This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/inquiring-minds-john-hibbing-physiology-ideology

by fixedd • 12 years ago

48 77 12 years ago

m.motherjones.com

dghf• 12 years ago

This sounds a lot like Robert Shea's & Robert Anton Wilson's division of humanity into neophiles and neophobes in the Illuminatus! trilogy.

a8da6b0c91d2• 12 years ago

Some other features that can help classify a liberal:

Weaker upper and lower body strength. Weaker immune system, lower T-cell counts. Weaker ability to detect odors and tastes like burning smoke and acrid compounds.

jksmith2• 12 years ago

Not to mention excellent fashion sense. Conservatives are so Carharrt.

jksmith2• 12 years ago

Finally, I've been taken seriously on this board.

iamthepieman• 12 years ago

http://www.businessinsider.com/study-strength-politics-conse...

thrillgore• 12 years ago

I'm wondering if you're being legitimate and informative, or just trolling.

MrBuddyCasino• 12 years ago

Sounds interesting - but please, provide sources for such bold statements or expect to get downvoted.

peterkelly2• 12 years ago

But what if I take the results this machine gives, and then immediately start supporting candidates at the opposite end of the spectrum?

sunir• 12 years ago

I don't claim this view of the world is true, but the analogies they might make is that would be same as

1. Learning to use your righthand dominantly as a lefthanded person. 2. Pretending you were heteronormal when you were actually queer

Both examples have been commonly seen in the world.

That is you can use your executive function to override (m)any of your intrinsic personality traits, but physiologically you remain either gay, lefthanded, or liberal/conservative.

tormeh• 12 years ago

Um... Then you'll vote for a party you don't agree with. Your point was?

peterkelly2• 12 years ago

It was an attempted joke referencing the halting problem. Never mind ;)

caidan• 12 years ago

That picture at the top is horrifying. Looks like she is undergoing the Ludovico technique http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjAxODIxMDQwNl5BMl5Ban...

stackcollision• 12 years ago

How could they do that to Ludwig Van!?

bradjohnson• 12 years ago

Both pictures are pretty horrifying

patrickmay3• 12 years ago

Left/right or liberal/conservative are false dichotomies, at least in U.S. politics. Both major parties are willing to use coercion to achieve their goals, and they don't even differ very much in what those goals are.

The real divide is between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. It would be interesting to see a similar study (or the results of this study re-analyzed) with liberal/conservative replaced with authoritarian/live-and-let-live.

aut0mat0n1c• 12 years ago

Couldn't agree more. The classic 'false dilemma'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

eli_gottlieb• 12 years ago

No, the real divide is not between libertarians and "statists". You are simply projecting a complicated, multidimensional space down onto a single axis and then twisting it to make your ideology sound right-by-default.

For one thing, property is theft ;-).

ChrisNorstrom• 12 years ago

I disagree. I find that Conservatives generally "conserve" a society's traditions, culture, religion, and way of life while Liberals "liberate" a society from it's traditions, culture, religion, and way of life. When taken to an extreme Conservatives can accidentally stagnate a society by holding it back from ideas that further it (see: conservative southern states, Islamic extremist countries), while Liberals can accidentally destroy a society altogether by giving it away in pieces (see: Israel, liberal immigration policies, Islamification of Europe).

They're both extremes on a spectrum. One prevents new ideas that a society wants, the other forces new ideas that a society isn't ready for.

humanrebar4• 12 years ago

What you describe is a Burkean brand of conservatism, though there are others.

If conservatism was purely about defending the status quo, it would be liberal to enact a flat tax, restructure school funding to work through vouchers, or replace social security with private savings accounts.

