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The Last Psychiatrist wrote some interesting commentary about the Science paper that this article mentions. "[T]he actual finding isn't that conservatives are f

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_are_cowar.html http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2008/09/either_conservatives_...)

gknoy 13y 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 13y ago
  By not describing the content of the picture you're just encouraging people to go and look at it :)
  - devindotcom 13y ago
    Can confirm this. Went to link and scrolled all the way down. it's not too bad.
- zhemao 13y 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.
- ScottBurson 13y ago
  Brain bleach, really? I think the spider is quite beautiful. I must be a psychopath :-)
josephschmoe 13y 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.
- thesimpsons1022 13y 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.
satellitecat 13y 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.
- humanrebar 13y 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"
  - satellitecat 13y ago
    I know, just that they behave similarly to the pictures shown. My point was just that I think the reason liberal-type people don't react to the image can be either that the images themselves are not dangerous, or that the images do not depict actual scary situations (the model with the spider on her head is not actually scared or in danger). (Whereas a psychopath, lacking empathy, would not react much to even real images)
- ScottBurson 13y 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.
thedufer 13y 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.
- satellitecat 13y 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.
  - thesimpsons1022 13y ago
    I think most people are too ignorant to even be either party but instead vote narrowly on issues that benefit them or stupid stuff. that's why we end up with divided government with the president as one party and congress as others.
    - satellitecat 13y ago
      Agreed, yep. They'll vote for their niche issue even though the rest of the platform may hurt them or their ideals more in the big picture.
      - thesimpsons1022 13y ago
        and that's why the parties seem so hypocritical. they just serve a lot of niche issues. like big business and Christians.

gknoy 13y 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 13y ago
By not describing the content of the picture you're just encouraging people to go and look at it :)
- devindotcom 13y ago
  Can confirm this. Went to link and scrolled all the way down. it's not too bad.
zhemao 13y 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.
ScottBurson 13y ago
Brain bleach, really? I think the spider is quite beautiful. I must be a psychopath :-)

josephschmoe 13y 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.

thesimpsons1022 13y 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.

satellitecat 13y 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.

humanrebar 13y 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"
- satellitecat 13y ago
  I know, just that they behave similarly to the pictures shown. My point was just that I think the reason liberal-type people don't react to the image can be either that the images themselves are not dangerous, or that the images do not depict actual scary situations (the model with the spider on her head is not actually scared or in danger). (Whereas a psychopath, lacking empathy, would not react much to even real images)
ScottBurson 13y 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.

thedufer 13y 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.

satellitecat 13y 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.
- thesimpsons1022 13y ago
  I think most people are too ignorant to even be either party but instead vote narrowly on issues that benefit them or stupid stuff. that's why we end up with divided government with the president as one party and congress as others.
  - satellitecat 13y ago
    Agreed, yep. They'll vote for their niche issue even though the rest of the platform may hurt them or their ideals more in the big picture.
    - thesimpsons1022 13y ago
      and that's why the parties seem so hypocritical. they just serve a lot of niche issues. like big business and Christians.