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August 28, 2022 - November 1, 2025
Conservatives distrust the idealism of progressives, criticizing it as an impossible effort to build a perfect utopia; an effort that is more likely to lead to totalitarianism in which the elite dominate all aspects of public and private life.
The Center for Responsive Politics, which publishes the website Opensecrets.org, reported that during this same election cycle, people who worked for the seven major media corporations donated six times as much to Democrats as they did to Republicans.
A New York Times opinion piece noted that only 2 percent of English professors were Republicans, while 18 percent of social scientists identified themselves as Marxist.
Mental flexibility—the ability to change one’s behavior in response to changing circumstances—is also an ingredient in how we measure intelligence.
When circumstances change, liberals do a better job of rapidly activating neural circuits and adjusting their responses to meet the new challenge.
Intelligence has been defined in many different ways. Most experts agree that an IQ test is not a measure of general intelligence.
Another way of saying it is that an IQ test measures a person’s ability to build imaginary models based on past experiences, and then use those models to predict what will happen in the future. Control dopamine plays a large role.
However, there are other ways to define intelligence, such as the ability to make good day-to-day decisions.
Being in touch with our emotions and processing emotional information skillfully are crucial for almost every decision we make. Intellectual prowess is not enough.
A high score on an IQ test may be a good predictor of academic success, but for a happy life, emotional sophistication may be more important.
The problem is that when we talk about the averages of a large group, there are always exceptions, sometimes lots of exceptions. Many of us can think of heavy smokers who lived well into their nineties. Similarly, not everyone with a highly dopaminergic gene is creative.
Many things influence human behaviors: how dozens of different genes interact with one another, what kind of family you grew up in, and whether you were encouraged to be creative at a young age, to name a few. Having one specific gene usually has only a small effect.
There’s a good chance that the difficulty the conservatives faced stemmed from differences in their DNA. In fact, political attitudes in general seem to be influenced by genetics. In addition to the American Journal of Political Science article just discussed, other studies support a link between a genetic disposition to a dopaminergic personality and a liberal ideology. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego focused on a gene that codes for one of the dopamine receptors called D4. Like most genes, the D4 gene has a number of variants. Slight variations in genes are called
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The researchers found a connection between the 7R allele and adherence to liberal ideology, but only if a person grew up around people with a variety of political opinions. There had to be both a genetic piece and a social piece for the connection to take place.
While conservatives on average may lack some of the virtuoso talents of the dopaminergic left, they are more likely to enjoy the advantages of a strong H&N system. These include empathy and altruism—particularly in the form of charitable giving—and the ability to establish long-term, monogamous relationships.
Liberals advocate for laws that provide assistance to the poor. Compared to charitable giving, legislation is a more hands-off approach to the problem of poverty. This reflects our often-observed difference in focus: dopaminergic people are more interested in action at a distance and planning, while people with high H&N levels tend to focus on things close at hand.
The here-and-now emotional impact of impersonal government assistance is different from a personal connection with a church or charity. Charity is more flexible than law, so it’s better able to focus on the unique needs of real individuals as opposed to abstractly defined groups. People who work for private charities typically come in close contact with the people they help, often actual physical contact. This intimate relationship allows them to get to know the people they help,
Many charities stress personal responsibility and good character as the most effective combatants of poverty. This approach will not work for everyone, but for some it will be more helpful than receiving government entitlements.
Altruism has been associated with greater well-being, health, and longevity.
the benefits of altruism may derive from “deeper and more positive social integration, distraction from personal problems and the anxiety of self-preoccupation, enhanced meaning and purpose in life,
The results showed that Americans who strongly oppose redistribution by government to address this problem gave 10 times more to charity than those who strongly support government action: $1,627 annually versus $140. Similarly, compared to people who want more welfare spending, those who believe that the government spends too much money on welfare are more likely to give directions to someone on the street, return extra change to a cashier, and give food or money to a homeless person.
Dopaminergic people want the poor to receive more help, while H&N people want to provide personal help on a one-to-one basis.
When an imagined object of desire turns into a real person, when hope is replaced with possession, the role of dopamine comes to an end. The thrill is gone, and orgasm is anticlimactic.
In a similar vein, people who were married were happier than those who were single, and people who went to church were happier than those who did not.
Red state couples are pressured to marry sooner, and they are less likely to live together or have sex prior to marriage. Consequently, the average red state couple has less opportunity to get to know each other before getting married, which may destabilize their marriage.
the quality of data is always imperfect, and the information gathered from surveys given to thousands of people will have more errors in it than data from closely supervised clinical trials. Surveys also depend on the truthfulness of the respondents.
The big picture might look something like this: On average, liberals are more likely to be forward thinking, cerebral, inconstant, creative, intelligent, and dissatisfied. Conservatives, by contrast, are more likely to be comfortable with emotions, reliable, stable, conventional, less intellectual, and happy.
