How Liberal and Conservative Delusions Differ


Any part of a character's make up is an understanding or description of their political stands.  This research demonstrates how a delusion common to liberals differs from moderates and conservatives according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
  • Liberals tend to underestimate the amount of actual agreement among those who share their ideology, while
  • conservatives tend to overestimate intra-group agreement.
 These findings may help to explain differences in how political groups and movements, like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, gain traction on the national stage.  According to psychological scientist Chadly Stern of New York University,
  • "The Tea Party movement developed a succinct set of goals in its incipient stages and effectively mobilized its members toward large-scale social change quite quickly."  
  • "In contrast, despite its popularity, the liberal Occupy Wall Street movement struggled to reach agreement on their collective mission and ultimately failed to enact large-scale social change."
Stern, with co-authors Tessa West and Peter Schmitt, recruited almost 300 hundred participants to complete an online survey. The participants read political statements (e.g., "In general, I support labor unions,") and non-political statements (e.g., "I enjoy coffee") and were asked to indicate whether they agreed or disagreed with each statement. They were also asked to indicate how much others of the same political persuasion would support their own attitudes -- a measure of perceived in-group consensus.

Truly False Uniqueness v. Truly False Consensus
  • Liberals show what the researchers call "truly false uniqueness," perceiving their beliefs as more divergent from the beliefs of other liberals than they actually are.
  • Moderates and conservatives, on the other hand, show evidence of "truly false consensus," perceiving their beliefs to be more similar to those of other members of their political group than they actually are.
Data from a second study suggest that the relationship is driven by participants' desire to feel unique: Liberals report a stronger desire for uniqueness than did moderates or conservatives.

Surprisingly, these trends even emerged among nonpolitical judgments, such as preference for coffee: Liberals believe their preferences are more different from those of other liberals than they actually are, while conservatives believed their preferences were more similar to those of other conservatives than they actually are.

Given that perceptions of in-group consensus can be an important motivator for social change, these new findings may help to explain why liberal and conservative movements develop different political trajectories:
  • "Liberal social movements might struggle to develop solidarity and formulate shared goals within their ranks, both because liberals want to maintain unique beliefs and because they underestimate the amount of agreement among their members," Stern explains.
  • "Conservative social movements might initially capitalize on perceiving agreement to galvanize their ranks, but their inaccurate perceptions could impair group progress when actual agreement is necessary."
*  *  *  *  *
As a personal observation, this result explains the current gridlock within the Republic Party between Tea Party Republicans and more traditional party loyalists.  Based on comments in the press, it appears members of both conservative groups are surprised if not a little shocked when they discovered that the other doesn't agree with their positions.
*  *  *  *  *         

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Greek Bronze Age ended 100 years earlier than thought

Image
Source: www.shef.ac.uk The charred remains of Assiros Toumba in Greece. Writing historical fiction set in the Greek Bronze Age?  Or simply enjoy reading this genre'?  Here's a study you may find interesting. C onventional estimates for the collapse of the Aegean civilization may be incorrect by up to a century, according to new radiocarbon analyses. While historical chronologies traditionally place the end of the Greek Bronze Age at around 1025 BCE, this latest research suggests a date 70 to 100 years earlier. www.weather-forecast.com Archaeologists from the University of Birmingham selected 60 samples of animal bones, plant remains and building timbers, excavated at Assiros in northern Greece, to be radiocarbon dated and correlated with 95.4% accuracy using Bayesian statistical methodology at the University of Oxford and the Akademie der Wissenschaften Heidelberg, Germany. Researcher Dr Ken Wardle says, 'These new results tell a story that is totall
Read more

How the lives of Georgian gaolbirds and highwaymen shaped modern Britain

Image
Writing historical fiction requires solid research of available materials and databases.  The key word here is available.   So news of a new publicly accessible database that allows an author to research a very interesting past era is priceless almost beyond words.   I expect some exciting fiction to come out of this announcement. Here's the story, with a link to the source in the attribution. *  *  *  *  * London Lives, a landmark project led by Professor Bob Shoemaker from the University of Sheffield and Professor Tim Hitchcock from the University of Sussex, has uncovered a mass of extraordinary new evidence which reveals how the lives of thousands of 18th-century poor and criminal Londoners helped shape modern Britain. Based on evidence made available in a publicly available database, the study sheds new light on the everyday lives of thieves, prostitutes, vagrants, highwaymen, con-men, paupers and jailbirds, revealing how their daily fight for survival led to t
Read more

Mood Instability and Your Characters

Image
You're putting together a character who's mood simply bounces all over the place, happy one moment, in a fit of rage the next.  Researchers at King's College London note that this sort of mood instability is part of a number of mental health disorders.  So how do you structure the personality and behavior of a character like this?  Below is the King's College report, along with a brief description from mentalhealth.com, of typical behavior, sometimes in the extreme, of a person who is very emotionally unstable.  This is offered strictly as a guide for crafting character in fiction - and NOT for the amateur diagnosis of the state of someone's mental health.  That is always best left to trained professionals. Another note about emotionally unstable behavior:  as any parent will tell you, this is how adolescents and teen-agers often behave.  It's a normal part of growing up - but it is a matter of degree .  In the extreme, however, this behavior can be diag
Read more

SciFi: Introducing "Technofossils" the legacy of modern humans for future generations to explore

Image
Source:  blogs.miaminewtimes.com  Daniel Fiorda's "Nostalgic Hardware" Techno-Fossil Art Imagine what a future archaeologist would think finding any of the myriad bits and pieces of technology we bury in modern middens, aka garbage dumps.  So now we have a name for it:  Technofossils, coined recently to describe the stuff humanity tosses out. T he fossil impact humans make on the planet is vast and unprecedented in nature -- there's been nothing remotely like it since the Earth formed over four and half billion years ago. The researchers argue that, like dinosaurs, who left their bones and footprints behind for future generations to discover, humans will also leave a footprint behind -- one made up of material goods unique to humankind that are so different from anything else produced by animals in the history of Earth that they deserve their own name: technofossils. Dr Zalasiewicz said: "Palaeontologists call preserved animal-made structures trace f
Read more

Remember faces but not names? You got it wrong.

Image
Source:   Daily Excelsior So, you think you're good at remembering faces, but terrible with names? New research has revealed we are actually better at remembering names than faces The cringe-worthy experience of not being able to remember an acquaintance's name leads many of us to believe we are terrible with names. However, new research has revealed this intuition is misleading; we are actually better at remembering names than faces. With the Christmas party season fast approaching, there will be plenty of opportunity to re-live the familiar, and excruciatingly-awkward, social situation of not being able to remember an acquaintance's name. This cringe-worthy experience leads many of us to believe we are terrible at remembering names. However, new research has revealed this intuition is misleading; we are actually better at remembering names than faces. The authors of the study, from the University of York, suggest that when we castigate ourselves f
Read more