Interesting, this resonated with me. I'm a "conservative" from the view of modern liberals (strictly speaking I'm a classical liberal or libertarian- I support gay marriage, the end of war, the end of drug wars, the elimination of income taxes, hard money, open borders freedom of speech and gun rights) ... and I will openly admit that the primary motivation for many of these beliefs is a feeling of a lack of safety.
I don't like humans being abused, physically or mentally, and I feel that happens way too much in our society, and all of those positions in one way or another are attempting to end abuse.
I know many liberals feel their positions are based on similarly wanting freedom (at least when I was a liberal that was my motivation)... which is why I think the great divide is largely due to wedge issues being shoved down our throats.
I think wedge issues are perverted to be the centerpieces of modern conservatism to create an easier path to adhere out of fear. Reasoning about the issues you mentioned is much more difficult than bite-sized strawmen ("sharia law is coming to america!").
I think the issue comes down to a conflict of motivations between the politicians and the voters. The voters may desire safety, but the politicians who offer them safety have no accountability to deliver on that, nor do they tend to actually do so.
FYI, Bargh (the author of this editorial) has been pushing these sorts of priming effects for a long time. Many of these (most famously the "priming people with elderly-related words makes them walk slower" study) have not held up under subsequent replications.
Clearly this doesn't mean that the studies Bargh is describing here are similarly flawed – but he has shown a strong resistance to admitting his mistakes, and so I'm less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt here, particularly when the original studies aren't linked anywhere.
Thank you for pointing out the issues behind “priming”. The cult of believers that’s grown up around Daniel Kahneman and others (including many in the Positive Psychology) field is distressing. To Kahneman’s credit, even he recognized issues within the field back a couple of years in an online post.
Some issues that come to mind in this field are 1). Scientists who want to be famous, do TED talks, and get that sweet sweet consulting money instead of humbly contributing to the field and 2). The ethical issues all of this has when these findings are applied to things like Facebook, various apps, etc.
Also to take a page from the gender movement, what’s with the binaryness of liberal and conservative? Those were handy labels at one point, but they’ve utterly failed to catch up to the world we’re in. A lot of liberals are now arguing for a more aggressive foreign policy, while conservatives are starting to back unions (conservatives and unions tends to unite every 60 years or so around the issue of immigration). These labels are old and useless.
Why not just describe what you wanted to convey via the labels. If you're working on a specific idea, then "people who agree that..." will be more specific and useful than generic labels.
I should have said Democrats you’re correct, I used “liberals” as a tenuous shorthand. Look at Clinton’s approach to Russia vs Trump, although confusingly this is reversed in the case of China.
This is interesting, but doesn't feel like anything new, at least in retrospect. Fear is a well-worn tool in the conservative political playbook.
Where this is interesting to me is in the possibility that fear generally drives a swing toward conservative attitudes, regardless of the alignment of the politician that wields it. In that case, left-leaning political campaigns could be self-sabotaging by engaging in dirty pool or attack ads. If this dynamic described in TFA is really repeatable, you might see a campaign that doesn't attack and just cranks up the optimism to 110%. Whether that's viable in this modern world is up for debate.
There has definitely been an element of this at the core of the Obama, Sanders, and Clinton campaigns, but on the outskirts you continued to have attack ads and fearmongering over the GOP candidates (or over primary challengers).
Back in the days of high crime rates, they used to say a Democrat is a Republican who has never been mugged. Maybe they were on to something. Same way George W Bush had an approval rating over 90% in the days after 9/11.
Yes, you have huge amounts of karma, so yes, you’re right that you don’t need to care about the downvotes. That said, someone who has been here as long as you have and has accumulated as much karma as you have presumably does actually understand how to raise the level of the discussion, even on complex political topics where it’s frequently difficult to do so.
I know many who fall in the conservative end of the spectrum and who are entrepreneurs and have taken tremendous risks for extended periods. "Fear makes you conservative" is catchy though.
Could it be a difference in why the risk is there? If you choose to start a business, you choose to take on those risks and I’d imagine people feel like they’re relatively safe (business will succeed, I can always get a job if it fails, I have savings...)
With a risk of a terrorist attack, you don’t choose to be in that situation and may feel like you’re not in control and can’t do anything to feel safe.
For more on suggested influences on political position, see New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt's TED talk The Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives:
The article argues that conservative views are correlated with fear/concern over physical safety, and that increasing the feeling of physical safety moves conservative views toward more liberal views.
