Political psychology, Christianity, and bigotry

I've taken a swipe at my religion yesterday, so I might as well go for broke. I spoke of how some memes basically encourage mindless obedience to Biblical and/or church authority, lack of empathy, wilful ignorance as to the lives of out-groups, and hostility towards them. I'm going to bring in a couple of concepts from political and personality psychology to elaborate my case. Thanks to David Winter, my political psych professor at the University of Michigan, and Veronica Benet-Martinez, my personality psych prof at the same institution. This article might get a bit technical, and might not make a lot of sense to anyone who hasn't studied psychology or another social science. If so, just forget about it and concentrate on the last article.

A construct is a mental structure, a "way in which some things are construed as being alike and yet different from others" (Kelly, cited in David Winter's textbook). They are like adjectives that describe the nouns of our experience: people, places, things. Some constructs are preemptive or constellatory. A preemptive construct, when applied, precludes all others. For example, all those gays want is to screw like rabbits. Nothing else about them matters, just the sex. A constellatory construct is one that, when applied, requires specific others to be applied. So, if all those gays want is to screw like rabbits, they must be out to destroy the family, discredit Christianity, etc. In contrast, some constructs are permeable or open. They can easily accomodate or incorporate new experiences. For example, we might say that the LGBT community has a broad, non-conformist expression of gender. That would validate the fact that some gay men are very masculine, and some are very feminine.

Cognitive complexity is a measurable variable. The more complex a person's constructs, the more permeable and the less constellatory or preemptive. They are more likely to be able to see things from multiple points of view. It was first scored by someone named Bieri, who obviously had nothing better to do with his time. He calculated the degree of overlap across constructs in his subjects' writing; two constructs overlap if they are applied in the same way to a group of persons or role titles. The more overlap, the less cognitive complexity.

This is the part where I hope it gets more intelligible to laypeople (and, frankly, to myself). People who are higher in cognitive complexity attend to a wider range of information, especially that which doesn't fit their previous stereotypes or violates familiar rules or schemas. Our ideologies can guide us, but they can also blind us. For example, I had been told that homosexuality was a choice; if I had hung on to that construct, I would have ignored the fact that many of the gay people I met felt that it was a far more complex issue than simply being a choice. In fact, I would have avoided gay people entirely. For world leaders, low-complexity leaders tend to advocate their own foreign policy goals (sound familiar?). High-complexity leaders are more likely to cooperate. Leaders that displayed higher complexity during foreign policy crises were more likely to resolve them peacefully - think the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Integrative complexity is the ability to integrate multiple perspectives, whereas cognitive complexity involves mainly differentiation.

A study was done on Robert Lee, the famous and probably best Confederate general during the US Civil War; he outranked most of his Union opponents significantly in integrative complexity, and when he did so, he defeated them in battle. He outranked Meade somewhat in integrative complexity at the battle of Gettysburg, but lost the battle. The Confederates were outnumbered in the battle, and Lee ordered an infantry assault against Union positions on Cemetery Ridge. The preceding artillery barrage was ineffective, and 12,500 of the Confederation's best troops advanced against a dug-in enemy over open ground with predictable results. I'm no military historian, but a lot of things obviously went wrong with the assault. Perhaps Lee felt he had no choice. In any case, he lost at Gettysburg, and his integrative complexity took a dive. It has been shown that integrative complexity will go down under stress. He suffered several subsequent losses. After the war, his cognitive complexity recovered to its previously high levels.

In modern times, President George Bush is actually a man of average intelligence. However, his integrative complexity is low. From an article posted in Political Psychology, and referenced below:

"...he scores particularly unimpressively for “openness to experience, a cognitive proclivity that encompasses unusual receptiveness to fantasy, aesthetics, actions, ideas and values. In the general population this factor is positively associated with intelligence”.

Bush’s openness score of zero — compared with 82 for Clinton and John F Kennedy, 95 for Abraham Lincoln and 99.1 for Thomas Jefferson — “placed him at the very bottom of US presidents”.

This assessment can only be considered tentative because of lack of available evidence on a sitting president, but it is corroborated by a measure of Bush’s “integrative complexity”. Simonton says: “Low scorers on integrative complexity can only see things from a single perspective — their own.”

Bush’s score, he says, is comparable to “extremist Islamic fundamentalists in the Taliban and Al-Qaeda leadership"

So, Bush isn't actually an idiot in terms of IQ ... but he is an idiot in terms of cognitive and integrative compexity. This does not bode well for Iraq, Iran, Israel/Palestine or North Korea. And I bet you some of that low complexity is exacerbated by the memes he has inherited from his branch of Evangelical Christianity have not helped at all. Had he come across a minister who preached a more complex version of Christianity, he might have turned out different. That having been said, people can only change if they want to, and he might very well have sought out churches whose ministers would not challenge him so much.

Integrative complexity is not necessarily a good thing. Let's say someone steps into the room, draws a pistol, and is about to fire. If I take the time to consider the fact that his homeland was invaded by Americans troops and his family was killed by a misguided cruise missile, and wonder what sort of response is appropriate, I will already have been shot. If I am not a pacifist, I should either run or attempt to disarm him. If I am, I should either run or allow myself to be shot. The time to think about these things, however, is before, not during. During the debate on slavery during the American Civil War, moderate leaders scored high on integrative complexity, but interestingly enough, abolitionists and slavery advocates both scored low. Perhaps the abolitionists scored high when they were considering whether slavery was justifiable or not. But, once they made their decision, there was no time to be nice. One criticism levelled at Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, is that in being too broad minded, he has been too accomodating to the conservatives at the expense of the liberals, and that he has turned back on his previous support of gays in the church.

I wrote this to reinforce the point that clergy and laypeople have important roles to play in broadening the experience of their fellow believers who may not yet have had "stretching" experiences, like Jesus had with the Syro-Phoenecian woman. Or, like Jesus' audience when he told the parable of the Good Samaritan - did you notice that it was the Samaritan, the unclean one, reaching out to the Jew in the story, and not the other way around? It will take some doing, but if we help broaden each other's minds, we will make this world a better place.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Gettysburg

http://www.idealgovernment.com/index.php/weblog/1019/