There are many other reasons that people are conservative or liberal. I would argue that the most prevalent are various flavors of identity politics.

rayiner2• 12 years ago

Your point is internally inconsistent. Authoritarianism is one dimension along which people can differ, but empirically, most people are more or less authoritarian. It's a point which you essentially concede by noting that both parties in the U.S. are authoritarian (and so are most political parties throughout the developed world). So how can you justify calling authoritarianism versus anti-authoritarianism the "real divide" when it only separates a small minority from the great majority?

patrickmay3• 12 years ago

Please see my comment above. My perception is that the two major parties are controlled by authoritarians, leaving anti-authoritarians no good alternative. They can either vote with the religious fundies or vote with the Nanny statists. By the nature of the system, anti-authoritarians are disenfranchised.

aptwebapps2• 12 years ago

The difference between left and right may seem less to you than that between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians but what about the numbers? If the former has a roughly 50/50 split in the general population and the latter is 90/10 (I have no idea), then it's not surprising that the former is considered more important.

patrickmay3• 12 years ago

True, real numbers would be helpful.

My perception is that, in the U.S., the fiscal conservatives would be more logically aligned with the social liberals since the freedom to live as one wishes valued by the latter is more consistent with the small government ideals of the former. It seems that whether a person with such views ends up in the Republican or Democrat camp depends on if they are better able to hold their nose in the face of the odious social policies of the religious right or the equally odious and equally authoritarian fiscal and social policies of the Nanny statists.

Regardless of the reasons for the current situation, the study being discussed suffers from its poor choice of categories. As an example, consider abortion rights (a topic I chose to avoid politicizing the discussion further ;-). I fully support a woman's right to choose and for abortion to be safe and available. I've donated to Planned Parenthood in the past. However, I also think it is reprehensible to force people who believe otherwise to pay for such procedures. Am I a liberal or a conservative?

wreegab2• 12 years ago

Of interest I suppose in the context of your comment. Bob Altemeyer's - The Authoritarians: https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

wreegab2• 12 years ago

I questioned that a population can be categorized in only two sets. It's unfortunate that a lot of people buy into this, and end up trying to be as faithful to one of the label as they can, just like a fan will dedicate himself/herself to a specific sport team for no good reason really than just picking a side and sticking to it.

gnaritas9• 12 years ago

I questioned that a population can be categorized in only two sets.

Bald, Not Bald. Q.E.D.

jerf• 12 years ago

More generally, it seems the more we look into the seemingly-simple emotion of disgust, the more complicated it gets. While I hate to just drop a Wikipedia page in a comment link, it seems to be a pretty good starting point on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgust It's fascinating stuff.

The other nice thing about this article is that it seems to refrain from judgments, which is a problem this general field has had. First, study scientifically. Then, if necessary, judge unscientifically as needed. (No sarcasm. A judgment here is necessarily by definition unscientific, but that doesn't make it wrong... just unscientific, and don't forget it. Unscientific is not a synonym of "wrong" any more than scientific is a synonym of "correct".) However I think that when you study the differences carefully, and with an open mind, it becomes much more difficult to say that one side is right and one side is wrong on the question of "the proper level of disgust". Disgust is a blunt instrument, like any other emotional reaction, and turning something so broad and vague "up" or "down" inevitably results in errors either way. This is especially true when you remember that not all humans live in the same situations... for a middle-class American living in a safe neighborhood, excessive paranoia about out-groups is probably unreasonable, but for someone living in a tribal area, insufficient paranoia about out-groups may very well get you killed.

a8da6b0c91d2• 12 years ago

Disgust is only one of the relevant psychometric dimensions in Jonathan Haidt's model, which is where this bit comes from. In a nutshell, Haidt found that liberals reason about moral problems almost exclusively through the lens of fairness, while Consevatives use a larger "moral toolbox."

http://www.moralfoundations.org/

One of the more interesting observations out of Haidt's work is that conservatives can reliably articulate the ideas of liberals as a liberal would. But the inverse is not true. Liberals have difficulty emulating perspectives that include concepts such as the divine.

saraid216• 12 years ago

One of the more interesting observations out of Haidt's work is that conservatives can reliably articulate the ideas of liberals as a liberal would. But the inverse is not true. Liberals have difficulty emulating perspectives that include concepts such as the divine.

In the interest of not setting off a flame war, I'm going to point out that this phenomenon can be explained in at least two directions (the obvious one and the reverse) and leave it at that.

gnaritas9• 12 years ago

Liberals have difficulty emulating perspectives that include concepts such as the divine.

