… but the politically engaged conservatives mostly are. Thomas Edsall, at the NYTimes, on “Finding the Limits of Empathy“:
… Ravi Iyer, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Southern California who analyzes the differences in the moral outlook of conservatives and liberals, has posted an exceptionally interesting collection of data on his “Politics and Moral Psychology Blog.” (Iyer’s research is reinforced by the work of Philip E. Tetlock at Wharton and Linda J. Skitka of the University of Illinois.)…
Politically engaged liberals and conservatives exhibit strikingly different levels of empathy. The following chart, constructed by Iyer, illustrates this beautifully:
The more interested in politics a conservative is, the lower his (or her) level of empathy. Liberals move in the opposite direction: the more interested in politics they are, the more empathetic. Empathy, in case you’re wondering, is measured by responses to 28 statements in the “Davis Interpersonal Reactivity Index,” including “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me,” “I sometimes find it difficult to see things from the ‘other guy’s’ point of view,” and “Sometimes I don’t feel very sorry for other people when they are having problems.”
In the 2010 election, 42 percent of voters identified themselves as conservative; 38 percent said they were moderate; and 20 percent said they were liberal. If that division obtains in 2012 and beyond, the proportion of conservative to liberal voters in the electorate should give liberals pause, especially insofar as they expect elected officials to propose and pass legislation the underlying purpose of which is to help those most in need…
I’m a little suspicious of the sudden rush to “prove” that if our political process is irretrievably borked, it’s all down to what’s broken in our individual brains. But there is a certain logic, if you accept the theory that people mostly get interested in politics — in spending precious time and energy on elections that could otherwise go towards work, family life, getting more use out of that expensive gym membership, or keeping up with the local sports franchise — when they perceive that something is “wrong” with the existing order. For conservatives, that “wrongness” is hardly likely to be an overwhelming sense that Tha Gubmint just isn’t doing enough for those people who are… unlike the aggreived conservative.
Spaghetti Lee
Very interesting. I know that my own experiences count for very little, but that seems to match up with what I’ve seen. Everyday small-c conservatives I may not agree with on certain things, but most of them don’t strike me as hateful. The ones who read Ayn Rand and listen to Limbaugh and Beck and not only take it to heart but insist on spreading it everywhere they go-well, that just seems designed to make you hateful.
BGinCHI
The paradox here is that even though I’m a liberal, the more I’m engaged with politics the less empathy I have for conservatives.
Or, fuck the empathy slackers.
srv
What if I only lack empathy for conservatives?
BethanyAnne
I guess the smart money when measuring humans is on “it depends, sometimes, and it’s complicated”, but I think there is something to this. I think we are mostly rationalizing, not rational. Long before I had any formal psych training, I though other people just didn’t seem very real to conservatives.
Tim F.
So liberals get involved in politics to help people, and conservatives get involved because fuck them (whoever them is). Surprise.
DaddyJ
OT, but I just got an interesting phone call from the NRA.
First I was asked to take a “one-question survey.” Then Robo Wayne LaPierre came on and barked out some tripe about a vote in the UN and how the U.N. was working hand-in-glove with Obama to strip us of our Second Amendment rights. Then a poll-taker with a sweet old grandpa voice came on and asked me, yes or no, if I believed the U.N. should be on U.S. soil voting to take away our Second Amendment freedoms. I said, “What I believe is, you people are paranoid nutjobs.” Much to my suprise, Grandpa seemed to be flummoxed for a second. He got riled and said I wasn’t answering the question, which he then started to repeat: “Yes or no…” I interrupted him and said, “It’s a bogus question, and a leading question, so I can’t answer it.” Still ruffled, he thanked me for my time and I thanked him as well.
I’ve never been cold-called by the NRA. I’m thinking them push-polling the general public is a sure sign of just how extreme this political season is going to get.
