How can {the other side} believe that?!?
why do people lean left or right?
Vegans care DEEPLY about animals. They have a hard time understanding how and why people just don’t care about animals.
Any meat eating liberal that doesn’t understand conservatives’ belief systems can learn a lot from this. Because on most social issues, people have a perception that conservatives don’t care about other people as much as they do. And many conservatives feel that liberals don’t care as much about sanctity and loyalty. If you think about animals, you can ask yourself “wait, why don’t I care as much about animals as that vegan?”
We all work in trade offs of selfishness vs. selflessness. If not, we’d all have flown immediately to Haiti immediately to help after the 2010 earthquake. But most of us didn’t. We weighed our options. We don’t want to lose our jobs. We need money. So we didn’t go.
The point is — many of the things you care deeply about are barely visible on other people’s radars. This can be hard for us to accept.
Our differing value systems
Some people care about the environment. Some about gay rights. Some about education. Some about animals.
In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt describes his Moral Foundations Theory, in which political values are framed along 6 categories:
Care/Harm
Fairness/Cheating
Loyalty/Betrayal
Authority/Subversion
Sanctity/Degradation
Liberty/Oppression
It’s a fascinating way to think about how people’s political perceptions are shaped. I now look at Facebook arguments from an emotionless standpoint. I have much better perspective on why people disagree with me on certain policies. I have a better understanding of whether or not people are being dishonest, stupid or just have different values.
Which sides care about what?
Conservatives care far more about loyalty and authority than liberals. They care about sanctity more (they’re more religious, more likely to dislike disgusting movies, be more uncomfortable with homosexuality, etc.).
Both sides care about care, but in different ways.
I find it interesting that conservatives value authority and loyalty when our founding fathers clearly did not (hard to think of a more subversive and less loyal group than them).
Haidt describes the moralities of both sides:
The various moralities found on the political left tend to rest most strongly on the Care/harm and Liberty/oppression foundations. These two foundations support ideals of social justice, which emphasize compassion for the poor and a struggle for political equality among the subgroups that comprise society.
Why?
Why do people differ? According to Haidt:
Genetics explains between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes.
This leads to personality:
the genes (collectively) give some people brains that are more (or less) reactive to threats, and that produce less (or more) pleasure when exposed to novelty, change, and new experiences. These are two of the main personality factors that have consistently been found to distinguish liberals and conservatives. A major review paper by political psychologist John Jost found a few other traits, but nearly all of them are conceptually related to threat sensitivity (e.g., conservatives react more strongly to reminders of death) or openness to experience (e.g., liberals have less need for order, structure, and closure).
Big 5 personality traits — Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness & Neuroticism.
In conducting brain scans of — those identifying as conservative are more likely to be threatened so they respond more to appeals of fear. The war on crime was largely a conservative push to scare people into voting conservative. It was so successful, liberals were pushed into doing the same culminating in Bill Clinton’s 3 strikes law in 1994 that has largely been seen as a massive failure.
Liberals more likely to score high on the personality trait of openness, which explains why the states that have legalized weed are all very liberal. People who only want to stick to alcohol (because it’s traditional) will be conservative.
And interestingly enough, the big 5 personality traits also appear to be tied to certain geographies.
Not really a huge shock that there is a strong correlation between people with high ‘openness’ scores and highly liberal states.
Elephant and the Rider (Emotion vs. Reason)
Have you ever thought that you value sanctity? Or authority? Probably not. Because it’s not something we take time to reason out using a spreadsheet. It’s just part of us. It lies in our gut. Haidt explains:
Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don’t. Republicans have long understood that the elephant is in charge of political behavior, not the rider, and they know how elephants work. Their slogans, political commercials, and speeches go straight for the gut…Democrats have often aimed their appeals more squarely at the rider, emphasizing specific policies and the benefits they’ll bring to you, the voter.
But people aren’t logical. They’re emotional. They vote with their gut. We vote for the taller candidate. The most ‘presidential’ looking candidate. The one that speaks to the elephant. George Bush is the guy we want to have a beer with, Al Gore is the guy we see giving lectures about data we don’t understand intuitively. He speaks to the rider. And people don’t respond to the rider. The two most successful Democrats in the past 50 years, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, were candidates who could speak to the elephant.
This is party what gives Republicans the advantage, especially in the short term. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. But the key word there is long. Progressives seem to eventually win out on their goals, but not in the short term. Haidt continues:
Liberals have a three-foundation morality, whereas conservatives use all six. Liberal moral matrices rest on the Care/harm, Liberty/oppression, and Fairness/cheating foundations, although liberals are often willing to trade away fairness (as proportionality) when it conflicts with compassion or with their desire to fight oppression. Conservative morality rests on all six foundations, although conservatives are more willing than liberals to sacrifice Care and let some people get hurt in order to achieve their many other moral objectives.
Democrats rely on facts and numbers. Republicans rely on emotions. That’s one of the reasons they’ve dominated politics for the past 50 years. The flag, bald eagle, troops are all easy symbols to psychologically prime people to be emotional about being American. What are these signs for liberals? The peace sign? How emotional does that make anyone?
What are those symbols? The peace sign?? How emotionally riled up does that get anyone??
As political commentator James Carville (Democrat) said:
I don’t like the Republican platform. I don’t understand the Democratic one.
Emotion is why we are so hard to persuade the other side to even listen. We take any kind of counter argument as personal insult.
Facts
This is (sadly) why facts don’t really matter. Our reptile brain sees something, immediately agrees with it and it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It’s already made its imprint. It’s already anchored our thinking.
This is why politicians lie. The truth doesn’t matter as much as much . Our reasoning didn’t evolve and doesn’t exist to find the truth. It exists to keep us alive, which in large part is reliant on our ability to stay within our social groups.
