Trump Supporters Think Like Children

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 hypothetically. They cannot consider abstract principles. They cannot hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously and evaluate them. The formal operational stage, beginning around age eleven, is when the brain develops the capacity for abstract thought. The child can now think about ideas that are not physically present. They can reason about hypothetical situations. They can consider multiple perspectives. They can understand that the same event can be interpreted in different ways depending on the framework you apply. Piaget’s research showed that most people develop the capacity for formal operational thinking. But having the capacity and using it are different things. Under stress, under cognitive load, under threat, and inside environments that reward simplicity and punish complexity, the brain defaults to the earlier, simpler mode. That is the concrete mode. The child’s mode. One cause. One villain. One answer. The Meta-Analysis In 2003, psychologists John Jost, Jack Glaser, Arie Kruglanski, and Frank Sulloway published the most comprehensive analysis of the psychology of political conservatism ever conducted. They analyzed 88 samples across 12 countries, totaling 22,818 cases. Their findings confirmed what Luguri would later demonstrate experimentally. Political conservatism is reliably associated with a specific cluster of cognitive characteristics: need for cognitive closure, intolerance of ambiguity, low integrative complexity, uncertainty avoidance, and preference for order and structure. In plain language, conservatism correlates with a brain that wants simple answers, wants them fast, and wants them to stay the same. Jost and Kruglanski described a conservative worldview as one that contains the promise of a predictable social order with minimal complexity and minimal risk of change. That promise is not a policy position. It is a cognitive preference. It is the brain saying: make it simple, make it certain, and do not make me reconsider. The need for cognitive closure, which Kruglanski had been studying since the 1980s, is the drive to reach a definitive answer on a topic and to avoid ambiguity. People high in need for closure seize on the first available answer and then freeze, refusing to update even when new information arrives. That is the concrete mode operating at the level of political identity. And the research shows it is the default setting for conservative cognition. Why Propaganda Works on Them This is why Trump’s language works. Every single sentence Trump speaks is constructed at the concrete level. One cause. One villain. One solution. “Immigrants are destroying this country.” That is a concrete sentence. A ten-year-old could follow it. And that is the point. “The election was stolen.” Concrete. One event. One villain. One conclusion. “I alone can fix it.” Concrete. One person. One action. One outcome. Trump does not speak in abstractions. He does not discuss competing interests. He does not acknowledge trade-offs. He does not present nuance. Every sentence is designed to land in the concrete mode and stay there. A brain operating in concrete mode receives these sentences as clear, strong, and true. A brain operating in abstract mode receives them as oversimplified, misleading, and incomplete. The same sentence. Two completely different responses. Determined entirely by which cognitive mode is active. Right-wing media reinforces the concrete mode every single day. Fox News does not present complex policy analysis. It presents villains. It presents threats. It presents one-sentence conclusions delivered with total certainty. The entire information ecosystem is designed to keep the conservative brain in its default mode, because the default mode is the one where the prejudice lives, the fear lives, and the loyalty lives. The Laziness Problem Luguri’s most disturbing finding was not that conservatives default to concrete thinking. It was that they do not shift out of it on their own. The researchers had to force the shift. They had to structure the experimental conditions to push participants into abstract mode. Without that external push, conservatives stayed in concrete mode. Not because they could not think abstractly. Because they did not. That is not a disability. That is cognitive laziness. It is the brain choosing the simplest available operating mode and staying there because the simplest mode is the most comfortable one. The concrete mode does not require you to hold contradictions. It does not require you to consider multiple perspectives. It does not require you to sit with ambiguity. It gives you one answer and lets you stop thinking. These people would rather be told what to think than do the work of thinking for themselves. Trump is the first politician who makes the world as simple as their brain needs it to be. And every day they spend inside his media ecosystem is another day the brain stays locked in the concrete mode. Another day the abstract capacity goes unused. Another day the fairness values stay inaccessible. The capacity is there. They just never use it. And the system they live inside is designed to make sure they never have to. Sources Luguri, J. B., Napier, J. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (2012). Reconstruing Intolerance: Abstract Thinking Reduces Conservatives’ Prejudice Against Nonnormative Groups. Psychological Science, 23(7), 756-763. Luguri, J. B., & Napier, J. L. (2013). Of Two Minds: The Interactive Effect of Construal Level and Identity on Political Polarization. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 49(6), 972-977. Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339-375. Trope, Y., & Liberman, N. (2010). Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance. Psychological Review, 117(2), 440-463. Kruglanski, A. W., & Webster, D. M. (1996). Motivated Closing of the Mind: “Seizing” and “Freezing.” Psychological Review, 103(2), 263-283. Piaget, J. (1952). The Origins of Intelligence in Children. International Universities Press. Piaget, J., & Inhelder, B. (1969). The Psychology of the Child. Basic Books. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit lucasbean.substack.com/subscribe