Modestly expand on current government services. Greatly expand on current government services. Which of the following statements come closest to your view?
If America is too open to people from all over the world, we risk losing our identity as a nation. In general, would you say experts who study a subject for many years are…. Thinking about increased trade of goods and services between the U.
Gained more than it has lost because increased trade has helped lower prices and increased the competitiveness of some U. Lost more than it has gained because increased trade has cost jobs in manufacturing and other industries and lowered wages for some U. How much more, if anything, needs to be done to ensure equal rights for all Americans regardless of their racial or ethnic backgrounds? A lot. Nothing at all. Which comes closer to your view about what needs to be done to ensure equal rights for all Americans regardless of their racial or ethnic backgrounds — even if neither is exactly right?
Most U. While there are many inequities in U. Which of the following statements comes closest to your view? Business corporations make too much profit. Most corporations make a fair and reasonable amount of profit. How much, if at all, would it bother you to regularly hear people speak a language other than English in public places in your community?
Not at all. On a scale of 0 to , where 0 means you feel as cold and negative as possible and means you feel as warm and positive as possible, how do you feel toward… How do you feel toward Democrats? How do you feel toward Republicans? Which of these statements best describes your opinion about the United States? The U. It was May Weeks earlier I had returned from a semester-long sabbatical in China, where I had traveled with my Taiwanese doctoral student for two research projects, both about language, but quite different.
One project studied the cognitive processing underlying reading Chinese script, and the other involved interviews and questionnaires on the comfort and frequency of use of the phrase Wo ai ni I love you. Once, during a visit to a local Starbucks, I was startled to see a woman, a foreigner, who appeared to have some sort of facial dysmorphology.
The bony protuberances of her cheekbones made me try to remember the name of the disease that could cause it. Then something clicked. She was a normal woman with a strong nose and cheekbones, characteristically Germanic features.
Back in Massachusetts, my face recognition system had almost instantly popped back to its normal setting. But the China trip had sensitized me to the virtue of minimizing individualist displays and respecting the desires of those above one in the social hierarchy.
In the collectivist cultures of East Asia, people have been less concerned with expressing their individuality and more concerned about harmonious relations with others, including being sensitive to negative appraisal by others. One result is a well-behaved classroom of 30 preschoolers led by one teacher and an assistant. As I sat at dinner with my female friends, I thought about the subtle power of social norms and respect for authority. Haidt had once given a colloquium to my department and visited my lab.
In recent years the New York University professor has become something of a rock star of social psychology, largely because of his persuasive analysis of the value systems of liberals and of conservatives. Haidt proposes that the moral worldview of liberals focuses on justice and fairness, with equal treatment for all, and on care vs. The idea that different groups embrace different value systems was, of course, not new, but prior to reading Haidt I had considered respect for authority, in-group favoritism, and purity to be components of collectivist cultural groups, which are usually associated with developing nations and are often described in opposition to the individualist values that are hallmarks of modern, developed regions especially North America, Europe, and Australia.
Collectivism is widespread throughout the rest of the world, particularly in what researchers call small scale societies, but it is also present in large and well organized societies such as China, where traditional values and wisdoms from premodern times, such as Confucian teachings, remain influential. Many Americans think it is good for all teenagers to have an after-school job, but Indians feel this should be done only if the family needs the money.
An American entrepreneur explains to his elderly Polish relatives that his son has succeeded in business without having his father pull any strings or offer any financial assistance. The Polish relatives are horrified. A graduate student from Kazakhstan has to forgo completing her PhD to return home to earn money so that her nephews can finish high school. I spent years holding conservative values in contempt.
Not care about global warming? Harmful, wrong, and unfair! The Turks, Indians, elderly Polish, Kazakhs, and Chinese presumably grew up in cultures where a premium was placed on sharing resources with in-group members, and where family members are expected to subordinate their own goals to those of the group.
The kind of urban living that most of us experience, for example, offers options that reduce the need to rely on other people. In fact, many Americans recall being warned not to loan money to friends, because that puts friendships in danger. In contrast, my Turkish collaborator, Ayse Aycicegi-Dinn, explains that Turkish friends loan money to deepen mutual obligations while avoiding paying interest to banks.
