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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."
The mentality between countries are enormous. For example Canada seems like the US but it isn't. Canada thinks the US are evil and sue-happy. They are very liberal because they don't want to become what the US is. I'm not joking, this is pretty much the general consensus on why people vote liberal in Canada from the people I've talked to. Being raised there, I know this mentality well too. But in the US, there's a huge barrier between left and right. The left want their set of ideologies to be met, and the right want their own. The differences are too vast, but the ones that aren't democrat or republican will stick around even as for an independent party. But let's face it, at the end of the day an individual vote does not matter. The united states is a republic, not a democracy.
So it seems the study basically is demonstrating that some people are more amenable to a symbol of authority telling them what they actually think/believe. Although the extent to which it is important that the authority is perceived to be 'neutral' isn't clear from the study.
You're kind of a moron, aren't you? Assuming that your opinion is the "right" one on all of the topics you list. A big part of the problem is that we limit ourselves to two opinions... liberal and conservative... and then stick to that opinion on all issues.
Personally, I'm liberal on a small portion of topics (mostly social), but fairly conservative on a wide range of other topics. Therefore if I have to label myself, I'd call myself conservative. However, if I were to list where I stand on the current "hot topics", most people would peg me as liberal.
Hey, you can have different opinions on different topics. Who knew?
Because of the slight of hand and then confrontation, I would think it is more like people just rationalize the circumstances and then seek to defend the supposed position they took (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_(making_excuses)) I also wonder if the researcher had any white lab coat, etc. that made them seem more authoritative?
What I do not see is an actual change of opinion.
no comment
One thing I've noticed (read: pure anecdote) is that most people who are enthusiastic about their party don't behave much differently from sports fans of opposing teams. It doesn't really matter what their side does, what matters is which letter wins the game. Even on Slashdot I've confronted a few people who say "well my side never does x abhorrent behavior" when all of ten seconds worth of Google found the opposite.
Personally I simply avoid registering to vote because all that happens is I get calls from people telling me to vote for their guy and they can't really explain why. For example I got a call from somebody on Matt Salmon's team telling me that they would repeal Obama Care, and lower medical costs through deregulation. Being a libertarian, that is music to my ears because I know from experience that red tape does raise costs in the medical field significantly. However when I asked what he would deregulate and how that would help, he didn't even know. But he expects me to vote for his guy anyways.
No thanks. I'd only register to vote if there was actually a significant movement to balance the budget and prevent what I see as an otherwise inevitable catastrophic economic collapse. I don't think that will ever happen though. Once you add social entitlements, no matter how unsustainable or unaffordable, they're basically impossible to get rid of. The best you can do is hedge your assets (gold is a horrible idea BTW) and grab your ankles.
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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.
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
The statistical power of a sample has pretty much zilch dependence on the population size being sampled (until you reach a near-unity portion of the population being sampled); 162 of 9.5 Million provides no less hypothesis-testing power than 162 of 1000 (assuming sampling is properly uniform; a caveat here is that the researcher has a sample of 162 voluntary-survey-responders). While it might have been nice to include statistical error bars on the percentages in the summary, the "in 9.5 Million" is irrelevant to the robustness of conclusions drawn from a sample of 162.
3. #2 also applies to gays. They should have a right to live how they wish like everyone else. They don't deserve the special privileges or attention they get from the left.
What special privileges do you suppose liberals are trying to get for gays. The right to marry the person of their choice just like a heterosexual can?. The right to not be bullied for being different than the majority of other people? The right to adopt children? The right to not be demonized? The right to dress and act how they want as long as it doesn't hurt anybody else? You mean those special privileges?
4. The argument for gun control is childish at best: "daddy maybe if we make the guns go away no one will kill one another anymore". If the left would address the issues in its own public education system, we'd have fewer klebolds and lanzas out there.
Got any evidence for that. Any at all?
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.
Hi. I'm an American too. We aren't all stubborn assholes. Case in point, I tracked down this poster and told a truck full of passing conservatives that a single mother lived at the poster's home address and was collecting welfare. I don't think we'll be seeing him after tonight.
