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TED Talks: Liberals and Conservatives

The real difference between liberals and con Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we're left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.

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15 Comments

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psychologyprofessor : LVL 33: VP 4.2: said:

psychologyprofessor

10 votes NegativePositive

77 days 1 hour ago...

Read Jonathan Haidt’s original article titled
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? at:
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt08/haidt08_index.html


SAM HARRIS` response

Neuroscience Researcher; Author, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation

BRAIN SCIENCE & HUMAN VALUES

“Haidt is, of course, right to worry that liberals may not always "hold the moral high ground." In a recent study of moral reasoning, subjects were asked to judge whether it was morally correct to sacrifice the life of one person to save one hundred, while being given subtle clues as to the races of the people involved. Conservatives proved less biased by race than liberals and, therefore, more even-handed. It turns out that liberals were very eager to sacrifice a white person to save one hundred non-whites, but not the other way around, all the while maintaining that considerations of race had not entered into their thinking. Observations of this sort are useful in revealing the biasing effect of ideology—even the ideology of fairness.

Haidt often writes, however, as if there were no such thing as moral high ground. At the very least, he seems to believe that science will never be able to judge higher from lower. He admonishes us to get it into our thick heads that many of our neighbors "honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats." Yes, and many of them honestly prefer the Republican vision of cosmology, wherein it is still permissible to believe that the big bang occurred less than ten thousand years ago. These same people tend to prefer Republican doubts about biological evolution and climate change. There are names for this type of "preference," one of the more polite being "ignorance." What scientific purpose is served by avoiding this word at all costs?”

“Does forcing women and girls to wear burqas make a positive contribution to human well-being? Does it make happier boys and girls? More compassionate men? More confident and contented women? Does it make for better relationships between men and women, between boys and their mothers, or between girls and their fathers? I would bet my life that the answer to each of these questions is "no." So, I think, would many scientists. And yet, most scientists have been trained to think that such judgments are mere expressions of cultural bias. Very few of us seem willing to admit that simple, moral truths increasingly fall within the purview of our scientific worldview. I am confident that this period of reticence will soon come to an end.”

Read Sam Harris’ full response at:
http://www.edge.org/discourse/vote_morality.html#harriss

sato : LVL 21: VP 3: said:

sato

4 votes NegativePositive

77 days ago...

found that very interesting, specially the bit about people needing punishment to help improve their compassion, not for themselves but for others who they fear might be getting away with less giving.

on the comment above, the bit in the first paragraph could be this protecting the weak thing, perhaps liberals maintain a sense of injustice to blacks, and so feel as though they are the little guy, so would be less willing to sacrifice even 1 to save 100. in that case it would be an unfortunately overlapping of those 2 characteristics basically fouling the outcome of that experiment.

psychologyprofessor : LVL 33: VP 4.2: said:

psychologyprofessor

5 votes NegativePositive

76 days 20 hours ago...

^^Read Sam`s whole response article.

beef n broccoli : LVL 31: VP 4: said:

beef n broccoli

Hidden (Show Comment) -10 votes

75 days 22 hours ago...

what a great talk, but now im afraid to have an opinion :S

vote me up or down guys on any future comment and you`ll be digging a deeper hole of self-righteousness. What gives you the right to think what i say is good or bad; fuck opinions we all know they`re as common as assholes. I declare there shall be no comments after me! break free, people break free!

alifeva1 : LVL 27: VP 3.6: said:

alifeva1

Hidden (Show Comment) -16 votes

74 days 16 hours ago...

nobody cares

flowtice : LVL 27: VP 3.6: said:

flowtice

9 votes NegativePositive

74 days 12 hours ago...

can i at least comment to thank the poster? because, seriously, nice post.

xupz : LVL 45: VP 5: said:

xupz

6 votes NegativePositive

74 days 7 hours ago...

For those of us who can’t tap into those yearnings, it seems the Palin faithful are blind – to the contradictions between her stated positions and the truth of the policies she espouses, to the contradictions between her ideology and their interests. But Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, argues in an essay this month, “What Makes People Vote Republican?”, that it’s liberals, in fact, who are dangerously blind.

Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. “Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview.

Perhaps that’s why the conservatives can so successfully get under liberals’ skin. And why liberals need to start working harder at breaking through the empathy barrier.

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/

D! : LVL 43: VP 5: said:

D!

6 votes NegativePositive

74 days 5 hours ago...

as another psychology professor on this site, i want to thank the poster for putting up something interesting, but I think there are a few things that appear to be missing here from the equation.

I should mention that this dude misses the boat on a much more robust line of inquiry going back many decades- that on the "fascist" personality, later termed right wing authoritarianism. Bob altemeyer`s research on this is among the best respected in all of social psychology, and he seems to just blow past it.

One thing missing is right wingers` comfort with violence and coercion- yes, this can be explained in terms of the need to have ingroup loyalty and to have societal stability, etc., but behaviorally, this is a HUGE difference that seems to somehow be equated. People on the left are not generally willing to start bombing the hell out of places in the name of their values.

Similarly, right wingers have been shown to be much more comfortable with using government power to stifle dissent. Again, sure, this could be part of the stability thing again, but we have to keep in mind here something important- we in the US live in a place that is based on the ability to speak freely and to have dissenting points of view. The people who are against this cause a great deal of trouble in this system.

