6 ms·

Jonathan Haidt (who is mentioned in the article) did a study years ago. He separated a group of people into conservatives and liberals and then gave them a ques

Jonathan Haidt (who is mentioned in the article) did a study years ago. He separated a group of people into conservatives and liberals and then gave them a questionnaire on politics. Then he got a second group, separated them, and gave them the same questionnaire. Only he asked the second group of liberals and conservatives to answer the questionnaire the way they imagined the other side would. What he found was that conservatives had no trouble answering the way liberals do. However, liberals could not do likewise. Liberals frequently chose the red herrings on the multiple choice questions, the ones that exaggerated the conservative positions to the point of more or less demonizing conservatives. That's why we're talking about Fox News, don't you see? CNN and MSNBC are just folks. Fox News is the Anti-Christ. Even the article itself has this same smell of bias about it.

Moodles 5y ago
Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all actually. I'm sure both side demonize the other to some extent, and it's our natural reaction to look at them both as equally bad like we're disciplining two siblings or something, but it really seems that right now the left is more melodramatic in the demonization than the right. In my personal experience, quite a few people I've met seem to think if you disagree with them, you must be full of hate, racist, sexist, dumb, a gun slinging Christian, etc.
- myfavoritedog 5y ago
  It's all part and parcel of the same problem. The default media narrative bubble leans heavily to the left. People trapped in that bubble are overly confident in what they believe. They aren't often exposed to arguments and data that are contrary to what they're told to believe over and over whenever they turn on the TV. So when these trapped people are confronted with opposing arguments or data, they resort to the easy mechanisms that relieve their cognitive dissonance. "You're a racist" "You're a homophobe" "You're a white supremacist" "You want sick people to die in the streets"
- aidenn0 5y ago
  My wife (who is pretty far left), observed that Trump was actually many of the things that G.W. Bush was accused of being. I think a major tenet of post-trump Republicanism is roughly: "We're going to be accused of being racist and conspiracy theorists by the left no matter what we do, so there is only an upside to openly courting those members of the electorate.
- ookdatnog 5y ago
  As someone left-leaning, I've always tried to be understanding and compassionate towards those with differing viewpoints. When Trump was campaigning, although I loath the man (and, to be clear, I believe he's outright evil), I did try to understand the viewpoint of "forgotten America" and see them as people whose frustrations are legitimate. But then Trump tried to overturn the presidential election by attempting to have millions of votes thrown out unceremoniously, without a shred of evidence, with a constantly shifting story. This constitutes no less than an attempted coup. Although some people in the Republican party resisted this, in the end, the party decided not to purge Trump and his supporters (which would be the appropriate response to an attempted coup), and a sizeable portion of the party still publicly stands by him. At the same time, they are openly courting white supremacist militias and conspiracy theorists. There are no other words for this: this is evil. Continued support for the Republican party is evil, as long as they have not purged Trumpism from the party.
  - username90 5y ago
    And the Democrats completely want to dismantle the police and let criminals run free on the streets. It is true, I saw these cherry picked quotes and the democrats still supports those politicans! How can you support them when they are pro crime? You are a horrible person, just like everyone else who votes Democrats and thinks that government handouts are more important than ensuring that rapists and murderers can't continue to rape and murder!!! /s I hope you realize the problem here. Republicans doesn't really support ending democracy, similarly Democrats doesn't support ending the police. Those are just what the other side thinks that side wants.
    - ookdatnog 5y ago
      Defunding the police, government handouts, etc etc, whether you are in favor or against them, are policy decisions that some factions within the Democratic party are striving for using democratic (small 'd') methods. That is, if these factions can convince a majority of people to defund the police, then the police will get defunded. That is how democracy works. If you disagree with defunding the police but with significant other parts of the Democratic platform, you can ally with these people on some issues but fight them on this issue. This is also how democracy works. Trump attempted to stay in power even though the people voted against him. This is tyranny. Working with him, in any way, is a subversion of democracy. Anyone who is willing to work with him is, by extension, an enemy of democracy. The only logical conclusion from your post is that you are against democracy: You argue that a policy you disagree with (defunding the police) getting implemented democratically, is a similar level of "bad" as a tyrant being installed. This means that you are willing to see a tyrant installed if the alternative is (democratically chosen!) policy being enacted that you disagree with. Seems like textbook authoritarianism to me.