I would hope so, since divine anything is simply ignorant and doesn't belong in any moral toolbox.

rubyn00bie• 12 years ago

I always thought it was pretty easy to tell being human.... One's an asshole, and one's not! zing

Update after downvotes: apparently no one reading this has a sense of humor, liberal or conservative.

unclebucknasty3• 12 years ago

apparently no one reading this has a sense of humor

Of course, the other possibility is that they do.

vilhelm_s• 12 years ago

The Last Psychiatrist wrote some interesting commentary about the Science paper that this article mentions. "[T]he actual finding isn't that conservatives are fearful; it's that liberals seem not to exhibit much response to scary photos. But it's actually a little worse than that." (http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/09/either_conservatives_...)

gknoy• 12 years ago

Note for the squeamish: There's a photo of one of the fear-inducing (kinda) pictures near the bottom of the blog post. I would like to have some brain bleach for the memory of that picture.

Logically, it shouldn't be scary. I'm pretty sure it's photoshopped... and yet part of me wants to squirm away from even looking at it in the peripheral vision. Ew ew ew.

JonnieCache• 12 years ago

By not describing the content of the picture you're just encouraging people to go and look at it :)

zhemao• 12 years ago

Maybe I'm just a psychopath, but after reading your comment, reading through the article, and getting to the picture at the end, I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it. It just looks incredibly fake, like something you'd see in a terrible 50s monster movie.

ScottBurson2• 12 years ago

Brain bleach, really? I think the spider is quite beautiful.

I must be a psychopath :-)

satellitecat4• 12 years ago

On it being "worse" and liberals being unafraid in the way psychopaths are -- it could be that they are unafraid of things that can't hurt them, like the "scary" staged photo in the article. Maybe if they used realistic pictures, they'd get an actual response. And of course a picture of something scary and something actually scary is quite different.

Makes me remember when I found a video online of a guy getting attacked by a lionesss. At first I thought it was fake or that the guy would get away, but when I realized it was real and saw him getting more and more tired of fighting the lioness off, I started feeling sick.

So a different takeaway could be that conservative-types are scared of imagined or suggested dangers or that liberal-types are better at discriminating between real and fake dangers. So I think it's more about the way the imaginations of the people work.

humanrebar4• 12 years ago

The thesis of the blog post wasn't that liberals are psychopaths. It was this:

"You can blame the general news media for being lazy and/or retarded. But the authors of the study are directly to blame for purposely skewing the results to the conclusion that conservatives are cowards.... When you write something, you must be aware of how people will read it. Since it is very obvious how this study will be taken, it is the authors' responsibility to prevent it from happening. Notice that they did not, anywhere write the equally plausible possibility that liberals inexplicably exhibit much less fear than would be expected"

ScottBurson2• 12 years ago

This is a very interesting comment. I'd love to see a followup study addressing the hypothesis that "liberals" place more emphasis on, and are better at, discriminating true threats from the appearance of threat than "conservatives".

Such improved discrimination wouldn't necessarily have been evolutionarily adaptive, it seems to me. First, there's the risk of false negatives: you might incorrectly dismiss a real threat. Second, such discrimination takes time that might be better spent fleeing (or whatever).

I can see that the optimal strategy might be to maintain a dynamic balance in the population between "discriminators" and "reactors". "Reactors" might get killed less often, but without a certain number of "discriminators" in the population, the tribe (or whatever) would fail to maximize its utilization of the environment and thus not compete well against neighboring tribes.

unclebucknasty3• 12 years ago

it could be that they are unafraid of things that can't hurt them

This was exactly my thought. It is actually unreasonable to be afraid of a photograph.

I would imagine that all people are subject to unreasonable levels of fear in various situations, but this does seem to show that conservatives may experience higher levels of unreasonable fear.

thedufer• 12 years ago

That quote doesn't seem right, either. The population is something like 50/50 liberal/conservative, right? So compared to the average person, it seems that this indicates both that conservatives are more fearful than average and that liberals are closer to a particular form of psychopathy. Choosing either one of these and ignoring the other shows a pretty clear bias.

satellitecat4• 12 years ago

I don't think there's a 50/50 split. It's just that with a 2-party system like in the US, it's natural that they will roughly split the vote.

josephschmoe• 12 years ago

The image felt very fake to me. If a spider were on my face, I would freak out internally, stand very still and slowly put my hand next to it to give it a way off so it doesn't bite my face.