Cross-cultural psychologists do not view either individualism or collectivism as inherently superior or inferior. They understand that each system has evolved to solve the problem of how individuals can benefit from living in groups, and they see both systems as having pros and cons. Individualist societies like ours allow people to pursue their dreams pro , but when big aspirations crumble because of bad luck or intense competition, they may lack a safety net, either in terms of government services or family support con.
In individualistic societies, transactions are abstract and conveniently monetized pro. And indeed, friendships in individualist societies are typically many, diverse, and often shallow. They are easily initiated and routinely abandoned, as when, for example, we choose to relocate for a better paying job. In collectivist societies, the familial ties and deep friendships that arise from never leaving your hometown and investing daily in relationship management provide a buffer against loneliness and depression.
The downside is that collectivist cultures can have an oppressive small-town mentality that punishes nonconformists who challenge religious, gender, or sex role norms.
As a liberal, I spent many years holding conservative values in contempt. Exploit and vilify immigrants? Hold men and women to different standards of sexual behavior? Dismiss those living in poverty?
Enact legislation to help those who were already successful keep their wealth? So what hit me so hard when reading the work of Jonathan Haidt was the realization that the three moral systems that liberals disavow, but conservatives embrace that is, respect for authority, prioritizing in-group members, purity are the hallmarks of the collectivist value systems I learned about as part of doing cross-cultural research and living overseas.
My current and more sympathetic understanding is that the central goal of collectivist societies and social conservatism as a political ideology is reserving resources for the in-group, a strategy that was necessary in earlier eras when the neighboring tribe was encroaching on your territory and daily survival was often uncertain. Purity rules and emphasis on obedience to authority are tools that help small-scale societies increase group cohesion and survival.
My research, my teaching, and my traveling showed me that for the majority of cultures that have thrived on our planet, socially conservative political views made a lot of sense. Theologian Wesley Wildman , a School of Theology professor, religious studies scholar, and wide-ranging thinker, asked me to become a research associate at the Institute for the Bio-Cultural Study of Religion. Many scholars and thinkers have grappled with just how the Republican party married probusiness, antiworker, neoliberalism ideas with small-town social conservatism.
One could even say that conservatives in Congress have to prioritize supporting their in-group, and their in-group is probusiness. Freemarket capitalism does seem to be a different beast from social conservatism. One of my conservative colleagues pointed me to enlightening essays about this in the American Conservative , a magazine I found to be far more reasonable than one would think from the constant vilification of conservatives on a website I enjoy, www.
All of the above, the travel, the research, teaching, and the collaboration, has led me to a place where, instead of inching away when I meet someone who expresses conservative political values, I take the opportunity to learn. And not just because some conservatives join forces with liberals by being against patriarchy, racism, and my-country-first patriotism. While I still embrace this view, I wonder if conservative ideals are more natural ideals.
That is, does human nature, as it emerged under the pressures of natural selection of our small-group-living ancestors, include the urge to curtail individual expression, enforce authority, and hoard resources for the in-group?
Compared to liberals, social conservatives may well be living lives that are more similar to what humans have lived for tens of thousands of years. And if so, is their more natural mind-set the reason that conservatives are, at least according to surveys, often happier than liberals?
Circle the answers you think best complete this sentence: If you are the houseguest of a friend-of-a-friend, your stay might be physically and socially more comfortable if your hosts are a liberal b conservative, but the conversation will be more intellectually stimulating if your hosts are a liberal b conservative.
If you answered b and a, then your intuitions are consistent with a growing literature on how personality and cognitive function match up with ideological beliefs. Conservatives are on average sociable, agreeable, and conscientious, as well as concerned about pleasing and fitting in with others of their group. When compared to conservatives, liberals are on average , less socially astute and less attuned to the needs of others, less agreeable, and overall, less happy.
On the intellectual side, liberals, compared to conservatives, prefer abstract, intellectual topics, as is consistent with their broader moral scope. After all, the ability to live in the moment and appreciate our lives as they exist does seem to be a key ingredient in day-to-day contentment. When we understand more of the full set of ways to be human, we can be more human. I will not say of which university for fear I will be failed… I must say I thank you Ms. Caldwell-Harris for being honest and open with your views.
