The intuitions that divide us

Everyone enjoys being right about subjects they care about. But in order to be right, one's beliefs must conform to the state of things in the world. And being right comes with a cost. Especially in complex domains such as the economy and politics, being right requires time and resources spent on acquiring domain-specific expertise – a luxury which most people simply do not have.

Even if we somehow manage to acquire expert knowledge, being right may not bring about sufficient benefits if we socialise in an environment where being right is not sufficiently valued. In political environments dominated by populism and conspiracy theories, there are high costs and low payoffs for being right.

Fortunately, shortcuts – such as convincing others that we are right without necessarily being right – help us avoid this problem. Convincing others is very valuable in terms of biological fitness and, it turns out, in political success as well. Indeed, recent insights from cognitive science on the human capacity to reason propose that, rather than evolving to enable us to be right, our minds seem to have evolved to enable us to convince others that we are.

My work suggests that populist politicians are expert convincers. Populist politicians on both sides of the ideological divide propose intuitively appealing yet epistemically unwarranted solutions that end up doing more harm than good. 

They claim to speak the minds of many voters, which is arguably true since they seem to be able to reproduce the content of their voters' intuitions. My research deals with the question of how people think about politics by using their intuitions. Here, I'll set out some of my findings that show how specific intuitions can lead to populist support.

Intuitions and zero-sum thinking

Intuitions are automatic brain computations that pop up in our minds when we reason about the world. Their role is to extract useful information from the environment and to motivate adaptive behaviour. Intuitions guide our behaviour in all domains of life and determine what beliefs we agree with and whom we may vote for. But our intuitions can be mistaken and can lead to false beliefs about the world.

Take, for example, zero-sum beliefs about immigration. Zero-sum beliefs about immigration essentially state that any gains made by migrants in terms of resources such as jobs, equal proportional losses in the same resources for locals already living there. Zero-sum beliefs are successful because they ring true to our intuitions, but they are mostly wrong, especially in today's economies. 

If we were to take the cumbersome alternative of carefully considering all available evidence on the fiscal impact of migrants on the labour market, we would probably arrive at totally different conclusions, since most economists agree that migrants do not pose a threat to local workers.

However, there are two reasons why we prefer shortcuts to elaborate reflection. 

First, any effortful reflection is cognitively taxing, and evolution has geared organisms toward prioritising immediate fitness payoffs. It was adaptive for organisms to take shortcuts because generally speaking, the more resource-effective an organism is, the better it is at playing the evolutionary game of survival and reproduction. 

Second, our intuitions are set to err on the side of caution because this allows organisms to better avoid potentially lethal threats. That is why populists can baselessly claim that the more welfare benefits we allocate to migrants, the less benefits remain available to locals already living there. Again, a zero-sum belief that makes sense to our intuitions.

Such zero-sum beliefs about immigration are attractive to our intuitions because our intuitions mirror the ancient environment of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In those evolutionarily ancestral times, the quantity of resources available at any given time would have been more or less stable and non-increasing, and our ancestors wouldn't have survived if other tribes would have monopolised their resources. 

As the descendants of our ancestor hunter-gatherer survivors, we have inherited the tendency to be overprotective with our resources. However, the crucial difference between our evolutionarily ancient environment and present-day environments is that we can now reproduce resources at an exponential scale due to technological innovation. 

We no longer have a zero-sum economy. In fact, we now have a positive-sum economy, especially considering the existence of international free trade zones. But since our intuitions operate under the assumption of a zero-sum environment, we tend to give credence to populist rhetoric alerting us that migrants are taking away our resources.

Whilst worries about immigration are predominantly associated with the political right, the left also holds zero-sum beliefs that mirror an adaptively safe logic. These beliefs can lead to unfounded conclusions when applied to contemporary economic environments. For example, a significant concern for left populists is the unprecedented high levels of economic inequality. 

This is often framed as a zero-sum belief, suggesting that the exponential increase in wealth for a very small percentage of billionaires automatically results in a decrease in wealth for the rest of the population. In reality, it is possible to achieve positive economic outcomes where there is unprecedented inequality alongside increasing living standards across the board.

However, when our intuitions are mirrored in the discourse of politicians it makes us think we're on the right track, saving us the time and effort of acquiring political and financial expertise. In my work I found that individuals who view migrants in terms of zero-sum competition for resources have voted for Brexit. 

However, the extent to which we allow our intuitions to guide our preferences is related to our tendency to think either more intuitively or more reflectively in general. For instance, participants who were more analytical were less likely to view immigration in zero-sum terms and were more likely to have voted Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum. Conversely, it is also likely that individuals who are more intuitive on the left will harbour left-wing populist preferences.

Folk beliefs in politics

Resource-protection intuitions are not the only type of intuitions explored in my work. Other intuitions that I have found to affect political preferences come from psychological essentialism, promiscuous teleology, and hyperactive agency detection. Although these are ostensibly separate domains, what they have in common is that they all predict populism.

Psychological essentialism is a cognitive tendency that provides intuitions about category membership. For instance, intuitions from psychological essentialism inform our beliefs that individual predators from the same species will behave in mostly the same way (a roughly true and adaptive intuition). But intuitions of essentialism also tell us that, due to some implicitly assumed and imperceptible 'essence' of the category of ethnic groups, different individuals of the same ethnicity will behave in roughly the same way (false intuition).