If true, it makes me wonder whether the balance of conservative and liberal populations confers survival value to the whole population. Surely there are times when there is more or less risk to our physical safety. Perhaps the liberals tend to be more blind to it when risk is more probable; and perhaps the conservatives overestimate it when it is less probable. Might we need the presence of both views to keep us safe when we're at risk and to loosen the reins for exploration when we're in less danger?
Yes, this is a very accepted theory. A country with only Liberals would cease to exist because they would be invaded or be unwilling to enforce any sort of borders or law. Even if no external threats exist, it will eventually succumb to the tyranny of minorities.
A country with only Conservatives would die of stagnation, forever condemned to follow tradition and existing dogma. New ideas would be quickly squelched and the country would succumb to the tyranny of majority.
The interesting thing about the United States is that you get to see almost both ends in different states. In some places, police departments are essentially unwilling to enforce the law lest they be called racist/sexist/ableist/anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim/anti-poor. In other states, an individual can not only openly carry a firearm but also stand their ground. Cross another state border and misgendering someone could constitute a hate crime. Another border over, a KKK or Neo-Nazi rally is not only occurring, but actively allowed under the idea that free speech triumphs over hate speech.
It is a fascinating place and time, and I wish I could be around in 200 years to see how the experiment evolves.
SCOTUS has routinely smacked down the notion of unlimited free speech without consequence. Hate speech is legal and generally allowed on public property as with any speech. Speech that incites violence against others is not.
So for instance it's legal in the US to say "Group X is subhuman and shouldn't be allowed to marry" but it's not oka to say "We should go murder Group X now.", especially when you have the means and motivation to do it. For instance while it is very common to make threats against the US president regardless of party, it's often seriously reviewed for obvious reasons and is not considered protected speech.
Except that it’s all relative. What you’re describing would merely be a shift, and only on some issues at that. Even within the most progressive / conservative groups, there are divisions. You would never get a place with universal acceptance of every issue. There would certainly still be conservatives and liberals, but at different places in the scale for each issue, compared to somewhere like the USA. See other countries for examples. It’s not so black and white between ‘left’ and ‘right’.
That different parties have different concerns and foucses, such that the process of mediating between their different plans leaves us better informed and prepared than listening to a single group.
The problem is that over the last 100 years, psychology has been weaponized and deployed at scale against the public, essentially drugging them on fear and anger hormones until they're incapable of rational responses.
The various factions have entered what can only be described as psychological trench warfare -- locked into positions, toxic things sprayed virtually indiscriminately, absolutely no actual progress.
It's important to note that the original paper (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2315/fu... - sadly behind a paywall, though it may or may not be available on scihub) specifically caveats the finding as only related to social progressivism, not economic:
> As predicted, making Republican participants feel physically safe
increased their liberalism on social issues, but their stance on economic
issues was unaffected. Contrary to predictions, however, Democrat
participants’ attitudes (both social and economic) were unaffected by the
prime. This is presumably because Democrats (and liberals) are chronically
lower on threat perceptions than Republicans (and conservatives). This
pattern of results mirrors that found in prior work, which has shown that
experimentally inducing threat does not affect conservatives’ responses, but
causes “liberals to think like conservatives” (Nail et al., 2009).
Still an important result and (IMO) something worth researching further (EDIT: especially given questionable replicability of the researcher's previous work, as posted by other commenters in this thread), but less impactful.
This entire study is based on the completely false and contrived idea that politics is binary. There is not some sort of line with "liberal" and "conservative" ends that people fall along. Its a false paradigm created and perpetuated by those with vested interests and/or those who have been conditioned to believe this is the case.
For example, take the most important of all issues - war. If you are against war, is that a liberal or a conservative position? Most American "liberals" hail Obama as the the great liberal champion. From Afghanistan (where his first act in office was to triple the number of troops) to Libya (where he launched countless bombings and missiles and toppled the central government) to a massive increase in robotic drone assassination globally, he was a big proponent of war. Is being against war a conservative position? A brief look at our last "conservative" president (not counting our current president who seemingly has no coherent ideology) George Bush destroyed Iraq with his illegal invasion, invaded Afghanistan and massively expanded our global military footprint.
The same question can be asked about a wide variety of the most important issues. Are you a liberal or a conservative if you oppose the police-state (constructed by "conservative" Bush and massively expanded by "liberal" Obama). If you are against central banking and a centrally controlled economy, does that make you a liberal or a conservative (the same group of supply-side economists have been running the FED, the SEC, and every other lever of the economy since the 90s, throughout all administrations - including currently with "liberal" Gary Cohen running things for Trump).
The simple truth is that there is no ideological definition, because the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have virtually no meaning in modern society, and simply morph into matching whatever positions are currently held by Democrats and Republicans. Pretending that ideology can be pegged along this binary Democrat/Republican paradigm is very useful if you are a Democrat or a Republican, but not useful at all if you seek to understand the human pysche.
