politics » The Thinking Meat Project

Personality and political views

Jun 132010

You may remember hearing about some work that looked at different aspects of morality and found that people who are politically liberal emphasize certain of these aspects, and those who are politically conservative tend to consider them all. (Liberals emphasize caring for others/avoiding harm and fairness/reciprocity, whereas conservatives also consider in-group loyalty, purity, and authority/respect.) A new study expands our knowledge of the relationship between personality traits and political views.

The new work looks at several of the Big Five personality traits: Openness/Intellect, two different aspects of Agreeableness (Compassion and Politeness), and the Orderliness aspect of Conscientiousness. Previous work had indicated that a conservative political outlook was negatively correlated with Openness/Intellect and positively correlated with Conscientiousness. The current work adds a little nuance: the negative correlation between conservatism and Openness/Intellect still holds, and a positive correlation between Orderliness (rather than overall Conscientiousness) was found. Furthermore, a liberal/egalitarian outlook was linked to higher levels of Compassion and a conservative/traditional outlook with higher levels of Politeness.

“Level” is a key word here, it seems to me. With personality traits, everyone falls somewhere on a continuum, so even those who are, say, profoundly introverted still enjoy spending time with others—just not nearly as much as those who are highly extroverted. So these differences are not apples and oranges, exactly; we should in theory be able to find some common ground and at least understand the other side’s point of view, even if we disagree with the degree to which they emphasize one thing or another. This article from Science Daily closes with a quote from one of the new study’s authors to the effect that we appear to need both the liberal and the conservative mindset in any society.

So why are these differences in mindset so sharply and painfully divisive in US politics at the moment? I think part of what is going on is that because political views are linked to personality traits, they often feel like self-obvious views of how the world is and how things work. They’re taken for granted like the water a fish swims in. It can be very difficult to examine them rationally and be prepared to compromise to accommodate the fact that the world and how it works look very different from behind another set of genetic and environmental influences. This leaves aside nasty tactics such as dishonesty or pandering to prejudice, ignorance, or selfishness, the need for an educated citizenry to make a democracy work, and things like the confirmation bias, which tends to make us notice the evidence that confirms our views and discount the evidence against them. I think all these other things come into play partly because our beliefs about the relative importance of fairness, order, or compassion are so inherent to us that we have a hard time taking other rankings of them seriously. I don’t know if it’s a failure of the melting pot, a failure of education, or some more fundamental human flaw, but somehow we haven’t really developed the capacity to use both mindsets productively rather than set them at each other’s throats. Maybe they can’t be consciously accommodated in a single society but must battle it out, back and forth, over and over again?

Oh, yeah. The paper itself is:
J. B. Hirsh, C. G. DeYoung, Xiaowen Xu, J. B. Peterson. Compassionate Liberals and Polite Conservatives: Associations of Agreeableness With Political Ideology and Moral Values. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2010; 36(5): 655. DOI: 10.1177/0146167210366854

Thinking Meat roundup

Animal behavior, Brain and mind, Psychology Comments Off

Oct 252008

While I’ve been busy editing and writing and getting the yard ready for next spring, a number of good Thinking-Meat type stories have appeared in the media. So without further ado, here’s a selection of links to articles for your weekend reading pleasure.

Slate examines the moral and social dimensions of the evolutionary psychology behind why people get huffy, with the obligatory tie-in to the presidential campaign.

In an opinion piece in the New York Times, a neuroscientist and a science writer note some of the ways our brains mislead us, describing several studies that illustrate how the line between misinformation and truth becomes blurred in the brain (again with a campaign tie-in).

Scientific American has published this article by Carl Zimmer about the search for links between genes and intelligence. (Note: Lest you think you’re going crazy, I’ll reassure you now by telling you that yes, the even-numbered pages do seem to be duplicates of their respective preceding odd-numbered pages. I don’t know why, but it’s free current content from Scientific American, so I won’t complain.)

Zimmer is evidently a busy man; here’s another article from him in Discover Magazine about the emotional importance of human facial expressions.

This next article, from the Telegraph, is about a month old, but somehow it slipped past my radar at the time. It describes experiments in which crows outperformed great apes in transferring a learned skill from one situation to another.

And finally, something a bit more speculative but certainly intriguing, another article from the Telegraph discusses some new research into whether television and movies affect whether we dream in color. There’s some evidence that people who grew up with black-and-white media may be more inclined to dream in black and white than those who grew up with color TV and movies.

