Drunk, Tired, and Voting Conservative: The Science of Low-Effort Political Thinking

By Callum Mercer

It’s a Tuesday night somewhere in New England — a time and a place of no particular romance, which is probably the point. The bar is doing what bars do: holding the shape of people’s exhaustion, converting it, with chemical assistance, into something that passes for ease. People file out through the busiest exit and find themselves confronted not by the cold or a cab, but by a team of researchers carrying breathalyzers and clipboards. Would they mind answering a few questions about their political beliefs? In exchange, they’ll find out their blood alcohol level. Eighty-five people, apparently, said yes. This is perhaps the most encouraging thing about human nature I have encountered this year.

The Bar Study Linking Alcohol, Cognitive Load, and Conservative Attitudes

What followed was not, technically, what you’d call a controlled experiment in the strict laboratory sense. What it was, rather, was one of those rare moments when real life arranges itself so perfectly to confirm your worst suspicions that you almost feel grateful for the efficiency of it. The researchers found that as blood alcohol level increased, so did political conservatism. Not dramatically. Not into jackboots-and-torches territory. But steadily, measurably — the correlation held even when they accounted for sex, education level, and participants’ own self-identified ideology. Drink more, think less, drift right.

The obvious joke writes itself, and I will resist it, because the finding is actually disturbing enough without the help of a punchline. What the New England bar study was measuring — what a series of four experiments published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by researchers Scott Eidelman, Christian Crandall, and their colleagues have systematically demonstrated — is something that should be occupying far more of our political conversation than it currently does. The hypothesis is this: low-effort thought promotes political conservatism. Not as a slur. Not as a provocation. As a documented, replicated, peer-reviewed cognitive process.

Cognitive Depletion and Political Conservatism: How Low-Effort Thinking Works

Consider what happens to a smartphone at three-percent battery. You know the mode. The screen dims. Background processes shut down one by one. The applications demanding the most energy — the maps calculating seventeen alternative routes, the six-tab browser rendering arguments nobody will finish reading, the live-updating feeds delivering information in the precise volume required to make sure you never actually absorb any of it — they go dark. What remains is the most basic, efficient, energy-conserving version of the device: something that can still make a call but has stopped pretending it can do everything at once. The engineers built this. They decided, somewhere in a glass building with very good coffee, what would survive the low-power cull and what would get sacrificed. They encoded a hierarchy of necessity into the factory settings.

Our brains, it turns out, have a version of this mode. When we are drunk, distracted, operating under time pressure, overwhelmed by noise and competing demands, or simply told to stop thinking too hard — when the cognitive machinery slows to its most basic and efficient operation — the political output of that diminished processing looks, reliably, like political conservatism. The researchers didn’t find this only at the bar. They found it in a laboratory where participants answered political questions while simultaneously tracking audio tones — the cognitive equivalent of trying to parallel park while someone describes their dream in meticulous detail. Cognitive load increased conservative attitudes and decreased liberal ones, without affecting participants’ mood, without any variable that might explain it away. It wasn’t frustration. It wasn’t annoyance. It wasn’t the ambient emotional weather of a bad day. It was, specifically, the depletion of the mental resources required to think carefully.

They found it again under time pressure, in a third experiment, where participants had under two seconds to respond to words and phrases aligned with either liberal or conservative ideology. Rushed, conservative terms gained endorsement. Liberal terms held flat. Not because conservative language was simpler or more familiar — the researchers checked this, methodically, comparing response times and complexity ratings across both sets of terms. There was no difference. The conservative concepts were not easier to understand. They were simply more readily endorsed when the mind didn’t have time to do much of anything at all.

And then, most directly, they found it when they simply told people how to think. Participants instructed to give their “first, immediate response” without deliberating endorsed conservative terms significantly more than those told to think carefully before answering. The people who were asked to engage — who were instructed, essentially, to make the effort — came out the other end measurably more liberal in their responses. Recognition memory, used as a proxy for depth of processing, partially explained the relationship. The people who remembered more had processed more, and the people who processed more thought more liberally.

The factory setting, in other words, is not neutral. It leans.

The Three Cognitive Shortcuts That Make Conservative Ideology Feel Instinctive

To understand why, you have to grapple with what the researchers identify as the three core components of political conservatism in Western democracies: an emphasis on personal responsibility, an acceptance of hierarchy, and a preference for the status quo. These are not moral positions being attacked here — they are ideological characteristics being traced backward to their psychological roots. And the roots, it turns out, are shallow in the most literal sense. They are among the first things the brain learns to do and among the last things it gives up.