Like resource-protection intuitions, essentialising intuitions were probably adaptive in our ancestral environment. However, they can also lead us astray. In my research, I have found that participants who scored higher on psychological essentialism were also more likely to rely on intuitive thinking, and to endorse unfounded beliefs about the world such as conspiracy theories. They were also more likely to exhibit populist attitudes and to have voted Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Similarly, I anticipate that essentialising intuitions also shape left-populist notions that billionaire capitalists and landlords are fundamentally different and beyond redemption. This subtle perspective is evident in the rhetoric of left-populists who vilify such groups, advocating for government restrictions on their businesses to safeguard workers and renters rather than supporting landlords and capitalists (as things are commonly perceived on the left).

Another illustration of left-leaning ideological beliefs influenced by essentialising intuitions is the opposition to genetically modified foods (GMOs). Individuals, mainly on the left, often hold the belief that the insertion of genetic material from animals into vegetables alters the DNA of the latter. 

Similar pseudoscientific notions surrounding the Covid-19 vaccine, not limited to the ideological right, are also rooted in essentialising intuitions, suggesting that vaccines deploy dangerous DNA-altering technology. I predict that such evolutionarily adaptive, but presently maladaptive intuitions also contribute to the 'bipartisan' yet unsubstantiated opposition to free trade agreements. 

This stance asserts that free trade agreements are inherently detrimental to the national economy, despite the concerted efforts of economics to persuade us otherwise.

Another set of intuitions are related to teleology. Teleology comes from the Greek telos, which roughly translates as meaning or purpose. Promiscuous teleology is a cognitive tendency that provides intuitions about meaning and purpose in our environment. As opposed to regular teleology, which provides factually correct intuitions such as 'cars exist in order to be driven' and that humans shout because they are angry, promiscuous teleology provides epistemically incorrect intuitions such as 'giraffes evolved long necks in order to reach leaves in tall trees' and that rivers exist in order to provide shelter for fish.

In my studies, participants with promiscuous teleology were more likely to believe that the 2008 economic recession and the Covid-19 pandemic were deliberately planned. I have also found that participants who scored higher on promiscuous teleology were also more likely to rely on intuitive thinking, to exhibit a conspiracy mentality, magical and superstitious thinking in politics, populist attitudes and to have voted for Brexit. 

This suggests a certain role for promiscuous teleological intuitions in the formation of political preferences and factually dubious beliefs about the world. However, based on previous research I predict that promiscuous teleology also influences typical liberal beliefs about the world such as that live or the universe are bestowed with a purpose or meaning.

In my studies, participants who scored higher on psychological essentialism and promiscuous teleology were also more likely to exhibit hyperactive agency detection intuitions. Hyperactive agency detection is yet another cognitive tendency, which provides intuitions about potential hidden agents, who are responsible for threatening outcomes. Akin to most of our intuitive systems, intuitions about hidden predators were essential for the survival of our ancestors. 

But hyperactive agency detection intuitions may also misfire and falsely signal the presence of predators that are not really there. Truly adaptive responses require considerable speed, and evolution has sacrificed epistemic accuracy in return for a speedy output. As a result of evolutionary pressures, our intuitions include the risk of frequent inaccuracies especially in situations when, for instance, environmental cues about the origin of threatening outcomes are uncertain. 

I found that individuals who relied on average more on hyperactive agency detection intuitions were also more likely to believe conspiracy theories and to entertain magical and superstitious beliefs in politics, as well as being on average more intuitive and more populist.

Likewise, participants with hyperactive agency detection were also more likely to have voted for Brexit. This is likely because pro-Brexit campaigners have made visible efforts to point to specific powerful agents both in Brussels and Westminster who allegedly conspired against ordinary Britons. 

But I predict that promiscuous teleology and hyperactive agency detection would also predict conspiracy beliefs more frequently encountered on the left, such as that the US government assassinated President John F. Kennedy, as well as ideologically diagonal beliefs, such as unfounded beliefs about powerful agents like Tech Tycoon Bill Gates or US Chief Epidemiologist Anthony Fauci, who are perceived by anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine campaigners to control the public through national lockdowns and mandatory vaccination campaigns in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Individuals who rely less on intuitions and more on analytic thinking are less likely to support populists and less likely to hold unfounded beliefs about the world. This is not to say that all intuitive voters are populist all of the time, or that all intuitive voters rely solely on unfounded beliefs about the world to form political preferences. 

This would be highly unlikely given that most of us are actually pretty intuitive most of the time. Instead, what my work suggests is a tendency for specific intuitions to lead predictably to specific unfounded beliefs, which are in turn associated with populist support. That is to say that predictably wrong intuitions can lead to predictably bad outcomes in a predictable way.

Where do we go from here?

The value of knowing the input conditions for the intuitions that inform unfounded beliefs resides in the hope that we may be able to avoid falling for unfounded beliefs in the future. For instance, knowing that resource-protection intuitions are activated by cues of perceived economic scarcity, the proximity of a designated outgroup, and, of course, populists' fear-mongering that migrants will take away our jobs, allows us to address the root cause of this widespread populist belief. 

Likewise, educating voters about the workings of the most common intuitive zero-sum beliefs can lead to a more accurate understanding of current affairs and potentially decrease the sway of populist politicians, who propose anti-immigrant or anti-landlord policies. Dissecting the workings of essentialising intuitions allows us to educate those audiences, who regardless of their ideological leaning wish to avoid being wrong.

In the end, the way we form political preferences is affected by our intuitions, and the more intuitions we uncover in our study of politics, the more accurately we can address those intuitions that divide us. The more we succeed in correcting our intuitions, the less sway populists will have over us in the future.

Bogdan Ianosev, PhD, Glasgow School for Business and Society, Glasgow Caledonian University