Conservatives/Liberals Hardwired Differently

[Chad]

http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2014/ ... ivity-bias

[jennypenny]

Different research about that topic ... viewtopic.php?f=13&t=4994&p=76035&hilit ... ind#p76035

[Chad]

If forgot that thread was there.

[jennypenny]

I find the current trend to try and find 'scientific' reasons for why people are liberal and conservative a little unsettling. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing.

[Chad]

I don't know if it's a good or bad thing, but it always seemed rather obvious to me.

Another difference between liberals and conservatives is the blue dress shirt with the white collar. Every damn time I see a guy wearing one on Bloomberg or CNBC he ends up being very conservative. I know this is unscientific, but I have yet to stumble across a liberal commentator wearing the shirt. I'm sure he exists, but it's kind of weird.

[workathome]

It's a little disconcerting because it suggest the human dimension of free will/decision-making is rather mechanistic and perhaps could be "fixed" with the right tuning. Maybe liberals/conservatives just need to start taking antidepressant type drugs to fix the chemical imbalance, etc.

Especially applies if you accept existential relativism. If there is no truth, maybe we just need to make people think what we think we should think...

[simplex]

Don't be concerned about giving someone drugs to change their free will. Facebook just ran some experiments how people react to censored news. As many people are quite naive when following news and often seek confirmation of what they already know, they are quite easily influenced. When you have a universal platform like facebook, you can influence nearly everyone, something difficult with tv or newspapers, because they exist in conservative / liberal flavour (and conservatives / liberals choose their preferred flavour).

[Chad]

I was a Republican/conservative until about 20-23 years old and now I'm rather liberal, but I wouldn't call myself a Democrat like I called myself a Republican then. I wonder how that fits in with this study.

[Tyler9000]

I find the current trend to try and find 'scientific' reasons for why people are liberal and conservative a little unsettling. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing.

It strikes me as political eugenics. Like the last round, it won't end well.

[jacob]

It's not good or bad. It simply is. The problem is that it significantly challenges the way we've set up our current political institutions(*) We'd possibly need new ones to deal with this knowledge. On the other hand, look how Barnay's findings in terms of election ads and now facebook datamining is used to manipulate political opinion. It kinda makes a farce out of the whole process, doesn't it? Then again, how is that different from us supposed arrogant intellectual elites doing the same thing by posting clever sounding tirades or politicians using every rhetorical trick in the book known since ... the ancient Greeks?

Two questions:

Does it matter as long as people still believe in the political process?
What happens if they stop?

(*) Or does it. If we know that 59% of the population is this way and 41% is the other way, might it be possible to compute an ideal society. The begs the next question: What if our initial assumptions about the importance of the neurochemistry is wrong? Representative democracy has been time-tested for about 200 years (7 generations of leaders) which isn't much. This stuff is new...

[jennypenny]

I find the current trend to try and find 'scientific' reasons for why people are liberal and conservative a little unsettling. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing.

It strikes me as political eugenics. Like the last round, it won't end well.

I agree.

It reminds me of when people try to cure things like introvertedness. I think learning about and understanding the scientific basis for different traits is a good thing. I just worry about it being used against people. Or misunderstood.

[Chad]

I find the current trend to try and find 'scientific' reasons for why people are liberal and conservative a little unsettling. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing.

It strikes me as political eugenics. Like the last round, it won't end well.

I agree.

It reminds me of when people try to cure things like introvertedness. I think learning about and understanding the scientific basis for different traits is a good thing. I just worry about it being used against people. Or misunderstood.

How is attaining information eugenics? No one is suggesting either conservatives or liberals be sterilized or some such nonsense.

[Tyler9000]

How is attaining information eugenics? No one is suggesting either conservatives or liberals be sterilized or some such nonsense.

The tone from the original article is not exactly one of pure information gathering. It's a left-wing article talking about the '"science" (validated by consensus of unnamed "scholars" including "political scientists" and "political psychologists") of conservatives behaving literally like cavemen. I'd find it a lot more interesting if they included discussion of similar research on liberal thinking. But they didn't.

True, there are no calls for sterilization. But INTJs who can coldly appreciate the search for knowledge would be wise to recognize when science is being cited merely as a veil for political bias and propaganda.

[GandK]

This discussion reminds me of an article I read recently in Pacific Standard:

First-Born Children Are More Likely to Grow Up Into Conservatives

[Chad]

This discussion reminds me of an article I read recently in Pacific Standard:

First-Born Children Are More Likely to Grow Up Into Conservatives

As a first born, that doesn't hold up.

[Chad]

How is attaining information eugenics? No one is suggesting either conservatives or liberals be sterilized or some such nonsense.

The tone from the original article is not exactly one of pure information gathering. It's a left-wing article talking about the '"science" (validated by consensus of unnamed "scholars" including "political scientists" and "political psychologists") of conservatives behaving literally like cavemen. I'd find it a lot more interesting if they included discussion of similar research on liberal thinking. But they didn't.

True, there are no calls for sterilization. But INTJs who can coldly appreciate the search for knowledge would be wise to recognize when science is being cited merely as a veil for political bias and propaganda.

A serious question. Have conservatives ever been true victims of liberals? I'm not talking about social ostracization and pressue like what occurs in academia, not that it's great. I'm asking has something like the Spanish Inquisition been done to conservatives by liberals.

[jennypenny]

A serious question. Have conservatives ever been true victims of liberals? I'm not talking about social ostracization and pressue like what occurs in academia, not that it's great. I'm asking has something like the Spanish Inquisition been done to conservatives by liberals.

Any communist uprising?

[jacob]

How is attaining information eugenics? No one is suggesting either conservatives or liberals be sterilized or some such nonsense.

Not literal eugenics, more like political eugenics as in "that's your neurochemistry talking, so we're going to weigh it accordingly". Right now, we, that is, our political institutions still work under the illusion that all political opinions are informed by free will.

[Chad]

A serious question. Have conservatives ever been true victims of liberals? I'm not talking about social ostracization and pressue like what occurs in academia, not that it's great. I'm asking has something like the Spanish Inquisition been done to conservatives by liberals.

Any communist uprising?

I thought of that, except after the revolution it always seems to be conservatives that have power. Stalin was far from a liberal.

[jennypenny]

I would argue that any dictator like Stalin eventually gets rid of all of the intellectuals. A liberal will get rid of the conservatives to attain power, and then gets rid of the remaining intellectuals. A conservative starts with the liberals, but eventually gets to the conservative ones, too.

Academia can be militant, Chad. It's a shame because it fuels the suspicion of the 'intellectual elite' that jacob mentioned in the other thread.