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This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

m.motherjones.com

21–30 of 79 posts

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#21

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_... )

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.

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#22
post #21

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_... )

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.

By not describing the content of the picture you're just encouraging people to go and look at it :)

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#23
It's dangerous to take a result like this and speculate on reasons, without developing proof that supports those reasons. The research mentioned in the article measured one particular trait which seems to be correlated with expressed political views, and provides the evidence for that (eye-tracking data); however, the article goes on to propose reasons for that trait and correlation, without justifying the reasons with any evidence. Perhaps the underlying research gives reasons, or perhaps it doesn't, but either way the article seems irresponsible to report those reasons without supporting evidence.

This article also assumes a single axis, single-variable political spectrum from liberal to conservative, which is an absurdly simplistic view.

The one thing that does seem notable in the article is the conclusion, though. Put that together with Duverger's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law), which explains why we have two political parties in the first place, and perhaps the article's research explains where we got the rather odd party division we have, rather than a more useful one. I dislike the conclusion that this might make compromise easier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation), but perhaps if we can recognize the current liberal/conservative distinction (as expressed in politics today) as a difference that has little to do with useful political views, perhaps we can talk less about the hot-button items that currently make up news and campaigns, and start getting issues that matter into the political spectrum.

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#24
post #15

But what if I take the results this machine gives, and then immediately start supporting candidates at the opposite end of the spectrum?

Um... Then you'll vote for a party you don't agree with. Your point was?

It was an attempted joke referencing the halting problem. Never mind ;)

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#25

Left/right or liberal/conservative are false dichotomies, at least in U.S. politics. Both major parties are willing to use coercion to achieve their goals, and they don't even differ very much in what those goals are. The real divide is between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. It would be interesting to see a similar study (or the results of this study re-analyzed) with liberal/conservative replaced with autho…

I disagree. I find that Conservatives generally "conserve" a society's traditions, culture, religion, and way of life while Liberals "liberate" a society from it's traditions, culture, religion, and way of life. When taken to an extreme Conservatives can accidentally stagnate a society by holding it back from ideas that further it (see: conservative southern states, Islamic extremist countries), while Liberals can accidentally destroy a society altogether by giving it away in pieces (see: Israel, liberal immigration policies, Islamification of Europe).

They're both extremes on a spectrum. One prevents new ideas that a society wants, the other forces new ideas that a society isn't ready for.

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#27
post #13

More generally, it seems the more we look into the seemingly-simple emotion of disgust, the more complicated it gets. While I hate to just drop a Wikipedia page in a comment link, it seems to be a pretty good starting point on the topic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disgust It's fascinating stuff. The other nice thing about this article is that it seems to refrain from judgments, which is a problem this general field…

Disgust is only one of the relevant psychometric dimensions in Jonathan Haidt's model, which is where this bit comes from. In a nutshell, Haidt found that liberals reason about moral problems almost exclusively through the lens of fairness, while Consevatives use a larger "moral toolbox."

http://www.moralfoundations.org/

One of the more interesting observations out of Haidt's work is that conservatives can reliably articulate the ideas of liberals as a liberal would. But the inverse is not true. Liberals have difficulty emulating perspectives that include concepts such as the divine.

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#28

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_... )

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.

Re: This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

#29

Left/right or liberal/conservative are false dichotomies, at least in U.S. politics. Both major parties are willing to use coercion to achieve their goals, and they don't even differ very much in what those goals are. The real divide is between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians. It would be interesting to see a similar study (or the results of this study re-analyzed) with liberal/conservative replaced with autho…

Your point is internally inconsistent. Authoritarianism is one dimension along which people can differ, but empirically, most people are more or less authoritarian. It's a point which you essentially concede by noting that both parties in the U.S. are authoritarian (and so are most political parties throughout the developed world). So how can you justify calling authoritarianism versus anti-authoritarianism the "real divide" when it only separates a small minority from the great majority?
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