Somewhat more seriously though, to the international community: We're sick of the two-party system too. It's a joke; Nobody really feels their interests are well-represented by either party. As a result, we've taken to discussing politics like it's a sporting event -- we bet on which team will win, scream and dance around in our underwear in front of the TV during the national debates, and get drunk and then either cry, or riot, when our team wins. Because while our political system is shit, we still really, really enjoy watching people we don't like fail. Take Romney for example -- his epic failure kept me happy (and warm!) through most of the frigid Midwestern winter.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
In my opinion a lot of people confuse libertarians with anarchists. For example, they assume libertarians are against any and all regulation. We're just against unreasonable regulation. For example, vocal libertarians such as John Stossel support the EPA regulating soot emissions from cars so that we can have clean air. But we hate regulations that for example make certain medications and surgeries needlessly expensive, or surgeries commonly performed overseas with great results that are banned here.
We're also very vocal against handing tax money to private corporations. For example, PBS is insanely profitable (its executives make over 300,000 per year) yet how dare anybody suggest we stop handing them free money, because clearly that means they hate children.
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This study is pretty obviously not statistically relevant
That's a really great statement there, and I'mma let you finish, but statistical relevance has no relevance here. It's a intellectual-sounding mean-nothing. What you meant was probably statistical significance. And the test of significance is met if the result is unlikely to have happened by chance alone.
You're going to have a hard time justifying a position that this guy's results were just a statistical fluke. You may disagree with the results. You may disagree with the method. You may even disagree with the hypothesis. But you can't say it is a "belief". The only belief here is your own: Specifically, that you believe people's political orientations can't be easily changed because you believe your political orientation is less malleable than what the author has demonstrated.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
In the US there are no left wing parties. As an example, "socialist" can be used as an insult there. From the outside, all US politicians are right wing (meaning that they are not for wealth redistribution or any other left wing concept). It's not that hard to change from strongly conservative to not that strongly conservative.
You know, if all it took to be equal was a declaration stating "You are now equal", African-Americans would have been free in 1865. But the real world is considerably more complex, and good intentions not backed by powerful resolve and yes, sometimes force of law and even of arms, often end up becoming empty sentiments. The US government's unwillingness to protect African-Americans from institutionalized racism in the northern states and from the more overt political, judicial and legislative racism in the southern states meant all the high rhetoric of the Abolitionists, The Emancipation Proclamation, and, no kidding, even a goddamned amendment to the Constitution did little bloody good until the Executive finally started doing things like putting soldiers between vile racists and black teenagers just trying to enjoy their lawful and natural rights, supposedly guaranteed nearly a century before.
Keep a bird in a cage most of its life, then declare if free and chuck if out the window. See how that works.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So you are for regulations where they are successful and making a net positive impact and against regulations where they are useless or hurting without net positive impact? Is that you call "libertarians"? I call it "common sense".
http://www.mueller-public.de - My site http://www.anr-institute.com/ - Advanced Natural Research Institute
We're just against unreasonable regulation.
In my experience, opinions vary *wildly* amongst self-defined libertarians as to the definition of "unreasonable".
For example, PBS is insanely profitable (its executives make over 300,000 per year) yet how dare anybody suggest we stop handing them free money, because clearly that means they hate children.
The Federally chartered Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created by Congress specifically to keep PBS alive in the late 60s.
I don't think you hate kids, I just think your ideology is based on a poor grasp of public policy.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Take a look at Political Compass. It at least splits economic and social issues, and does a decent job of explaining the different combinations. It also nicely shows how the Democrats and Republicans aren't as different overall as they would have you believe.
Judgement free zones are not a right. See, the problem with identity politics is that certain groups are shielded from criticism. So the employer of a gay person has to tread lightly when the gay employee doesn't do a good job, or risk a lawsuit. This is true for women and non-white people as well. Any accusation can be deflected with a counteraccusation of discrimination (or in the case with women, outright assault). Conversely, when a protected group member gets a promotion/access to exclusive schooling/wins a legal case etc, the unprotected groups are left wondering whether this person got it by earning it, or due to (legal or white knighted) political manipulation. This PC culture has invaded nearly every aspect of life.
People in free societies do not have the right to not be criticized because the same right to wear their shit on their shoulders if they choose gives others the right to criticize (or complement) in response. In order to protect this, our culture needs to (re)learn the coping skills that, really, all people should have learned by age 15. What we have today is a culture that runs crying to the courts every time its butt gets hurt. The solution is to fix the oversensitivity, not to whitewash everything down to the lowest common denominator in order to avoid offense. The latter builds even more sensitive people who'll bitch about even smaller minutiae.
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The people advocating for restrictions should be the ones who have to justify themselves.
