Episode Details

There is a stage of brain development that every child goes through. Before the age of eleven, the human brain processes the world in concrete terms. One cause. One villain. One answer. Good guys and bad guys. Simple rules that never bend.

Most people grow out of this stage. Their brains develop the capacity for abstract thought. They learn to hold contradictions. They learn that most questions have complicated answers. They learn that the world is not divided into heroes and villains.

But most people are not MAGA.

What Luguri Found

In 2012, psychologist Jamie Luguri at Yale University, along with his colleagues Jaime Napier and John Dovidio, published three studies applying construal level theory to political attitudes. Construal level theory, originally developed by psychologists Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman, measures how the brain shifts between two modes of processing: abstract thinking and concrete thinking.

Abstract thinking is high-level. It focuses on the big picture. It processes values, principles, and categories. It asks why something happens and what it means. Concrete thinking is low-level. It focuses on specifics. It processes surface details, immediate reactions, and individual cases. It asks what something looks like right now.

Luguri wanted to know what happens when you measure people’s political attitudes at each level. And what happens when you shift them from one level to the other.

What he found should have ended the debate about conservative intolerance permanently.

When conservatives were thinking concretely, which is their default cognitive mode, they were significantly more intolerant than liberals. Specifically toward gay men, lesbians, Muslims, and atheists. Anyone who deviated from their Judeo-Christian worldview was a target.

When researchers shifted those same conservatives into abstract thinking, the intolerance disappeared. Political orientation stopped predicting prejudice. Conservatives who were thinking abstractly were statistically indistinguishable from liberals in their tolerance of nonnormative groups.

The prejudice was not a deeply held belief. It was not a value. It was not something they inherited from their faith or their family or their culture. It was a setting. And it only existed when their brain was operating at the concrete level.

The Fairness Finding

Study 3 revealed something that deepens the finding even further.

Luguri and his colleagues tested what was actually changing inside the conservative brain when it shifted to abstract thinking. They found that the reduction in prejudice was mediated by an increase in concerns about fairness.

When conservatives were thinking concretely, fairness was not a priority. Their brain was processing the world in terms of in-group and out-group. Us and them. People like us and people not like us. That is concrete thinking. It sorts by surface-level category and assigns value based on belonging.

When those same conservatives were shifted into abstract thinking, their concern for fairness increased. And that increase in fairness drove the decrease in prejudice. Their brain accessed a value it already held but could not reach from the concrete level.

This means the problem is not that conservatives do not value fairness. It is that their default cognitive mode does not let them access it. The value is there. The wiring is there. But the operating system they run on by default cannot reach it.

The Child’s Brain

The developmental framework for what Luguri found was established decades earlier by Jean Piaget.

Piaget identified the stages of cognitive development that every child passes through. The concrete operational stage, roughly ages seven to eleven, is when a child can think logically but only about concrete, tangible things. They can sort, classify, and organize the physical world. But they cannot think hypoth