The human brain is an engine of belief. Our minds continually consume, produce, and attempt to reconcile propositions about ourselves and the world that purport to be true: Iran is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons; human beings are contributing to global climate change; I actually look better with gray hair. What must a brain do to believe such propositions? This question marks the intersection of many fields: psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, economics, political science, and even jurisprudence. Understanding belief at the level of the brain is the main focus of my current research, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

Belief encompasses two domains that have been traditionally divided in our discourse. We believe propositions about facts, and these acts of cognition subsume almost every effort we make to get at the truth—in science, history, journalism, etc. But we also form beliefs about values: judgments about morality, meaning, personal goals, and life's larger purpose. While they differ in certain respects, these types of belief share some important features.

Both types of belief make tacit claims about normativity: claims not merely about how we human beings think and behave, but about how we should think and behave. Factual beliefs like "water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen" and ethical beliefs like "cruelty is wrong" are not expressions of mere preference. To really believe a proposition (whether about facts or values) is also to believe that one has accepted it for legitimate reasons. It is, therefore, to believe that one is in compliance with a variety norms (i.e., that one is sane, rational, not lying to oneself, not overly biased, etc.) When we really believe that something is factually true or morally good, we also believe that another person, similarly placed, should share our conviction.

Despite the remonstrations of people like Jonathan Haidt and Richard Shweder, science has long been in the values business. Scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; it is the result of scientists making their best effort to value principles of reasoning that reliably link their beliefs to reality, through valid chains of evidence and argument. The answer to the question, "What should I believe, and why should I believe it?" is generally a scientific one: Believe a proposition because it is well supported by theory and evidence; believe it because it has been experimentally verified; believe it because a generation of smart people have tried their best to falsify it and failed; believe it because it is true (or seems so). This is a norm of cognition as well as the epistemic core of any scientific mission statement.

But what about meaning and morality? Here we appear to move from questions of truth—which have long been in the domain of science if they are to be found anywhere—to questions of goodness. How should we live? Is it wrong to lie? If so, why and in what sense? Which personal habits, uses of attention, modes of discourse, social institutions, economic systems, governments, etc. are most conducive to human well-being? It is widely imagined that science cannot even pose, much less answer, questions of this sort.

Jonathan Haidt appears to exult in this pessimism. He doubts that anyone can justifiably make strong, realistic claims about right and wrong, or good and evil, because he has observed that human beings tend to make moral judgments on the basis of emotion, justify these judgments with post hoc reasoning, and stick to their guns even when their post hoc reasoning demonstrably fails. As he says in one of his earlier papers, when asked to justify their emotional reactions to certain moral (and pseudo-moral) dilemmas, people are often "morally dumbfounded." He reports that subjects often "stutter, laugh, and express surprise at their inability to find supporting reasons, yet they would not change their initial judgments…" But couldn't the same be said of people's failures to solve logical puzzles? I think it would be fair to say that the Monty Hall problem leaves many of its victims "logically dumbfounded." Which is to say that even when a person gets the gist of why he should switch doors, he often cannot shake his initial intuition that each door represents a 50 percent chance of success. This reliable failure of human reasoning is just that—a failure of reasoning. It does not suggest that there isn't a single correct answer to the Monty Hall problem. While it might seem the height of arrogance to say it, the people who actually understand the Monty Hall problem really do hold the "logical high ground."

As a counterpoint to the prevailing liberal opinion that morality is a system of"prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other," Haidt asks us to ponder mysteries of the following sort: "But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom?" Interesting question. Are these the same ancient texts that view slavery as morally unproblematic? It would seem so. Perhaps slavery has no moral implications after all—could Abolition have been just another instance of liberal bias?—otherwise, surely these ancient texts would have something of substance to say about it. Or, following Haidt's initial logic, why not ask, "if physics is just a system of laws which explains the structure of the universe in terms of mass and energy, why do so many ancient texts devote so much space to immaterial influences and miraculous acts of God?" Why indeed.

Haidt is, of course, right to worry that liberals may not always "hold the moral high ground." In a recent study of moral reasoning, subjects were asked to judge whether it was morally correct to sacrifice the life of one person to save one hundred, while being given subtle clues as to the races of the people involved. Conservatives proved less biased by race than liberals and, therefore, more even-handed. It turns out that liberals were very eager to sacrifice a white person to save one hundred non-whites, but not the other way around, all the while maintaining that considerations of race had not entered into their thinking. Observations of this sort are useful in revealing the biasing effect of ideology—even the ideology of fairness.

