According to psychology professor Keith Payne in his new book Good Reasonable People: The Psychology behind America’s Dangerous Divide, during the Cretaceous Period’s 80-million-year run, microscopic plankton called coccoliths floated in the ocean by the trillions. As they died and settled, their calcium shells slowly added huge layers of chalk to the ocean floor. As the continents drifted and the oceans receded in various places, this chalky limestone created the perfect soil for growing cotton. As it happens, the southeastern part of what is now the United States had just such soil. In the early 1800s, the American South came to produce two-thirds of the world’s cotton. The cotton industry was the source of great wealth, but needed huge numbers of slaves to prosper.
Also in the early 1800s, the moral argument against the existence of slavery began to find purchase in various countries around the world, including the U.S. But only in the North, where the soil was not hospitable to cotton, and slavery did not play as significant a role in propping up the economy as it did in the South. Payne explains:
In the North, enslavers were conflicted between the economic self-interest of keeping their slaves and the moral force of Enlightenment ideas. Enslavers felt the same conflict in the South, too, but the economic boom, driven by cotton, meant that the enlightenment was simply overmatched in cotton-growing areas.
The chalk line set people on different paths. … There wasn’t anything intrinsically different about northerners and southerners. They shared the same history, culture, and language. They read the same books and worshipped the same God. The difference was not something about the personalities or moral compasses of the people but the conditions they were living in. (p. 82)
At work here, of course, is the self-serving bias (see video at https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/self-serving-bias), which we often discuss in these blog posts. That tendency people have to gather, process, and even remember information in self-serving ways can lead them to unintentionally make indefensible moral choices.
Payne describes research he did with colleagues where subjects of two similar groups were asked to do research and then pick stocks in which to invest. Regardless of how they fared, some were told they had done well. Others were told they had done poorly. Those who were told that they had done poorly naturally thought the game was unfair. Those who were told they had done well naturally attributed the success to their hard work and intelligence. And they believed that the poor performers were less intelligent and less hardworking. The professors then queried the subjects as to their political views. The losers supported raising taxes on the wealthy and strengthening the social safety net. The winners supported cutting those taxes and weakening the safety net.
Says Payne:
From the outside, we can see that this is a self-serving bias. But we all have self-serving biases. The challenge in understanding the meaning of studies like this is to hold two ideas in mind at the same time. First, people start with the assumption that they are good and smart and reasonable people, and therefore will have all sorts of self-serving biases. And second, they are actually being smart and reasonable people from the only point of view they have, looking out through their own eyes, just like you and I are. (pp. 69-70)
The self-serving bias, which includes the concept of motivated reasoning, supports what psychologists call the psychological immune system that allows people to protect their self-concept and their political and moral views via “flexible reasoning.” In one famous study (published under the title “At Least Bias is Bipartisan”), scores of studies were reviewed and found to demonstrate clearly that both Republicans and Democrats would support a particular policy if told it was proposed by their party but reject the same policy if told it was proposed by the other party.
Says Payne:
These mental gymnastics often lead us to take positions that are at odds with reason and evidence. But that’s not because they are flaws in rationality. Rather, it is because our cognitive systems value self-protection, sometimes more than reason. Like the biological immune system, the psychological immune system is constantly humming away in the background whether we notice it or not. (p. 29)
In general, it is easy for us to see these mental flaws in others, but not so easy to see them in ourselves. As Abraham Lincoln observed in his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas: “[The southerners] are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up. This I believe of the masses north and south.” (pp. 82-83
Although Payne focuses primarily on the sharp political disagreements we see daily, his slavery example demonstrates that our moral conclusions are also suspect. And even in the political realm, we have a moral obligation to avoid allowing the self-serving bias and other aspects of our psychological immune system to lead us take unreasonable positions or undermine our nation’s sacred values.
Payne observes that “the groups that make up the core of the Republican Party are all declining, while the groups that lean Democrat are all expanding.” (p. 202) In his estimation:
As the pressure of demographic change mounts, it forces Republicans to choose between maintaining power and maintaining a democracy. Anyone who thinks that people of good conscience will stand up and check the worst impulses of the politicians has not properly understood the psychological immune system. The vast majority of Republicans will easily rationalize such steps [as election denialism and restrictive voting laws] as necessary for the greater good of the country. If that outrages you, remember that Democrats would likely do the same if their positions were reversed. Rationalization is bipartisan. (p. 2023
Our moral duty to put country before party should also be bipartisan.
References
Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi et al., “Subjective Status Shapes Political Preferences,” Psychological Science, 26(1): 15-26 (2015).
Jazmin Brown-Iannuzzi et al., “A Privileged Point of View: Effects of Subjective Socioeconomic Status on Native Realism and Political Division,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 47(2): 241-256 (2021).
Paul Ditto, et al., “At Least Bias is Bipartisan: A Meta-Analytic Comparison of Partisan Bias in Liberals and Conservatives,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(2): 273-291 (2019).
Keith Payne, Good Reasonable People: The Psychology behind America’s Dangerous Divide (2024).
Videos
Self-Serving Bias: https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/self-serving-bias