Anthony
I think this might have less to do with any inherent personality traits that lead people to become conservative, and probably more to do with different emotional responses to the question asked since this is all measured using self reporting survey. An especially engaged conservative probably has read enough liberal attacks on conservatism using appeals to empathy, that the questions on the IRI probably subconsciously compel them to push back, even if that doesn’t really correspond to their behavior outside a political context.
slag
@DaddyJ:
Does laughing at this mean I, too, lack empathy? Dilemma.
PeakVT
Interesting that there’s a crossover on empathy for politically unengaged people.
kdaug
It’s the self-righteousness, the certitude, that makes me want to punch necks.
No, that’s not quite it.
It’s the certitude in the face of demonstrable wrongness.
Pick your topic/poison, it’s the same pattern every time – “We can’t hear you, la-la-la-la. Planet’s warming? La-la-la-la. Austerity will strangle us? La-la-la-la.”
Makes one tired after a while, banging their head on that wall.
And then you remember what the consequences are of losing, and you get up, dust off, and run back in.
Gets tiring, but it’s the noble fight.
Spaghetti Lee
@DaddyJ:
Nice. If I get that call I’ll say something like “I agree, because I’m one of them! The Central Collective will be hearing of your treason shortly, rebel scum!”
Genine
The study seems close to my experience. Though, to be fair, the conservatives I know will help out friends and family members in a heartbeat. On a personal level, my conservative friends are helpful if at times insensitive (I am a black woman and they just say some messed up things at times that I have to correct). It’s just that everyone else can fuck off and die.
It seems the further out of their sphere one is, the more suspicious that person is.
beltane
Here is a story about a study with similar findingshttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120430140035.htm
It seems that religious people are less motivated by compassion than non-believers. This provides support for my long-held view that the only thing preventing the average devout person from committing random acts of thuggery is the fear that their Daddy-God will put them in eternal time-out. They truly can’t wrap their heads around the fact that there are some people out there who just aren’t interested in going on a crime spree.
beltane
@DaddyJ: The NRA had been calling my house for several years regarding that same United Nations bullshit. I can’t believe they haven’t moved on to a new CT to fleece the rubes with.
General Stuck
My experience in life around all sorts of people with all sorts of personality traits, has taught me there is a minority subset of persons I believe to be fundamentally wired to be conservative, and wingnutty as well. If I had to put a percent around it, that could be the number 27. I don’t have any scientific data to back that observation up, but am convinced of it.
I don’t know if there is a corresponding congenital liberal, likely cause I am one of some stripe. So that muddles the mind a bit for the sake of objectivity.
But most republicans, I think, are not predisposed or destined to be wingnuts by their genetic wiring. Whatever else may lead these kinds of conservatives to act like they do, seems to have a common thread of lack of empathy, or concern for their fellow humans. They may care about family deeply, and even others for their own reasons. BUT, they have the option of simply not giving a shit about people in general, and by coalescing around a political gathering point, like a pol party, provides all the reinforcement needed to not give a shit, if they so desire. There is safety in groups no matter what the issue, but the GOP lends a fig leaf for those who choose to be assholes, if they so desire.
I see the GOP, above all else, as the lazy party full of morally lazy people, because it takes effort and pain to give a shit about your fellow man. And is easy to throw up all sorts of meaningless placards of this or that philosophy or belief, to justify going thru life a self absorbed dickweed. Things like the GOP mantra of ‘personal responsibility”, to not lend a hand to the hungry or the sick, in a manner that makes a difference.
Of course, until they, the wingnuts, gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar. Then it is somebody elses fault, probably a liberal to blame for their failures, some how, some way.
Petorado
All this poll does is validate John Kenneth Galbraith’s assertion that conservatism is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. And that’s why conservatives embrace the cover offered by religious affiliation since it glosses over their inherently amoral positions about resolving conflicts with the rest of humanity.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
LOD just destroyed little Pauly Ryan’s attempt to pivot away from his crush on Sunday Rand. With audio. Awesome.
TooManyJens
@beltane:
I’ve had a number of them straight-up say that to me. In conversations where they were talking about how atheists have no morals, of course. Scary motherfuckers. They never figured out that fear of punishment isn’t morality.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
LOD just destroyed little Pauly Ryan’s attempt to pivot away from his crush on Sunday Rand. With audio. Awesome.