parafactual 5y ago
Do you have a link? You may be right, but such a study seems very easy to bias, even unintentionally.
- NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  Here's a short article on the paper: https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand-liberals-liberals-dont-understand-conservatives/ https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand... The paper itself: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266 Here's his TED talk on it: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...
  - vaishaksuresh 5y ago
    Published in 2012. lol! good times!
NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
I'm currently a registered Pacific Green, lean left, and on the political compass I'm basically smack dab on top of Bernie Sanders (whom I voted for and donated to in the 2016 primaries). And have never voted Republican. So his observation is about my own "side" more or less. But I'm totally unsurprised to see this downvoted here only 18 minutes in. Here's a short article on the paper: https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand-liberals-liberals-dont-understand-conservatives/ https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand... The paper itself: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266 Here's his TED talk on it: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_... What's funny is if you bring this up (even with sources) to conservatives. They're unsurprisingly unsurprised. But if you bring it up to liberals they often get furious because it goes against their beliefs that they're the more intelligent, more educated "side". Nevermind that believing in only two possible sides is six times dumber than astrology... something "both sides" are about equally guilty of. If nothing else I strongly encourage everyone to watch his TED talk. It's super informative, well delivered, and has a solid message of unity tbh.
- mariodiana 5y ago
  Thank you. I have a friend I haven't seen since high school, though I'm connected with him on Facebook. He will outright tell you himself that he's a communist—familiar with the writings of Marx, etc. We could not be more diametrically opposed. However, he's as clear-eyed as you seem to be. I suspect that most people simply aren't all that intellectually curious. I don't remember if Haidt explicitly mentioned this, but I think somewhere either he or someone commenting on his study asserted that it is much easier to pick up the party line of liberals through osmosis, since those in education, the media, and so forth tend to be liberal. So, even conservatives are more readily exposed to the liberal take on things. Liberals on the other hand are not. But the point I'm making by mentioning my friend and thanking you is that I suspect that people who are intellectually curious are more or less inoculated against mischaracterizing the side they disagree with, since they don't learn almost exclusively through osmosis. I appreciate your contribution to this thread.
- 5y ago
nradov 5y ago
I think you are referring to this study. Your summary of the results is basically accurate. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0050092 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
- bena 5y ago
  In a way, it's the Family Feud problem. Spiders are not insects. But if you are playing Family Feud and the prompt is "Name the most popular insect", you should say spider because a lot of people will off the cuff say spiders are insects. So it's possible they are not answering to how conservatives see themselves. And let's not ignore that the MFQ is kinda shaky at best. I also find it interesting in that link is the why they were the most off. Liberals seemed to have been wrong because they regressed to the mean when answering for other people. They seemed to think conservatives were more group-focused than they were and less individual-focused. And vice versa for liberals. They thought that the average liberal was less group-focused and more individual-focused than they were. And it's not like conservatives weren't wrong. They got it right when estimating the average conservative and liberal answers for individuals, but not groups. Moderates were the most accurate in estimating the average conservative and liberal answers for groups. And both conservatives and liberals over-estimated conservatives concerns for the group. So I really don't think it's entirely fair to frame the results as "conservatives know how liberals think better than liberals know how conservatives think". Because another reading of it is that liberals give conservatives a greater benefit of the doubt. And also that conservatives don't even know how little they care for the group. And that's also ignoring that these are self-reported morality questionnaires. It's not really indicative of how these people might act in real situations. Even Hitler thought he was a swell guy just trying to do right. We all kind of think that of ourselves. No one thinks they're the monster.
