Studies: Conservatives and Liberals are Psychologically Different

[Avocado]

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.

Started out with socialist ideals, then I was lead to believe by my step-father and a few public service announcements from the guy who runs the oil business here that pure capitalism was best. Now I am a moderate, since I can see that Sweeden is socialist and doing fine. I may even shift back to socialist thought now that I am more environmentally aware. If the common welfare is your goal rather than endless growth, you are more apt to take care of the Earth, it seems. That said, I would like to see more opportunities for (and less regulation for) small businesses and harder regulations on businesses with over $1 million (in 2015 money) in assets. Does not seem too hard to allow economic freedom for the lower classes, but to hold wealthier institutions accountable.

The only negative outcome I could potentially see is that the greedy corporations will just move elsewhere and exploit people. The problem should be solved here, though.

 

[C.J.Woolf]

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 inherently good or bad about this. It simply is. It's observed traits shown as a trend...

The studies you cite predict that some people will continue to reject this, no matter how much solid evidence there is for it. Consider evolution and climate change. If the facts do not fit the worldview, then the facts are rejected.

 

[Lark]

Started out with socialist ideals, then I was lead to believe by my step-father and a few public service announcements from the guy who runs the oil business here that pure capitalism was best. Now I am a moderate, since I can see that Sweeden is socialist and doing fine. I may even shift back to socialist thought now that I am more environmentally aware. If the common welfare is your goal rather than endless growth, you are more apt to take care of the Earth, it seems. That said, I would like to see more opportunities for (and less regulation for) small businesses and harder regulations on businesses with over $1 million (in 2015 money) in assets. Does not seem too hard to allow economic freedom for the lower classes, but to hold wealthier institutions accountable.

The only negative outcome I could potentially see is that the greedy corporations will just move elsewhere and exploit people. The problem should be solved here, though.

I'll be honest with you that socialism and capitalism both are made impossible by more fundamental breakdowns and shifts in society if you ask me.

What exists in the place of either is a sort of alternative to the both which is not particularly satisfactory to anyone but if they can be diverted with enough discussions by the "popular kids" about what they think is cool at that time there's not much real analysis going on.

 

[Tater]

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.397.4526&rep=rep1&type=pdf (a study from 2010)

To review, we find that Openness and Conscientiousness,
the two traits most consistently associated with
political ideology in prior research, also have effects of
similar magnitudes on social and economic attitudes.
Conscientiousness explains overall conservatism and
holding conservative economic and social policy attitudes,
whereas Openness is associated with liberalism
across these three measures. However, the effects
of the other three traits vary in direction or magnitude
across issue domain. Although Emotional Stability
is associated with social conservatism, it is much
more strongly associated with economic conservatism.
Similarly, we find a modest relationship between Extraversion
and both economic and social conservatism,
but the effect on economic attitudes is relatively
larger. Finally, Agreeableness, which prior research has
found to be uncorrelated with self-reported ideology, is
associated with economic liberalism but social conservatism. The countervailing effects of Agreeableness
and weak associations between Stability and Extraversion
and social policy attitudes may explain the
relative lack of statistically significant relationships between
these traits and ideology in prior research relying
on smaller samples.

Among the motivations for this research was the
possibility that ideological constraint—the tendency of
liberals (conservatives) to hold similar views across a
variety of policy domains—could be partially explained
by the influence of personality traits. Our finding that
for four traits, and particularly for Conscientiousness
and Openness, responses to economic and social policy
stimuli are congruent (move in the same ideological
direction, although for Emotional Stability and Extraversion
there are important differences in effect
sizes across issues domains) provides some evidence
that ideological coherence is in part a function of core
individual-level differences in personality (combined
with contexts that give meaning to political and social
stimuli). It also provides a micro-level explanation for
the observation that liberals and conservatives are different
in both their public political and private lives
(Carney et al. 2008) because such ideological differences
emerge, in part, from an individual’s general
response to external stimuli in both the political and
nonpolitical world.
Of course, there are other explanations for the
sources of, and barriers to, ideological thinking. But,
in this regard, our new finding that Agreeableness is
associated with economic liberalism and social conservatism
provides important evidence of the value of a
trait-based explanation. For the one trait for which we
identify reasons why individuals could be moved in
opposite ideological directions by economic and social
policy stimuli, we find such differences. This suggests
that when forming opinions, individuals do not need to
be uniformly liberal or conservative, but instead that
at times they may be cross pressured. Thus, seemingly
conflicting views across domains may be evidence not
of confusion or inattention to elite cues, but genuine
differences in personality-shaped preferences across
domains that do not conform to elite or academic notions
of ideological constraint.

 

[Avocado]

I'll be honest with you that socialism and capitalism both are made impossible by more fundamental breakdowns and shifts in society if you ask me.

What exists in the place of either is a sort of alternative to the both which is not particularly satisfactory to anyone but if they can be diverted with enough discussions by the "popular kids" about what they think is cool at that time there's not much real analysis going on.

Which is sad, sense any mindful considerations about how things should be are off drowned out by mindless drivel. I know why Plato shied from politics.

 

[Smilephantomhive]

What if you changed your political opinion?

 

[Jaguar]

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.

