More On Turning Conservatives Into Liberals

WaPo had an article on it:

Conservatives, it turns out, react more strongly to physical threat than liberals do. In fact, their greater concern with physical safety seems to be determined early in life: In one University of California study, the more fear a 4-year-old showed in a laboratory situation, the more conservative his or her political attitudes were found to be 20 years later. Brain imaging studies have even shown that the fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals. And many other laboratory studies have found that when adult liberals experienced physical threat, their political and social attitudes became more conservative (temporarily, of course). But no one had ever turned conservatives into liberals.

Until we did.

In a new study to appear in a forthcoming issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology, my colleagues Jaime Napier, Julie Huang and Andy Vonasch and I asked 300 U.S. residents in an online survey their opinions on several contemporary issues such as gay rights, abortion, feminism and immigration, as well as social change in general…

But before they answered the survey questions, we had them engage in an intense imagination exercise. They were asked to close their eyes and richly imagine being visited by a genie who granted them a superpower. For half of our participants, this superpower was to be able to fly, under one’s own power. For the other half, it was to be completely physically safe, invulnerable to any harm.

If they had just imagined being able to fly, their responses to the social attitude survey showed the usual clear difference between Republicans and Democrats — the former endorsed more conservative positions on social issues and were also more resistant to social change in general.

But if they had instead just imagined being completely physically safe, the Republicans became significantly more liberal — their positions on social attitudes were much more like the Democratic respondents. And on the issue of social change in general, the Republicans’ attitudes were now indistinguishable from the Democrats. Imagining being completely safe from physical harm had done what no experiment had done before — it had turned conservatives into liberals.

So if they could just make everyone imagine that actions will have no consequences, they could turn the entire country leftist, and we would live in Utopia forever. Except actions have consequences, and everywhere that has adopted the leftist’s ignorance of future consequences has turned into a total disaster, from the old Soviet Union to Venezuela today. You wonder how people could be so thick, or so blind to how stupid their own research makes them look.

What also kills me with these simpletons is that they have never thought about whether these psychologies might be emerging from conditions of threat or safety as part of a programmed system designed to guide our behavior to maximize survival and reproduction. Where did this response come from? What if these behavioral responses are beneficial?

They also never question why issues of sex and child-rearing would accompany all of the other issues they looked at, why men become feminine in a leftist utopia, or why females become aggressive and masculine. To say nothing of the sexualization of the young.

Of course if they made the jump to “political ideology = reproductive strategy,” a full understanding of the entire issue would be wrapped up in a nice bow for the holidays, but unfortunately, we will have to labor here a little longer.

But perhaps not too long. Bernie Sanders is supposed to be the favored opponent of Donald for 2020, and if ever any candidate begged to be labeled a rabbit by the God Emperor, it is Bernie. Normally Presidential campaigns have been beginning two years before the actual election, so it may not be long now before we are hearing about rabbits and wolves as ideological mascots.

Tell others about r/K Theory, because the people in the field have no idea what they are doing