avs733 5y ago
I'm reading the article you linked down thread and after an initial skim I am not confident the article actually makes the point you are claiming.
majormajor 5y ago
I would be curious to see what that looks like today when elected Republicans are increasingly spouting what you'd call a "demonized" conservative viewpoint if it wasn't coming out of their mouths directly. "Those are just the opinions of a small fringe" was much more believable in a pre-Trump world - but now, even more than post-Tea Party, the fringe is pushing the agenda. And even pre-Trump, you can read that study as an indictment of the conservative media and it's evolution to sensationalism since the 1980s. To use an example from the linked article: "For instance,when conservatives express binding-foundation moral concerns about gay marriage—e.g., that it subverts traditional gender roles and family structures—liberals may have difficulty perceiving any moral value in such traditional arrangements and therefore conclude that conservatives are motivated by simple homophobia, untempered by concerns about fairness, equality, and rights." - the vocal conservatives were not expressing a very nuanced view, it was the violent fringe that was making the most noise and claiming the most airtime even in conservative outlets. If you want liberals to understand your complex conservative reasoning, you gotta get the very-un-complex trolls off the air!
- atq2119 5y ago
  That seems fair to me. If this reasoning is correct, then conservatives should be becoming worse at gauging liberals' position on social justice-related topics, considering how their reporting tends to be dominated by extremists as well.
  - mariodiana 5y ago
    What exactly seems fair? The reply you're responding to asserts there was a "violent fringe that was making the most noise and claiming the most airtime." Is that fair? The discussion, at the time, concerning gay marriage in conservative national media was dominated by a "violent fringe"? Were their calls for violence? Were there even suggestions that violence "may be necessary"? I'm going to reach here a bit, but are we going to rope in the Westboro Baptist Church and pretend these people were the "conservative" response? Even if we do that, do you recall them—as odious as they are—being violent or advocating violence? And if we're not pointing to them, who are we pointing to?
beprogrammed 5y ago
Then he turned to his conservative flock and said 'See? We ARE smarter than them!'
- deleted 5y ago
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- deleted 5y ago
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klyrs 5y ago
Another way to look at this is that extremists have a significant platform on the right, and that is likely to skew the perception of the right by the left.
- tmn 5y ago
  Can you give 3 examples of extremists on the right? Would just like to understand how people are viewing things
  - klyrs 5y ago
    Atwater's Southern Strategy: attract racists, without saying... you know the rest. He said that a long time ago, but the strategy is obviously still in play (see e.g. Thomas Hofeller, bithers, blatantly anti-mexican and anti-muslim quotes from the party) The far right keeps showing up bearing the battle flag and nazi flags -- and Flynn, Stone, and Trump appear to love groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Other Republicans who speak out about that get cancelled. Jerry Sexton's "who knows, maybe some of us will be slaves one of these days." And the QAnon candidates.
tchock23 5y ago
Has this study been repeated recently (rather than 2012). Very curious to see if/how the results have changed of late.
anonfornoreason 5y ago
Not sure why you are getting downvotes. For anyone curious, Haidt is a liberal professor who is dedicated to figuring out how to get people talking across political ideologies. The book that covers this topic is called The Righteous Mind and is an excellent read or listen.
- myfavoritedog 5y ago
  It's being downvoted exactly for the reason that this topic is important. Too many people are hopelessly trapped in their narrative bubbles and unable to calmly evaluate arguments against what they've been taught to believe.
- bena 5y ago
