what is the psychology of conservatives and liberals?

[INTP]

We were addressing this comment, Marm, not IQ.

The topic of discussion has changed. Dont be such a conservative

 

[Jaguar]

The topic of discussion has changed. Dont be such a conservative

Yeah, right, buckaroo. Lol.

 

[Thalassa]

Go ahead and cling to that raft.

Statistical facts? Okay, I will. Thanks.

 

[Thalassa]

We were addressing this comment, Marm, not IQ.

Ooooh...yeah. That's bullshit.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Statistical facts

Lets see em.

 

[Jaguar]

Statistical facts?

Manipulation of statistics is so common, I rarely give them the time of day.

 

[Ginkgo]

GOD THIS THREAD IS FULL OF MISCONCEPTIONS.

Everyone knows mentally retarded people almost never have political affiliations.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

Statistical facts? Okay, I will. Thanks.

I'll do your job for you.

This is taken from a Time article: Study: Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?

The notion that liberals are smarter than conservatives is familiar to anyone who has spent time on a college campus. The College Democrats are said to be ugly, smug and intellectual; the College Republicans, pretty, belligerent and dumb. There's enough truth in both stereotypes that the vast majority of college students opt not to join either club.

But are liberals actually smarter? A libertarian (and, as such, nonpartisan) researcher, Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has just written a paper that is set to be published in March by the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. The paper investigates not only whether conservatives are dumber than liberals but also why that might be so.

The short answer: Kanazawa's paper shows that more-intelligent people are more likely to say they are liberal. They are also less likely to say they go to religious services. These aren't entirely new findings; last year, for example, a British team found that kids with higher intelligence scores were more likely to grow into adults who vote for Liberal Democrats, even after the researchers controlled for socioeconomics. What's new in Kanazawa's paper is a provocative theory about why intelligence might correlate with liberalism. He argues that smarter people are more willing to espouse "evolutionarily novel" values — that is, values that did not exist in our ancestral environment, including weird ideas about, say, helping genetically unrelated strangers (liberalism, as Kanazawa defines it), which never would have occurred to us back when we had to hunt to feed our own clan and our only real technology was fire.

Kanazawa offers this view of how such novel values sprang up in our ancestors: Imagine you are a caveman (if it helps, you are wearing a loincloth and have never shaved). Lightning strikes a tree near your cave, and fire threatens. What do you do? Natural selection would have favored the smart specimen who could quickly conceive answers to such a problem (or other rare catastrophes like sudden drought or flood), even if — or maybe especially if — those answers were unusual ones that few others in your tribe could generate. So, the theory goes, genes for intelligence got wrapped up with genes for unnatural thinking.

It's an elegant theory, but based on Kanazawa's own evidence, I'm not sure he's right. In his paper, Kanazawa begins by noting, accurately, that psychologists don't have a good understanding of why people embrace the values they do. Many kids share their parents' values, but at the same time many adolescents define themselves in opposition to what their parents believe. We know that most people firm up their values when they are in their 20s, but some people experience conversions to new religions, new political parties, new artistic tastes and even new cuisines after middle age. As Kanazawa notes, this multiplicity of views — a multiplicity you find within both cultures and individuals — is one reason economists have largely abandoned the study of values with a single Latin phrase, De gustibus non est disputandum: there's no accounting for taste.

Kanazawa doesn't disagree, but he believes scientists can account for whether people like new tastes or old, radical tastes or Establishment ones. He points out that there's a strong correlation between liberalism and openness to new kinds of experiences. But openness to new experience isn't necessarily intelligent (cocaine is fun; accidental cocaine overdose is not).

So are liberals smarter? Kanazawa quotes from two surveys that support the hypothesis that liberals are more intelligent. One is the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, which is often called Add Health. The other is the General Social Survey (GSS). The Add Health study shows that the mean IQ of adolescents who identify themselves as "very liberal" is 106, compared with a mean IQ of 95 for those calling themselves "very conservative." The Add Health study is huge — more than 20,000 kids — and this difference is highly statistically significant.