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I think there's plenty of examples, both from media outlets and in anecdotal experiences about the passive aggressive bullying and psychological manipulation that goes on in american public schools these days. The fact these shooters are targeting schools (for many, the one they graduated from) instead of just going apeshit in random places with lots more targets, suggests that their school experiences played a large role in their motivations.
Simply locking the tools away will not stop people from taking things apart. All it might do is raise the difficulty bar slightly, so instead of 26 kids dying by gunfire, it'll be 260 kids dying from a homemade explosive. The latter is harder to make/use and thus needs more motivation, but it does a lot more damage The right way to deal with these kinds of issues is to find the systemic sources and minimize them. Jumping to reactionary containment policies just builds pressure to the next critical point, resulting in more extreme reactions and counterreactions that are ultimately self defeating for everyone.
Bullying can also go way over the line and teachers rarely step in to stop it. Kids do learn coping skills, they are not always skills you want them to learn. Some of them have learned that shooting their classmates gets rid of the problem. It is hard to stand up to 20+ kids that want to beat you up because the teacher pointed out that you wrecked the curve for the entire class. You start to learn other methods to deal with problems. You do things like read up on human anatomy and learn nerve strikes. Kids are some of the nastiest creatures around and adults can and should intervene to keep things from getting out of hand.
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
He does have a bit of a point. Who would want to vote for the party who filibustered the civil rights act?
From 1967 to 2009 they had a KKK leader as a primary leader of their party. (Byrd's first elected office was when he was elected to a KKK leadership position.)
Regarding women, they voted 170-85 against women's right to vote.
So he's got a point, who would want to vote for that party, the Democrats? I'd sure go with the party that voted FOR women's rights (Republicans 81-34 for women's right to vote , 1915), the party who pushed the Civil Rights Act through against the democrat filibuster, etc.
The general idea for 'hate crimes' is a person commits a major felony, from a select list of violent felonies, AND the evidence indicates there are additional consequences to many other people AND the perp meant to produce those consequences. That's how these laws are written in the overwhelming majority of cases, that the prosecution has to prove ALL those things. I.e Criminal X committed, for example, Murder One, and Criminal X also indicated there was intention to make many other people suffer, fear for their lives, stop exercising their rights, or otherwise be injured. Whether it's a klansman hanging a black man for having made efforts to get more black people to the polls on election day, or a rapist sending a letter to the local paper warning all women to get back to the home or be presumed whores who deserve what he's dishing out, the person charged has to commit a major felony, and has to make threats or otherwise indicate they are trying to do additional harm to others by it. So why is it a conservative position to be soft on particularly violent murderers and rapists who are trying to add more victims to their talley? How did the conservative movement ever become the appologists for the worst of the worst? How does this idea that liberals are the ones soft on crime persist when self appointed spokesmen for the right are reduced to trying to oppose punishing murderers and rapists for aggravating circumstances? Read the actual laws, not what some nut such as Coulter has said about them, and decide for yourself.
Who is John Cabal?
>>I will ever maintain that there's no legitimate objection to gay marriage
I agree. I am in a gay relationship with my younger brother (27), who is bi and has a girlfriend. While I am not sexually attracted to her, I like her a lot and the three of us would like to get married. However, due to current laws against incest, polygamy, and gay marriage, that's not likely to happen. We are all consenting adults; why shouldn't we be allowed to have a group marriage? I could see a potential issue if it involved minors, but if one more Republi-fascist compares our living situation to bestiality (which I find disgusting, but whatever floats your boat), I'll scream.
3. #2 also applies to gays. They should have a right to live how they wish like everyone else. They don't deserve the special privileges or attention they get from the left.
What special privileges do you suppose liberals are trying to get for gays. The right to marry the person of their choice just like a heterosexual can?.
The special privileges granted to married couples. How about we just do away with those entirely? Allow people to form whatever family units they want. Don't give special tax statuses. Allow inheritance under uniform rules. Allow whomever somebody wants to be involved in medical decisions.
Recognizing gay marriage perpetuates the problem; the real solution is to de-recognize marriage as a special state of being. Just let people make their own decisions.
