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Studies: Conservatives and Liberals are Psychologically Different

á´…eparted

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Scientists Are Beginning to Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

The title seems bias, and in a certain light it is, but it's because the studies have focused on the personality attributes that defines conservatives. It's implied that the opposings to these define Liberals.

Excerpts said:
Ten years ago, it was wildly controversial to talk about psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. Today, it's becoming hard not to.
...
[In] the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.
...
in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics. ... Twenty-six different scholars or groups of scholars then got an opportunity to tee off on the paper, firing off a variety of responses. But as Hibbing and colleagues note in their final reply, out of those responses, "22 or 23 accept the general idea" of a conservative negativity bias, and simply add commentary to aid in the process of "modifying it, expanding on it, specifying where it does and does not work," and so on. Only about three scholars or groups of scholars seem to reject the idea entirely.
...
All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.

It's worth reading the full article, as it's not entirely too long. It really hammers home the notion that there are fundemental differences between many of those who subscribe to liberal and conservative views. At one point they mention the common traits featured in many conservatives:

Conservative Traits said:
This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety.

What I find surprising is how much backlash this has gotten in the past, and is likely to get now. Thankfully it won't go very far because of how solid this is. There isn't anything inheriently good or bad about this. It simply is. It's observed traits shown as a trend, not everyone is going to fit to it (I certainly buck it; reading the above quote by all accounts I should be very very conservative as all of those define me except the last). It's still enlightining though and does lend to considering different ways of discourse and presentation when it comes to politics.

Discuss.
 

Passacaglia

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Very interesting article; thanks for posting this, Hard!

What I find surprising is how much backlash this has gotten in the past, and is likely to get now. Thankfully it won't go very far because of how solid this is. There isn't anything inheriently good or bad about this. It simply is. It's observed traits shown as a trend, not everyone is going to fit to it (I certainly buck it; reading the above quote by all accounts I should be very very conservative as all of those define me except the last). It's still enlightining though and does lend to considering different ways of discourse and presentation when it comes to politics.
Yeah, this certainly isn't two-sizes-fit-all. I myself am a big fan of certainty, consistency, and simplicity, despite definitely not being conservative.

The title seems bias, and in a certain light it is, but it's because the studies have focused on the personality attributes that defines conservatives. It's implied that the opposings to these define Liberals.
Just to pick a nit: I think the implication is that liberals are simply less extreme in the mentioned traits. The Us vs. Them mentality of politics makes it tempting to frame liberal and conservative traits as opposites, but I bet that if Dr. Hibbing were asked, he'd say that each group simply exaggerates certain universal traits.
 

INTP

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This topic has been studied before. Basically conservatives are low on openness scale on big 5(not open to new ideas or change). Also conservatives have lower IQ on average than liberals(high openness correlates with high IQ), but thats just obvious..
 

JjJot

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I love studies like this, but I have to ask what people think of the anomalies in these kinds of observations?

Some may immediately reference Sweden or the Netherlands, but England is my favorite example.

If anyone ever visited England and really looked closely, you will see that the English are absolutely bonkers for security... if England were a person I would consider them completely paranoid. Everything Americans do overseas to "protect themselves", England does in the homeland. England is pretty moderate, maybe liberal... yet they are terrified of the Eurozone and consider it "below them", while Germany is borderline socialist, equally paranoid about security, and they are the sugar daddy of the whole continent.

I don't disagree general idea of the article, but I guess what I'm trying to say is that conservatism and liberalism across societies can be surprisingly similar and strangely different at the same time. It seems too generalized yet.

Now that I think about it, I guess this just confirms what I have read in the above posts... that it is strange that someone who identifies himself as liberal would be nodding at "conservative" cognitive traits
 
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Julius_Van_Der_Beak

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Hmm...

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a "negativity bias," meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments.

Is this really a phenomenon limited to the political right? That's not necessarily been my experience. I think the "negativity bias" expresses itself differently, but some people who consider themselves left-wing appear to have it.

After all, one of the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity.

Again, are we only seeing this on the right at the moment?

Or is it just a matter of it representing a statistical trend, and not something absolute?

How are they separating out the people who are conservative?
 