Rational decisions are fragile things, always open to revision as new evidence comes along. Irrationality is more enduring, and both desire dopamine and the H&N pathways can be taken advantage of to guide people toward making irrational decisions. The most effective tools are fear, desire, and sympathy.
Fear speaks to our most primitive concerns: Can I stay alive? Will my children be safe? Will I be able to keep my job so I’ll have money for food and rent? Stirring up fear is an indispensable part of almost any political campaign. Encouraging Americans to hate one another is an unfortunate side effect.
He observed that television news had by then acquired many of the characteristics of entertainment. He quoted television newscaster Robert MacNeil: “The idea, he writes, ‘is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement.
The healthcare story is more pertinent to our lives, but the work of processing that story is no match for the easy pleasure of those dopamine hits.
It has been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes. Or if the value of its news is determined by the number of laughs it provides.”
In addition to tapping into primitive needs, another reason fear works so well is loss aversion, meaning that the pain of loss is stronger than the pleasure of gain.
Fear, like desire, is primarily a future concept—dopamine’s realm. But the H&N system gives a boost to the pain of loss in the form of amygdala activation, tipping our judgment when we have to make decisions about the best way to manage risk.
Liberals and conservatives both have their reasons for focusing on threats versus benefits, reasons they believe are rational conclusions resulting from thoughtful weighing of evidence. That’s probably not true. It’s more likely that there is a fundamental difference in the way their brains are wired.
Arousal is sometimes used to describe sexual excitement, but more broadly it’s a measure of how engaged a person is with what’s going on around him. When a person is interested and engaged, his heart beats a little faster, his blood pressure goes up a bit, and small amounts of perspiration are released from his sweat glands. Doctors call this a sympathetic response.
Liberals had a stronger response to the positive photos, conservatives to the negative ones. Because the researchers were measuring a biological reaction—perspiration—the response couldn’t have been intentionally controlled by the participants. Something more fundamental than rational choice was being measured.
Conservatives are more likely than liberals to focus on threat. At the same time, when people of either inclination feel threatened, they become more conservative. It’s well known that terrorist attacks boost the popularity of conservative candidates. But even small threats—threats so small we’re not even consciously aware of them—nudge people to the right.
The researchers concluded that the serotonin-boosting drug increased what they called harm aversion. Increasing serotonin shifts moral judgment away from an abstract goal (enforcing fairness) toward an avoidance of carrying out actions that might harm someone (depriving the proposer of her share of the money).
The researchers described this behavior as prosocial at the individual level. Prosocial is a term that means willingness to help other people. Rejecting unfair offers is called prosocial at the group level. Punishing people who make unfair offers promotes fairness that benefits the larger community, which is more consistent with a dopaminergic approach.
Liberals see individuals as intertwined, and some talk about abolishing immigration laws completely. But what happens when the immigrants actually show up—when they change from an idea to a reality, from distant and abstract to right next door?
Democratic states have more housing restrictions that deter in-migration of lower-income people. These restrictions include limiting the number of families allowed to live in a single home and zoning restrictions that reduce the supply of affordable housing.
Barriers that shut out impoverished immigrants are reminiscent of Einstein’s statement, “My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings.”
Just as researchers were able to increase conservatism with the tiny nudge of putting a hand sanitizer nearby, Dr. Napier was able to make people more liberal with a simple imagination exercise. She told conservatives to imagine they had superpowers that made it impossible for them to be injured. Subsequent testing of political ideology found that they became more liberal.
Abstract thinking is one of the primary functions of the dopamine system. Abstract thinking allows us to go beyond sensory observation of events to construct a model that explains why the events are occurring.
The researchers began by asking the participants to think about maintaining good physical health. Then half were asked to describe how they would do it (concrete) and the other half were asked to describe why it’s important (abstract). Describing how had no effect on attitudes, but describing why raised the conservative participants’ feelings of liking and warmth for the unfamiliar groups to the point where there was no significant difference between their attitudes and the attitudes of liberals.
H&N conservatives may be hostile to the idea of immigration, but they have an innate ability to connect on an empathic basis to actual immigrants.
Politics is about change and change is driven by dopamine. Whenever tragedy strikes, the cry goes up, Do something!
Some people in Washington call themselves liberal and others call themselves conservative, but pretty much everyone involved in politics is dopaminergic. Otherwise they couldn’t get elected. Political campaigns require intense motivation.
Growth may never stop. Dopamine’s mandate is more. Change—representing either progress or loss of tradition, depending on one’s point of view—is inevitable. Only H&N circuits can bring about feelings of satisfaction, feelings that the end has been reached and it’s time to stop. Endorphins, endocannabinoids, and other H&N neurotransmitters tell us that our work is done, and now it’s time to enjoy the fruits of our labor. But dopamine suppresses these chemicals. Dopamine never rests. The game of politics is played 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and stopping to take a breath or saying the
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