Before I started my course I was very much conservative. I was naive and even mentioned a thing or two about that fact. I was attacked by the professor and classmates. Today I have a good balance and not to the extreme of either side. Basically taking each side with a grain of salt.
I do feel however that the reactionary behavior of liberals creates nausea in my stomach. Liberals devalue everything that had value not so long ago.
Today there is chaos in place of norm. No hierarchy, no morality, and no logical thinking. What will happen if you topple the hierarchy? What will happen with no morality? And logical thinking… Where oh where in the entire world do you have as many welfare, elderly, vulnerable persons, social programs? And yet the extreme liberal is still crying that its not enough. Will the liberal keep crying until there is no stable government to cry to???
So, what your saying is that the working class should be blind to what the wealthy are doing to them and just be corporate stooges. Because the federal government does belong to the masses, not corporations! And fascism is very right wing and conservative and reactionary. There is nothing progressive about Conservatism!
Conservatism ONLY benefits the richest people and makes the masses suffer in poverty to make the richest richer. You are wrong! Theres a reason why the right is reactionary, and the left is revolutionary!
Right and left are polar opposites. The left believes in peace and equality. The right divides and conquers. Dont blur the lines of English language definitions. The deceptive right wing confuses mixes up definitions to fool the masses into believing things that enable corporatism and income inequality.
I think the true meaning of liberalism is backwards compared to the rest of the world. Liberals are not elitists going to elite colleges and rich! Neo-liberal is economically conservative and socially liberal.
That works! Social liberalism is common sense, everyone socially treated equal. Economic conservatism is to make the rich richer and poor poorer through divide and conquer tactics and oppressing labor movements!
Mindfulness or Conservative thinking?? It is defeatist thinking. How about.. I mean hey its not so far removed. What ever happened to civil discussions among caring people with different views? We can appreciate each others differences in thought if we are willing to listen respectfully to each other without trying to define one another in some specific category.
I disagree with the last 3 paragraphs of your opinion piece, as I have found them to be quite the opposite in my 55 years 30 of which have been politically active.
I have long called myself a social conservative. I think it is very important to have standards for behaviour etiquette and defined roles. The problems with this system is not that it exists, but the lack of flexibility and the value placed on them. There needs to be more discussion around finding a balance instead of so much effort being spent on trying make a utopia.
As it stands now the social pendulum swings back and forth. People cannot make the right decisions all the time nor can they make the right decisions if they are not allowed to. I must apologize, but I got about half way through this article and realized this person was so clueless about how normal people live and think that she was completely irrelevant.
It really is sad to see someone that is so out of touch with reality that she is just never going to be able to relate to normal people. At least she can reside peacefully in some ultra liberal northeastern university and live out her life cluelessly, perhaps ultimately like a zoo exhibit as an about to be extinct human unsuccessful genetic deadend. I understand your assessment, but I strongly disagree with it. Yes, people are different, and some are relatively clueless, as you say, about others.
But some readers of this article have said they also have had to do this. Going along to get along is not a virtue, but the foundation of every problem we have faced in the past, and will face in the future. Classical liberalism is i. Then honestly tell me where you would rather live. I think one mistake that is made is the use of the work Liberal in the context you apply I would argue that Communist and Dictatorial societies are called Conservative, but bears little if any resemblance to what we refer to as a Conservative politically in the USA.
This was a painful read. The author treats American Preservationists as if they are a majority of Republicans. Republicans are merely co-belligerents against a common enemy. I agree with this article, but would take it a step further. This probably also lies at the core of why conservatives are often perceived as being more attractive than liberals, as well.
Most people find genuineness and authenticity to be attractive traits, in general. At least most Americans believe that individual liberty is part and parcel of the American Dream, inbred with our conscious genes of the spirit and leaving the deepest imprint on our National Soul. And history cannot be rejected by all. We need a term to identify with its historically divine upbringing. Although retaining the term classical. Being somewhat liberal myself I personally believe it has much to do with the law of attraction.
Many of them believe the same as I that we all have preservative instincts toward values as well as liberal instincts toward values. And the same discovery of friendship and familiarities must also be true about self-avowed conservatives, other than the ones I personally know.
Belittling the spiritual sovereignty image, likeness, and potential of themselves and others as well, known by their idiosyncrasies of extreme antipathy and hatred. It puts them in their proper place. And that can not exclude certain self-avowed conservatives who have the same uncivilized qualities and demeanor. The changes from recognizing our cultured divine qualities to gradually displacing them with ignorance and secularization were for the worse, and not for the better optimal growth and health for a nation conceived and born with sacred guiding principles.
However, one of the brightest rays of hope, shining from enlightened conservatives, liberals, libertarians, moderates or progressives no matter what their mix and brand of ideologies may be can see through the demonization of the uncivilized leftist mentality.
Their transforming influences work. For example, it is a term that references the discussion of free will and to what extent there is free will, fate, or divine purpose and intervention and such. That is a broad and interesting discussion that is not unrelated to political liberalism and instead shares roots with it.
It was either Mill or Locke that noted that the use of the same term for both things that is, liberty was unfortunate. Regardless of what hand they must write with, or what ideology they stand by.
God loves us all. Judeo-Christian worldviews easily fleshes itself out as shown in this article? Is it an inaccurate generality to say that liberal mindsets, statistically speaking, lean more towards pluralistic or atheistic moral codes and conservative mindsets lean more towards Judeo-Christian moral codes? If we can be honest and agree that there is a decent correlation albeit not absolute between these two moral codes and their political implications, one can easily see why conservatives would be united under social expectations, given that conservatives are generally united under the same source of moral code — the Bible.
The very concept of atheism suggests that every man adopts for himself whatever is fitting for himself and implies that people are different and can and should live by different systems if desired.
This is precisely why we can observe atheists that are both conservative and liberal politically albeit the vast majority liberal while there are virtually no Christian that would support various liberal positions, such as abortion, for instance, or would at least shamefully and secretly support it for personal benefits because it would go against their own moral code. Partisanship does not just affect our vote; it influences our memory, reasoning and even our perception of truth.
Knowing this will not magically bring us all together, but researchers hope that continuing to understand the way partisanship influences our brain might at least allow us to counter its worst effects: the divisiveness that can tear apart the shared values required to retain a sense of national unity. Social scientists who observe behaviors in the political sphere can gain substantial insight into the hazards of errant partisanship.
Political neuroscience, however, attempts to deepen these observations by supplying evidence that a belief or bias manifests as a measure of brain volume or activity—demonstrating that an attitude, conviction or misconception is, in fact, genuine. Brain scans are also unlikely to be used as a biomarker for specific political results because the relationships between the brain and politics is not one-to-one.
To study how we process political information in a paper , political psychologist Ingrid Haas of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and her colleagues created hypothetical candidates from both major parties and assigned each candidate a set of policy statements on issues such as school prayer, Medicare and defense spending. Most statements were what you would expect: Republicans, for instance, usually favor increasing defense spending, and Democrats generally support expanding Medicare.
But some statements were surprising, such as a conservative expressing a pro-choice position or a liberal arguing for invading Iran. Haas put 58 people with diverse political views in a brain scanner. On each trial, participants were asked whether it was good or bad that a candidate held a position on a particular issue and not whether they personally agreed or disagreed with it.
Framing the task that way allowed the researchers to look at neural processing as a function of whether the information was expected or unexpected—what they termed congruent or incongruent. Liberals proved more attentive to incongruent information, especially for Democratic candidates.
When they encountered such a position, it took them longer to make a decision about whether it was good or bad. How do out-of-the-ordinary positions affect later voting? Haas suspects that engaging more with such information might make voters more likely to punish candidates for it later. Motivated reasoning, in which people work hard to justify their opinions or decisions, even in the face of conflicting evidence, has been a popular topic in political neuroscience because there is a lot of it going around.
While partisanship plays a role, motivated reasoning goes deeper than that. Just as most of us like to think we are good-hearted human beings, people generally prefer to believe that the society they live in is desirable, fair and legitimate.
Nam and her colleagues set out to understand which brain areas govern the affective processes that underlie system justification. They found that the volume of gray matter in the amygdala is linked to the tendency to perceive the social system as legitimate and desirable. In short, we derive our identities from both our individual characteristics, such as being a parent, and our group memberships, such as being a New Yorker or an American.
These affiliations serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. And our brain represents them much as it does other forms of social identity. Among other things, partisan identity clouds memory. In a study , liberals were more likely to misremember George W.
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