9 ms·

Yale researchers conducted an experiment to turn conservatives into liberals

71 points by daegloe 9y ago

rothbardrand 9y ago
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.
- beager 9y ago
  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.
moyix 9y ago
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. Further reading: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/18/primed-by-expectations-why-a-classic-psychology-experiment-isnt-what-it-seemed/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/1... http://andrewgelman.com/2016/02/12/priming-effects-replicate-just-fine-thanks/ http://andrewgelman.com/2016/02/12/priming-effects-replicate... http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/ http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-he...
- Top19 9y ago
  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.
  - wocka 9y ago
    > A lot of liberals are now arguing for a more aggressive foreign policy... Would you please provide your evidence for this? Or do you mean a lot of Democrats are arguing for a more aggressive foreign policy?
    - jeffdavis 9y ago
      If labels are failing, it's kind of hard to provide evidence that requires labeling people.
      - viraptor 9y ago
        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.
    - Top19 9y ago
      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.
moomin 9y ago
As always with these announcements from academia, I’ll remind people that it’s going to take years before we can industrialise this process.
beager 9y ago
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).
tootie 9y ago
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.
- jostmey 9y ago
  A republican was someone who was the victim of a crime. A domocrate was someone falsely accused of a crime.
  - yodon 9y ago
    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.
- ianai 9y ago
  The rally behind Bush after 9/11 was apolitical.
throwanem 9y ago
So the genie just grants me invulnerability to physical harm? What about everyone else?
Proven 9y ago
Sociopathic socialist scum...
mmaunder 9y ago
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.
- jchw 9y ago
  Even if the article is bunk, I think you're conflating different kinds of fear. You can be afraid of the dark without being afraid of heights.
- ancarda 9y ago
  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.
BurningFrog 9y ago
This is a single, non replicated experiment in human psychology, with a viral result. 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.
andrewl 9y ago
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: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind
divs1210 9y ago
This bears an uncanny resemblance to the "Great Operation" from We[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
standupstandup 9y ago
If conservatives are people who are dominated by physical fear, why are so many American soldiers conservatives?
- novia 9y ago
  Can American soldiers imagine that they are completely safe from all physical threats?
- charonn0 9y ago
  > If conservatives are people who are dominated by physical fear That's not what the article is saying at all.
- gamechangr 9y ago
  Hard to disagree with that...even though I want to :) That's very succinct.
quizotic 9y ago
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?
- tenpies 9y ago
  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.
  - Fjolsvith 9y ago
    - actively allowed under the idea that free speech triumphs over hate speech I thought that as long as it was speech, it was allowed, period. Seem to remember something about a first amendment...
    - 9y ago
btown 9y ago
It's important to note that the original paper (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2315/full 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.
StanislavPetrov 9y ago
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.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
localastronaut 9y ago
For some reason “60 out of every 1,000” sounds a lot worse than “6 out of 100”
- chesimov 9y ago
  Would it be correct to say that '60 out of 1000' has more predictive power than '6 out of 100'?
CM30 9y ago
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?
- chesimov 9y ago
  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.
dominotw 9y ago
Other way round would have had equally interesting outcomes. Wonder why they choose this particular direction.
jeffdavis 9y ago
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. These are just generalizations, of course.
- cannonedhamster 9y ago
  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.
nabla9 9y ago
Similar observation has been made in the Wall Street. 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.
dominotw 9y ago
> 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. These people clearly have an agenda. Gross!! 1. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(11)0.. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(11)0....
kapauldo 9y ago
What did they do? Force them to read?
bayonetz 9y ago
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?
bmh_ca 9y ago
Make them judges. Almost all judges become less conservative and more liberal over time on the bench.

71 points by daegloe 9y ago

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.

beager 9y ago
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.

moyix 9y ago

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. Further reading: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/18/primed-by-expectations-why-a-classic-psychology-experiment-isnt-what-it-seemed/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/01/1... http://andrewgelman.com/2016/02/12/priming-effects-replicate-just-fine-thanks/ http://andrewgelman.com/2016/02/12/priming-effects-replicate... http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/ http://andrewgelman.com/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-he...

Top19 9y ago
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.
- wocka 9y ago
  > A lot of liberals are now arguing for a more aggressive foreign policy... Would you please provide your evidence for this? Or do you mean a lot of Democrats are arguing for a more aggressive foreign policy?
  - jeffdavis 9y ago
    If labels are failing, it's kind of hard to provide evidence that requires labeling people.
    - viraptor 9y ago
      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.
  - Top19 9y ago
    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.

moomin 9y ago

As always with these announcements from academia, I’ll remind people that it’s going to take years before we can industrialise this process.

beager 9y ago

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).

tootie 9y ago

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.

jostmey 9y ago
A republican was someone who was the victim of a crime. A domocrate was someone falsely accused of a crime.
- yodon 9y ago
  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.
ianai 9y ago
The rally behind Bush after 9/11 was apolitical.

throwanem 9y ago

So the genie just grants me invulnerability to physical harm? What about everyone else?

Proven 9y ago

Sociopathic socialist scum...

mmaunder 9y ago

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.

jchw 9y ago
Even if the article is bunk, I think you're conflating different kinds of fear. You can be afraid of the dark without being afraid of heights.
ancarda 9y ago
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.

BurningFrog 9y ago

This is a single, non replicated experiment in human psychology, with a viral result. 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.

andrewl 9y ago

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: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind

divs1210 9y ago

This bears an uncanny resemblance to the "Great Operation" from We[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)

standupstandup 9y ago

If conservatives are people who are dominated by physical fear, why are so many American soldiers conservatives?

novia 9y ago
Can American soldiers imagine that they are completely safe from all physical threats?
charonn0 9y ago
> If conservatives are people who are dominated by physical fear That's not what the article is saying at all.
gamechangr 9y ago
Hard to disagree with that...even though I want to :) That's very succinct.

quizotic 9y ago

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?

tenpies 9y ago
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.
- Fjolsvith 9y ago
  - actively allowed under the idea that free speech triumphs over hate speech I thought that as long as it was speech, it was allowed, period. Seem to remember something about a first amendment...
  - 9y ago

btown 9y ago

It's important to note that the original paper (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/ejsp.2315/full 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.

StanislavPetrov 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

localastronaut 9y ago

For some reason “60 out of every 1,000” sounds a lot worse than “6 out of 100”

chesimov 9y ago
Would it be correct to say that '60 out of 1000' has more predictive power than '6 out of 100'?

CM30 9y ago

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?

chesimov 9y ago
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.

dominotw 9y ago

Other way round would have had equally interesting outcomes. Wonder why they choose this particular direction.

jeffdavis 9y ago

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. These are just generalizations, of course.

cannonedhamster 9y ago
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.

nabla9 9y ago

Similar observation has been made in the Wall Street. 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.

dominotw 9y ago

> 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. These people clearly have an agenda. Gross!! 1. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(11)0.. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(11)0....

kapauldo 9y ago

What did they do? Force them to read?

bayonetz 9y ago

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?

bmh_ca 9y ago

Make them judges. Almost all judges become less conservative and more liberal over time on the bench.