Take personal responsibility. The tendency to explain people’s behaviour by pointing to internal character rather than external circumstance — what psychologists call dispositional attribution — is the brain’s default. It happens automatically, before effortful analysis has a chance to intervene. When our mental resources are taxed, we rely on it more, not less. It is cognitively cheap and cognitively fast. The unreflective explanation for someone’s poverty is that they are insufficiently motivated. The more accurate explanation — involving structural unemployment, inherited disadvantage, the quiet cruelties of geography, race, and circumstance, the compounding effect of every system arranged against them before they were old enough to understand that systems existed — requires effort. Requires holding multiple, simultaneous causes in mind at once. Requires exactly the kind of processing that gets the first cut when the battery starts blinking.

Acceptance of hierarchy is similarly efficient. Status differences between people are discerned quickly, accepted easily, maintained often without any awareness that we are doing it. Research shows that hierarchical arrangements are perceived, remembered, and learned more readily than non-hierarchical ones. They fit the brain’s architecture like a groove worn smooth by long use. Equality, it turns out, is harder. Treating people as genuinely equal — in practice rather than in principle, in policy rather than in sentiment, in the concrete distribution of resources and opportunity rather than in the warm abstraction of our stated values — requires active cognitive construction. It requires overriding a set of fast, automatic readings of who is above whom, who defers and who dominates, what arrangements are natural and what arrangements are chosen. This is not impossible. It is simply expensive. And expense is precisely what a diminished cognition cannot afford.

Preference for the status quo is older than any of this. The familiar is processed more easily, rated more favourably, mistaken more readily for good. What has existed for a long time is assumed, on some pre-reflective level, to have earned its existence. The researchers describe this elsewhere as the “existence bias”: the mere fact that something is here, and has been here, generates a quiet cognitive endorsement. Challenging the existing arrangement — arguing that the world could be fundamentally different and better, that inherited structures are not laws of nature but choices made by people who benefited from them — is not just politically difficult. It is, at the level of basic cognition, genuinely effortful. The status quo does not merely have cultural defenders and economic beneficiaries. It has a neurological advantage.

Conservative ideology, in other words, is not only culturally transmitted or politically manufactured — though it is certainly both of those things. It is, in some significant part, what the mind produces when it is running on emergency power.

How the Attention Economy Is Engineering a Permanently Conservative Electorate

Here is where it becomes interesting, and by interesting I mean genuinely unsettling in a way that has nothing to do with partisan point-scoring.

American political life is optimized — structurally, economically, algorithmically — for cognitive depletion. The average worker is operating on less sleep, more economic anxiety, longer commutes, shorter attention spans, and more raw informational noise than at any previous point in recorded history. The attention economy has built a machine specifically engineered to harvest the mind’s resources and sell them back as engagement. Political media — of every stripe, but especially of the fragmentary, algorithmically-sorted, outrage-calibrated variety that now passes for civic discourse — does not make people think more carefully. It makes people feel more intensely while thinking less rigorously. Thirty-second video clips replace the long-form argument. The hot take colonizes the space where analysis used to live. The comment section provides the illusion of engagement without requiring any of its metabolic cost.

And into this exhausted, distracted, cognitively depleted landscape, we periodically hold elections.

What the research suggests is not that conservatives are winning because their ideas are better scrutinized, or because the working class has been uniquely hoodwinked, or because of any particular piece of political genius on the right’s part. It suggests something more structurally disquieting: that the conditions of modern life — the grinding, depleting, attention-fracturing texture of it — create a cognitive environment that, all else being equal, tilts toward conservatism by default. Not because people choose it after reflection. Because they are too tired to reflect. The right has understood this intuitively, even if not empirically, for a very long time. Keep people afraid. Keep people overworked. Keep the questions simple, the enemies concrete, the solutions familiar. The brain under duress reaches for the familiar. The familiar, culturally and historically, is the world as it is. The world as it is, distributively, is unequal — and the unequal world, it turns out, is the one that the exhausted mind most easily endorses.

The researchers noted this implication with appropriate academic restraint: the psychological foundation from which ideology is derived may not be neutral, and without the means or motive to override an initial impulse toward conservative responses, the political scales may be tipped toward the right of centre. They phrase it gently. I will not.

