Fear and paranoia; virtues of the modern conservative?

Wired Science said:
Conservatives Scare More Easily Than Liberals, Say Scientists

By Brandon Keim September 18, 2008 | 4:09:46 PMCategories: Behavior, Politics

Deep-seated political differences aren't simply moral and intellectual: They're also biological.

In reflex tests of 46 political partisans, psychologists found that conservatives were more likely than liberals to be shocked by sudden threats.

Accompanying the physiological differences were deep differences on hot-button political issues: military expansion, the Iraq war, gun control, capital punishment, the Patriot act, warrantless searches, foreign aid, abortion rights, gay marriage, premarital sex and pornography.

"People are experiencing the world, experiencing threat, differently," said University of Nebraska political scientist John Hibbing. "We have very different physiological orientations."

The study, published today in Science, has not yet been duplicated, but adds a potentially troubling piece to the puzzle of biology, behavior and politics.

Earlier studies have linked reflexive responses to threats -- which for testing purposes take the form of loud noises and graphic images -- with existing states of heightened anxiety.

Though the Science study's authors cautioned against an overly broad interpretation of their findings, the results suggest that fear leads to political conservatism.

"Threatening situations do indeed seem to increase people's affinity for politically conservative opinions, leaders, and parties," said New York University psychologist John Jost.

Study co-author Kevin Smith, also a University of Nebraska political scientist, demurred at making such a connection. "Historically speaking, politicians have appealed to the 'be afraid' response in the electorate in an attempt to mine votes," he said. "But in terms of going from campaigning to what we did in the laboratory, that's a large leap."

But even Smith agreed that "people with stronger responses are more sensitive to potential threats in their environment."

Asked whether the findings imply a fearmongering strategy for conservatives, New York University psychologist David Amodio responded, "Yes. And some people believe that they are actively using this strategy."

The Bush administration has been accused of exploiting fears, though it's hardly a new approach.

"The whole aim of practical politics," wrote journalist gadfly H.L. Mencken, "is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins."

Jost condemned such tactics. "From an ethical standpoint, conservative campaigns should not exploit feelings of fear in the general population," he said.

Of course, ethics tend to be forgotten during election seasons -- but fear-mongering may be counterproductive.

"From a practical standpoint, I think that there will eventually be a backlash against those tactics as it becomes more obvious how exploitative they are," said Jost.

Darren Schreiber, a University of California, San Diego political psychologist, contends that a candidate "who merely tries to trigger fear simply can't be successful in the long run. Joe McCarthy had his run, but now his name is synonymous with a vile form of politics."

Exploitation aside, there may be a gentler side to the findings.

"Instead of political opponents thinking their opposite party is simply being willfully bullheaded," said Hibbing, "you can say, 'Well, they see a little differently than I do.'"

Political Attitudes Vary With Physiological Traits [Science] [not yet online]

Images: A terrorism awareness poster in London, circa 2002, courtesy of ToastyKen; differences in automatic responses to threatening stimuli, from Science.

Source

:rofl: :lurk:
 

Cerise

Well-Known Member
:rofl3:

Liberalism isn’t a political ideology; it’s a psychology - the psychology of self-satisfaction to be precise. Their motivations can include things like a desire to feel intelligent, moral, noble, or unique, as well as a desire for peer acceptance or reverence, and aversion to being ostracized, among many other things.

The only common bond that truly holds liberal ideas together is their straight-forward simplicity (pass a law, raise taxes, hand out money, talk it out, etc), which is solely a consequence of the fact that liberals are completely uninterested in real solutions to real problems. Liberals press the issue because it makes them feel important, and they support it because it makes them feel morally superior.

Ideologies are motivated by common principles, and liberal “ideologues” simply have none. They are only a cohesive ideology insofar as they value their own sense of superiority and care little to nothing about the consequences of their policies


Liberals argue, not to show the value of an idea, but to show the value of themselves, either to the other person, or to some other observer. They either want to “prove” their superiority or the other person’s inferiority (or more often both). Rationality simply isn’t required as long as they can feel good about themselves in the end.

No where is liberal egotism more evident than in the way they argue and debate though....That’s why debate with them so often devolves into personal attacks, attacks on the credibility of opposing sources, claims of bigotry, denial and evasion, and any number of other tactics which do nothing to advance their argument. All of these are psychological defense mechanisms (“you’re being too simplistic” and “the world isn’t black and white” are two major defense mechanisms liberals use when an opposing position is straight-forwardly true).

Anything liberals can do to avoid facing damage to their ego, they will do, both consciously and unconsciously. But they rarely put real thought into the consequences of their positions, because those consequences simply don’t interest them. They engage in politics solely because it feeds their ego.