Interesting experiment, though part of me wonders how different countries and their general political leanings are affected by this. Why are both American political parties more right leaning than their European counterparts? Would such an experiment have different results based on where/what culture it was being held in?
And what about the fact politics has multiple dimensions to it? What makes someone more libertarian or authoritarian?
One difference might be that continental US have not been invaded in modern times. Within living memory, most of Europe was invaded and occupied by foreign powers. This may be part of the reason that nationalism and pride in the military etc (perhaps until recently?) has been much less prominent in northern Europe.
I don't see a clear mapping of fear to either side in particular, more that they fear different things. For instance, a liberal might be more fearful of guns, while a conservative might be more fearful of foreigners. A liberal might be more fearful of economic hardship, while a conservative might be more fearful of crime.
The article said the "study" was specific to physical threats versus other threats. Conservatives were more likely to sway towards liberal positions if their physical safety was secure.
> the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives
This[1] seems to be the source study on 90 "young adults"
Seems like( not sure if same name or what) this paper is authored by british actor colin firth who seems to have no actual research qualifications on his wikipedia page.
Disclaimer: it's hard to take any effect seriously anymore until it's survived meta-analysis. Having said that, I'll bite...
1. Some of the most conservative people I've known were my sports teammates (football, baseball, and basketball). Due to their above average physical abilities and training, these were also the people least at risk for being bullied, physically harmed, etc. Seems at odds with the study's effect right?
2. I'm quite liberal in my political and social ideals and yet I'm deeply skeptical and cynical when it comes to trusting other people, groups, nations, etc. to safeguard my best interest, i.e., I feel "conservative" in many ways too. Bernie Sanders is sort of my spirit animal. How should the study's effect play out for people like me?
49 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 45.0 ms ] threadI don't like humans being abused, physically or mentally, and I feel that happens way too much in our society, and all of those positions in one way or another are attempting to end abuse.
I know many liberals feel their positions are based on similarly wanting freedom (at least when I was a liberal that was my motivation)... which is why I think the great divide is largely due to wedge issues being shoved down our throats.
I think the issue comes down to a conflict of motivations between the politicians and the voters. The voters may desire safety, but the politicians who offer them safety have no accountability to deliver on that, nor do they tend to actually do so.
Clearly this doesn't mean that the studies Bargh is describing here are similarly flawed – but he has shown a strong resistance to admitting his mistakes, and so I'm less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt here, particularly when the original studies aren't linked anywhere.
Further reading:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/1...
http://andrewgelman.com/2016/02/12/priming-effects-replicate...
http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-he...
Some issues that come to mind in this field are 1). Scientists who want to be famous, do TED talks, and get that sweet sweet consulting money instead of humbly contributing to the field and 2). The ethical issues all of this has when these findings are applied to things like Facebook, various apps, etc.
Also to take a page from the gender movement, what’s with the binaryness of liberal and conservative? Those were handy labels at one point, but they’ve utterly failed to catch up to the world we’re in. A lot of liberals are now arguing for a more aggressive foreign policy, while conservatives are starting to back unions (conservatives and unions tends to unite every 60 years or so around the issue of immigration). These labels are old and useless.
Would you please provide your evidence for this? Or do you mean a lot of Democrats are arguing for a more aggressive foreign policy?
Where this is interesting to me is in the possibility that fear generally drives a swing toward conservative attitudes, regardless of the alignment of the politician that wields it. In that case, left-leaning political campaigns could be self-sabotaging by engaging in dirty pool or attack ads. If this dynamic described in TFA is really repeatable, you might see a campaign that doesn't attack and just cranks up the optimism to 110%. Whether that's viable in this modern world is up for debate.
There has definitely been an element of this at the core of the Obama, Sanders, and Clinton campaigns, but on the outskirts you continued to have attack ads and fearmongering over the GOP candidates (or over primary challengers).
With a risk of a terrorist attack, you don’t choose to be in that situation and may feel like you’re not in control and can’t do anything to feel safe.
These are all prime risk factors for studies that turn out to impossible to replicate.
Doesn't mean this has to be one of those, but I wouldn't change any major life philosophy until this has been confirmed a few times.
https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
That's not what the article is saying at all.
That's very succinct.
If true, it makes me wonder whether the balance of conservative and liberal populations confers survival value to the whole population. Surely there are times when there is more or less risk to our physical safety. Perhaps the liberals tend to be more blind to it when risk is more probable; and perhaps the conservatives overestimate it when it is less probable. Might we need the presence of both views to keep us safe when we're at risk and to loosen the reins for exploration when we're in less danger?
