The Republican Brain by is Mooney Page B

they’re unsophisticated they can just reject it out of hand,” says Stony Brook’s Milton Lodge. “But if they’re sophisticated, they can go one step further and start coming up with counterarguments.” These counterarguments, because they are emotionally charged and become stored in memory and the brain, literally become part of us. They thus allow a person with more sophistication to convince him- or herself even more strongly about the correctness of an initial conviction.
    It was this “smart idiots” effect, and especially its recurrent appearance on the political right, that changed how I think about our disputes over science and the facts, and eventually set in motion the writing of this book. I even remember when I first became aware of it. It was thanks to a 2008 Pew report documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the reality of global warming—a divide that, maddeningly for scientists, has shown a tendency to widen even as the basic facts about global warming have become more firmly established.
    Those facts are these: Humans, since the industrial revolution, have been burning more and more fossil fuels to power their societies, and this has led to a steady accumulation of greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere. At this point, very simple physics takes over, and you are pretty much doomed, by what scientists refer to as the “radiative” properties of carbon dioxide molecules (which trap infrared heat radiation that would otherwise escape to space), to have a warming planet. Since about 1995, scientists have not only confirmed that this warming is taking place, but have also grown confident that it has, like the gun in a murder mystery, our fingerprint on it. Natural fluctuations, although they exist, can’t explain what we’re seeing. The only reasonable verdict is that humans did it, in the atmosphere, with their cars and smokestacks.
    The Pew data, however, showed that humans aren’t as predictable as carbon dioxide molecules. Despite a growing scientific consensus about global warming, as of 2008 Democrats and Republicans had, like a couple in a divorce, cleaved over the facts stated above, so that only 29 percent of Republicans accepted the core reality about our planet (centrally, that humans are causing global warming), compared with 58 percent of Democrats. (The divide is, if anything, even bigger nowadays.)
    But that’s not all. Buried in the Pew report was a little chart showing the relationship between one’s political party affiliation, one’s acceptance that humans are causing global warming, and one’s level of education. And here’s the mind-blowing surprise: For Republicans, having a college degree didn’t make one any more open to what scientists have to say. On the contrary, better educated Republicans were more skeptical of modern climate science than their less educated brethren. Only 19 percent of college-educated Republicans agreed that the planet is warming due to human actions, versus 31 percent of non-college-educated Republicans.
    For Democrats and Independents, precisely the opposite was the case. More education correlated with being more accepting of climate science—among Democrats, dramatically so. The difference in acceptance between more and less educated Democrats was 23 percentage points.
    This finding recurs, in a variety of incarnations, throughout the rapidly growing social science literature on the resistance to climate science. Again and again, Republicans or conservatives who know more about the issue, or are more educated, are shown to be more in denial, and often more sure of themselves too—and are confident they don’t need any more information on the issue.
    The same “smart idiots” effect also occurs on nonscientific but factually contested issues, like the claim that President Obama is a Muslim. Belief in this falsehood