If a spider landed on my face, I'd be flailing my arms back and forth trying to swat the spider away freaking out.

The neutral response is the proper one - if I saw someone screaming and standing still with a spider on their face, I would assume it is an actor.

What do I conclude from this study? Liberals spend much more time on the internet because they are more tech savvy as a community, and therefore have seen lots of "scary" pictures.

thesimpsons10223• 12 years ago

seriously. I didn't even react to that picture. it didn't scare me in the least, the spider seemed too fake. if I saw this spider in real life id be scared. now I know my mother who is very conservative would have freaked out if she saw that picture.

JoshTriplett3• 12 years ago

It's dangerous to take a result like this and speculate on reasons, without developing proof that supports those reasons. The research mentioned in the article measured one particular trait which seems to be correlated with expressed political views, and provides the evidence for that (eye-tracking data); however, the article goes on to propose reasons for that trait and correlation, without justifying the reasons with any evidence. Perhaps the underlying research gives reasons, or perhaps it doesn't, but either way the article seems irresponsible to report those reasons without supporting evidence.

This article also assumes a single axis, single-variable political spectrum from liberal to conservative, which is an absurdly simplistic view.

The one thing that does seem notable in the article is the conclusion, though. Put that together with Duverger's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law), which explains why we have two political parties in the first place, and perhaps the article's research explains where we got the rather odd party division we have, rather than a more useful one. I dislike the conclusion that this might make compromise easier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation), but perhaps if we can recognize the current liberal/conservative distinction (as expressed in politics today) as a difference that has little to do with useful political views, perhaps we can talk less about the hot-button items that currently make up news and campaigns, and start getting issues that matter into the political spectrum.

gboudrias• 12 years ago

From the outside, it has looked for a long time as if avoiding issues that matter is the whole point of your political system. No offense, we (Canada) are not much better, but your problems in that regard seem more dire.

humanrebar4• 12 years ago

Just because there isn't a consensus doesn't mean that issues are avoided.

Many questions do not have answers that two-thirds of the country can agree on. For small questions, perhaps that's harmful. However, for large questions, it's definitely a feature of the system that the electorate is forced to deliberate until wider agreement is reached.

Are there issue in particular that you think are important yet avoided?

JoshTriplett3• 12 years ago

From the outside, it has looked for a long time as if avoiding issues that matter is the whole point of your political system. No offense,

None taken; I find that a problem myself. Though I'd characterize it less as "avoiding issues that matter" and more as "over-inflating issues that don't, crowding out everything else".

When I look at politics elsewhere, though, I tend to see the same issue, just shifted elsewhere on the spectrum; I don't think this problem is unique to US politics.

gadders• 12 years ago

That article wears its heart on its sleeve a bit, doesn't it? "This is why Conservatives believe all those weird things!"

luma• 12 years ago

The article is from Mother Jones, and they don't really attempt to hide their own agenda as a rule.

nateabele• 12 years ago

As with most other articles about politics, it's easy to miss the forest through the trees. There's one most important, indisputable point: that we can generally be divided into two groups politically, and those divisions go well beyond opinions developed over time.

How you classify these groups (liberal vs. conservative, individualist vs. collectivist, voluntaryist vs. statist -- I tend to use the language of i vs. c) doesn't really matter. The two groups exist and are verifiably distinguishable.

The important part (and I say this as a libertarian) is that both groups are necessary to the health of a functioning society. It is both useful and necessary for (I'm generalizing here) one group to focus on individualistic pursuits while the other focuses on the well-being of the collective at large -- and we probably would have a healthy, functioning society if each side could appreciate the other's differences of perspective.

Instead, both sides are mutually antagonistic, and exploited by the political class, which almost always acts in its own exclusive interest.

unclebucknasty3• 12 years ago

we probably would have a healthy, functioning society if each side could appreciate the other's differences of perspective.

But, what this article/study suggests is that those differences are hard-wired and almost visceral. This would explain why it is so difficult for each side to appreciate the other's perspective, as well as why it's so easy for the political class to exploit both.

This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

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