Why Progressive Politics Requires More Cognitive Effort — Neurologically Speaking

What the research also implies — though the scientists, being careful people, do not say it this way — is that progressive values are cognitively demanding. Not in the pejorative, intellectual-elitist way that the right has weaponized for cultural advantage for fifty years running (“elites,” “ivory tower,” “out-of-touch liberals who overthink everything”). Cognitively demanding in the literal, neurological sense: believing in structural inequality as a cause of poverty requires holding multiple variables in mind simultaneously. Supporting social welfare as a legitimate function of government requires overriding the automatic tendency to reach for personal responsibility explanations. Believing in progressive reform — that the status quo is neither inevitable nor just, that the world can be meaningfully different and better — requires actively resisting the existence bias, the brain’s quiet conviction that whatever is, has earned the right to remain.

The separate finding that liberals, in correlational research, are more likely to correct an initial person-blame attribution with a situational explanation — to catch themselves, in other words, and adjust — is not evidence of liberal intellectual superiority. That reading is both self-flattering and useless. It is evidence of a correction process. A second pass. An override of the automatic. And overrides cost something. They cost precisely the cognitive resources that modern life is structurally arranged to drain.

This is a different kind of argument for progressive politics than we are used to making. Not that progressive ideas are more compassionate (though one might argue they are). Not that the evidence supports them (though one might argue it does). But that they require more of us. That they are, in a literal sense, the product of effort — and that in a society built to exhaust us, choosing effort is itself a meaningful, difficult, and consequential act.

What This Research Does Not Say — And Why That Distinction Matters

There is a version of this argument that slides, with sufficient self-congratulation, into exactly the intellectual smugness it should be critiquing. The version that whispers, beneath its academic citations, that the study proves what you already believed about the people you already don’t like — that the other side has simply failed some test of reflective capacity, that you are here among the effortful thinkers and they are over there among the cognitively depleted, and isn’t it clarifying.

The researchers are clear, and I will be equally clear: that reading is wrong, and it misunderstands the findings almost completely.

The studies are about conditions, not character. They are about what any human mind produces when depleted — regardless of its normal ideological commitments. The interaction between blood alcohol level and preexisting political identity was not significant; as intoxication increased, liberal and conservative participants alike drifted toward conservatism. Nobody is exempt from the power-saving mode. The habitually conservative voter who has rehearsed their positions across thirty years of dinner-table arguments is not going to meaningfully shift when tired. The habitually progressive voter, armed with well-worn positions and well-worn language, is similarly resistant. But for the vast and largely unglamorous middle — the politically unschooled, the ideologically undecided, the enormous population that does its political thinking in the margins of an already over-scheduled and under-resourced life — the cognitive conditions matter enormously. These are the people whose political futures are shaped not by grand ideological persuasion but by whether they were well-rested on a Tuesday in November.

We are all, at certain moments, running on three percent. None of us gets to be smug about what the brain does when the lights go down.

Effortful Thinking as Political Resistance: The Inconvenient Conclusion

A long time ago, people decided that literacy was a political act. Not because reading was neutral — it obviously wasn’t, and the people who benefited from illiteracy in their subjects knew this perfectly well — but because access to complex thought, practiced over time and across a community, was demonstrably connected to the capacity to resist certain kinds of power. The right to read was fought for, denied, rationed, and weaponized. It was not coincidental that access to sustained education was among the first things targeted by systems that needed compliant subjects rather than questioning citizens.

We are living through a moment when a different kind of literacy is quietly eroding: the capacity for sustained, effortful, multivariable thinking about political life. Not because anyone has explicitly banned it, but because the architecture of our attention — the economy of our exhaustion, the design of our information environment, the particular genius of a media ecosystem that monetizes engagement without caring in the slightest what the engagement is for — makes it progressively harder to practice. The result is a politics conducted largely on autopilot. And autopilot, the evidence suggests, has a preferred destination.

The call to “think critically” has become such a bumper-sticker bromide that it no longer lands as anything but noise — a piece of educational theatre, familiar and therefore meaningless. But there is a more specific, less comfortable version of the request: think hard about political questions, not once but repeatedly, at full cognitive capacity, when you are rested and focused and deliberately engaged rather than scrolling in the bleak blue light of a screen at midnight. Treat effortful political thought not as an inconvenient luxury belonging to people with the time and education to afford it, but as a civic precondition — for a politics that does not simply ratify whatever the exhausted brain defaults to, for a society that chooses its arrangements rather than merely inheriting them and calling it nature.

The factory setting is not fate. But it will act like fate if we continue to mistake our depletion for our deliberation, our exhaustion for our convictions, our defaults for our choices.

The lights are dimming. The question is whether we notice.

Have any thoughts?

Share your reaction or leave a quick response — we’d love to hear what you think!