Political Viewpoints Linked To Fear

Pentagram writes "Researchers writing in Science report that the political orientation of test subjects who have strong views is linked to how easy they are to startle. They found that subjects who were more fearful were more likely to have right wing views, such as being in favor of capital punishment and higher defense budgets. The researchers suggest that this psychological difference is why it is so difficult to change people's minds in political arguments."

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more detail...

[crescente]

There was also a more indepth article about this last year in Psychology Today: http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20061222-000001.xml

So Obvious

[Naughty Bob]

In retrospect.... I'm in the UK, and the more right-wing the paper, the more knee-jerk to headlines.

I guess it's also what gives the conservatives (small c) that weird advantage in polls- their always more likely to be 'in tune' with the masses, because their opinions are always more likely to have been formed off the back of the most recent scare story.

Re:So in other words...

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I appreciate the humor, I don't think acting out of a perceived need of self preservation is how I would define cowardice.

NPR has the scoop

[AKAImBatman]

So in other words... Republicans are cowards.

The researchers commented on this situation on NPR this morning. Yes, you could potentially see Republicans that way. But the researchers suggested that you could also see Democrats as "lacking in a basic sense of self-preservation."

The researchers went on to say that they don't believe that either label is appropriate. Rather, they hope both sides will use this information to better understand one another.

From my own perspective, I feel that it's also worth pointing out that both sides tend to follow their ideals. It's not like Republicans tend to avoid military service after demanding it, and it's not like Democrats seek military service due to a lack of self-preservation. The two sides merely react to certain stimulus, but the actual psychology of the drive is obviously more complex. Which leads me to my next point.

The researchers suggest that this psychological difference is why it is so difficult to change people's minds in political arguments.

Many of the other researchers interviewed by NPR were skeptical of these findings. Their belief was that the study failed to show that these responses were set biologically and not by environmental stimuli. So in fact, it may be that Republicans are more suspicious of attacks than Democrats due to their environmental training. Which certainly seems more likely than dividing people up into "cowards" and "idiot-savants".

Re:NPR has the scoop

[HiVizDiver]

A propos of not much, I've spoken with several people who have admitted that they are voting for McCain, and when pressed as to why (not in an interrogatory way, I assure you - mostly out of general interest), it boiled down to Obama's black AND his middle name is Hussein. One person actually said (and I quote) "He went to a Muslim school, and I don't care what anyone says about it - that stuff gets IN THERE" as she pointed to her head. I'm not sure what "stuff" she was referring to. That was there only reason for voting for McCain. While I don't feel that voting for McCain automatically makes a person a Republican, it certainly seems that their vote is being cast out of a complete sense of fear of that which they don't understand.

I would not argue that voting against something that concerns you is a good idea; however, their fear is SO misplaced (and racist, or at least xenophobic), that it certainly paints them as uneducated and ridiculous.

Re:NPR has the scoop

[mdarksbane]

Your question is biased in an of itself. If liberals are so charitable, why are they so willing to add an inefficient government system that will increase our taxload, giving people less money to spend on medicine, and could eventually put medical progress itself at risk?

Not saying I espouse either value, but it's not a fair question :)

Personally I think it's a strange urban versus rural mentality.

Poor conservatives tend to come from a rural cultural background where you didn't have much materially, but always had both a farm to keep you fed, and a large social network of family and friends to lean on in times of crisis. Even if it no longer holds true entirely, the culture is still based around the consequences of that mentality - you don't depend on the government for things, because your core needs are handled, and while you expect to stay poor through hard work for yourself (on your own farm, or family's farm) you will never be desperate. Even with the medical situation - the whole cultural memory of a poor country doctor accepting a chicken because that's all they had to give is a strong ideal that still means something to people, even if it isn't something that's reasonable now - in a small town you know everyone well enough that sometime someone has done that sort of favor for you at some point in your life, and you've done the same.

Someone who grew up in it can fill in the urban half of this better than I, but it seems that being in a larger city, you are much more interdependent on society as a system, as opposed to individuals. You generally don't have that level of your own farm produce and land to fall back on - if you lose your job, if you can't get a paying job, you're on the street. And there's a lot more people around in general, so instead of the homeless population of the town being named "Bob," it becomes a real social concern. You're more likely to see police in action, or their failure to act. Your experience with guns is a couple drug dealers shooting each other intead of hunting a deer to add to your dinner or your grandma's story about scaring off robbers. Government and society in general just has a lot more to do with your life - so you expect it to do something for it, look to it for answers because the problems you see aren't of a scale where the preacher at church can just take a donation to help the Jones' get through a hard couple months.

I guess that's where I see people's base leaning of conservative versus liberal coming from. Anything beyond and more intelligent than that requires real thought and investigation, which is more than most people put into it.

I guess the old saying is true, then...

[Tetsujin]

"A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged" - I guess the message there is supposed to be "having been mugged and now being familiar with the true nature of the world around them, they learned that the ideals they formerly embraced were foolishly misguided" but I always read it more as "having been mugged they allowed fear to take over their lives, replacing their sense of justice with a more Machiavellian approach to the world."

Re:I guess the old saying is true, then...

[AKAImBatman]

I always read it more as "having been mugged they allowed fear to take over their lives, replacing their sense of justice with a more Machiavellian approach to the world."

I think that's a naive interpretation of the saying. In this case "mugged" tends to be a metaphor for "negative experience". A negative experience does sometimes teach people to be a little harsher.

