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"Choice Blindness" Can Transform Conservatives Into Liberals - and Vice Versa
ananyo writes "When U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney said last year that he was not even going to try to reach 47% of the US electorate, and that he would focus on the 5–10% thought to be floating voters, he was articulating a commonly held opinion: that most voters are locked in to their ideological party loyalty. But Lars Hall, a cognitive scientist at Lund University in Sweden, knew better. When Hall and his colleagues tested the rigidity of people's political attitudes and voting intentions during Sweden's 2010 general election, they discovered that loyalty was malleable: nearly half of all voters were open to changing their minds. Hall's group polled 162 voters during the final weeks of the election campaign, asking them which of two opposing political coalitions — conservative or social democrat/green — they intended to vote for. The researchers also asked voters to rate where they stood on 12 key political issues, including tax rates and nuclear power. The person conducting the experiment secretly filled in an identical survey with the reverse of the voter's answers, and used sleight-of-hand to exchange the answer sheets, placing the voter in the opposite political camp. The researcher invited the voter to give reasons for their manipulated opinions, then summarized their score to give a probable political affiliation and asked again who they intended to vote for. On the basis of the manipulated score, 10% of the subjects switched their voting intentions, from right to left wing or vice versa. Another 19% changed from firm support of their preferred coalition to undecided. A further 18% had been undecided before the survey, indicating that as many as 47% of the electorate were open to changing their minds, in sharp contrast to the 10% of voters identified as undecided in Swedish polls at the time (research paper). Hall has used a similar sleight of hand before to show that our moral compass can often be easily reversed."
Did you use an example of the united states against a study done in another country?? Sorry but us Americans are stubborn assholes who dont care about the issues all we care about is what the party says on the issue. Just my observation as an American.
And outlawing seatbelts would reduce seatbelt injuries. Both total crime and violent crime increased with the gun ban, as they always do, anywhere it's tried. In the UK, violent crime DOUBLED when the potential victims were disarmed.
I took a political quiz recently for fun, which pegged me as Democrat (I guess D & R were the only two outcomes)... which is funny, because I'm pretty solid in Libertarian ideals. Which also tends to be socially liberal, and conservative on other issues.
The republicans are a financially conservative party that wants to interfere with your personal life
The democrats are a financially conservative party that doesn't want to interfere with your personal life
America doesn't have a financially liberal party
Oh, and by the way, I don't know but I assume that your politics are democratic or liberal (in the modern American sense, as in more government) or 'progressive', whatever that is, am I right?
Here is a comment I left related to slavery and I give examples there of just one of the modern socialist states and how the entire population there was enslaved. I was born there long ago, it just so happens. I could talk about all these other socialist or communist states that did the same thing to their people as USSR and even worse.
I can talk about the democratised slavery of the modern society, where the voting majority votes to enslave a voting minority and this ability to discriminate is used to steal productive output of people (income taxes) and even have a scale of theft graduation ('progressive' income tax), so that's the modern 'civilised' version of slavery.
I see projection on your part when you say that I like slavery, what you mean is that you like slavery, you like your version of slavery.
AFAIC individuals must be free from the oppression of the state, if while being free from oppression of the state an individual signs a contract promising to be a 'slave' of some kind to somebody, that's between them.
They can't sign away their inalienable rights, so you can't actually physically harm and murder them, you can't even own them, but they can be your personal 'slave' when it comes to the output of their labour if you both shake on that, I don't care what you do in private.
However you want a very specific, government enforced type of slavery, not anything voluntary, something coercive and oppressive. Examine your motives, I don't think they are pure.
You can't handle the truth.