Recently my friend and collaborator Meagan Kohler wrote an article in the Deseret News on abortion. The article resulted in an avalanche of responses, which was expected. We and some of our other writing friends frequently discuss our projects and the responses to them. But I was surprised by the responses to Meagan’s article: not at the volume of responses, but rather at the lack of any new insight among them. With that number of responses, we tend to expect to see some new thinking that does not follow the normal rhetorical scripts, and yet every response seemed 100% predictable.
When we use the phrase “mental heuristics,” we are talking about something like a set of software programs in our minds. These programs cause us to process information rapidly in certain ways, usually automatically and without our awareness. For example, sports fans sometimes become excessively caught up in intense rivalries, and when two fans of opposing teams in a rivalry see each other in public, they might go out of their way to avoid each other after their mental heuristics lead them to anticipate an ugly public confrontation.
And their mental heuristics may be completely wrong. It may be true that both of them are very kind and respectful toward opposing fans and would be great friends if they got to know each other.
Mental heuristics can be accurate or inaccurate, but they are extremely useful. We cannot constantly investigate our surroundings, interrogate the people around us, and study every issue in depth at every moment. The human mind relies on heuristic shortcuts to keep us safe and help us avoid sensory and information overload.
Mental heuristics can be accurate or inaccurate, but they are extremely useful.
Indoctrination into belief systems creates mental heuristics. Expressive individualism is the worldview at the heart of movies like “Footloose” and “Frozen,” and a person with an expressive individualist heuristic automatically views all attempts to create community norms and standards as preventing the expression of a person’s “authentic self.” Postmodernism is a worldview that many people adopt in graduate school, and it creates a heuristic that views all human activity and discourse as attempts to structure power. Marxism and Marxist-influenced approaches create mental heuristics in which we divide the world into oppressors and oppressed and see society as “systems of oppression” that maintain various forms of “supremacy.”
I should reiterate that heuristics are not inherently good or bad. As Latter-day Saints, we actively strive to develop good heuristics of charity that lead us to a default processing of the world with love of God and neighbor.
Our political heuristics in particular are powerfully reinforced by brain chemistry. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox recently wrote an excellent book, “Off Ramp,” in which he explained:
When we feel connected to others, our brains give us a ‘warm and fuzzy’ feeling that is caused by the hormone oxytocin. This is a bonding hormone that increases feelings of trust, empathy, and closeness to partners, friends, and family and communities … It also pushes us to defend our in-groups against threats from others. In a 2015 study, participants given oxytocin were more likely to “adopt the erroneous judgments of their in-group members than subjects who did not receive the hormone.” Oxytocin increases in-group favoritism, lying for one’s team, conformity to in-group preferences, and aggressive protection against threatening outsiders. It’s fun to consider when you’re watching the TV show Survivor, but alarming when it suddenly invades every aspect of our lives. That loyalty doesn’t disappear once a person steps outside of the ballot box. It seems to follow us everywhere.
This echoes the observation in psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s landmark book “The Righteous Mind” that the brain chemical dopamine is also directly involved in our political thinking. He described a study in which researcher Drew Westen gave his research participants political messaging they found difficult and then gave them counter-information that “released” them from the mental stress of that initial information:
Once Westen released them from the threat, the ventral striatum started humming—that’s one of the brain’s major reward centers. All animal brains are designed to create flashes of pleasure when the animal does something important for its survival, and small pulses of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the ventral striatum (and a few other places) are where these good feelings are manufactured. Heroin and cocaine are addictive because they artificially trigger this dopamine response … Westen found that partisans escaping from handcuffs (by thinking about the final slide, which restored their confidence in their candidate) got a little hit of that dopamine.
Given the role of these two chemicals in our responses to political information, we benefit from asking: What is really going on in our personal experiences of politics?
Most of us believe our political and other views are correct; otherwise, we would hold different views. But in a TED Talk, Kathryn Schulz asked a question later echoed by Jonathan Haidt: “How does it feel to be wrong?” The answer is the same way it feels to be right. The reassuring, reinforcing sensations of oxytocin and dopamine are experienced by people who are right and also by people who are dangerously wrong.