Haidt often writes, however, as if there were no such thing as moral high ground. At the very least, he seems to believe that science will never be able to judge higher from lower. He admonishes us to get it into our thick heads that many of our neighbors "honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats." Yes, and many of them honestly prefer the Republican vision of cosmology, wherein it is still permissible to believe that the big bang occurred less than ten thousand years ago. These same people tend to prefer Republican doubts about biological evolution and climate change. There are names for this type of "preference," one of the more polite being "ignorance." What scientific purpose is served by avoiding this word at all costs?

Haidt appears to consider it an intellectual virtue to adopt, uncritically, the moral categories of his subjects. But where is it written that everything that people do or decide in the name of "morality" deserves to be considered part its subject matter? A majority of Americans believe that the Bible provides an accurate account of the ancient world (as well as accurate prophecies of the future). Many millions of Americans also believe that a principal cause of cancer is "repressed anger." Happily, we do not allow these opinions to anchor us when it comes time to have serious discussions about history and oncology.

Much of humanity is clearly wrong about morality—just as much of humanity is wrong about physics, biology, history, and everything else worth understanding. If, as I believe, morality is a system of thinking about (and maximizing) the well being of conscious creatures like ourselves, many people's moral concerns are frankly immoral.

Does forcing women and girls to wear burqas make a positive contribution to human well-being? Does it make happier boys and girls? More compassionate men? More confident and contented women? Does it make for better relationships between men and women, between boys and their mothers, or between girls and their fathers? I would bet my life that the answer to each of these questions is "no." So, I think, would many scientists. And yet, most scientists have been trained to think that such judgments are mere expressions of cultural bias. Very few of us seem willing to admit that simple, moral truths increasingly fall within the purview of our scientific worldview. I am confident that this period of reticence will soon come to an end.

Unless human well-being is perfectly random, or equally compatible with any events in the world or state of the brain, there will be scientific truths to be known about it. These truths will, inevitably, force us to draw clear distinctions between ways of thinking and living, judging some to better or worse, more or less true to the facts, and more or less moral.

Of course, questions of human well-being run deeper than any explicit code of morality. Morality—in terms of consciously held precepts, social-contracts, notions of justice, etc.—is a relatively recent invention. Such conventions require, at a minimum, language and a willingness to cooperate with strangers, and this takes us a stride or two beyond the Hobbesian "state of nature." But prior to emergence of explicit notions of right and wrong, the concept of well-being still applies. Whatever behaviors served to mitigate the internecine misery of our ancestors would fall within the scope of this analysis. To simplify matters enormously: (1) genetic changes in the brain gave rise to social emotions, moral intuitions, and language… (2) which produced increasingly complex cooperative behavior, the keeping of promises, concern about one's reputation, etc… (3) which became the basis for cultural norms, laws, and social institutions whose purpose has been to render this growing system of cooperation durable in the face of countervailing forces.

Some version of this progression has occurred in our case, and each step represents an undeniable enhancement of our personal and collective well-being. Of course, catastrophic regressions are always possible. We could, either by design or negligence, employ the hard-won fruits of civilization, and the emotional and social leverage of millennia of biological and cultural evolution, to immiserate ourselves more fully than unaided Nature ever could. Imagine a global North Korea, where the better part of a starving humanity serves as slaves to a lunatic with bouffant hair: this might, in fact, be worse than a world filled merely with warring Australopithecines. What would "worse" mean in this context? Just what our (liberal?) intuitions suggest: more painful, less fulfilling, more conducive to fear and despair, etc. While it will never be feasible to compare such counterfactual states of the world, that does not mean that there are no experiential facts of the matter to be compared.

Haidt is, of course, right to notice that emotions have primacy in many respects—and the way in which feeling drives judgment is surely worthy of study. It does not follow, however, that there are no right and wrong answers to questions of morality. Just as people are often less than rational when claiming to be rational, they are often less than moral when claiming to be moral. We know from many lines of converging research that our feeling of reasoning objectively, in concordance with compelling evidence, is often an illusion. This is especially obvious in split-brain research, when the left hemisphere's "interpreter" finds itself sequestered, and can be enticed to simply confabulate by way of accounting for right-hemisphere behavior. This does not mean, however, that dispassionate reasoning, scrupulous attention to evidence, and awareness of the ever-present possibility of self-deception are not cognitive skills that human beings can acquire. And there is no reason to expect that all cultures and sub-cultures value these skills equally.

