Prof says conservatives make stricter parents

New developments in cognitive science will drastically change politics because they show that… New developments in cognitive science will drastically change politics because they show that the brains of liberals and conservatives work differently, a prominent author said during a lecture at Pitt on Friday.

George Lakoff, a cognitive linguistics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, says liberals and conservatives think differently because parents raise children in two different types of environments: a “strict-father” or a “nurturing parent” family.

Conservative parents tend to believe the family needs a strict-father to protect the family from evil, to compete with other families and to teach morality using painful punishment, Lakoff said. Liberal families, encourage nurturing roles for each parent, teaching empathy and responsibility.

Lakoff has written heavily on the subject. His newest book, “The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century American Politics with an 18th-Century Brain,” will be released this spring.

He said that nurturing parent families value protection, which is freedom from harm, and empowerment, which is freedom to act.

“The job of government is to maximize freedom in both of those senses,” he said. “That is the job of progressive government.”

A person’s upbringing affects their political affiliation because the brain forms schemes of perception from childhood, Lakoff said. People raised with elements of both types of family structures adopt both liberal and conservative ideals – cognitive scientists call them “biconceptuals.”

Lakoff said that prototypes, frames and metaphors comprise the information structures of the brain, which cognitive scientists call “frame somatics.” Metaphors and relations between words form a person’s understanding of the world.

Metaphors play a part in politics because children learn to associate governing bodies such as churches and nations with the family, which titles such as “Mother Russia” and “Mother India” demonstrate.

Many of these metaphors, such as “affection is warmth,” are used by people around the world. However, some complex metaphors are culturally distinct, Lakoff said, and show that no universal logic exists.

One example of a distinct metaphor is the American idea that life has purpose. Research shows that not all cultures share this assumption.

“Not everybody has a purpose in life,” Lakoff said to a laughing audience. “Some people just live.”

Lakoff said that enlightenment thinking assumes reason is conscious, disembodied, logical, universal and selfish. He said developments in cognitive science prove they are false, and this will change academics traditionally taught with “Anglo-American philosophy.”

Ninety-eight percent of thought is unconscious, said Lakoff, disproving the first component of western reason. He also explained that when a person imagines doing the action, they use the same part of the brain as when they perform the action, so reason is a function of the brain.

“What you’re doing with your body correlates to your understanding of a sentence,” Lakoff said.

He also emphasized that human reason cannot transcend emotion, as many ancient philosophers, such as Aristotle, proposed. He said that the purpose of any action revolves around how other people will act emotionally.

Lakoff explained that research shows when a person observes another person feeling an emotion, they can recognize it and feel that same emotion.

“We are hard-wired for empathy and cooperation,” said Lakoff.

George Lakoff co-founded the Rockridge Institute, an organization that promotes a broadened public understanding of politics. He studied linguistic logic with scholar Noam Chomsky and taught linguistics since 1972.

The Pitt Law-sponsored conference featured panel discussions of linguistics, law and rhetoric professors from Pitt, Carnegie Mellon, Wayne State, Vanderbilt and University of Oregon.