  It's a mis-framing of the results. Conservatives didn't have "no problem" answering as liberals. Conservatives were better able to estimate what liberals would answer for individual concerns, but were wrong about group concerns. Moderates were better able to estimate how both groups would answer for group concerns. Both liberals and conservatives overestimated how much conservatives cared for group concerns. Liberals underestimated how much conservatives cared for individual concerns and overestimated how much they cared for group concerns. Liberals also overestimated how much liberals cared for individual concerns and underestimated how much the cared for group concerns. In light of that, we could even frame it as liberals see themselves closer to conservatives than vice versa. Because that's how they answered for the groups. They think there's less difference than there actually is. So they under and overestimate appropriately. Framing it as "conservatives know liberals better than vice versa" is wrong and is a tactic to put the onus on liberals to do all the changing. Because conservatives can fill out a morality questionnaire better. Or let me put it this way, if the question was "How many puppies is it acceptable to kick in a lifetime?" The fact that puppy kickers were correctly able to guess "zero" for the non-kicking group while the non-kickers said the kickers would say "ten" while the kickers really said "twenty" doesn't mean that the puppy kickers are the better group.
  - anonfornoreason 5y ago
    That's not at all what I got out of reading "The Righteous Mind", so not sure how to respond to this constructively. Did you read the book? Granted it's been ~ 1 year since I read it, but I walked away with a completely different impression. The interesting thing that was covered was that liberals and conservatives have different ways to approach moral reasoning. Republicans tend (this is not universal) to view things through a lense of six things: faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order. Democrats focus on care and fighting oppression. Again, this is a simplification, but the theme is that conservatives have different moral foundations that make it hard for liberals to understand why they make decisions they do. A solid example (I can't remember if this was used in the book, but it helps me) is "why are they voting against their own interests". I hear this in my personal life all the time! I used to say it! Then I realized that voting for someone who is against welfare, when you are low on the socioeconomic spectrum, makes sense if you overweight faith, and believe that abortion is a grave moral sin. What's some poverty now compared to eternal damnation? I don't believe in hell myself, but this insight let me understand that someone who views things different than me isn't dumb, they just have different values that allow them to rationally decide things that my values seem irrational. The hard part is trying to talk across this gap in moral reasoning, and find the right balance.
ookdatnog 5y ago
That's a very interesting study, but I think it's quite spurious to connect this result to media quality/partisanship the way you do. Certainly the study doesn't make this connection. After all, surveys tend to find that Fox News viewers are less informed about domestic and international events than consumers of other news media (one study found them less informed than people who did not watch the news at all). So I don't think this effect is caused by media. Haidt's study uses his five moral foundations model, where one's moral foundations are characterized by five dimensions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. The first two are called "individualizing foundations" and the last three are called "binding foundations". Haidt's findings in other studies (which generalize beyond just the US or the West) are that people across the political spectrum care about the individualizing foundations, but progressives care more about these foundations than conservatives. But progressives care much less about the binding foundations. With this in mind, I don't think it's too surprising that conservatives have an easier time estimating the viewpoint of progressives, since the moral foundations of progressives are not alien to conservatives, they are just weighted differently. Whereas for progressives, the moral foundations of conservatives can feel utterly alien and inexplicable, especially if they tend to have their social interactions in a progressive bubble. (Also, be mindful that the population sample of the study is nowhere close to a random sample of the population. The sample is over 60% female, overwhelmingly young (median age is 28), and liberal participants outnumbered moderates and conservatives combined. Since it's an online survey, there's a reasonable chance that you're mostly reaching urban people, which tend to live in progressive bubbles. Conservatives who live in areas that are mostly progressive may understand progressives better than those who live in conservative bubbles. The study acknowledges this in the discussion section. The result might still hold up, but the effect might be exaggerated by the sample.)