If there are objective truths about human well-being—if kindness, for instance, is generally more conducive to happiness than cruelty is—then there seems little doubt that science will one day be able to make strong and precise claims about which of our behaviors and uses of attention are morally good, which are neutral, and which are bad. At time when only 28 percent of Americans will admit the truth of evolution, while 58 percent imagine that a belief in God is necessary for morality, it is truism to say that our culture is not prepared to think critically about the changes to come.

Why do People Vote at All?

As a political scientist, I see the question "Why do people vote Republican?" and I think immediately of its premise. Haidt and other commenters have focused on the choice between a Republican and a Democrat. But this choice misses half the question. When someone votes Republican, the first question they must ask themselves is "Should I vote at all?" People who vote Republican have chosen not to vote Democratic, but they have also chosen not to abstain. And it is that choice to vote or not that says something deep about political competition and group behavior.

The choice to vote or not hinges in part on our perception of the effectiveness of the activity. Will voting matter? To know this, we need to imagine what happens in a world where we vote and what happens in a world where we do not, and then compare those two worlds. Thinking about the world this way may seem like an impossible task because there are so many possible outcomes. Obama could beat McCain by 3 million votes. Or he could beat him by 2,999,999 or he could lose to McCain by 1,345,267. Or… there are literally millions of possible outcomes.

Of course, there is actually only one circumstance in which an individual vote matters. And that is when we expect an exact tie. To see why this is true, ask yourself what would you do if you could look into a crystal ball and see that Obama would win the election by 3 million votes. What effect would your vote have on the outcome? Absolutely none. You could either change the margin to 2,999,999 or to 3,000,001, but either way Obama still wins. Notice that the same reasoning is true even for very close elections. No doubt some citizens of Florida felt regret about not voting in 2000 when they learned that George W. Bush had won the state (and therefore the whole election) by 537 votes. But even here, the best a single voter could do would be to change the margin to 536 or to 538, neither of which would have changed the outcome.

So what is the probability of an exact tie? One way of looking at this is to assume that any outcome is equally possible. Suppose 100 million people vote for Obama or McCain. McCain could win 100 million to 0. Or he could win 99,999,999 to 1. Or he could win 99,999,998 to 2…. You get the point. Counting all these up, there are 100 million different outcomes, and only one of these is an exact tie. So the probability of an exact tie for a given number of voters is just one divided by the number of voters. Since roughly 100 million people vote in US Presidential elections, that would mean that the probability was about 1 in 100 million. Just to give a sense of scale, the odds of being struck by lightning in the United States are about one in a million, which would make getting struck by lightning 100 times more likely than one person determining the outcome of an election because of an exact tie in the popular vote!

The exact probability is obviously much more complicated than this, since it is unlikely that Obama or McCain would win every single vote. Close elections are probably more likely than landslides. So instead of theorizing about the probability of a tie, we could study lots and lots of real elections to see how often it happens. In one survey of 16,577 U.S. elections for the House and Senate over the last hundred years, not one of them yielded a tie. The closest was an election in 1910 for the Representative for New York's 36th congressional district, when the Democratic candidate won by a single vote, 20,685 to 20,684. However, a subsequent recount in that election found a mathematical error that greatly increased the margin, so there are actually no examples of winning by a single vote, either.

Thus, a rational analysis of voting suggests that the core act of modern democratic government makes absolutely no sense. Economists would literally call voting "irrational" because it violates the preferences of the people who engage in it. For some reason, people decide to vote even though they would not buy a lottery ticket with identical odds, cost, and payoff. Economists typically think that people who vote are making a mistake, or there are other benefits to voting that we have not considered. For example, early scholars noted that people might vote in order to fulfill a sense of civic duty or to preserve the right to vote. Later scholars have also pointed out that people might vote because they enjoy expressing themselves in the same way they enjoy expressing themselves when they cheer for their favorite team at a ballgame. But these explanations beg the question, "Why?" It is a tautology to say that people vote because they feel like voting.

