Posted on 04/19/2015 2:18:58 PM PDT by null and void
With a presidential election on the horizon, maybe we should try to figure out what makes each side of the political aisle tick. Knowing what someone else cares about, instead of just lobbing insults on message boards, can sometimes help you land on something close to understanding.
A social psychologist named Jonathan Haidt has spent the bulk of his career trying to figure out what motivates both conservatives and liberals. He’s uncovered some interesting points, which have been published in a book called “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.”
According to Haidt’s research, there are five things people care about:
1. avoidance of harm
2. fairness
3. loyalty
4. authority
5. sanctity
Conservatives care about all five in equal measure and liberals care about only the first two. Here is a quote from the book, as transcribed by The American Conservative:
“It’s as though conservatives can hear five octaves of music, but liberals respond to just two, within which they have become particularly discerning.”
There is also a sixth term, which both sides care about in equal measure: liberty. However, conservatives and liberals see the word as meaning two completely different things, according to the author.
Conservatives tend to view liberty as the notion of being left alone to pursue happiness in whatever way they choose. Liberals tend to view it as the act of creating a level playing field for society’s most vulnerable individuals.
There have been dozens of studies that produced similar findings, concluding that conservatives and liberals are different, even apart from their political leanings.
A scientist named John Jost recently published a paper on the subject:
“There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different.”It’s not all bad, according to Haidt’s research; people on both sides of the political spectrum like their dogs to be clean. We aren’t so different, after all.
Unfortunately psychology has nothing to do with science.
Please see my tagline.
Interesting and probably true. When we think of fairness
we tend to consider fairness in the opportunity to do
for yourself. Liberals think of fairness in terms of equal
outcomes. At least we hear about that all the time.
I’m not buying the low authority on the liberal side. Leftists are some of the most authoritarian people around.
Yes and no.. see they are blind to they action being authoritarian that what makes it so dangerous...they do not see the oxymoron of authoritarian imposed “fairness and liberty”..we see what cost to achieve it and trying to balance it out...
it encompassed in the old concept of seeing power of good intertwined with necessary evils..that’s the whole point of conservatism to go cautiously because of on different ramifications of any action weighing the multiple streams of results
Hey!
This Youtube video shows how Haidt goes from a socialist to a capitalist.
WATCH THIS TO THE END.....
I am a great fan of Adam Smith and he is mentioned in this around minute 16.
While your second observation is correct, authoritarianism and valuing authority are different things. The left doesn't value authority -- for the most part, they follow the leftist herd, not leftist leaders. (This has been true from the time of the French Revolution, which spawned the joke "Which way is the mob going? I'm its leader!" to the recent laments by leftists about the joyless purveyors of political correctness starting to attack their own). And "authority" is something they define themselves as being against in a similar phenomenon to certain strains of protestants claiming to be against "tradition" -- and in both cases motivated by the same thing, a horror of the Latin church, seen by secularists as the paradigmatic example of "authority" and by the sort of protestant who calls himself a "Bible-believing Christian" as the paradigmatic example of "tradition".
Valuing authority is very much part and parcel of valuing tradition, both authority and tradition, when they function correctly, represent the crystalized knowledge of past generations, knowledge the left is perpetually fleeing from in their quest for the shining new tomorrow -- which they'll force down everyone's throats for their own good.
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