As specific examples, I think of President Donald Trump and Jon Stewart as the kings of political dopamine on the right and left, respectively. Trump built his political career and Stewart built his career as a commentator in the same way: publicly humiliating people to entertain audiences. Both of them have always offered their audiences some amount of truth, paired with enormous heuristic shortcuts that avoid real truth in opposing views. By sneering and insulting their opponents, they leave their audiences awash in surges of dopamine that reinforce their sense of intellectual and moral superiority.
What is really going on in our personal experiences of politics?
We sometimes discuss peacemaking in terms of civility, but in reality, civility only reduces conflict, which we might call “détente-making.” This is valuable, to be sure, but peacemaking—the attainment of genuine mutual understanding and respect—requires work that is deeper and more difficult than détente-making. It requires work that breaks us free from the dopamine- and oxytocin-reinforcement loops that keep decent people suspicious and even hateful toward each other.
Brookings Institution fellow Jonathan Rauch has recently caused a stir by pointing to the “civic theology” of Latter-day Saints, articulated most strongly by President Dallin H. Oaks. I suggest this notion of our civic theology is essential to understanding President Oaks’ prophetic project. And I suggest the heart of our Latter-day Saint civic theology can be seen in a simple personal exercise: Imagine the political figure you most despise. For American Latter-day Saints on the political left, that figure is likely Donald Trump. For American Latter-day Saints on the political right, that figure might be Kamala Harris or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Understand that this person, who fills your heart with fear and loathing, may well end up in the presence of God for eternity, in what we call the celestial kingdom. And the celestial kingdom is a place where everyone will be fully at peace with one another, without any personal hostility or grievances. Knowing the likelihood that many of your current political adversaries will be there, is the celestial kingdom still a place where you yearn to be?
So many of our discussions of peacemaking focus on the tactical, on things we should or should not do. But as this exercise illustrates, a real theological question in which we name names is a much better exercise for helping Latter-day Saints to understand the stakes involved in peacemaking. If we are mired in political oxytocin that leaves us feeling love and belonging toward our in-group and fear and loathing toward everyone outside our in-group, we would do well to break free of that chemical feedback loop. The work of breaking free is to honestly explore the validity of opposing political views. This involves setting aside heuristics that we formerly relied upon to rapidly make sense of political information. In the process of sincerely looking for validity in opposing political views, we may or may not change our minds. But we will likely lose relationships that depend on the constant chemical reinforcement of political oxytocin. In this, we take up our cross.
Honesty really is the new punk rock.
In politics and everywhere else, the quest for truth cannot long coexist with other cravings like belonging, comfort, or validation. All of the most important questions of our time are so serious that they sift out people who are willing to patiently see beyond their heuristics and wrestle deeply over what is true, from those who use political and moral discussions merely as a means to oxytocin- and dopamine-driven rewards.
Returning to where we started: In her article on abortion, Meagan Kohler could have done the predictable thing. She could have written a typical article intended to push her readers’ partisan mental buttons and give them another hit of dopamine. Instead, she wrote a serious piece exploring how the assumptions about gestation that we find in the pro-choice movement are regressive for civilization. That is a position that deserves deep reflection, not shallow heuristic dismissal.
But for people who have spent years or even decades cultivating heuristics of intellectual entropy, expressions of moral order and clarity are received as oppressive or even pathological. Social media is a place where intellectually entropic people gather to reassure each other in a hot tub of oxytocin after feeling the sharp discomfort of clarity. On subjects like abortion, there are many voices of entropy both in and out of the Church, so a frenzied response is almost to be expected. But there also may be a few people—perhaps even just one—at a crossroads in their thinking, willing to give their hearts to a real consideration of a thoughtful treatment of the issue.
To reach that small subset of readership is the goal of every converted Latter-day Saint commentator. We should likewise each carry a personal goal of modeling something other than heuristic-driven responses toward people we regard as political or religious opponents. In many cases, even when we disagree, there are things we can learn from them in that disagreement.
