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This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

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

#31

Post by thedufer »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #18

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_... )

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.

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

#32

Post by aptwebapps »

patrickmay wrote: post #10

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…

The difference between left and right may seem less to you than that between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians but what about the numbers? If the former has a roughly 50/50 split in the general population and the latter is 90/10 (I have no idea), then it's not surprising that the former is considered more important.

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

#33

Post by wreegab »

patrickmay wrote: post #10

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…

Of interest I suppose in the context of your comment. Bob Altemeyer's - The Authoritarians: https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

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

#34

Post by gboudrias »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #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 wi…

From the outside, it has looked for a long time as if avoiding issues that matter is the whole point of your political system. No offense, we (Canada) are not much better, but your problems in that regard seem more dire.

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

#35

Post by satellitecat »

thedufer wrote: post #31
vilhelm_s wrote: post #18

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_... )

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.

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.

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

#36

Post by josephschmoe »

vilhelm_s wrote: post #18

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_... )

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.

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

#37

Post by humanrebar »

gboudrias wrote: post #34
JoshTriplett wrote: post #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 wi…

From the outside, it has looked for a long time as if avoiding issues that matter is the whole point of your political system. No offense, we (Canada) are not much better, but your problems in that regard seem more dire.

Just because there isn't a consensus doesn't mean that issues are avoided.

Many questions do not have answers that two-thirds of the country can agree on. For small questions, perhaps that's harmful. However, for large questions, it's definitely a feature of the system that the electorate is forced to deliberate until wider agreement is reached.

Are there issue in particular that you think are important yet avoided?

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

#38

Post by saraid216 »

a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #27
jerf wrote: 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 a…

> 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.

In the interest of not setting off a flame war, I'm going to point out that this phenomenon can be explained in at least two directions (the obvious one and the reverse) and leave it at that.

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

#39

Post by patrickmay »

aptwebapps wrote: post #32
patrickmay wrote: post #10

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…

The difference between left and right may seem less to you than that between authoritarians and anti-authoritarians but what about the numbers? If the former has a roughly 50/50 split in the general population and the latter is 90/10 (I have no idea), then it's not surprising that the former is considered more important.

True, real numbers would be helpful.

My perception is that, in the U.S., the fiscal conservatives would be more logically aligned with the social liberals since the freedom to live as one wishes valued by the latter is more consistent with the small government ideals of the former. It seems that whether a person with such views ends up in the Republican or Democrat camp depends on if they are better able to hold their nose in the face of the odious social policies of the religious right or the equally odious and equally authoritarian fiscal and social policies of the Nanny statists.

Regardless of the reasons for the current situation, the study being discussed suffers from its poor choice of categories. As an example, consider abortion rights (a topic I chose to avoid politicizing the discussion further ;-). I fully support a woman's right to choose and for abortion to be safe and available. I've donated to Planned Parenthood in the past. However, I also think it is reprehensible to force people who believe otherwise to pay for such procedures. Am I a liberal or a conservative?

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

#40

Post by nateabele »

As with most other articles about politics, it's easy to miss the forest through the trees. There's one most important, indisputable point: that we can generally be divided into two groups politically, and those divisions go well beyond opinions developed over time.

How you classify these groups (liberal vs. conservative, individualist vs. collectivist, voluntaryist vs. statist -- I tend to use the language of i vs. c) doesn't really matter. The two groups exist and are verifiably distinguishable.

The important part (and I say this as a libertarian) is that both groups are necessary to the health of a functioning society. It is both useful and necessary for (I'm generalizing here) one group to focus on individualistic pursuits while the other focuses on the well-being of the collective at large -- and we probably would have a healthy, functioning society if each side could appreciate the other's differences of perspective.

Instead, both sides are mutually antagonistic, and exploited by the political class, which almost always acts in its own exclusive interest.

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