Moodles 5y ago

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me at all actually. I'm sure both side demonize the other to some extent, and it's our natural reaction to look at them both as equally bad like we're disciplining two siblings or something, but it really seems that right now the left is more melodramatic in the demonization than the right. In my personal experience, quite a few people I've met seem to think if you disagree with them, you must be full of hate, racist, sexist, dumb, a gun slinging Christian, etc.

myfavoritedog 5y ago
It's all part and parcel of the same problem. The default media narrative bubble leans heavily to the left. People trapped in that bubble are overly confident in what they believe. They aren't often exposed to arguments and data that are contrary to what they're told to believe over and over whenever they turn on the TV. So when these trapped people are confronted with opposing arguments or data, they resort to the easy mechanisms that relieve their cognitive dissonance. "You're a racist" "You're a homophobe" "You're a white supremacist" "You want sick people to die in the streets"
aidenn0 5y ago
My wife (who is pretty far left), observed that Trump was actually many of the things that G.W. Bush was accused of being. I think a major tenet of post-trump Republicanism is roughly: "We're going to be accused of being racist and conspiracy theorists by the left no matter what we do, so there is only an upside to openly courting those members of the electorate.
ookdatnog 5y ago
As someone left-leaning, I've always tried to be understanding and compassionate towards those with differing viewpoints. When Trump was campaigning, although I loath the man (and, to be clear, I believe he's outright evil), I did try to understand the viewpoint of "forgotten America" and see them as people whose frustrations are legitimate. But then Trump tried to overturn the presidential election by attempting to have millions of votes thrown out unceremoniously, without a shred of evidence, with a constantly shifting story. This constitutes no less than an attempted coup. Although some people in the Republican party resisted this, in the end, the party decided not to purge Trump and his supporters (which would be the appropriate response to an attempted coup), and a sizeable portion of the party still publicly stands by him. At the same time, they are openly courting white supremacist militias and conspiracy theorists. There are no other words for this: this is evil. Continued support for the Republican party is evil, as long as they have not purged Trumpism from the party.
- username90 5y ago
  And the Democrats completely want to dismantle the police and let criminals run free on the streets. It is true, I saw these cherry picked quotes and the democrats still supports those politicans! How can you support them when they are pro crime? You are a horrible person, just like everyone else who votes Democrats and thinks that government handouts are more important than ensuring that rapists and murderers can't continue to rape and murder!!! /s I hope you realize the problem here. Republicans doesn't really support ending democracy, similarly Democrats doesn't support ending the police. Those are just what the other side thinks that side wants.
  - ookdatnog 5y ago
    Defunding the police, government handouts, etc etc, whether you are in favor or against them, are policy decisions that some factions within the Democratic party are striving for using democratic (small 'd') methods. That is, if these factions can convince a majority of people to defund the police, then the police will get defunded. That is how democracy works. If you disagree with defunding the police but with significant other parts of the Democratic platform, you can ally with these people on some issues but fight them on this issue. This is also how democracy works. Trump attempted to stay in power even though the people voted against him. This is tyranny. Working with him, in any way, is a subversion of democracy. Anyone who is willing to work with him is, by extension, an enemy of democracy. The only logical conclusion from your post is that you are against democracy: You argue that a policy you disagree with (defunding the police) getting implemented democratically, is a similar level of "bad" as a tyrant being installed. This means that you are willing to see a tyrant installed if the alternative is (democratically chosen!) policy being enacted that you disagree with. Seems like textbook authoritarianism to me.

parafactual 5y ago

Do you have a link? You may be right, but such a study seems very easy to bias, even unintentionally.

NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
Here's a short article on the paper: https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand-liberals-liberals-dont-understand-conservatives/ https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand... The paper itself: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266 Here's his TED talk on it: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_...
- vaishaksuresh 5y ago
  Published in 2012. lol! good times!

NaturalPhallacy 5y ago

I'm currently a registered Pacific Green, lean left, and on the political compass I'm basically smack dab on top of Bernie Sanders (whom I voted for and donated to in the 2016 primaries). And have never voted Republican. So his observation is about my own "side" more or less. But I'm totally unsurprised to see this downvoted here only 18 minutes in. Here's a short article on the paper: https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand-liberals-liberals-dont-understand-conservatives/ https://ricochet.com/76902/archives/conservatives-understand... The paper itself: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2027266 Here's his TED talk on it: https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_... What's funny is if you bring this up (even with sources) to conservatives. They're unsurprisingly unsurprised. But if you bring it up to liberals they often get furious because it goes against their beliefs that they're the more intelligent, more educated "side". Nevermind that believing in only two possible sides is six times dumber than astrology... something "both sides" are about equally guilty of. If nothing else I strongly encourage everyone to watch his TED talk. It's super informative, well delivered, and has a solid message of unity tbh.

mariodiana 5y ago
Thank you. I have a friend I haven't seen since high school, though I'm connected with him on Facebook. He will outright tell you himself that he's a communist—familiar with the writings of Marx, etc. We could not be more diametrically opposed. However, he's as clear-eyed as you seem to be. I suspect that most people simply aren't all that intellectually curious. I don't remember if Haidt explicitly mentioned this, but I think somewhere either he or someone commenting on his study asserted that it is much easier to pick up the party line of liberals through osmosis, since those in education, the media, and so forth tend to be liberal. So, even conservatives are more readily exposed to the liberal take on things. Liberals on the other hand are not. But the point I'm making by mentioning my friend and thanking you is that I suspect that people who are intellectually curious are more or less inoculated against mischaracterizing the side they disagree with, since they don't learn almost exclusively through osmosis. I appreciate your contribution to this thread.
5y ago

nradov 5y ago

I think you are referring to this study. Your summary of the results is basically accurate. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0050092 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