A HUGE thing missing here is that the right tend to use many more cognitive distortions to prop up their viewpoints. The "openness to experience" thing has many real world connotations, especially when making decisions. This guy makes a HUGE mistake when he equates them as a value neutral "yin and yang." Instead, the tendency to ignore contrary evidence and "have faith" in your position, which the right tends to do much more of, is more likely to have disastrous consequences than being open to thinking differently.

Another key insight this dude is missing out on is the work of George Lakoff, who I think does a much better job of explaining this stuff in terms of family structure. People who found this talk interesting should not miss out on altemeyer and lakoff. Both have very good research to back up what they are saying, and this dude is basing his ideas on evolutionary psychology, which is often quite speculative. Anyway, all of the claims I have made here are backed up by decades of research and you can find it at places like the rockridge institute, theauthoritarians.com and google the article "political conservatism as motivated social cognition"

wizguy34 : LVL 24: VP 3.3: said:

wizguy34

2 votes NegativePositive

74 days 3 hours ago...

^ Thanks for the read-ups. I like this subject and I am going to read up more on this.

Awesome posts. I love TED but I don`t have much time to check out all there vid`s. Thanks

alifeva1 : LVL 27: VP 3.6: said:

alifeva1

-3 votes NegativePositive

74 days 3 hours ago...

Liberalism is an ideology doomed to fail.

I recommend Phil Valentines new book `The Conservatives Handbook` so you may read the foundations upon which this good country was built and how today in America we are trying to stray from those values and beliefs. This country has always been a country based on the belief of God. Right to bear arms. We have Americans living here that hate our country so much. And the left is trying to take away those identities that make us America. I say if they don`t like it they can get out. While the illusion they are trying to portray that conservatives are self serving individuals is not true. Take the tsunami for example, The United States gave Indonesia 656 million dollars and over 1 billion in donations from people just like you and me. Due to a recent poll how Indonesians felt about the US, 39% said they favored our country. You see we can`t make the world like us so why do we give to them and help? Because we are a good country. And we can. We don`t have to, but we do.

Personally I believe there are two roads you take in life, you have the liberal and conservative road. A homeless man asks for some money a liberal is inclined to give him the money and say there he has money he has now been helped. A Conservative is inclined to help that man help himself so that he does not buy that crack or booze but rather change his life around by helping that man get and HOLD a job. The house, the family, is all around the corner should a person HOLD a decent job.

Liberals need people to need them. You see where I am getting at. Its a non ending cycle. Evil philosophy.

There I played your game. I win. Checkmate. Peace.

That book again is `The Conservatives Handbook` PHIL VALENTINE. You can also catch him on C-Span. Holla.

ChileanGoD : LVL 20: VP 2.9: said:

ChileanGoD

-4 votes NegativePositive

74 days 3 hours ago...

Fuck liberals or conservatives. Two sides of the same coin. They change on social issues but the imperialistic background is the same. On either side you`re getting deeper into a coorporatistic world.

The Trunk Monkey : LVL 24: VP 3.3: said:

The Trunk Monkey

0 votes NegativePositive

74 days 2 hours ago...

Aya. You guys are falling into the trap that was just explained in the video! I mean cmon, did you even bother listening?

Poitington : LVL 25: VP 3.4: said:

Poitington

0 votes NegativePositive

74 days 1 hour ago...

DI: Soooo right wingers this and that and oh don`t forget another reason why right wingers are scum, oh yeah there`s this and that too.
Dude, don`t you have anything to say about the left? Could it really be that simple. Right are scum and left are saints?

Also, if it`s the right who are comfortable with abusing power to stifle desent then why did we see cages being put up in secluded areas for any protesters at the Dem convention?

Bollo Delux : LVL 30: VP 3.9: said:

Bollo Delux

2 votes NegativePositive

73 days 23 hours ago...

alifeva1 you`re so fucken thick.

exploder : LVL 48: VP 5: said:

exploder

0 votes NegativePositive

73 days 22 hours ago...

What I find most interesting in this line of thinking is the possibility that perhaps the increased weighting on the extra 3 moral basics that the conservatives show, is an evolutionary result of 12000-ish years of selective breeding in agriculturalist societies. These traits directly coincide with the kinds of behavior that fit into primitive hierarchical societies. So people who had more of them had more kids, while people who didn`t, didn`t fit in or do as well, and had fewer kids. Over the history of human agricultural societies, that means we have bread homo sapiens domestica. As opposed to the original hunter-gatherer homo sapeins sapiens. I would also call them sheeple.

This idea also fits nicely with modern metabolic diet science, which practically takes for granted that there is a basic historical bifurcation of human`s dietary needs, based on the hunter-gatherer vs. agriculturalist backgrounds. There are many minor side branches too, but that is the primary split. It makes sense that our breeding history would affect personal behaviour every bit as much as it has personal dietary metabolisms and requirements.

We humans have used selective breeding to create every type of dog there is, in under 10000 years. You would have to be a fool to think we haven`t done something similar to ourselves, with some analogue to the behavioral diversity as well.

As a sapiens sapiens, I recommend to my fellows to avoid those valleys full of dangerous sheeple. They want to enslave you in their drudgery and obediance. Stick to your small groups and families, try to breed true, and enjoy your independant thinking and self reliant lifestyles.

Cheers.

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