Did it ever occur to you those "rich bastards" started out poor and worked their ass off while making investments with every penny? Open your mind, already. I've never understood those who cheer for the little guy until he gets to be the big guy. Then they try and take down the big guy for not being the little guy any longer. What kind of rubbish is that, Wonka?

 

[Lark]

Did it ever occur to you those "rich bastards" started out poor and worked their ass off while making investments with every penny? Open your mind, already. I've never understood those who cheer for the little guy until he gets to be the big guy. Then they try and take down the big guy for not being the little guy any longer. What kind of rubbish is that, Wonka?

The sorts of rich bastards I'm talking about could never have acquired their wealth in a single human life time, no matter how lucky or hard working they are, the rags to riches stories, they're just stories for the most part, the ones that are true, well, they are still little guys and will remain little guys all their days, you're thinking way too small time and attributing that thinking to me. Which I dont appreciate but whatever.

All the stories about risk and hard work being rewarded properly are a lot of self-congratulation for the most part, all the free market econonmic ideology does is serve a normative function, motivates people to get up and work in pretty shitty circumstances, that's all.

 

[Jaguar]

The sorts of rich bastards I'm talking about could never have acquired their wealth in a single human life time, no matter how lucky or hard working they are, the rags to riches stories, they're just stories for the most part, the ones that are true, well, they are still little guys and will remain little guys all their days, you're thinking way too small time and attributing that thinking to me. Which I dont appreciate but whatever.

Define rich bastard.

 

[Lark]

Define rich bastard.

I was pretty sure I just did, legacy may be a better phrase but its all relative.

I'll give you an example, I dont like the drug trade, I think its reprehensible for a lot of different reasons but its popular, very, very popular and its definitely not the taboo any longer that it once was, at least not in my part of the world, and there is that population of people among which it has never been a taboo.

So that popularity is pretty much an infinite demand for a finite product, a recipe for riches in the traditional tale economics likes to tell, yet I heard a very good documentary from the US in which decriminalisation and legalisation by the back door are picking up serious, serious momentum.

This documentary involved interviews with one of the biggest emergent businesses "medicine man" or something like that, which has innovated a lot of "guerilla finance" and stuff like that, real bastion of free market ideology there, capitalism that breaks all the rules and all that stuff.

So this business would appear to have a licence to print money, particularly when the full scale legalisation happens (as I think it will eventually, the cultural struggle has been lost on that front), you would imagine that the businesses emerging now will have a monopoly or at the very least competitive advantages over new competition or new start ups or whatever.

Do they see it that way? Are they the rags to riches exemplar that you might think, exactly as you've outlined in the earlier post, nope, they've gone on the record saying that they are only creating a business for sale, in fact have said that anyone who is setting up in a business of any description should know the smart move is to realise that you're going to have to sell up to some old money at some stage.

You dont even need to be anti-capitalist to realise what's wrong with that, you could even say its an example of capitalism at its worst rather than capitalism at its best, that'd be fine too but getting angried up and jumping to the defence of some rich stranger or the rich strangers systemic advantages (not saying you're doing that but plenty do) its the worst move.

 

[anticlimatic]

Did it ever occur to you those "rich bastards" started out poor and worked their ass off while making investments with every penny? Open your mind, already. I've never understood those who cheer for the little guy until he gets to be the big guy. Then they try and take down the big guy for not being the little guy any longer. What kind of rubbish is that, Wonka?

Standard leftist 'equality of outcome' thinking.

 

[Jaguar]

The sorts of rich bastards I'm talking about could never have acquired their wealth in a single human life time

There are no "sorts of" with you:

I hate rich people.

As if we didn't already know that.

It's personal with you. Get over it before you drown in it.

Standard leftist 'equality of outcome' thinking.

Equality of opportunity is not the same as equality of outcome. I'm a proponent of the former, not the latter.
As far as I'm concerned, a world where everyone is a duplicate of another isn't a world worth living in.

Keep your hands off of my stack.

 

[Lark]

There are no "sorts of" with you:





It's personal with you. Get over it before you drown in it.


Equality of opportunity is not the same as equality of outcome. I'm a proponent of the former, not the latter.
As far as I'm concerned, a world where everyone is a duplicate of another isn't a world worth living in.

Keep your hands off of my stack.

Having a bad day, week, month, year Jag? Life maybe?

Anyway, equality doesnt mean uniformity or sameness, whatever the rainbow fascists and other dickheads have made of it to date, Adam Smith et al thought their market forces were all that because they believed in equality of outcome aswell as equality of opportunity, at the very, very least they didnt believe in inequality or privileged inequality, if you actually read any of their stuff its hard to miss that but I know there's plenty of people who've been really, really good at that.

So, yeah, screw Mr. Burns.

 

[Jaguar]

Having a bad day, week, month, year Jag? Life maybe?

Considering your long-standing hatred of rich people, I'd say you're having issues. Snap out of it.

 

[Lark]

Considering your long-standing hatred of rich people, I'd say you're having issues. Snap out of it.

Aye, whatever.

 

[Gunboat Diplomat]

Equality of opportunity is not the same as equality of outcome. I'm a proponent of the former, not the latter.

I am new here, so I don't know the whole context, but I wonder:
Isn't this way too simple? I think most people (at least in the West) would agree with the above sentiment in principle. But is the situation, when a handful of people that could fit in a bigger room (even assuming they started poor) owns half of the planet, an acceptable outcome?