bena 5y ago
In a way, it's the Family Feud problem. Spiders are not insects. But if you are playing Family Feud and the prompt is "Name the most popular insect", you should say spider because a lot of people will off the cuff say spiders are insects. So it's possible they are not answering to how conservatives see themselves. And let's not ignore that the MFQ is kinda shaky at best. I also find it interesting in that link is the why they were the most off. Liberals seemed to have been wrong because they regressed to the mean when answering for other people. They seemed to think conservatives were more group-focused than they were and less individual-focused. And vice versa for liberals. They thought that the average liberal was less group-focused and more individual-focused than they were. And it's not like conservatives weren't wrong. They got it right when estimating the average conservative and liberal answers for individuals, but not groups. Moderates were the most accurate in estimating the average conservative and liberal answers for groups. And both conservatives and liberals over-estimated conservatives concerns for the group. So I really don't think it's entirely fair to frame the results as "conservatives know how liberals think better than liberals know how conservatives think". Because another reading of it is that liberals give conservatives a greater benefit of the doubt. And also that conservatives don't even know how little they care for the group. And that's also ignoring that these are self-reported morality questionnaires. It's not really indicative of how these people might act in real situations. Even Hitler thought he was a swell guy just trying to do right. We all kind of think that of ourselves. No one thinks they're the monster.

avs733 5y ago

I'm reading the article you linked down thread and after an initial skim I am not confident the article actually makes the point you are claiming.

majormajor 5y ago

I would be curious to see what that looks like today when elected Republicans are increasingly spouting what you'd call a "demonized" conservative viewpoint if it wasn't coming out of their mouths directly. "Those are just the opinions of a small fringe" was much more believable in a pre-Trump world - but now, even more than post-Tea Party, the fringe is pushing the agenda. And even pre-Trump, you can read that study as an indictment of the conservative media and it's evolution to sensationalism since the 1980s. To use an example from the linked article: "For instance,when conservatives express binding-foundation moral concerns about gay marriage—e.g., that it subverts traditional gender roles and family structures—liberals may have difficulty perceiving any moral value in such traditional arrangements and therefore conclude that conservatives are motivated by simple homophobia, untempered by concerns about fairness, equality, and rights." - the vocal conservatives were not expressing a very nuanced view, it was the violent fringe that was making the most noise and claiming the most airtime even in conservative outlets. If you want liberals to understand your complex conservative reasoning, you gotta get the very-un-complex trolls off the air!

atq2119 5y ago
That seems fair to me. If this reasoning is correct, then conservatives should be becoming worse at gauging liberals' position on social justice-related topics, considering how their reporting tends to be dominated by extremists as well.
- mariodiana 5y ago
  What exactly seems fair? The reply you're responding to asserts there was a "violent fringe that was making the most noise and claiming the most airtime." Is that fair? The discussion, at the time, concerning gay marriage in conservative national media was dominated by a "violent fringe"? Were their calls for violence? Were there even suggestions that violence "may be necessary"? I'm going to reach here a bit, but are we going to rope in the Westboro Baptist Church and pretend these people were the "conservative" response? Even if we do that, do you recall them—as odious as they are—being violent or advocating violence? And if we're not pointing to them, who are we pointing to?

beprogrammed 5y ago

Then he turned to his conservative flock and said 'See? We ARE smarter than them!'

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klyrs 5y ago

Another way to look at this is that extremists have a significant platform on the right, and that is likely to skew the perception of the right by the left.

tmn 5y ago
Can you give 3 examples of extremists on the right? Would just like to understand how people are viewing things
- klyrs 5y ago
  Atwater's Southern Strategy: attract racists, without saying... you know the rest. He said that a long time ago, but the strategy is obviously still in play (see e.g. Thomas Hofeller, bithers, blatantly anti-mexican and anti-muslim quotes from the party) The far right keeps showing up bearing the battle flag and nazi flags -- and Flynn, Stone, and Trump appear to love groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Other Republicans who speak out about that get cancelled. Jerry Sexton's "who knows, maybe some of us will be slaves one of these days." And the QAnon candidates.

tchock23 5y ago

Has this study been repeated recently (rather than 2012). Very curious to see if/how the results have changed of late.