How the other half votes

Being human, Psychology 2 Responses »

Sep 272008

I’ve run across several things lately about the psychology and even the physiology of people’s political beliefs. For instance, this press release from EurekAlert describes some work that studied 46 adults with strong political views and examined their political beliefs as well as their physiological responses to disturbing images and unexpected loud sounds. The team of US researchers found a notable difference between those who reacted more strongly to the images and those who did not. (The paper, Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits, was published in the September 19, 2008, issue of Science.) To quote from the abstract: “. . . individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War.”

The abstract goes on to describe the policies favored by the former as protective of the existing social order. I find the concept of protectiveness interesting in this context, because gun control and pacifism can also be considered protective, but of individual lives and well-being rather than of the social order. Another press release, this one from the National Science Foundation, goes into a little more detail, and describes the strong reactors as believing that the biggest threat to the well-being of those they care about is other people, while the other group sees more risk in technology or inanimate objects (like guns). This was a small study, and obviously there’s a lot more to political views than just your physiology (remember the old joke about how a conservative is just a liberal who’s been mugged?), but this is a very interesting starting point.

Another study, this one by two psychologists at Northwestern, looked at the political beliefs of 128 church-attending Christians. The researchers asked the church-goers what life would be like if there were no god. The politically conservative among them were more likely to envision a world of chaos, where social institutions break down due to uncontrolled human behavior. The politically liberal, on the other hand, thought the world would be empty, barren, and lacking in deep emotional experiences. The disparity suggests that the two groups are motivated by a different set of fears and hopes. This press release from EurekAlert has more information. The article, What if there were no God? Politically conservative and liberal Christians imagine their lives without faith, is in press in the Journal of Research in Personality.

Finally, over at Edge.org, psychologist Jonathan Haidt has written an essay about different conceptions of morality and what they mean in terms of Republicans, Democrats, and the American political landscape. This follows up on some research I wrote about awhile back that looks at five different dimensions of morality that are concerned with preventing harm and caring for others; fairness and reciprocity; loyalty to the group you belong to; authority and respect; and purity and sanctity. In a nutshell, political liberals tend to base their ideas of morality on the first two more than on the other three, while political conservatives are more attuned to all five. (You can see where you fall in this framework at YourMorals.org.)

Stereotypes and candidates

Psychology 3 Responses »

Feb 192008

This article from the Boston Globe discusses racial and gender stereotypes and how they may be playing into the ongoing primary elections in the US. Citing various pieces of psychological research, it describes how gender stereotypes are apparently fairly entrenched, while those based on race shift more easily depending on the context. (Good news for Obama, bad news for Clinton.) Evidently there is something about people’s ideas of womanhood that often makes it hard for women to be seen as both strong (assertive, competitive, smart, a good leader) and likable. This brings up an interesting feature of sexual stereotypes: many of them are not negative in the way that racial stereotypes are. After all, what’s wrong with being kind and gentle? Unfortunately, however, the pedestal that “nice” women are sometimes placed on is not a seat of power.

The meaning of morality

Being human, Psychology Comments Off

May 202007

The May 18 issue of Science has an article by Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia that looks at the foundations of morality in light of our knowledge of neuroscience, social psychology, and evolution. (Looks like there are a couple of other articles about behavioral science in there too.) I haven’t read the article yet, but this press release from EurekAlert gives a brief overview of what it covers. It looks like it should be very interesting.

The press release links to YourMorals.Org, a web site run by a small group of social psychologists (including Haidt) who are interested in morality and politics. You can participate in several research studies there, completing online questionnaires and learning a bit about the psychologists’ framework for understanding morality as well as your own moral sense. The site describes five different facets of moral thinking: “1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity”. The first two areas, which have to do with how we treat other people, are of prime importance to liberals; for conservatives, those two are important, but not generally as important as they are to liberals, and conservatives tend to place more weight on the other three factors, which have to do with being a good member of whatever social groups you belong to. The site says that one of the goals for this research is increased understanding of others who occupy other niches on the political spectrum, which strikes me as highly useful.

One of the online questionnaires tells you how you score in each of the five areas. I scored at the top of the scale on the “harm/care” scale and came close to maxing out on “fairness” (no surprise there; those are the two “liberal” scales) but I also scored higher than average on two of the other three (the average being that of other visitors to the site). Make of it what you will.

