Conservatives Are Lazy Thinkers

Scott Eidelman went into a bar and proved something that most of us already suspected.

In 2012, Eidelman, a psychologist at the University of Arkansas, wanted to test a simple idea. What happens to a person’s political beliefs when they stop thinking hard? Not when they change their mind. When they stop using their mind altogether.

He walked into a bar, asked patrons their political opinions on a series of social issues, and then breathalyzed them. He controlled for sex, education, and how the person identified politically when sober. None of that mattered. The drunker they were, the more conservative they answered. Every single time.

Then he took sober people into a lab and did it three more ways. He split their attention with a distracting task. He put them under a time limit so they had to answer fast. He told one group to give their gut reaction and another group to actually think about their answers. Every single manipulation produced the same result. When people stopped thinking, they got more conservative. When they started thinking again, they moved away from it.

Four studies. Four different ways of shutting down deliberate thought. Same finding every time.

Eidelman called it low-effort thought.

Conservatism is what your brain does when it quits.

The Default Setting

That is the part nobody on the right wants to hear. Conservative positions are not conclusions. They are defaults. They are what the brain produces when it is not working. Hierarchy is natural. People get what they deserve. The system is fine. Tradition is good. These are not ideas anyone reasoned their way into. They are the path of least resistance. They require no imagination, no complexity, no willingness to consider that the world might be more complicated than it looks from your couch.

Liberal positions require effort. Inequality is structural. Outcomes are shaped by systems most people cannot see. The current setup might need to be torn apart and rebuilt. Those conclusions cost something. You have to override your defaults. You have to sit with ambiguity. You have to hold more than one idea in your head at the same time. That takes energy. And a lot of people do not have it because they were never trained to use it.

Conservatism is not an ideology. It is what happens when you skip the homework and guess on the test.

The Machine That Prevents Thinking