Mane

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So the American 2 party system suggests 2 distinct personality types? Australia currently has 11 parties with sits. Does that indicate 11 personality types? Or must we ignore their internal differences and place them on a single spectrum of right vs. left?
 

Passacaglia

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So the American 2 party system suggests 2 distinct personality types? Australia currently has 11 parties with sits. Does that indicate 11 personality types? Or must we ignore their internal differences and place them on a single spectrum of right vs. left?
If you listen to the podcast included with the article, Hibbing addresses this. In short, 'conservative' and 'liberal' are not being used as synonyms for 'republican' and 'democrat' in this particular case -- if indeed there is ever a case where they are truly synonyms. (I recently discovered that there is no actual nation-wide U.S. liberal party, though there is a national conservative party.) Hibbing uses 'conservative' and 'liberal' as terms for two universal attitudes -- although he doesn't exactly define those attitudes in the podcast.
 

93JC

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So the American 2 party system suggests 2 distinct personality types? Australia currently has 11 parties with sits. Does that indicate 11 personality types? Or must we ignore their internal differences and place them on a single spectrum of right vs. left?

Any study of "left vs. right" or "conservative vs. liberal" is relative to how the author defines these terms. One man's right-winger is another's liberal pinko. It's why I don't put much stock into the various online "political compass" tests I've taken: most tend to be very "ameri-centric".

There are six political parties with members in the Canadian House of Commons (and seven members sitting as independents). The most "right-wing" of them all is the Conservative Party, which holds the majority of seats and formed government. This is a government that governs a country that has universal public healthcare, gay marriage, gun control, no laws on abortion, no laws on prostitution, etc.
 

Passacaglia

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Is this really a phenomenon limited to the political right? That's not necessarily been my experience. I think the "negativity bias" expresses itself differently, but some people who consider themselves left-wing appear to have it.
It's definitely not limited to the conservative mindset, although I personally find it much easier to call up memories of conservative negativity than liberal. Just since I've joined TypeC, I've witnessed outright paranoia and fear-mongering from certain conservative personalities.

Or is it just a matter of it representing a statistical trend, and not something absolute?
The former.
 

á´…eparted

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Any study of "left vs. right" or "conservative vs. liberal" is relative to how the author defines these terms. One man's right-winger is another's liberal pinko. It's why I don't put much stock into the various online "political compass" tests I've taken: most tend to be very "ameri-centric".

There are six political parties with members in the Canadian House of Commons (and seven members sitting as independents). The most "right-wing" of them all is the Conservative Party, which holds the majority of seats and formed government. This is a government that governs a country that has universal public healthcare, gay marriage, gun control, no laws on abortion, no laws on prostitution, etc.

Politics varies from country to country, and sometimes region to region. There really isn't a good way to make it universal throughout everything, so you have to pick a reference point to set the "zero" value within a specefic country and region. I don't think that invalidates the study though. They've merely chosen a window to view it under, and within the US anyway, it appears to work.
 

Lark

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Yeah, I love studies like that because I break all the molds.

I'm mainly fiscally socialist, culturally conservative but I'm not even consistently so, some cultural topics I'm libertarian about provided people are doing their own thing and keeping to themselves I dont care, although that's never the case, always someone wanting to interfer and control someone else, assholes. Usually liberals, so called progressives, always someone despising the way things have been done and proven to work well, or rich bastards ready to take more than they deserve with no one to stop them.
 

93JC

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Politics varies from country to country, and sometimes region to region. There really isn't a good way to make it universal throughout everything, so you have to pick a reference point to set the "zero" value within a specefic country and region. I don't think that invalidates the study though. They've merely chosen a window to view it under, and within the US anyway, it appears to work.

Absolutely politics vary. I don't think the study is invalidated either (although admittedly all I did was breeze through the article, so I haven't looked at it in any detail), and I don't doubt that it "works" in the US... but it's probably the only place it works. That's all I was getting at.
 

Passacaglia

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Any study of "left vs. right" or "conservative vs. liberal" is relative to how the author defines these terms. One man's right-winger is another's liberal pinko. It's why I don't put much stock into the various online "political compass" tests I've taken: most tend to be very "ameri-centric".

