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We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City, just across the street from Washington Square Park. The cafe's entrance is below street level down some stairs, which can be confusing if it's your first time. Our group meets in the large room upstairs.

Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person attending the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside. If you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they have more substantial fare such as salads, soups & sandwiches which are pretty good and their prices are reasonable.

The cafe is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 2 blocks west. With PATCO, just get off at the 9th-10th & Locust stop and walk 3 blocks east & 1 block north. For those who are driving, parking in the neighborhood can be tough to find. If you can't find a spot on the street, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.

WHO'S MORE RATIONAL: LIBERALS OR CONSERVATIVES?

ANALYZING THE EFFECTS OF POLITICAL ORIENTATION ON SCIENCE DENIAL, CONSPIRACY THINKING, CORRECT VOTING, AND THE "ASYMMETRY THESIS" FOR RATIONALITY

INTRODUCTION:

We often hear people debating whether one political party is more "anti-science" or more irrational in some way or whether "both sides do it". This meetup will address a collection of arguments & debates around whether the Republicans or Democrats are equally partisan when it comes to accepting or rejecting scientific consensus, endorsing conspiracy theories, staying informed on politics & "voting correctly", and exhibiting negative personality traits. We'll look at some of the research in political psychology that's emerged over the last decade and see if it can help us shed some light on this subject.

Throughout our discussion, we'll try to avoid 2 false dichotomies:

(1) Rationality & irrationality are not binary -- there's a spectrum of how logically consistent & evidence-based people's beliefs are, and a person's level of rationality can vary dramatically depending on the topic.

There's also the question of how high we should set the bar to consider someone "rational"...

To the extent that most adults aren't clinically paranoid or delusional, have relatively stable preferences, and can live independently and figure out how to solve most mundane problems they face on an average day, we could say that most adults are functionally rational. This would be consistent with the concepts of "bounded rationality" and "instrumental rationality" used to explain & predict human behavior in economics & political science. "Bounded rationality" accounts for limited information, human cognitive limits, and limited time for decision-making, and it's based not on finding the optimal solution to problems but rather on "satisficing" - i.e. finding solutions that are "good enough" that you avoid catastrophic losses, meet your basic needs, and maintain your current status. "Instrumental rationality" means we're not concerned with whether someone has a relatively accurate mental model of the world (that's "epistemic rationality") nor on whether their behavior align with certain values (that's "value rationality"), but rather we're just seeing if they know how to get what they want. (Consider that some criminologists argue that even most criminals & drug addicts are "rational" but just have very different preferences.)

However, if we define rationality as some sort of specialized ability that allows one to obtain a highly accurate mental model of the world (i.e. "epistemic rationality" only a small segment of the population could rightly claim to be "highly rational". For example, to score in the 90th percentile on Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky's cognitive bias tests or Keith Stanovich's "Comprehensive Assessment of Rational Thinking" (CART) would require a temperament that inclined one to slow, methodical reasoning as well as knowledge of probabilistic fallacies & logical pitfalls that would trip up most people.

(2) Liberal vs conservative also isn't a binary -- even though we have a (mostly) two-party political system, Americans' political beliefs tend to fall along a spectrum and can vary based on the issue. When Pew Research polls Americans every 3 years on their political views and subjects their answers to "cluster analysis", they tend to find 8-9 different clumps: 3-4 of which are very partisan & fairly predictable in their views, another 4 that are less partisan & more eclectic in their views, and yet another group of "bystanders" who mostly don't follow politics or vote.

Unfortunately, most of the studies we'll look at below don't offer this type of granular analysis, meaning that they implicitly lump rural rednecks in the Bible Belt & wealthy country club Republicans together as "conservatives" and lump white secular humanists & New Age hippies together with deeply religious black & Hispanic Democrats together as "liberals". Yet the few studies that do break up the parties into different subsets find quite a bit of variation -- e.g. check out the bar graph above that shows the variation in conspiracy theory beliefs based on which candidate respondents favored in the 2016 primaries (taken from David Healy's article in the LA Times posted down in Section 2 of the discussion outline below).

RELIGION & RATIONALITY: AN OVERVIEW & SOME LINKS RELEVANT MATERIAL FROM PAST MEETUPS:

One thing this meetup won't address is the differences in the rates of religiosity between conservatives & liberals, and how that ties into the question of which side of the political spectrum is more rational. For a quick reference, you can refer to Pew Research's 2014 Religious Landscape Study, particularly the part that looks at "Belief in God By Political Party" - it shows 3% of Republicans & 7% of Democrats say they believe in God but are "not too certain", 5% of Republicans & 13% of Democrats say they do not believe in God, and 1% of Republicans & 2% of Democrats say they "don't know".
https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/compare/belief-in-god/by/party-affiliation/

We can also look at Pew Research's 2012 Religion & Public Life Project's report "'Nones' on the Rise", which showed that the "religiously unaffiliated" (a.k.a. "Nones") are heavily Democratic in their partisanship and liberal in their political ideology, with 63% saying they lean towards the Democrats and 11% saying they have no political leaning, while only 26% saying they lean towards the Republicans (p. 25). This partisan split intensifies for the 30% of "Nones" who self-identify as atheist/agnostic, with only 18% saying they lean Republican while 73% saying they lean Democrat (p. 67). However, Pew Research notes that the unaffiliated appear to be more socially liberal than economically liberal -- almost three-quarters support abortion rights & same-sex marriage, but they're about evenly split on whether or not the US needs a larger government to provide more social services (p. 26).

Interestingly, the unaffiliated are no more or less likely than members of the public as a whole to have New Age beliefs -- in both cases, about 20-30% report believing in astrology, reincarnation, "spiritual energy" in inanimate objects, mystical experiences, and ghosts (p. 24).
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2012/10/NonesOnTheRise-full.pdf

Note that we have also partially addressed the overlaps between atheism & political orientation in previous meetups...

In January of 2019, we had a meetup entitled "Can Skeptics Fight Irrationality Without Succumbing To It?" In the 3rd section, we looked at whether or not atheists & agnostics are more likely to endorse paranormal or "New Age" beliefs as a substitute for their lack of religious faith -- there appears to be mixed evidence for this, with studies that indicated the non-religious were less likely to believe in lucky charms & horoscopes but more likely to believe in ghosts & UFOS. In the 4th section, we looked at whether or not atheists & agnostics are liable to become highly partisan and treat politics almost like a religion -- since the non-religious tend to vote at lower rates, this allegation seems unlikely.
https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/lckqkqyzcbrb/

In July of 2018, our group hosted a meetup entitled "Is 'New Atheism' Declining or Evolving?" We looked at various social & demographic trends that may underlie the recent rise of the "Nones", as well as the oddly high level of religious belief that still persists in the US compared to Europe. We also looked at how American atheists has been recently split by the growing political divide, with a explicitly left-wing group devoted to feminism & social justice facing off against a more centrist wing that's culturally libertarian, concerned with freedom of speech & skeptical of identity politics.
https://www.meetup.com/Philly-Skeptics/events/252679767/

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