Another questionnaire rates you on ten basic values that have been observed across cultures (e.g., benevolence, security, power, achievement, conformity). The values are shown grouped in a circle, with similar or related values adjacent to each other and opposing values across from each other. This questionnaire is on the site to see how the ten values are related to the five facets of morality. There’s a link to a paper that explains the values and their relationships; I’ll have to go back and look at that. Right now I’m still trying to puzzle out my own results. My highest score was for self-direction, which I’m sure is no surprise to those close to me. (My mother used to say that when I was a very little girl and trying to do something, even if it looked like I needed help, I would insist “I do it by self!”) My lowest score (an absolute zero, in fact) is for the adjacent value of stimulation (“Excitement, novelty, and challenge in life”). Hmmmm. I wonder why those two are adjacent. At any rate, if you have some time, you might enjoy visiting the YourMorals.org site and contributing your data points to the research.

Atheist politicians

Being human Comments Off

Mar 142007

Hey, there is at least one openly atheist politician in the US after all! One of the laments of author Sam Harris and others who write about reason vs faith is that religious beliefs are held in such high esteem in this country that it’s hard for an elected official to admit to not believing in God. This article from the Tri-Valley Herald says that Congressman Pete Stark of California identifies himself as an atheist. You can also read a press release from the Secular Coalition for America, which was offering a $1,000 prize to whoever could “identify the highest level atheist, agnostic, humanist or any other kind of nontheist currently holding elected public office in the United States.” Actually there are several other elected officials who identify as non-theist, but they are not in as high an office as Rep. Stark. Thanks to Ray for passing this one along.

Reading faces

Psychology Comments Off

Feb 262007

You may remember a post from last month about how people estimate a man’s character and guess at his future behavior based on his facial features. Some new research indicates that people’s votes might be influenced by their estimates of a candidate’s character solely as read from his face. A team of psychologists manipulated images of the faces of candidates in eight recent elections in the US, New Zealand, and Great Britain; the modified faces had key features in common with the candidates but were not recognizable as the candidates. Then volunteer subjects were shown the faces in pairs and asked to choose which of the men they would vote for. In all eight cases, the subjects chose the face resembling that of the candidate who won the real election. The researchers also investigated the personality characteristics that the subjects were inferring from the faces. (Note that people didn’t seem to be judging based on conventional attractiveness, but on how they evaluated the man’s personality based on what his face looked like.) This article from the Toronto Star has more info. It’s not clear how much of an effect a candidate’s face has on real elections, but the article points out that even if it’s not a major factor for everyone, it might well be a factor for voters who base their decisions on a gut feeling. Even though faces are highly important to us and we’re creatures who read them well, it’s a little scary to think of people being swayed more by a person’s face than his or her ideas or behavior.

Self and self deception

Brain and mind, Psychology Comments Off

Jan 282007

In this essay from Edge, neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran discusses how the evolution of mirror neurons might have contributed to our sense of self. He proposes that mirror neurons developed before conscious awareness of self did. Having developed this nifty ability to read the minds of others and figure out what they were thinking (and perhaps anticipate how they might behave), could we have then turned this ability on ourselves and learned to figure out what we ourselves were thinking, thus developing a sense of a self that we could observe? He notes that if this is the case, the mirror neurons might have been necessary but were not sufficient, because other primates have them but don’t have the kind of self-awareness that we do. I would like to see how his proposal could be tested, and I’m also curious about how it relates to the fact that in some ways we don’t really know ourselves all that well (of course, we don’t always know other people very well either). I’m thinking in particular of Timothy Wilson’s book Strangers to ourselves: The adaptive unconscious, which describes the ways that, for a variety of reasons, our brains keep a good deal of their workings away from conscious awareness, so that what we know about ourselves is sometimes not as reliable as what others could tell us about ourselves. (I think this is related to the “Easy Question” about consciousness that Steven Pinker mentions in the essay I linked to yesterday: “to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved.”)

And along those lines, here is a discussion on Seed Magazine’s site between evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers and linguist Noam Chomsky about deception, including self-deception. It’s a mix of political and other examples of group and self deception (including the mental gyrations of the Bush administration in the lead-up to the war in Iraq), and some data from psychology about how people describe themselves and others (tending to flatter themselves, in general, and downplay the virtues and overemphasize the failings of the other guy).

Older Entries