There are six political parties with members in the Canadian House of Commons (and seven members sitting as independents). The most "right-wing" of them all is the Conservative Party, which holds the majority of seats and formed government. This is a government that governs a country that has universal public healthcare, gay marriage, gun control, no laws on abortion, no laws on prostitution, etc.
My takeaway is that while party platforms vary from country to country, the conservative tendency to support the status quo is consistent -- because of the negativity bias. The negativity bias leads conservatives to be uncomfortable with variation from whatever set of norms and laws they grew up with, and in extreme cases to come up with all kinds of rationalizations, suspicions, and conspiracy theories to justify their dogmatic adherence to said status quo.

So for example -- and correct me if this has not been your experience when listening to Canadian conservatives -- even though U.S. conservatives argue against universal healthcare and Canadian conservatives might argue against privatized healthcare*, many of their arguments are similar. "Why change what's been tried and proven to work?" "Other healthcare systems may work in other nations, but every nation is different!" "Change healthcare?! No, that way lies communism/libertarianism!!!" And so on.

(Granted, Canadian conservatives do have a good argument for the healthcare status quo that U.S. conservatives don't: Human empathy. :))

*I don't know if any Canadian group of note argues for privatizing healthcare, but for the sake of discussion...
 
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gromit

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People who prefer the predictability/the status quo tend to not want things to change?
 

Cellmold

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Any study of "left vs. right" or "conservative vs. liberal" is relative to how the author defines these terms. One man's right-winger is another's liberal pinko. It's why I don't put much stock into the various online "political compass" tests I've taken: most tend to be very "ameri-centric".

There are six political parties with members in the Canadian House of Commons (and seven members sitting as independents). The most "right-wing" of them all is the Conservative Party, which holds the majority of seats and formed government. This is a government that governs a country that has universal public healthcare, gay marriage, gun control, no laws on abortion, no laws on prostitution, etc.

Sounds like a sexy sexy country.
 

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Is a "no shit" really necessary in reference to the title alone of this thread? I think so.
 

Swivelinglight

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I've read somewhere that when two opposing sides are against each other in beliefs that new incoming information would be seen as support for each opposing side. Something along the lines of cognitive bias or something; it happens when two sides don't really care what the other believes and uses anything new as support, molding it to their own view. It's interesting how this difference in psychology could be the cause of each one thinking that the new piece of information (be it a study or opinion of an expert) is support for their view.
 

Nicodemus

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It's still enlightining though and does lend to considering different ways of discourse and presentation when it comes to politics.
Hardly. When was the last time you saw a political campaign that tried to present 'best honed arguments' at the expense of superficial, emotional siren calls? Marketing research has known it for quite a while. More recently, the gods saw fit to give us neuromarketing to confirm it yet again. Pretty much any intelligent person interested in politics knew it all along. The sad part is that, regardless of political persuasion, people all around are fucking gullible. I am quite convinced that the temperamental differences between the two groups studied here will remain no more than a minor fun fact.
 

Kullervo

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This topic has been studied before. Basically conservatives are low on openness scale on big 5(not open to new ideas or change).

Yes, this is generally true.

However, I would argue that one needs to distinguish between mainstream conservatives (mainly SJs) and radical conservatives (mostly Ns, at least from what I've seen on the internet).

Also conservatives have lower IQ on average than liberals(high openness correlates with high IQ), but thats just obvious..

As far as I am aware, studies on this have been very conflicting, and whatever IQ differences there may be between liberals and conservatives, they are within a standard deviation on average (so not significant). Please cite.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blo...igence-and-politics-have-complex-relationship

Nonetheless, I do agree that liberals and conservatives are cognitively distinct, and there is a good lecture by Jonothan Haidt on moral differences between the two groups. I will dig it up later.
 

á´…eparted

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Hardly. When was the last time you saw a political campaign that tried to present 'best honed arguments' at the expense of superficial, emotional siren calls? Marketing research has known it for quite a while. More recently, the gods saw fit to give us neuromarketing to confirm it yet again. Pretty much any intelligent person interested in politics knew it all along. The sad part is that, regardless of political persuasion, people all around are fucking gullible. I am quite convinced that the temperamental differences between the two groups studied here will remain no more than a minor fun fact.

Ok, so it's a little wishful thinking on my end. At the minimum though academics and political scientists will be taking this further, and it can frame conversations an analysis somewhat.
 
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