But self-identification is often misleading; do kids really know what it means to be liberal? The GSS data are instructive here: Kanazawa found that more-intelligent GSS respondents (as measured by a quick but highly reliable synonym test) were less likely to agree that the government has a responsibility to reduce income and wealth differences. In other words, intelligent people might like to portray themselves as liberal. But in the end, they know that it's good to be the king.

The jury may be out on whether conservatives are less intelligent than liberals, but there's evidence that they may be physically stronger. Last year, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a fascinating paper by Aaron Sell, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. The authors measured the strength of 343 students using weight-lifting machines at a gym. The participating students completed questionnaires designed to measure, among other things, their proneness to anger, their history of fighting and their fondness for aggression as a way to solve both individual and geopolitical problems.

Sell, Tooby and Cosmides found that men (but not women) with the most physical strength were the most likely to feel entitled to good treatment, anger easily, view themselves as successful in winning conflicts and believe in physical force as a tool for resolving interpersonal and international conflicts. Women who thought of themselves as pretty showed the same pattern of greater aggression. All of which means that if you are a liberal who believes you're smarter than conservatives, you probably shouldn't bring that up around them. You might not like them when they're angry.

I consider myself and all the incredibly intelligent people I work with as living refutation of any assertion that Liberals are smarter.

 

[Thalassa]

The Cato Institute shows that only 25 percent of Conservatives hold a college degree, while 48 percent of Liberals do. 30 percent of Libertarians have college degrees.

The Gallup Poll showed in 2010 that it is actually 49% of self-identified Liberals who have a college degree, while only 28% of Social Conservatives do.

I also made an entire thread here with an article that links higher IQ in children to becoming liberal here:http://www.typologycentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=41293&p=1451949&viewfull=1#post1451949

 

[Thalassa]

I'll do your job for you.

This is taken from a Time article: Study: Are Liberals Smarter Than Conservatives?

That's nice. Many libertarians hate liberals so when I posted my statistics I took them from both a libertarian and mainstream source.

 

[Jonny]

It seems to be more of a T/F issue, and not really what everyone on one side or another prefers, but simply how the arguments are framed.

Conservatives seem to focus more on T concerns like finance and efficiency, while liberals seem to focus more on F concerns like compassion. It doesn't mean either side has a monopoly on those thigns, but again, it is how the rhetoric is framed.

I came to see this when debating with conservatives online, and the frequently claim to go by "the facts", while liberals only go by emotional appeals. Now, I myself am frustrated, because I look at things through a T perspective, but still see the conservatives as wrong on many issues, or at least in the rhetoric, though perhaps making some good points. So I look to liberals, or at least a more neutral party somewhere to make an equally logical counter-argument, but that is extremely far between. The conservatives then capitalize on this, saying "see, they can't, because they simply don't have the 'truth' on their side like we do!"
I then am almost embarrassed, because I too see the F approach as weak and ineffective compared to tough logic. So ever more frustrated, I feel almost alone in really tackling the issue.

So the conservatives will say "we have to cut spending; there's no money', and the liberals do not address this, but instead insist "we have to help people out; we can't cut aid". Clearly, a T vs F perspective.

The flipside of this is when the liberals' less mature T comes out in the form of using government to impose their "humanitarian" causes, and the conservatives' less mature F in the often inflammatory passion behind their vocal stances.

So I remain torn, because my T can agree that runaway spending cannot be good, and then my inferior F sees that if so many people are against spending, then we should not force it. However my T also sees that if the rich are getting richer, then the blaming of the poor that often goes on in conservative rhetoric is totally off base (and likely a diversionary tactic of those with the economic power). Sso that's why I'm not conservative.

I've always resented these T/F distinctions because at the very heart of any quality analysis is a clear understanding of the desires of the involved parties. It would be abhorrently foolish to press forward in the name of efficiency without a clear understanding of what the absolute goals of the actions were, and it would be equally foolish to attempt to achieve a particular set of desires without spending time logically analyzing the situation. Your post is a grotesque oversimplification. Cutting spending, increasing taxes, providing welfare, balancing the budget, et cetera, are all good only insofar as they facilitate a state which most closely resembles the ideal (which itself must be derived from an analysis of the aggregate desires of the populace). Furthermore, given the dynamic nature of our society, each is perhaps an ideal at one time or another, but none should be blindly touted as an absolutely superior method.