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
Well, if the Republicans of 1915 were running in current races, that would be a different matter. Heck, even the Republican party that supported Reagan-era top marginal tax rates (higher top tax rates than now) would provide a nice alternative slightly to the left of Obama. But the Republicans (and Democrats) of 2012 have little to do with groups of the same name from decades ago. With the exception of Byrd, most of the notorious anti-civil-rights Democrats (like the long-lived Strom Thurmond) eventually switched party affiliations, and ended their careers as Republican candidates. The "Southern Strategy" era, where the Republican party intentionally courted the racist vote to turn the once-solidly-blue South into the solid "red" area today was remarkably successful, and cemented the modern Republican party as undisputed champions of neo-Confederate racists and the Religious "women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen" Right.
So, if you're blind to the last several decades of history, you might accidentally vote for the Republican party assuming that they were progressives in civil and gender rights. However, assuming you haven't Rip-Van-Winkled the last couple decades away in slumber, it's pretty obvious where the party currently stands.
"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"
Got to wonder about an article that starts out this way. Grant you, I haven't gone back and reviewed the video in a while. Still, I'm pretty sure what he said was that about 47% of the population wouldn't be interested in him and a platform for a smaller government.
Well, after five seconds of googling I found:
Romney: There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. That that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. And I mean, the president starts off with 48, 49, 48—he starts off with a huge number. These are people who pay no income tax. Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn't connect. And he'll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that's what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people—I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives. What I have to do is convince the 5 to 10 percent in the center that are independents that are thoughtful, that look at voting one way or the other depending upon in some cases emotion, whether they like the guy or not, what it looks like. I mean, when you ask those peoplewe do all these polls—I find it amazing—we poll all these people, see where you stand on the polls, but 45 percent of the people will go with a Republican, and 48 or 4
I did enjoy, however, how you removed the inflammatory notion that "there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it" and replaced it with "a platform for a smaller government."
It's amusing to call out one summary as being inaccurate and replace it with your own inaccuracies. I found the line you quoted from the summary more accurate about Romney's "giving up on them" attitude than your "they refuse a small government."
Every campaign focuses their attention on those votes they're most likely to get. You didn't see Obama spending a lot of his campaign in states that weren't likely to go his way no matter what. Certainly he had his strategy sessions that had they been publicly released wouldn't be especially flattering either.
So quote them. Go ahead, you don't think he's mindful of what he says to a large group of people? Your accusations that Obama was just as bad as Romney are backed up with absolutely zero citations.
My work here is dung.
"Sample of 162 in 9.5 Million"
This is the dumbest goddamn thing you can say about statistics.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I would find this maybe sensical if the Republicans had, in the last ten or twenty years, ever actually tried to advocate for policies that were likely to actually lead to lower taxes. You can't be the party of small government while creating whole new categories of quasi-law-enforcement with unlimited powers and no accountability, and proposing to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money trying to force the creation of Creationist-friendly textbooks, prevent women from getting abortions, prevent gay people from marrying, and so on.
They aren't the party of smaller government, and haven't been in a long time. They are the party that uses the phrase "small government" a lot while constantly looking for new ways to expand government powers and spend more money.
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For example, PBS is insanely profitable (its executives make over 300,000 per year) yet how dare anybody suggest we stop handing them free money, because clearly that means they hate children.
That's not true. Maybe you didn't know it was a lie, and are just stating what you honestly believe to be fact, but it's a lie all the same. I blame Romney for creating this ridiculous talking point in the debates last year.
You can review PBS's financial statements for yourself. They lost ~$30 million in the past year, and a similar amount the year before -- page 5, "Change in net assets" row, "Total" columns for both 2012 and 2011.
They've got enough money that they could last for a while without public funding, but not forever. Cutting executive pay wouldn't make a difference. Also, I find it funny that banks need to pay millions of dollars of tax payer bailout dollars as bonuses to retain "top talent", but it's outrageous when PBS or schools want to spend a fraction of that to keep their top employees.
And really, it's a trivial cost for tax payers to bear (something like $1 per person per year), and provides our kids with educational programming that doesn't smother them with ads or ADHD-inducing hyperactive crap.
If you don't mind me trying to get the first thread back on track, the results quoted here apply to Sweden, not necessarily the U.S.
Sweden has a multi-party parliamentary system. Parliamentary system do create inequality that favors established parties, especially first-past-the-post ones like the U.K. Yet, their process of government formation means electing small parties isn't automatic pork suicide for districts. So at least some small parties get in and influence the direction for future changes.
In other words, Swedes change their mind because they've some choice. American parties more resemble sports teams. Yes, one plays nastier than the other, but fundamentally Americans might not change their minds because neither party represents much meaningful change.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell