In this and the following blog posts I will present you with something that will shock you. I promise nothing more and nothing less than to answer once and for all the question of what the difference between liberals and conservatives is. And by that I mean the psychological difference. We all know that liberals and conservatives are different. We know that the difference must be in the mind of liberals and conservatives. There is no shortage of theories about how the minds of liberals and conservatives work. But I will settle this question once and for all.
I know this is a bold claim to make but by the end of these following few posts I think you’ll see I will follow true on that promise.
The liberal-conservative divide is the defining conflict of our generation. Two people could live across the street from one another. But if you hear them talk. If one is liberal, the other one conservative you’d think they come from different planets. Their worldviews are so different. It’s not just about politics, they would describe every aspect of the earth differently from one another.
Starting with the earth itself. One says the earth is continuously getting warmer to the point it can endanger life on earth, the other does not.
One says that we’re being displaced by immigrants, the other says the country is on stolen land.
One says the government has too much power, the other says cooperations have too much power.
One says we’re on the brink of falling into fascism, the other says we’re on the brink of falling into communism.
One says our culture is degenerate the other says our culture is too rigidly religious.
One says gender is a spectrum, the other says it is determined by birth.
I could go on and on. But I think I don’t need to. I think everybody who has just a cursory knowledge of contemporary politics has made the same observation at some point. It really is like we are living on different planets.
Most people like to blame the media for this divide. The idea is that when your liberal or conservative the media you consume exposes you to different facts about the world, filtering out everything that doesn’t fit one sides worldview. And this filter is responsible for them seeing the world differently. I don’t think the media is the problem. The problem goes much deeper than that. You will find the root of the problem in psychology.
In fact, I would say if we take one liberal and one conservative to an alien planet. A planet they know nothing about, where they have no prior knowledge about anything. And also, they learn the same information about the planet at the same time, so it can’t be that they have different facts. Even in that world it wouldn’t take long until they live on different planets again.
Let’s say they learn two facts about this planet: 1. On this planet blue aliens and green aliens are living together. 2. On average the blue aliens have a lot more money than the green aliens. They know nothing else. They don’t know what money is in this world, they don’t know why the aliens are green or blue, they don’t know if it is genetics or if there is discrimination here.
The conservative would say: This is a planet where blue aliens are smarter and harder working than green aliens.
And the liberal would say: This is a planet where there is widespread discrimination against green aliens.
It takes just two facts for them to be living on different planets.
Whatever the divide is about, it’s getting more extreme and more violent. The percentage of people who say that they hate the other side is growing since the 2000s. The same with the percentage of people who say they would support violence against the other side. It is getting worse. But you would think that that extremity would come with some benefits.
People say liberals are more empathetic, conservatives are more conscientious and everybody says of themselves that they are smarter. So if we are becoming more extreme when it comes to hating the other side shouldn’t we also have more of these attributes. But we don’t. We’re not becoming more empathetic, we’re not becoming more conscientious and we’re certainly not becoming smarter. In fact when you ask people “How favorably do you view your own political party?” that number stayed consistent over the decades. Or love for our side didn’t grow, just our hatred for the other side.
So we’re getting more extreme, but only more extreme in hate, not more extreme in anything positive.
This and the following posts are about a new theory about the psychology of liberals and conservatives. Now, everytime when you talk about psychology, there are a million different factors to consider. Every liberal and every conservative is an individual and has their own reason to join a side. And with every individuals decisions there are countless factors consciously or subconsciously to consider. So this theory can not explain EVERYTHING about the left-right-divide. But this will explain a lot of it, and I would say more than any psychological theory before.
To test this theory I created a survey. I gave liberals and conservatives questions about unique situations, that means situations that haven’t happened before. Moral questions they never had to deal with in real-life, so that they can’t be influenced by the media or what other people say about this. We’ll see if this theory predicts how they will react to those situations.
I have to give a disclaimer here that this did not go through peer review. But I will explain everything about my methodology. That’s all peer review is. Looking at somebodies methodology, and then criticizing it it. If you find a flaw with it, tell me.
So maybe one survey is not enough proof. I will also talk about other findings from psychology that work with this theory. And I am also going to look at how this theory plays out in real-life. Does this theory predict how liberals and conservatives in reality, not just in theory? So maybe if we put all 3 together it will convince you that the theory is true.
So we have 3 avenues of proof:
-Other findings that support the theory
-The survey, and
-Real life examples
If that is not good enough, I’d love to hear from you. Please tell me why you disagree, and what would convince you that this theory is true?
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