A country with only Conservatives would die of stagnation, forever condemned to follow tradition and existing dogma. New ideas would be quickly squelched and the country would succumb to the tyranny of majority.
The interesting thing about the United States is that you get to see almost both ends in different states. In some places, police departments are essentially unwilling to enforce the law lest they be called racist/sexist/ableist/anti-immigrant/anti-Muslim/anti-poor. In other states, an individual can not only openly carry a firearm but also stand their ground. Cross another state border and misgendering someone could constitute a hate crime. Another border over, a KKK or Neo-Nazi rally is not only occurring, but actively allowed under the idea that free speech triumphs over hate speech.
It is a fascinating place and time, and I wish I could be around in 200 years to see how the experiment evolves.
I thought that as long as it was speech, it was allowed, period. Seem to remember something about a first amendment...
So for instance it's legal in the US to say "Group X is subhuman and shouldn't be allowed to marry" but it's not oka to say "We should go murder Group X now.", especially when you have the means and motivation to do it. For instance while it is very common to make threats against the US president regardless of party, it's often seriously reviewed for obvious reasons and is not considered protected speech.
That different parties have different concerns and foucses, such that the process of mediating between their different plans leaves us better informed and prepared than listening to a single group.
The problem is that over the last 100 years, psychology has been weaponized and deployed at scale against the public, essentially drugging them on fear and anger hormones until they're incapable of rational responses.
The various factions have entered what can only be described as psychological trench warfare -- locked into positions, toxic things sprayed virtually indiscriminately, absolutely no actual progress.
No one is quite sure what to do to fix this.
> As predicted, making Republican participants feel physically safe increased their liberalism on social issues, but their stance on economic issues was unaffected. Contrary to predictions, however, Democrat participants’ attitudes (both social and economic) were unaffected by the prime. This is presumably because Democrats (and liberals) are chronically lower on threat perceptions than Republicans (and conservatives). This pattern of results mirrors that found in prior work, which has shown that experimentally inducing threat does not affect conservatives’ responses, but causes “liberals to think like conservatives” (Nail et al., 2009).
Still an important result and (IMO) something worth researching further (EDIT: especially given questionable replicability of the researcher's previous work, as posted by other commenters in this thread), but less impactful.
For example, take the most important of all issues - war. If you are against war, is that a liberal or a conservative position? Most American "liberals" hail Obama as the the great liberal champion. From Afghanistan (where his first act in office was to triple the number of troops) to Libya (where he launched countless bombings and missiles and toppled the central government) to a massive increase in robotic drone assassination globally, he was a big proponent of war. Is being against war a conservative position? A brief look at our last "conservative" president (not counting our current president who seemingly has no coherent ideology) George Bush destroyed Iraq with his illegal invasion, invaded Afghanistan and massively expanded our global military footprint.
The same question can be asked about a wide variety of the most important issues. Are you a liberal or a conservative if you oppose the police-state (constructed by "conservative" Bush and massively expanded by "liberal" Obama). If you are against central banking and a centrally controlled economy, does that make you a liberal or a conservative (the same group of supply-side economists have been running the FED, the SEC, and every other lever of the economy since the 90s, throughout all administrations - including currently with "liberal" Gary Cohen running things for Trump).
The simple truth is that there is no ideological definition, because the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have virtually no meaning in modern society, and simply morph into matching whatever positions are currently held by Democrats and Republicans. Pretending that ideology can be pegged along this binary Democrat/Republican paradigm is very useful if you are a Democrat or a Republican, but not useful at all if you seek to understand the human pysche.
And what about the fact politics has multiple dimensions to it? What makes someone more libertarian or authoritarian?
These are just generalizations, of course.
When people get their "Fuck you money" (subjectively enough money that they feel safe and can keep their lifestyle and status) they turn more liberal.
This[1] seems to be the source study on 90 "young adults"
Seems like( not sure if same name or what) this paper is authored by british actor colin firth who seems to have no actual research qualifications on his wikipedia page.
These people clearly have an agenda. Gross!!
1. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(11)0....
1. Some of the most conservative people I've known were my sports teammates (football, baseball, and basketball). Due to their above average physical abilities and training, these were also the people least at risk for being bullied, physically harmed, etc. Seems at odds with the study's effect right?
2. I'm quite liberal in my political and social ideals and yet I'm deeply skeptical and cynical when it comes to trusting other people, groups, nations, etc. to safeguard my best interest, i.e., I feel "conservative" in many ways too. Bernie Sanders is sort of my spirit animal. How should the study's effect play out for people like me?