Social Networks and Voting Cascades

In my collaboration with Nicholas Christakis, we have thought about the effect of social networks on voting and several other important phenomena like obesity, smoking, and even happiness. And as it turns out, the rational analysis of voting overlooks important psychological features of human social networks that we have known about for some time. The earliest research on the social spread of political behavior came in the classic voting studies of Paul Lazarsfeld and Bernard Berelson that took place in the 1940s in the towns of Erie, Pennsylvania, and Elmira, New York. These giants in social science helped invent the survey method and bullied their colleagues into starting the long march towards making the study of politics a science. Their classic election studies eventually became the American National Election Studies that are still conducted every two years.

Although Lazarsfeld and Berelson did not collect information about the whole network that interconnected all their subjects, they did ask people to discuss who influenced them and how, and this gave us the very first picture of how important networks can be. One of the key findings from these studies was that the media does not reach the masses directly. Instead, a group of "opinion leaders"—a coinage they may have invented—usually acts as intermediary, filtering and interpreting the media for their friends and family who pay less attention to politics. In other words, the media appeared to work by getting its message to those who are most central in the social network. Politicians themselves follow a similar strategy, targeting frequent voters who have already made up their minds, rather than trying to persuade those at the periphery of the network who may or may not participate. It's efficient to do this, of course, but it is also, as we will see, unavoidable, and this kind of process arises from the fundamental nature of social networks.

Later research by Robert Huckfeldt and John Sprague in the 1970s and 1980s would innovate on these earlier designs. Their voting studies in South Bend, Indiana, Indianapolis, Indiana, and St. Louis, Missouri, would use a "snowball" design, asking people to talk about friends who influenced them and to give the researchers their friends' contact information so they could be in the study, too. Huckfeldt and Sprague found that when it comes to politics, birds of a feather flock together. Democrats tend to be friends with other Democrats and Republicans tend to be friends with other Republicans. In fact, about 2 out of every 3 friends had the same ideology as the respondent. We can even see this on a large scale in recent U.S. elections by looking at the increase in polarization between "Red States" that support the Republicans and "Blue States" that support the Democrats. In other words, people appear to be clustered together politically, acting and believing in concord with the people who surround them.

Nicholas Christakis and I wondered whether this insight could shed light on why people vote at all. We also wondered whether strong similarity in people's local networks could arise from a spread of political behaviors and ideas. Did people choose to associate with those who resembled them or did they induce a resemblance by influencing their peers? Robert Huckfeldt and John Sprague showed us the person-to-person effect, but now we wanted to know how and whether it might spread to other people in the network. Could one vote really spur thousands of others to the polls in a "voting cascade"?

In order to find out just how far we could push the idea that voting might spread from person to person to person, we decided to create a computer model to answer the question, "If I vote, how many other people are likely to vote as well?" The results were very surprising. In some cases one person's vote spread like wildfire, setting off a cascade of up to 100 other people voting. In our world of artificial voters we saw some people tell their friends to vote, who then told their friends to vote, and so on, and so on and so on. Moreover, since liberals and conservatives tend to associate more with like-minded individuals, these cascades would yield sizable increases in the number of people voting the way their friends wanted them to. About 60% of the time, one person's vote turned into two or more votes for their favorite candidate. One interesting implication here is that the more polarized we become by befriending only people with similar ideologies, the greater incentive we have to participate in politics. This certainly creates a dilemma for people who think polarization is bad and voter turnout is good!

We were also able to use this experiment to see what factors increase the size of a voter cascade. Not surprisingly, these cascades got bigger when we increased the number of friends each person has, the number of interactions they have with each other, and the probability that that one will influence the other. But we also discovered a complex relationship between the cascades and the degree to which people were socially clustered in tightly-knit groups. When we move from a low to high probability that one's acquaintances know one another, the number of paths between individuals in the group increases dramatically. This increases the number of ways a single decision to vote can be transmitted to other people in the population. However, as the group gradually gets even more clustered, people tend to cut ties to the outside world and focus only on members of their own group. This means there is a sweet spot in the amount of social interconnection that maximizes the likelihood that people will participate in politics. Thus, contrary to Robert Putnam's advice, sometimes more social interaction is not always better.

