficult at all to find scientific issues on which it is liberal Democrats who fail to accept the scientific consensus. Leftists become the “science deniers” in these cases. In fact, and ironically, there are enough examples to produce a book parallel to the Mooney volume cited above titled Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left (2012). To mention an example from my own field, psychology: liberals tend to deny the overwhelming consensus in psychological science that intelligence is moderately heritable.

This isn’t the only instance of left-wing science denial, though. In the area of economics, progressives are very reluctant to accept the consensus view that when proper controls for occupational choice and work history are made, women do not make more than 20 per cent less than men for doing the same work.

Progressives tend to deny or obfuscate (just as conservatives obfuscate the research on global warming) the data indicating that single-parent households lead to more behavioral problems among children. Overwhelmingly progressive university schools of education deny the strong scientific consensus that phonics-based reading instruction facilitates most readers, especially those struggling the most. Many progressives find it hard to believe that there is no bias at all in the initial hiring of women for tenure-track university positions in STEM disciplines. Progressives tend to deny the consensus view that genetically modified organisms are safe to consume. Gender feminists routinely deny biological facts about sex differences. Largely Democratic cities and university towns are at the forefront of the anti-vaccine movement which denies a scientific consensus. In the same cities and towns, people find it hard to believe that there is a strong consensus among economists that rent control causes housing shortages and a diminution in the quality of housing. [Research citations for all the above are available from the author here.]

You can check the links for yourself. And Stanovich doesn’t even mention the complete dismissal of evolutionary psychology by the Left. Although you can say that Stanovich is simply a conservative going after Leftists, it’s not that simple. You have to dismiss his facts, not his ideology. In fact, I’m not at all sure what Stanovich’s political leanings are; his article is good because it deals with hard arguments that you can’t dismiss with ad hominem remarks. 

What about the claim that, in general, Republicans are just more ignorant than Democrats—they know less about the world in general? Stanovich cites studies showing that there’s no important difference here in views about world events, economics, how the U.S. government works, and so on.

Okay, well what about conspiracy theories? Aren’t Republicans more prone to accept those than are Democrats? Nope: data show that both sides are about the same.

 3.) Other forms of irrationality. At this point Stanovich senses the frustration of Democratic readers, adding a section called “There’s got to be something else wrong then.” What this boils down to is the Democratic claim that the worldview of Trump voters is less rational than that of Democrats, and that is why Trumpians are more irrational.

Stanovich is sympathetic with the tenor of this claim, but says that there’s no way to prove that one worldview is more rational than another. (Well, you could do it in principle: if you argue, for example, that drastically restricting immigration will have certain social effects, those might be tested, but only for claims that are based on proposed consequences.) Further, Stanovich says that this kind of difference in “utility values” might be offset by the “symbolic utility” of expressing your preferences for a candidate whose values you share. Is this irrational?  Stanovich says “not necessarily”—if such preferences are “expressive of one’s identity and cultural commitments,” which has personal value. As he says, “there is no rational way of assessing the tradeoff between the worth of an expressive signal and its negative consequences.”

At the end of the article you might be frustrated, but you might also share Stanovich’s conclusions:

I am afraid that my Democratic friends are just going to have to reconcile themselves to the conclusion that the cognitive science of rationality does not support their judgment of the Trump voters. You can say whatever you want about the rationality or irrationality of Trump himself, but cognitive science does not support the claim that his voters were irrational—or, more specifically, that they were any less rational than the Clinton voters. Politics is not the place to look for objective rightness or wrongness—and that is what judgments about the rationality of voting entail. Our judgments in this domain are uniquely susceptible to myside bias. [JAC: he’s referring to confirmation bias, whereby you are blind your own biases but not to those of your opponents.]

Many of our most contentious political issues hinge on values and culture rather than facts. That may be a good thing. It could be signalling that our society has already handled the easiest issues—those that can be solved by educating everyone to accept the same facts and then implementing the obvious solution that follows from these facts. We may have achieved a social structure that is so optimized that the remaining disputes revolve largely around values and cultural choices. Rather than calling the Trump voters irrational, it might be a better idea to engage with their Country and Citizen cultural concerns and treat them as equally valid and rational as the Global and Groups cultural concerns that largely drove the Clinton voters.

To see the difference between “Country and Citizen cultural concerns” (Republican) and “Global and Groups cultural concerns” (Democratic), have a look at the article.

And even if Trump fails to enact the legislation that got many to vote for him (building the Big Wall, dismantling Obamacare, and so on), that doesn’t mean that people who voted for him were irrational; it means that we value different things. Stanovich sees politics the way I see morality: in the end, it comes down to preferences that can’t be resolved empirically. There is no objective right or wrong.