:kiss:

interesting read on the psychology of conservatism
 

Professur

Well-Known Member
Well, given that liberals tend to trust that the powers that be have Joe Q's best interests at heart, and conservatives tend to believe that you shouldn't trust anyone but yourself... I wouldn't expect otherwise.
 
The Los Angeles Times said:
Are you a born conservative (or liberal)?

A new study suggests that your political attitudes are wired in from the beginning.

By Denise Gellene
September 19, 2008

Die-hard liberals and conservatives aren’t made, they’re born. It’s literally in their DNA.

That’s the implication of a study by a group of researchers who wanted to see if there was a biological basis for people’s political attitudes.

They found to their surprise that opinions on such contentious issues as gun control, pacifism and capital punishment are strongly associated with physiological traits that in all likelihood are present at birth.

The key is the differing levels of fear that people naturally feel.

“What is revolutionary about this paper is that it shows the path from genes to physiology to behavior,” said James H. Fowler, a political science professor at UC San Diego who was not involved in the research.

The researchers, whose findings were published today in the journal Science, looked at 46 people who fell into two camps – liberals who supported foreign aid, immigration, pacifism and gun control; and conservatives who advocated defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq war.

In an initial experiment, subjects were shown a series of images that included a bloody face, maggots in a wound and a spider on a frightened face. A device measured the electrical conductance of their skin, a physiological reaction that indicates fear.

In a second experiment, researchers measured eye blinks – another indicator of fear – as subjects responded to sudden blasts of noise.

Compared with staunch liberals, people with strongly conservative views were three times more fearful after factoring out the effects of gender, age, income and education, which can all affect political attitudes.

Kevin B. Smith, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a study author, said conservatives were more vigilant to environmental threats, and he speculated that this innate tendency led them to support policies that protect the social order.

Fowler said the study added to the growing research suggesting that over millions of years, humans have developed two cognitive styles – conservative and liberal. Cautious conservatives prevented societies from taking undue risks, while more flexible liberals fostered cooperation.

“For the species to survive, you need both,” he said.

But Jon A. Krosnick, a political science professor at Stanford University, said it was impossible to draw any conclusions from a study with so few people all drawn from a small Midwestern town. What’s more, it’s just too squishy interpreting people’s reactions.

“I don’t believe any of this,” he said. “The people who are most scared are less in favor of gun control. Why wouldn’t they be more in favor? Because they need guns to fight the bad guys? You can make up a story in either direction.”

The study is the latest to challenge the long-standing dogma that upbringing and environmental factors determine political attitudes. Recent studies have found that identical twins – who share the same genetic inheritance – think alike on political issues more often than nonidentical siblings.

Last year, researchers reported that the brains of conservatives and liberals process information differently.

None of this, however, suggests that people are slaves to their biology, researchers agree.

The latest study “does not mean that people can’t sit down and think about the issues and come to some logical compromise,” Smith said. “What it does mean is that it is going to be hard work.”

Source

What it does say is that a conservative is much more likely to crack under pressure.

:evileek2:
 
Newsmax.com said:
Wednesday, March 22, 2006 11:10 p.m. EST

Study: Conservatives Begin Life as Whiners

Whiny, insecure brats who cowered with fear of being bullied on the playground grow up to be conservatives, while smooth self-confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grow up to be liberals, according to a new study conducted in the sheltered confines of Berkeley, Calif., the very heart of rabid liberalism.

From the 1960s onward, a husband-and-wife team at the University of California-Berkeley spent 20 years keeping an eye on children from their nursery school days to young adulthood.

According to the Toronto Star, Berkeley professor Jack Block and his now late wife and fellow professor, Jeanne Block, began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality.

The kids' personalities were evaluated and described at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months and were apparently agile in spotting the whiners among them.

With 95 of the subjects grown to young adulthood, Block took another look, checking on their personalities and their political leanings. In the study published in the Journal of Research Into Personality, he says that he discovered that the kids described as whiners when at nursery school age tended to grow up to be conservatives, becoming rigid young adults who adhered to traditional gender roles - you know, the idea that men are men and women are women and there's nothing in between, and were uncomfortable with ambiguity, a trait that is one of the hallmarks of liberalism.

The kids seen as confident during their nursery school days however, turned out to be liberals, becoming easygoing bright, nonconforming adults with wide interests.

Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country, a rather obvious conclusion given that Berkeley is about as far-out leftist as any community in the United States. But he insists that the results within his sample are valid, reasoning that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

Writing for Tribune Media Services, Jonah Goldberg observed that the single best predictor of partisan affiliation is the political orientation of your parents. "In Berkeley, the most liberal majority-white city in America, most kids are going to be liberal because their parents are liberal. If one or two of the whinier kids turn out to be conservative, it might have more to do with the fact that their parents are whiny conservatives. Heck, if I lived in Berkeley, I might be whiny, too."

And Jeff Greenberg, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona told NPR that "I found (the study) to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best."

The academics at Berkeley seem to have an obsession with the notion that there's something not quite right with people who don't share their prevailing liberal Marxist worldview. One study that was disgorged from the belly of the Berkeley beast was rightly called the "conservatives are crazy study." It linked Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini all, it now appears, once a bunch of whiny brats.

Goldberg notes that liberal and leftist social scientists have been trying to diagnose conservatism as a psychological defect or sickness and recalls another infamous study by Theodor Adorno that argued that conservatism was little more than a "pre-fascist personality type."

Conversely, according to the researchers, sympathy for communism "was an indication of openness and healthy idealism. Opposition to communism was a symptom of your more deep-seated pathologies and fascist tendencies."

The lesson: If your child is a whiner, prepare him for adulthood by getting him a subscription to NewsMax magazine so he'll know how to be a well-informed conservative when he grows up.

Very conservative source
 
Arizona Daily Star said:
Study: Conservative, liberal brains differ

Region of cortex said more sensitive in Americans whose politics lean left
By Judy Peres
Chicago Tribune
Tucson, Arizona | Published: 09.10.2007
advertisementCHICAGO — The differences between liberals and conservatives may run deeper than how they feel about welfare reform or the progress of the Iraq war: Researchers reported Sunday that their brains may actually work differently.

In a study likely to raise the hackles of some conservatives, psychologist David Amodio and others found that a specific region of the brain's cortex is more sensitive in people who consider themselves liberals than in self-declared conservatives.

The brain region in question helps people shift gears when their usual response would be inappropriate, supporting the notion that liberals are more flexible in their thinking.

"Say you drive home from work the same way every day, but one day there's a detour and you need to override your autopilot," said Amodio, a professor at New York University. "Most people function just fine. But there's a little variability in how sensitive people are to the cue that they need to change their current course."

That "cue" is processed in a part of the brain know as the anterior cingulate cortex, and Amodio was able to monitor its electrical activity by hooking his subjects up to electroencephalographs (EEGs) while they performed laboratory tests.

The work grew out of decades of previous research suggesting that political orientation is linked to certain personality traits or styles of thinking. A review of that research published in 2003 found that conservatives tend to be more rigid and closed-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to new experiences.

Some of the traits associated with right-wingers in that review were decidedly unflattering, including fear, aggression, tolerance of inequality, and lack of complexity in their thinking.

(Wow they must have been studying H20 boy himself!)

In the current study, Amodio and his colleagues recruited 43 college students for a simple experiment. The subjects reported their political attitudes confidentially on a scale from -5 (extremely liberal) to +5 (extremely conservative). Then they completed a computer test called "Go/No-Go" while an EEG measured their brain activity.

Subjects were told to press a button ("Go") each time the computer flashed the letter M, but not when a W was displayed. Each stimulus-response set had to be completed within half a second.

Amodio said the "Go" stimulus came up 400 out of 500 times, so "they're sitting there getting in the habit of pressing this button. But 20 percent of the time, the 'No Go' stimulus comes up — it's unexpected — and they're supposed to do nothing. We can see how accurate people are at withholding the habitual response."

Subjects who rated themselves more liberal had higher scores for accuracy, Amodio said. But, more importantly, they also showed stronger electrical activity when the "No Go" cues were presented, indicating that more neurons were firing.

Linda Skitka, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois-Chicago, said there's ample evidence ideologues on the far left can also be uptight.
"Extreme conservatives could be really rigid," she said. "Moderates should be pretty flexible. But if we go all the way to the left, they may look a lot like the extreme right — rigid in their ideas."

Source
 
Fox News said:
Study Suggests Workspace Reveals Conservative or Liberal Tendencies

Thursday, September 25, 2008

By Jeanna Bryner

E-Mail Print Share:

Your office or bedroom holds telltale signs of whether you are a conservative or a liberal, finds a new study. While political conservatives tend to keep a tidy, organized office, political liberals favor colorful, more stylish but cluttered spaces.

A person may hide their political ideology from others, including from pollsters, but the researchers were delighted to learn that a peek into subjects' living quarters or even workspaces could give that away.