Interestingly, the number of people voting had virtually no effect on how far the cascades would spread in our computer model. Nicholas Christakis and I originally believed that the size of voter cascades would be bigger in larger populations because of the increased number of people who might be influenced by a cascade. However, instead we discovered that voter cascades are primarily local phenomena, occurring in a smaller part of the population closely connected to an individual. As it turns out, this is exactly what we have been finding in our other studies of the spread of obesity, smoking, and happiness. These phenomena can spread to our friends (1 degree of separation), our friends' friends (2 degrees), and our friends' friends' friends (3 degrees), but not much further. This "3 Degree Rule" suggests that the power of one individual to influence many is limited by the effect of competing waves of influence that emanate from everyone else in the network.

Experimental Evidence of Voting Cascades

Our computer model provided some of the first indirect evidence that voter cascades are real, but direct evidence was not far behind. In 2006, Notre Dame political scientist David Nickerson traveled to neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado and Minneapolis, Minnesota to conduct a novel experimental study of voter turnout. In this study, experimenters walked door-to-door to contact people who lived in two-person households. Each of these households was randomly assigned to receive one of two treatments. In one treatment, the experimenter encouraged the person who answered the door to vote at an upcoming election. In the other treatment, the experimenter encouraged the practice of recycling. Nickerson noted who came to the door to speak to the experimenter, and then waited until after the election to look up who voted and who did not.

Voter contact studies are very common, and it is well-established that get-out-the-vote campaigns actually work. So it was not surprising that the people in Denver and Minneapolis who answered the door and heard the plea to vote were about 10% more likely to turn out than those who heard the plea to recycle. The big surprise, however, was the behavior of the people who did not answer the door. As it turns out, the other person in the household was about 6% more likely to vote. In other words, 60% of the effect on the person who answered the door was passed on to the person who did not answer the door.

Consider for a moment how these indirect effects might flow through a whole network. Nickerson's creative study showed that a single plea to vote can change political behavior and spread from the experimenter to the person who heard the get-out-the-vote message to a person who neither heard the message nor met the experimenter. But why would it stop there? The person who didn't answer the door might pass the effect on to his or her other friends and family, as well. The effect probably won't be as strong when it gets passed along—like the game of telephone when kids whisper a message from friend to friend to friend, the get-out-the-vote message might get lost along the way as it passes from person to person to person. But suppose that the reduction of the effect is the same between every pair of people, decreasing by 60% at every step. If the first person is 10% more likely to vote and the second person is 6% more likely to vote, then the third person would be 3.6% more likely to vote, the fourth person would be 2.16% more likely to vote, and so on. That may not seem like much change, but remember that while the size of the contagious effect decreases at each step, the number of people affected increases exponentially. Thus the decision to vote appears to be an inherently social phenomenon that scholars are only recently coming to terms with.

Doing Your Civic Duty

So where do these results leave us on the question "Why do people vote?" The existence of voter cascades suggests that rational models of voting have underestimated the benefit of voting. Instead of each of us having only one vote, we effectively have several and we are therefore much more likely to have an influence on the outcome of the election.

The fact that one person can influence so many others may help to explain why some people have such strong feelings of civic duty. Establishing a norm of voting with one's acquaintances is one way to influence them to go to the polls. People who do not assert such a duty miss a chance to influence people who share similar views, and this tends to lead to worse outcomes for their favorite candidates. In large electorates, the net impact on the result might be too marginal to create a dynamic that would favor people who assert a duty to vote. However, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted almost 200 years ago, the civic duty to vote originated in much smaller political settings like town meetings where changing the participation behavior of a few people might make a big difference.

And this norm has taken such a strong hold, that many people are actually dishonest when they talk to pollsters. Typically, about 20-30% of the people who say they voted in an election actually did not. How do we know this? The ballot in America is secret, but whether or not you showed up to cast a ballot is a matter of public record, so we have very good third-party official information about who voted and who did not. The problem of over-reporting voter turnout is very well-known among political scientists and a common subject in college classrooms. One of our favorite moments in Poli Sci 101 occurs when we ask our students to raise their hands really high if they did not vote. Typically only about a quarter raise their hand, but realistically it should usually be more than half the class.

So why do people lie about this? One possibility is that they fear social sanctions. Another is that people believe that others are influenced by their political actions. Consider what happens if you tell everyone you are voting, but then you stay home instead. On average your actions will increase turnout even though you didn't vote yourself. Moreover, since most of the people who decide to vote are likely to share your beliefs, you can increase the vote margin for your favorite candidates without going to the polls. Hence, one explanation for why people vote is that they are connected and that it is rational for them to vote—as a result of this connection. In fact, one begins to wonder why anyone would ever say that they do not vote.

The New Science of Genopolitics

Christopher Dawes and I have also tackled voting from a brand new point of view. Unbeknownst to most political scientists, behavior geneticists began using twin studies in the 1970s to study variation in social attitudes, and these studies suggested that both genes and environment played a role. However, behavior geneticists did not specifically pursue the question of whether or not political attitudes were heritable, and political scientists remained largely unaware of the heritability of social attitudes until 2005. In that year, the American Political Science Review published a reanalysis of political questions on a social attitude survey of twins that suggested liberal and conservative ideology is heritable. Follow-up studies showed that genes did not play much of a role in the choice of a political party, supporting a core finding in the study of American politics that the choice to be a Democrat or a Republican is largely shaped by parental socialization. In other words, one very important reason why people vote Republican is because their parents did. However, other studies have shown that the decision to affiliate with any political party and the strength of this attachment are significantly influenced by genes.

These initial twin studies suggested political ideas are heritable, but they said little about political behavior. That changed this year when we published a new study in the American Political Science Review that examined the heritability of voter participation. We matched publicly available voter registration records to Laura Baker's twin registry in Los Angeles, analyzed self-reported turnout in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), and studied other forms of political participation. In all three cases, both genes and environment contributed significantly to variation in political participation. This suggests that at least some of the difference between someone who votes and someone who does not has to do with the genetic lottery.

More recently, Chris Dawes and I turned our attention to specific genes that might be associated with political behaviors and attitudes. In particular, we focused on genes that affect the serotonin and dopamine systems because these systems are known to exert a strong influence on socialization. In the first-ever research to link specific genes to political phenotypes, we established a direct association between voter turnout and monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) and a gene-environment interaction between turnout and the serotonin transporter (5HTT) gene among those who frequently participated in religious activities. In other research we have also found an association between voter turnout and a dopamine receptor (DRD2) gene that is mediated by a significant association between that gene and the tendency to affiliate with a political party. Thus we are beginning to find specific genes that can help us to predict who will vote and who won't.

In our most recent work with Jaime Settle, Peter Hatemi, and Nicholas Christakis, we have brought together social networks and genopolitics. Political liberalism has been associated with the psychological trait of ‘openness' and the gene DRD4 has been associated with novelty-seeking behavior. One might think that these two associations would lead to a direct association between DRD4 and political liberalism, but this misses the important point that novelty-seekers sometimes exhibit anti-social tendencies. They might, for example, be quite interested in climbing a mountain alone. We thus hypothesized that individuals with a genetic predisposition towards seeking out new experiences would tend to be more liberal, but only if they are embedded in a social context that provides them with multiple points of view. Using data from Add Health, we tested this hypothesis and found that the number of friendships a person has in adolescence is significantly associated with liberal political ideology among those with novelty-seeking variant of DRD4. Among those without the gene variant there is no association. This is the first study ever to elaborate a specific gene-environment interaction that contributes to ideological self-identification, and it highlights the importance of incorporating both nature and nurture into the study of politics.

Whether or not this association or any of the others we find will have an impact on the decision to vote for a Republican is an open question. But one thing is clear. We can no longer hide our head in the sands when people whisper that genes and biology might play a role. And we can no longer ignore the important influence of social network structure on how attitudes and behaviors might spread from person to person to person. In the next few years we will see an increasing number of studies that report neurological and physiological differences between members of these two political groups and how they affect the transmission of political information and ideas.

There is obviously still plenty of room to make and manipulate individual choices—genes and networks are not destiny. However, these studies suggest that the divide between voters and abstainers and between left and right is a long-lasting and natural part of our heritage as humans, and therefore political choices are not always amenable to rational analysis or moral suasion. We are not blank slates, and any effort to understand the moral basis for a political action like voting for a Republican must acknowledge that our evolutionary history has endowed us with genetic and social variation that constrains (but does not extinguish) our capacity for self-control. We do not have vicious debates about why autumn winds cause some leaves to turn red and others blue. So why get so worked up about a similar November occurrence, cleaving our states into red and blue?

Two cheers for Jonathan Haidt's essay. At long last a liberal academic social scientist has recognized (and had the courage to put into print) the inherent bias built into the study of political behavior—that because Democrats are so indisputably right and Republicans so unquestionably wrong, conservatism must be a mental disease, a flaw in the brain, a personality disorder that leads to cognitive malfunctioning. Thus, Haidt is mostly right when he asks us to move beyond such "diagnoses" and remember "the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats 'just don't get it,' this is the 'it' to which they refer."

