3 ms·

This is not a surprising take to find online as it's been well demonstrated that while conservatives mostly understand where liberals are coming from, liberals

This is not a surprising take to find online as it's been well demonstrated that while conservatives mostly understand where liberals are coming from, liberals have a really hard time understanding right wing concerns.

je_bailey 3y ago
I haven't seen that demonstrated myself. Could you point me to a study or two that provides the details on that?
- jonahx 3y ago
  Without vouching for the validity of this source, a quick search on perplexity.ai (which is good for this kind of thing) gives: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01461672231198001 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01461672231198... It also mentions a 2017 article in The Atlantic that I wasn't able to dig up.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Haidt, "The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Spectrum" https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050092 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050092 Jonathan Haidt in his book "Righteous Mind" https://righteousmind.com/ https://righteousmind.com/
  - anon291 3y ago
    These were what I was thinking of. I believe they asked liberals to answer a political question about their own beliefs, and then again to answer for a 'stereotypical' liberal and conservative. The liberals were not accurate for anyone. The conservatives were able to better match the 'average' for those groups. In other words, the study claims that this means they are better able to put themselves in the shoes of the 'other' side
  - lolinder 3y ago
    > The participants were 2,212 visitors (62% female; median age 28; only U.S. residents or citizens) to ProjectImplicit.org, where they were randomly assigned to this study. All participants in the research pool had previously filled out demographic information, including sex, age, and political identity (7-point scale, strongly liberal to strongly conservative). 1,174 participants self-identified using one of the three liberal options, 538 chose the “moderate” midpoint, and 500 chose one of the three conservative options. The strong left-leaning bias in the sample makes me suspicious that this sample isn't representative of the wider population. I can't find the raw data, but given the selection method I strongly suspect that the sample is mostly college students. If so, one hypothesis that might explain the results is that conservatives who go to college of necessity have a stronger understanding of the other side than liberals because they're the minority on campus for many years. If you repeated this study with a more representative sample of conservatives, including conservatives who do not have the opportunity to interact with many liberals, do you get different results?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
lolinder 3y ago
Speaking as someone who leans very slightly left in a deep red state (I would probably be considered a conservative anywhere else), this is nonsense. It may or may not have been true in the Reagan years, I'm too young to know, but Trump conservatives have absolutely no idea where liberals are coming from. Their perspectives on liberal views are just as skewed by stereotypes and propaganda as leftists' views of conservatives are.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  who you are calling "Trump conservatives" is really a populist coalition of groups, very similar actually to the populist coalition that makes up the bulk of liberal voters. What marks "Trumpism" is precisely the appeal that Trump has to groups of working class people. But what is usually meant by "conservatives" are intellectual conservatives, similar again to intellectual liberals who write for the NY Times and NPR. There's an old saying, "if you are not a [liberal/socialist] when you are young, you have no heart; if you are not a [conservative/capitalist] when you are older, you have no brain." Obviously, no leftist wants to agree they're all heart and no brain, but the saying exists nonetheless, from multiple observers; and perhaps in that adage is the same "common sense": if that's some sort of common progression, we can see that those conservatives might very well understand liberalism better than the liberals in that formulation would correspondingly understand conservatism.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    If you're going to restrict "conservatives" to the intellectuals, then yes, I'll concede that intellectual conservatives as a rule understand liberals better than the average liberal does conservatives. However, if you control for intellectualism, either by restricting both pools to intellectuals or expanding both pools to include everyone who identifies as left/right of center, that difference disappears. Neither wing understands the other very well at all, both sides as a rule choose to engage with strawmen versions of their opposition, and each side claims that its strawman is a more truthful model than the other's.
    - anon291 3y ago

je_bailey 3y ago

I haven't seen that demonstrated myself. Could you point me to a study or two that provides the details on that?

jonahx 3y ago
Without vouching for the validity of this source, a quick search on perplexity.ai (which is good for this kind of thing) gives: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01461672231198001 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01461672231198... It also mentions a 2017 article in The Atlantic that I wasn't able to dig up.
fsckboy 3y ago
Jesse Graham, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Haidt, "The Moral Stereotypes of Liberals and Conservatives: Exaggeration of Differences across the Political Spectrum" https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050092 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0050092 Jonathan Haidt in his book "Righteous Mind" https://righteousmind.com/ https://righteousmind.com/
- anon291 3y ago
  These were what I was thinking of. I believe they asked liberals to answer a political question about their own beliefs, and then again to answer for a 'stereotypical' liberal and conservative. The liberals were not accurate for anyone. The conservatives were able to better match the 'average' for those groups. In other words, the study claims that this means they are better able to put themselves in the shoes of the 'other' side
- lolinder 3y ago
  > The participants were 2,212 visitors (62% female; median age 28; only U.S. residents or citizens) to ProjectImplicit.org, where they were randomly assigned to this study. All participants in the research pool had previously filled out demographic information, including sex, age, and political identity (7-point scale, strongly liberal to strongly conservative). 1,174 participants self-identified using one of the three liberal options, 538 chose the “moderate” midpoint, and 500 chose one of the three conservative options. The strong left-leaning bias in the sample makes me suspicious that this sample isn't representative of the wider population. I can't find the raw data, but given the selection method I strongly suspect that the sample is mostly college students. If so, one hypothesis that might explain the results is that conservatives who go to college of necessity have a stronger understanding of the other side than liberals because they're the minority on campus for many years. If you repeated this study with a more representative sample of conservatives, including conservatives who do not have the opportunity to interact with many liberals, do you get different results?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

lolinder 3y ago

Speaking as someone who leans very slightly left in a deep red state (I would probably be considered a conservative anywhere else), this is nonsense. It may or may not have been true in the Reagan years, I'm too young to know, but Trump conservatives have absolutely no idea where liberals are coming from. Their perspectives on liberal views are just as skewed by stereotypes and propaganda as leftists' views of conservatives are.

fsckboy 3y ago
who you are calling "Trump conservatives" is really a populist coalition of groups, very similar actually to the populist coalition that makes up the bulk of liberal voters. What marks "Trumpism" is precisely the appeal that Trump has to groups of working class people. But what is usually meant by "conservatives" are intellectual conservatives, similar again to intellectual liberals who write for the NY Times and NPR. There's an old saying, "if you are not a [liberal/socialist] when you are young, you have no heart; if you are not a [conservative/capitalist] when you are older, you have no brain." Obviously, no leftist wants to agree they're all heart and no brain, but the saying exists nonetheless, from multiple observers; and perhaps in that adage is the same "common sense": if that's some sort of common progression, we can see that those conservatives might very well understand liberalism better than the liberals in that formulation would correspondingly understand conservatism.
- lolinder 3y ago
  If you're going to restrict "conservatives" to the intellectuals, then yes, I'll concede that intellectual conservatives as a rule understand liberals better than the average liberal does conservatives. However, if you control for intellectualism, either by restricting both pools to intellectuals or expanding both pools to include everyone who identifies as left/right of center, that difference disappears. Neither wing understands the other very well at all, both sides as a rule choose to engage with strawmen versions of their opposition, and each side claims that its strawman is a more truthful model than the other's.
  - anon291 3y ago