Conservatives and liberals leave behind distinct "behavioral residue" that can be picked up by savvy scientists and possibly other observers, according to the study by New York University psychologist John Jost and his colleagues. The results are set for publication in a forthcoming issue of the journal Political Psychology.

Office snoops

The researchers took inventory of five office locations — a commercial real estate agency, an advertising agency, a business school, an architectural firm and a retail bank — all in a large U.S. city. They had observers check out the workspaces of 94 male and female employees. The subjects' average age was 37. The snoopers had no idea of the workers' political orientation.

Political orientation was measured with survey questions.

Liberals' offices were judged as significantly more distinctive, comfortable, stylish, modern, and colorful and as less conventional and ordinary, in comparison with conservatives' offices, Jost said.

The researchers also sent snoopers into the living spaces of 76 undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley, arriving at similar results.

"Conservative rooms tended to be cleaner, more brightly lit, better organized, less cluttered, and also more conventional and ordinary in terms of decoration," Jost said during a panel discussion on "The Neuroscience of Elections and Human Decision-Making" at NYU, adding: "Conservatives' rooms were rated by independent raters as better organized and tidier in general."

Specifically, individuals who reported a more conservative ideology also had bedrooms that contained more organizational and cleaning supplies, including calendars, postage stamps, ironing boards and laundry baskets.

Liberals' rooms on the other hand were marked by more clutter, including more CDs, a greater variety of CDs, a greater variety of books and more color in the room in general.

Political personalities

The findings agreed with a link found by Jost's team between two personality traits and political ideology. In personality tests of thousands of college students, Jost found that liberals tended to score higher than conservatives on one key measure called openness to experiences, which includes holding wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.

Conservatives showed higher scores for conscientiousness, which measures a person's need for order, discipline, achievement striving and rule following.

"I think it's a truly fascinating possibility that the left-right distinction, which emerged over 200 years ago in response to the French Revolution and continues to be the single best way of understanding ideological differences today, may be rooted in fundamental human needs for stability vs. change, order vs. complexity, familiarity vs. novelty, conformity vs. creativity, and loyalty vs. rebellion," Jost told LiveScience.

(The terms of left-right political leanings was originally based on the seating arrangement of those in the French parliament during the time of the French Revolution.)

He added, "It may be that conflicting tendencies in human nature play themselves out in the political sphere as the struggle between right and left."

But for a self-proclaimed conservative or liberal whose office conditions do not match these findings, say a conservative living in a cluttered room, Jost said, that's to be expected.

"What we have observed are just differences on average between liberals and conservatives, and the variability around these averages is considerable," he said, giving the example that while on average men are taller than women, plenty of tall women and short men are walking around.

He added, "But I do wonder whether conservatives with messy rooms feel worse about the mess than do liberals with messy rooms, again, on average. For conservatives, it may be more likely that they are failing to live up to their own norms with regard to conscientiousness."

Well by God if Fox News says it you know it has to be true!
 
Live Science said:
Conservatives Happier Than Liberals

By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer

posted: 07 May 2008 08:20 am ET

Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are."

To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance. In that way, one's social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.

If your beliefs don't justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings.

"Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives," the researchers write in the June issue of the journal Psychological Science, "apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light."

The results support and further explain a Pew Research Center survey from 2006, in which 47 percent of conservative Republicans in the U.S. described themselves as "very happy," while only 28 percent of liberal Democrats indicated such cheer.

The same rationalizing phenomena could apply to personal situations as well.

"There is no reason to think that the effects we have identified here are unique to economic forms of inequality," the researchers write. "Research suggests that highly egalitarian women are less happy in their marriages compared with their more traditional counterparts, apparently because they are more troubled by disparities in domestic labor."

The current study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

So much for the notion of all men being created equal!
 

Gonz

molṑn labé
Staff member
I keep seeing the word "fear".

Seeing how things get discussed, I'd have to translate that into observational knowledge. Since conservatives have sen the past & don't wish to repeat the mistakes.
 

2minkey

bootlicker
Well, given that liberals tend to trust that the powers that be have Joe Q's best interests at heart, and conservatives tend to believe that you shouldn't trust anyone but yourself... I wouldn't expect otherwise.

right... so, then, why do we see so many conservatives that more or less worship authority and love making tough-guy proclamations about "enforcement" of this or that?
 

Cerise

Well-Known Member
The difference between liberals and conservatives:

The division of the human family into its two distinct branches occurred some 10,000 years ago, a few hundred years after the flood. Humans coexisted as members of small bands of nomadic hunter/gatherers. In the pivotal event of societal evolution, beer was invented. This epochal innovation was both the foundation of modern civilization and the occasion of the great bifurcation of humanity into its two distinct subgroups: Liberals and Conservatives.