anonfornoreason 5y ago

Not sure why you are getting downvotes. For anyone curious, Haidt is a liberal professor who is dedicated to figuring out how to get people talking across political ideologies. The book that covers this topic is called The Righteous Mind and is an excellent read or listen.

myfavoritedog 5y ago
It's being downvoted exactly for the reason that this topic is important. Too many people are hopelessly trapped in their narrative bubbles and unable to calmly evaluate arguments against what they've been taught to believe.
bena 5y ago
It's a mis-framing of the results. Conservatives didn't have "no problem" answering as liberals. Conservatives were better able to estimate what liberals would answer for individual concerns, but were wrong about group concerns. Moderates were better able to estimate how both groups would answer for group concerns. Both liberals and conservatives overestimated how much conservatives cared for group concerns. Liberals underestimated how much conservatives cared for individual concerns and overestimated how much they cared for group concerns. Liberals also overestimated how much liberals cared for individual concerns and underestimated how much the cared for group concerns. In light of that, we could even frame it as liberals see themselves closer to conservatives than vice versa. Because that's how they answered for the groups. They think there's less difference than there actually is. So they under and overestimate appropriately. Framing it as "conservatives know liberals better than vice versa" is wrong and is a tactic to put the onus on liberals to do all the changing. Because conservatives can fill out a morality questionnaire better. Or let me put it this way, if the question was "How many puppies is it acceptable to kick in a lifetime?" The fact that puppy kickers were correctly able to guess "zero" for the non-kicking group while the non-kickers said the kickers would say "ten" while the kickers really said "twenty" doesn't mean that the puppy kickers are the better group.
- anonfornoreason 5y ago
  That's not at all what I got out of reading "The Righteous Mind", so not sure how to respond to this constructively. Did you read the book? Granted it's been ~ 1 year since I read it, but I walked away with a completely different impression. The interesting thing that was covered was that liberals and conservatives have different ways to approach moral reasoning. Republicans tend (this is not universal) to view things through a lense of six things: faith, patriotism, valor, chastity, law and order. Democrats focus on care and fighting oppression. Again, this is a simplification, but the theme is that conservatives have different moral foundations that make it hard for liberals to understand why they make decisions they do. A solid example (I can't remember if this was used in the book, but it helps me) is "why are they voting against their own interests". I hear this in my personal life all the time! I used to say it! Then I realized that voting for someone who is against welfare, when you are low on the socioeconomic spectrum, makes sense if you overweight faith, and believe that abortion is a grave moral sin. What's some poverty now compared to eternal damnation? I don't believe in hell myself, but this insight let me understand that someone who views things different than me isn't dumb, they just have different values that allow them to rationally decide things that my values seem irrational. The hard part is trying to talk across this gap in moral reasoning, and find the right balance.

ookdatnog 5y ago

That's a very interesting study, but I think it's quite spurious to connect this result to media quality/partisanship the way you do. Certainly the study doesn't make this connection. After all, surveys tend to find that Fox News viewers are less informed about domestic and international events than consumers of other news media (one study found them less informed than people who did not watch the news at all). So I don't think this effect is caused by media. Haidt's study uses his five moral foundations model, where one's moral foundations are characterized by five dimensions: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. The first two are called "individualizing foundations" and the last three are called "binding foundations". Haidt's findings in other studies (which generalize beyond just the US or the West) are that people across the political spectrum care about the individualizing foundations, but progressives care more about these foundations than conservatives. But progressives care much less about the binding foundations. With this in mind, I don't think it's too surprising that conservatives have an easier time estimating the viewpoint of progressives, since the moral foundations of progressives are not alien to conservatives, they are just weighted differently. Whereas for progressives, the moral foundations of conservatives can feel utterly alien and inexplicable, especially if they tend to have their social interactions in a progressive bubble. (Also, be mindful that the population sample of the study is nowhere close to a random sample of the population. The sample is over 60% female, overwhelmingly young (median age is 28), and liberal participants outnumbered moderates and conservatives combined. Since it's an online survey, there's a reasonable chance that you're mostly reaching urban people, which tend to live in progressive bubbles. Conservatives who live in areas that are mostly progressive may understand progressives better than those who live in conservative bubbles. The study acknowledges this in the discussion section. The result might still hold up, but the effect might be exaggerated by the sample.)