I allocate two (instead of three) cheers for Haidt's commentary because I think he does not go far enough. The liberal bias in academia is so entrenched that it becomes the political water through which the liberal fish swim—they don't even notice it. Even the question "What makes people vote Republican?" hints at something amiss in the mind of the conservative, along the lines of "Why do people believe weird things?" As Haidt notes, the standard liberal line is that people vote Republican because they are "cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death." A typical example of this characterization can be found in a famous 2003 paper published in the prestigious journal Psychological Bulletin by the New York University social psychologist John Jost and his colleagues, entitled "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," in which they argue that conservatives suffer from "uncertainty avoidance," "need for order, structure, closure," and "dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity," all of which leads to "resistance to change" and "endorsement of inequality."

It is not the data of these scientists that I am challenging so much as it is the characterizations on which the data were collected. We could just as easily characterize Democrats and liberals as suffering from a host of equally malevolent mental states: a lack of moral compass that leads to an inability to make clear ethical choices, an inordinate lack of certainty about social issues, a pathological fear of clarity that leads to indecisiveness, a naïve belief that all people are equally talented, and a blind adherence in the teeth of contradictory evidence that culture and environment determine one's lot in society and therefore it is up to the government to remedy all social injustices. As all conservatives know, liberals are a bunch of sandle-wearing, tree-hugging, whale-saving, hybrid-driving, trash-recycling, peaceniks, flip-floppers and bed-wetters.

This is a crass, unfair, and inaccurate characterization, of course, and that's my point. Once you set up the adjectives in the form of operationally defined personality traits and cognitive styles, it's easy to collect the data to support them. The flaw is in the characterization process itself. Two recent examples can be found in the 2008 book The Political Mind by Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff and the 2007 book The Political Brain by Emory University psychologist Drew Westen. The tropes are familiar: liberals are generous to a fault ("bleeding hearts"), rational, intelligent, optimistic, and appeal to voters' reason through cogent arguments; conservatives are stingy ("heartless"), dour, and dim-witted authoritarians who appeal to voters' emotions through threat and fear-mongering. But conservatives win most elections because of their Machiavellian manipulation of voters' emotional brains.

None of this is true. Although Republicans defeated Democrats 25 to 20 in the 45 Presidential elections from 1828 to 2004, in the Senate Democrats outscored Republicans 3395 to 3323 in contesting 6832 seats from 1855 to 2006, and in the House Democrats trounced Republicans 15,363 to 12,994 in the 27,906 seats contested from 1855-2006.

Further, according to the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Surveys, 1972-2004, 44 percent of people who reported being "conservative" or "very conservative" said they were "very happy" versus only 25 percent of people who reported being "liberal" or "very liberal." A 2007 Gallup poll found that 58 percent of Republicans versus only 38 percent of Democrats said that their mental heath is "excellent." One reason may be that conservatives are so much more generous than liberals, giving 30 percent more money (even when controlled for income), donating more blood, and logging more volunteer hours. And it isn't because conservatives have more expendable income. The working poor give a substantially higher percentage of their incomes to charity than any other income group, and three times more than those on public assistance of comparable income—poverty is not a barrier to charity, but welfare is. One explanation for these findings is that conservatives believe charity should be private (through religion) whereas liberals believe charity should be public (through government).

Why are academic social scientists so wrong about conservatives? It is, I believe, because almost all of them are liberals! A 2005 study by the George Mason University economist Daniel Klein, using voter registrations, found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans among the faculty by a staggering ratio of 10 to 1 at the University of California, Berkeley and by 7.6 to 1 at Stanford University. In the humanities and social sciences the ratio was 16 to 1 at both campuses (30 to 1 among assistant and associate professors). In some departments, such as anthropology and journalism, there wasn't a single Republican to be found. The ratio for all departments in all colleges and universities throughout the U.S., says Klein, is 8 to 1 Democrats over Republicans. Smith College political scientist Stanley Rothman and his colleagues found a similar bias in a 2005 national study: only 15 percent professors describe themselves as conservative, compared to 72 percent who said they were liberal (80 percent in humanities and social sciences).

Why do people vote Republican? Because they believe their lives—and the lives of all Americans—will be better for it. And as often as not they are right.