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social is a term that means willingness to help other people. Rejecting
unfair offers is called prosocial at the group level. Punishing people who
make unfair offers promotes fairness that benefits the larger commu-
nity, which is more consistent with a dopaminergic approach.
SHOULD THEY STAY OR SHOULD THEY GO?
We see this individual/group contrast play out in the debate over
immigration. Conservatives tend to focus on smaller groups, such as
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individuals, family, and country, whereas liberals are more likely to
focus on the largest group of all: the global community of all men and
women. Conservatives are interested in individual rights, and some
support the idea of building walls to keep illegal immigrants out of
their country. Liberals see individuals as intertwined, and some talk
about abolishing immigration laws completely. But what happens when
the immigrants actually show up—when they change from an idea to
a reality, from distant and abstract to right next door? There are no
large-scale studies that would provide an answer to this question, but
there is anecdotal evidence that the H&N experience of direct contact
produces different results compared to the dopaminergic experience of
setting policy.
In 2012 the New York Times reported on a group called Unoccupy
Springs, which had arisen in the heart of the very liberal, very wealthy
Hamptons. The group advocated for a crackdown on immigrants who
were packing single-family homes with unrelated people in violation
of the local housing code. The Unoccupy group argued that their new
neighbors were overburdening the schools and depressing property val-
ues. Similarly, a study from Dartmouth College found that compared
to Republican states, Democratic states have more housing restrictions
that deter in-migration of lower-income people. These restrictions
include limiting the number of families allowed to live in a single home
and zoning restrictions that reduce the supply of affordable housing.
Harvard economist Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko of the
University of Pennsylvania evaluated the impact of zoning on housing
affordability. They found that in most of the country, housing costs are
very close to the cost of construction, but they’re significantly higher in
California and some East Coast cities. They note that in these areas,
zoning authorities make new construction extremely costly, as much
as 50 percent higher in urban areas, which are otherwise favored by
immigrants.
Barriers that shut out impoverished immigrants are reminiscent of
Einstein’s statement, “My passionate sense of social justice and social
responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack
of need for direct contact with other human beings.” Conservatives
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appear to be the opposite. They want to exclude illegal immigrants
from this country in order to prevent what they fear will be a funda-
mental transformation of their culture. However, harm aversion moti-
vates them to take care of the ones who are here.
William Sullivan, a writer for the conservative publication American
Thinker, noted that in the midst of the debate on immigration, leading
conservative figures were going to the Mexican border to assist church
groups in delivering relief, including hot meals, fresh water, and a trac-
tor trailer filled with teddy bears and soccer balls. Some called it a pub-
licity stunt, but it’s consistent with an overarching approach to life that
emphasizes harm aversion: protect the status quo while protecting indi-
viduals in danger.
In opposite and complementary ways, liberals and conservatives
want to help impoverished immigrants. At the same time, they both
want to keep them away.
WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU LIBERAL
If introducing threats into the environment makes people more conser-
vative, is it possible to make people more liberal by doing the opposite?
Dr. Jaime Napier, an expert on political and religious ideologies, found
that the answer is yes, and it doesn’t take very much prodding. Just as
researchers were able to increase conservatism with the tiny nudge of
putting a hand sanitizer nearby, Dr. Napier was able to make people
more liberal with a simple imagination exercise. She told conservatives
to imagine they had superpowers that made it impossible for them to
be injured. Subsequent testing of political ideology found that they
became more liberal. Reducing feelings of vulnerability, which subse-
quently suppressed H&N fear of loss, allowed dopamine, the agent of
change, to switch on and play a larger role in determining ideology.
What about the act of imagining all by itself ? Imagining is a
dopaminergic activity because it involves things that have no physi-
cal existence. Did simple activation of the dopamine system through
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the exercise of imagination contribute to the leftward shift in political
beliefs? A separate study suggests that it did.
Abstract thinking is one of the primary functions of the dopamine
system. Abstract thinking allows us to go beyond sensory observation of
events to construct a model that explains why the events are occurring.
A description that relies on the senses focuses on the physical world:
things that actually exist. The technical term for this type of thinking is
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