Once beer was discovered, it required grain, and that was the beginning of agriculture. Neither the glass bottle or aluminum can had yet been invented, so it was necessary to stick pretty close to the brewery. That's how villages were formed.

Some men spent their days killing animals to barbeque at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of the conservative movement.

Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting, learned how to live off conservatives by showing up for the BBQs every night and doing women's work like sewing, fetching and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the liberal movement. Later, some of the liberals actually became women.

Liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, invention of group therapy and democratic voting to see how to divide the beer and meat that the conservatives provided. Women were not interested in democracy at that time because most of them were still women back then, and the conservatives fed them.

Conservatives are symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass.

Modern Liberals like imported beer (they add lime), but most prefer white wine or foreign water in a bottle. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done. Sushi, tofu, and French food are on liberal menus. Their women have more testosterone than the men. Liberals like deviant sex and want others to like it too. Their first successful city governments were Sodom and Gomorrah.

Most social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, and group Therapists are Liberals. Liberals invented the designated hitter rule in baseball because it wasn't "fair" to make the pitcher also bat.


Conservatives drink domestic beer. They eat red meat, and still provide for their women. Conservatives are big-game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumber jacks, construction workers, medical doctors, police officers, corporate executives, soldiers, athletes, and generally anyone who works productively outside government. Conservatives who own companies hire other conservatives who want to work for a living.

Liberals do not produce anything. They like to "govern" the producers and decide what is to be done with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals just stayed in Europe when conservatives were coming to America.

Conservatives have principles; believe in a Creator, and the rule of law. They practice charity and give to the poor, normally through their churches. When in doubt on an issue, they check both the Bible and the Constitution, which they use as a constant reference in a changing world. They believe in the concept of truth.

Liberals do not have principles, except for their dedication to stealing production of conservatives and undermining principled references such as the Bible and Constitution. They are never in doubt on an issue because they always do whatever is best for them without regard to others. They have no standard of reference. Liberals do not give to charity. They cultivate the poor like a cat cultivates a field of mice. They use the poor as voters and give them a portion of stolen tax money which they vote away from conservatives.


Conservatives believe in self defense, both at home and abroad. They own guns and use them to discourage liberals and other common criminals. They provide guns to the armed forces to discourage foreign liberals and other foreign criminals.

Liberals do not believe in conservative self defense. They disarm conservatives, and then attack them with impunity by liberal armies with guns. King George, Hitler and Stalin were all liberals who abandoned the rule of Law, had no principles except their own self indulgence, and attempted to tax and govern conservatives. Liberals believe in BIG government. They think the United Nations is the ultimate answer.


Conservatives believe in the rule of law and when sitting on juries, convict common criminals and acquit fellow conservatives who have been charged by liberals. When serving in the armed forces, they shoot liberals from other countries who want to govern our country. Conservatives know the difference between a common-sense law and a bone-headed statute passed by some liberal from Massachusetts. When sitting on juries, they do not enforce bone-headed statutes, and don't explain their reasons.

Liberals only believe in whatever laws are appealing to them, such as the privilege of making a living by taxing conservatives. When sitting on juries, liberals convict producers and acquit liberals and other common criminals. Modern Judges are all liberals as they do not produce anything except chaos, and are paid with confiscated tax money. They consider it against the law to reference any source of law such as the Bible or Constitution. Like other liberals, they just make it up as they go and do what is best for them. Judge Roy Bean is their model.


The American cowboy, of course, is your basic, full-bore Conservative. A hundred years ago, an Englishman visiting Wyoming was attempting to find the owner of a huge cattle ranch. He rode up to one of the ranch hands, and inquired, "Pardon me, but could you perhaps tell me where I might locate your master?" To which the cowboy replied, "That sumbitch ain't been born yet".


So, what'll it be? Wine or Beer? Domestic or Imported?
 
The difference between liberals and conservatives:

Did you write that fantasy? Where is the source? You know it is pure fantasy, fiction, and wishful thinking don't you? It has the barest smidgen of truth in it, perhaps enough to call it satire optimistically, but it is not even close to reality.
 

2minkey

bootlicker
in humor we see many underlying cultural assumptions.

"Other men who were weaker and less skilled at hunting, learned how to live off conservatives by showing up for the BBQs every night and doing women's work like sewing, fetching and hair dressing. This was the beginning of the liberal movement. Later, some of the liberals actually became women."

because, um, you know, women are weak. right?


 
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