I know I tried a hands-off approach with administrating a web forum for a quite a while, and quickly found that a few disruptive members were driving away all the actual contributors to the discussions. I tried being reasonable and applying polite warnings. I mean, we were all adults, right? The only thing that happened was that these users got good at skirting the edge of the rules. They'd cross the line regularly, but tried not to do enough to warrant a perma-ban. They got especially good at pushing the buttons of other users such that otherwise contributing members became part of the problem. Then these users were able to play a game of public appeal when the mods pointed a finger at them.

In the end, there was only one solution. I clamped down. I hated doing it, I really did. But I managed to drive those users out, keep careful controls on the direction of threads, and attract many of our lost users to return. The community came together and really helped the site(s) it supported to thrive after that. I initially got some blame for the bans, but most users ended up thankful after only a short period of time. (Which I honestly didn't expect.)

I eventually relaxed the controls a bit, but I still found I had to keep vigilant or else someone would show up to attempt to ruin the forums again.

What I'm getting at is that Republicans aren't always wrong in those respects. Sometimes control and structure ARE necessary. It's just difficult for them to always know when. There's a fairly good talk from a psychologist on TED TV who echos these thoughts.

On the flip-side, I think the recent issue over deregulation shows that Republicans do try to relax controls, sometimes with disastrous effects. Which simply reinforces their ideas of control and structure.

Re:I guess the old saying is true, then...

[binary paladin]

I always counter by saying, "Yeah and a liberal is a conservative that's been abused by the police."

And historically... I wonder who has a higher body count, government goons or mere muggers.

It goes both ways

[Robotbeat]

This definitely affects Democrats, too. My father-in-law is a staunch democrat, and he's also very anxious all the time. It affects his political views because he worries greatly about things like health care and such, things which he thinks the gov't can protect us from.

There's a well-known saying: "A Democrat is a Republican who's been arrested, and a Republican is a Democrat who's been mugged."

I know that the saying works for me, too. My wife and I were the victims of gang violence (well, just some inner-city middle schoolers who broke our car window while we were in the car, causing my wife's face to bleed) and I definitely think it caused me to lean to the right, and more recently I was arrested (charges later dismissed) which caused me to not trust the police and lean to the left.

Now, I don't think I'm really on either side. The police aren't going to really do too much to you as long as you don't make their lives difficult, and I think I can handle myself and my family if the whole economy implodes. Politicians usually don't actually make you safer. Good neighbors, family, and friends do.

Fear? Perhaps misweighted utility fxn?

[calmofthestorm]

It seems to me that much of the current war on * sham is based on irrational fears. It's well known that humans have difficulty understanding on a qualitative level very low and very high probabilities.

So, for example, people might be far more concerned about being killed in a 9/11 repeat (5000 people) rather than in an automobile accident (~20,000 p/yr), despite the latter being far more of a risk to them.

Of course there are reasons to fear the former more than the latter that are reasonable, such as placing more value on how one dies than if (I don't consider this unreasonable; I'd rather be shot by a stranger than my best friend)

Conservative =Protective?

[R2.0]

FTA: "decided to test the idea that liberal and conservative (or "protective") social beliefs are related to individuals' sensitivity to threat."

So really what they tested was whether people who have more protective attitudes toward others react more to fear stimulus. Well, isn't that obvious? Correlation OR causation, it seems a pretty direct link that if you are afraid of something, you'd want to protect against it, and if you are afraid of more things, you'd want to protect against more things, and if the intensity of your fear is higher, the level of protection would increase.

So how on Earth did they translate that into "conservative" political views?

Re:Fear? Look in the mirror

[Aphoxema]

What if I think being politically motivated at all is a mental illness?

Re:Point and counterpoint

[calmofthestorm]

On a more rational (than my last post) note, how is it a defect to be more easily afraid? Fear is a GOOD thing when one is facing a real threat; it causes one to take actions to defend oneself (such as increasing military spending or reaching for a rock, as the case may be)

You could just as reasonably argue that liberals irrationally shrug off threats that are dangerous to them, and that they are incorrect, or make a more fair argument that people who hold extremist beliefs fair to accurately gauge risk.

Even if it is the liberals who are right and conservatives who are wrong here I hardly think you can call this a "disease", more a different worldview.

I'm a lot more scared of being abducted and held without trial by my own government than dying in a tiny terrorist attack; this is no more or less rational than someone with the opposite fears, and both are less rational than someone who is afraid of cars because of the risk of death.

Re:Fear

[number6x]

Since the US is the leading user of recreational drugs in the world ( the amount of money US citizens spend on illegal substances dwarfs the budgets of most countries), we should really take illegal drug use into account when we interpret most American social behavior.

The right wingers tend to be split into two big groups: The wealthier old money types and the poorer rural types.

The left wingers are wealthier intellectuals and poorer hipsters.

The wealthy right wingers can afford more cocaine and the poorer use the most popular rural drug Meth. These substances make them jumpier and more paranoid.

The left wingers tend top have the pot smokers, so they are more mellow.

</sarcasm>

Maybe the fear or lack of it follows from the behavior?

Sure, But Only the Paranoids Survive

[Louis Savain]

A November 2007 Gallup poll reveals that Republicans by a wide margin across all age, gender, income, and education levels report significantly better mental health than Democrats and Independents.

As we observe in nature, only the paranoids survive. The others are just nuts. LOL.

Re:This surprises no one

[Dragonslicer]

Oh please. Left wingers are just as happy to surrender their civil rights... And who voted for the Patriot Act? Yep, both sides of the aisle.

It's important not to confuse "left wing" or "liberal" with "Democratic Party". The current Democratic party holds to liberal ideals about as well as the current Republican party holds to conservative ideals.