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A review by branch_c
The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won't Admit It by Robert Kurzban, Jason Weeden
4.0
Like Kurzban’s earlier book, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite, this book deserves a far wider audience, especially among those who value intellectual honesty in today’s political environment. It’s an impressively clearly written and well argued case for the theory that people tend to act in ways that further their own self interest. It seems strange that this argument would even need to be made, but in fact the authors point to the numerous writers and thinkers in academia and the media who go to some lengths to deny that this is the case.
Weeden and Kurzban even tell us the reason why, and it’s based on evolutionary psychology: because of the way our minds evolved to help us succeed in our intensely social environment, we trick ourselves into believing that the reasons we give for our actions are true, while in fact they’re like press releases generated by an internal “public relations department” with limited (if any) knowledge of the actual underlying decisions made by our internal “board of directors”.
The authors discuss this conclusion in the context of a variety of strongly held positions across the political spectrum, and provide a large amount of data as evidence - in fact there are 120 pages of data appendices that can be safely skimmed or skipped by less statistically minded readers. But it falls to those who would argue against the thesis of this book to address what the data shows.
Early in the book, the authors refute the statement that one can typically predict someone’s views on one subject - say, abortion, by knowing their views on an unrelated topic - say, income redistribution. While this may be true for some subsets of the population, data shows this is not the case in general, and again, it’s strange that anyone would think otherwise - but in fact, people like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker, both of whom I greatly admire for their own clear writing and thinking, have said exactly that.
The thesis is well argued, and I would only take issue with a couple of points; for example, the analogy of the mind’s public relations department and board of directors is brilliant, but this leads the authors to explicitly ignore many of the usual reasons given for people’s behavior: “ideologies, values, political personality variables, biblical literalism, constitutional principles, and so on”, stating that they are “less interested in the press releases penned by Public Relations Departments” (p. 66). But we can’t actually deal with others by ignoring their “PR” and claiming to know what their “board of directors” really thinks. Instead, we have to take them at their word and hope that we can move people’s PR departments closer to the truth over time.
The authors also recognize that their “view is, almost by definition, a deeply cynical one” (p. 210). But I think there’s room to both accept this data and the authors’ analysis while also striving for improvements in this area. If it’s true that people, whether on the left or right, support policies out of personal interest, then by all means we ought to admit this - both to others, and to ourselves. But there’s no reason why we can’t also find ways in which our opinions truly do map to an objectively better society, not just for us personally, but for others as well. After all, it’s possible that there are right and wrong answers about the best policies for our society, in terms of how many people’s lives are improved, and by how much, and this data, if we can gather it, also deserves to be taken into account.
Kurzban originally came to my attention with a now inactive evolutionary psychology blog that I always found interesting, but this book also inspired me to look again online, and happily I found that he and coauthor Weeden are blogging again, at www.pleeps.org, and I look forward to continuing content along the lines of the fascinating subject matter of this book.
Weeden and Kurzban even tell us the reason why, and it’s based on evolutionary psychology: because of the way our minds evolved to help us succeed in our intensely social environment, we trick ourselves into believing that the reasons we give for our actions are true, while in fact they’re like press releases generated by an internal “public relations department” with limited (if any) knowledge of the actual underlying decisions made by our internal “board of directors”.
The authors discuss this conclusion in the context of a variety of strongly held positions across the political spectrum, and provide a large amount of data as evidence - in fact there are 120 pages of data appendices that can be safely skimmed or skipped by less statistically minded readers. But it falls to those who would argue against the thesis of this book to address what the data shows.
Early in the book, the authors refute the statement that one can typically predict someone’s views on one subject - say, abortion, by knowing their views on an unrelated topic - say, income redistribution. While this may be true for some subsets of the population, data shows this is not the case in general, and again, it’s strange that anyone would think otherwise - but in fact, people like Sam Harris and Steven Pinker, both of whom I greatly admire for their own clear writing and thinking, have said exactly that.
The thesis is well argued, and I would only take issue with a couple of points; for example, the analogy of the mind’s public relations department and board of directors is brilliant, but this leads the authors to explicitly ignore many of the usual reasons given for people’s behavior: “ideologies, values, political personality variables, biblical literalism, constitutional principles, and so on”, stating that they are “less interested in the press releases penned by Public Relations Departments” (p. 66). But we can’t actually deal with others by ignoring their “PR” and claiming to know what their “board of directors” really thinks. Instead, we have to take them at their word and hope that we can move people’s PR departments closer to the truth over time.
The authors also recognize that their “view is, almost by definition, a deeply cynical one” (p. 210). But I think there’s room to both accept this data and the authors’ analysis while also striving for improvements in this area. If it’s true that people, whether on the left or right, support policies out of personal interest, then by all means we ought to admit this - both to others, and to ourselves. But there’s no reason why we can’t also find ways in which our opinions truly do map to an objectively better society, not just for us personally, but for others as well. After all, it’s possible that there are right and wrong answers about the best policies for our society, in terms of how many people’s lives are improved, and by how much, and this data, if we can gather it, also deserves to be taken into account.
Kurzban originally came to my attention with a now inactive evolutionary psychology blog that I always found interesting, but this book also inspired me to look again online, and happily I found that he and coauthor Weeden are blogging again, at www.pleeps.org, and I look forward to continuing content along the lines of the fascinating subject matter of this book.