 

[DiscoBiscuit]

The Cato Institute shows that only 25 percent of Conservatives hold a college degree, while 48 percent of Liberals do. 30 percent of Libertarians have college degrees.

The Gallup Poll showed in 2010 that it is actually 49% of self-identified Liberals who have a college degree, while only 28% of Social Conservatives do.

Stick this in your pipe and smoke it.

From Wikipedia: Republican Party (United States)

Education: Self-identified Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to have 4-year college degrees. The trends for the years 1955 through 2004 are shown by gender in the graphs below, reproduced from a book published by Joseph Fried.[77] These graphs depict results obtained by Fried from the National Election Studies (NES) database.

Regarding graduate-level degrees (masters or doctorate), there is a rough parity between Democrats and Republicans. According to the Gallup Organization: "oth Democrats and Republicans have equal numbers of Americans at the upper end of the educational spectrum — that is, with post graduate degrees..."[78] Fried provides a slightly more detailed analysis, noting that Republican men are more likely than Democratic men to have advanced degrees, but Democratic women are now more likely than Republican women to have advanced degrees.[79]

Republicans remain a small minority of college professors, with 11% of full-time faculty identifying as Republican.[80]

From wikipedia: Democratic Party (United States)

Although Democrats are well-represented at the postgraduate level, self-identified Republicans are more likely to have attained a 4-year college degree. The trends for the years 1955 through 2004 are shown by gender in the graphs above, reproduced with permission from Democrats and Republicans — Rhetoric and Reality, a book published in 2008 by Joseph Fried. These results are based on surveys conducted by the National Election Studies, supported by the National Science Foundation.[33]

 

[Thalassa]

I believe that we are comparing two different things. I am showing statistics from self-identified Liberals (all of which are not registered as Democrats); Conservatives (etc.), and Libertarians. I'm sure that many Republican business people are college educated; typically one does not become a CEO or a stock broker or lawyer without degrees.

On the other hand, Time magazine also showed in 2010 that liberalism, atheism, and male sexual exclusivity is linked to higher IQ in adults.

Observe.

 

[FDG]

If more smart people self identify as liberal because conservatives are perceived as dumb redencks that doesn't make conservatives smarter, it makes them progressively comparatively dumber as a group, which might lead to a dangerous vicious cycle. They might be interested in changing such perception, if research indeed shows that it is present.

 

[Jonny]

Here is a chart I just made using data from the General Social Survey. The sample size was 40,000.

 

[Red Herring]

OMG. It's leftovers for dinner again

 

[CzeCze]

OMG. It's leftovers for dinner again

Haha! Were you commenting on re-using the same statistics from another thread or something?

 

[Magic Poriferan]

Anyone seen this rather excellent TED talk? It addresses the issues you guys have raised:
[YOUTUBE="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs41JrnGaxc"]Jonathan Haidt: The real difference between liberals and conservatives[/YOUTUBE]

I've seen this talk, and I think my biggest beef with it is that I want to know how they define fairness and justice. It sounds to me like it's blatantly obvious that both liberals and conservatives like that, because the terms seem to be code for "whatever I think is good". It's possible that every liberal and conservative who emphasized those values meant something so different that it's virtually useless.

I suppose the other question I have is how the punishment thing conflicts with the harm thing, since he claims that conservatives put more emphasis on punishment but do not really put less on the no-harm principle. How did this happen?

 

[Hazashin]

How surprising, yet another thread where posters are supposed to discuss both conservative liberal values has devolved into unrepentant conservative bashing.

This site has become an ever more insulated echo chamber for liberal group think.

It's no wonder I've continued to find less and less reason to post here as time goes by.

So you're saying that don't want to post here simply because they are criticizing beliefs you hold? Don't you think that's a little extreme to disregard the site in its entirety because you feel your beliefs are being unjustly criticized?

 

[Sniffles]

I said it once, I'll say it again: gotta love manichean-style politics.