Ideological Turing tests and cognitive exhaustion

Bryan Caplan introduces an interesting idea in The Ideological Turing Test by Bryan Caplan. For those on opposites sides of a debate, the question to ask is "What is it you believe they believe to be true?"

But the ability to pass ideological Turing tests - to state opposing views as clearly and persuasively as their proponents - is a genuine symptom of objectivity and wisdom.

Caplan proposes that this can be objectively measured in the political system regarding conservatives and liberals. Who understands the other better?

Jonathan Haidt actually answers this question in his The Righteous Mind which came out within a year of Caplan's blog post. IIRC there were 2,000 participants in Haidt's experiment and his finding was that conservatives and moderates were far more accurate in predicting liberal positions than liberals were at predicting moderate or conservative views. Haidt ascribes this superior insight into the mind of the other as being a product of the differences in definition of morality between liberals and conservatives. Liberals focus on two issues, harm/cair and fairness/reciprocity, whereas conservatives focus on harm/cair and fairness/reciprocity but also ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. Conservatives weight each of these moral pillars about equally. The consequence is that conservatives have greater complexity to address in their moral equations (forcing greater cogitation) and they have more trade-offs that have to be reconciled. Haidt's argument is that that versatility makes conservatives more familiar with the limited moral repertoire of liberals than liberals of the more expansive moral universe of conservatives.

Andrew G. Biggs argues that there is a second causative attribute in play that drives conservatives to better comprehension of liberal positions. Biggs argues that liberal positions dominate universities, research, media, and popular culture such as movies and music, to a much greater extent than do conservative views. Basically, conservatives are always being bombarded by liberal positions which they have to cognitively rationalize and digest whereas liberals live in a cocoon where they are largely sheltered from genuine conservative beliefs. The famous quote of Pauline Kael, an American film critic living in New York City, is brought to mind regarding the landslide victory of Richard Nixon in 1972;

How could Nixon have won? Nobody I know voted for him.

I think Caplan's idea of a Turing test is an interesting one. Why don't we use it more, on every subject.

If you are able to convincingly articulate your opponent's argument, then you have some granular knowledge about its strengths and weakness. There is almost always a grain of truth in every opponent's argument. Where is that truth, what is the context for that being true and what are the necessary assumptions and definitions that make it true? When you know those things, then you are in a position to challenge the right assumptions, definitions, etc. in order to divine the truth more thoroughly.

I think the Ideological Turing Test is so little used because it is cognitively taxing and because often, proponents of a given position are left having to articulate much more clearly than they are prepared to do the non-faith-based reasons for their belief in a particular position or idea.