Steve in DC
Conservatives are perpetually worried that somewhere, someone is gaming the system to get rewards they did not earn and all the rest of us are paying for it. Liberals are perpetually worried that somewhere, someone has fallen through the cracks of the system and the rest of us are not helping out.
Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant)
Sorry about the multiple posts. FYWP.
slag
@TooManyJens:
This is true. When religious people ask me how I know right from wrong, I always tell them that, like everyone else, I learned it from a book…Jack Kerouac’s On the Road…and would they like to borrow it.
Steve in DC
@TooManyJens
It’s understandable though. As an atheist it’s not wanting to deal with the legal system that often prevents me from doing certain things. It’s something you have to think about. The urge to beat the tar out someone can be rather high, but what are the odds I’ll cop an assault charge and have to pay a fine or do time?
Threat of punishment works, that’s the whole reason we have laws. Take traffic laws, most people chose not to obey them if they think they won’t get caught.
Let’s face it, our entire legal system is based of the threat of rape, constant assaults, and financial ruin if you don’t fall inline.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
The replicators are malfunctioning on the Defiant. O’Brien is slacking.
TooManyJens
@Steve in DC: IDK, I just don’t feel the urge to rape and kill people, and I don’t take lessons on morality from people who say they’d do so if they wouldn’t get punished. Crazy, I know.
Steve in DC
@TooManyJens
I don’t know about rape and kill, other stuff for sure. Plus I don’t really take death threats or any of that all that seriously. It’s more blowing off steam. If they say it they really aren’t that serious about it. If I was going to kill someone I sure as hell wouldn’t tell them or anybody about it. I’d just be done with it and sink their body in the Potomac river.
Most screaming and yelling crazy shit is just to get attention.
Chris
@PeakVT:
It makes sense to me. You can be a Republican with empathy if you don’t really know what the hell your party stands for, but the more engaged you are, the more you’re aware of how sociopathic your party is and the more staying a Republican requires a conscious choice to be okay with a complete lack of empathy.
@General Stuck:
This.
The thing about this is that conservatives have made a conscious effort to attract people with no empathy. For forty years their electoral strategy has been to pander to the lowest in human nature – racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, hatred of the poor, hatred of other religions, etc. If after all that, their politically engaged base is now Psychopaths ‘R Us, that’s completely natural and very much deliberate.
vhh
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant): who the hell is LOD? talk about inside jargon . . .
PeakVT
@Villago Delenda Est: There is the theory of the moebius…
gaz
@vhh: I was thinking Lawrence O’Donnell?
danielx
Nice graph, and very illustrative. But it doesn’t take a doctorate to intuit what the graph shows….that being as individual Republicans become more politically engaged, the more they’re required to acknowledge the sociopathic and nonsensical nature of Republican ideology of the last forty years. The best of them ignore it as best they can, while the worst of them enjoy it.
Because what we see now is no more or less than the final distillation of what conservatives have had cooking in the old still for oh, forty years or so. (Illustration below.)
Fear, hate, outright denial of reality – “Ronald Reagan DID NOT RAISE TAXES!”. And, and, leave us not forget – ideological purity. Whether a given policy is good for the country as a whole, whether it actually works, is immaterial. If it doesn’t fit Republican ideology, which is more and more coming down to the libertarian ideal of “fuck you, I got mine”…then it’s bad, whether it accomplishes good things or not.
It does make me tired.
http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/8086/918/400/reactc.1.jpg
psycholinguist
Careful with that, the error bars are overlapped at that point – so I would interpret it more as no relationship when people are both low empathy and low politically active.
Merp
Ugh. You know in Sexy Beast when Ben Kingsley just starts shouting “no” over and over again? That is my reaction.
From the specific to the abstract:
– THE DATA IS FROM A VOLUNTARY ONLINE SURVEY. DO NOT EVER TRUST VOLUNTARY ONLINE SURVEYS. EVER.
– We don’t know how many people formed the sample group of the survey. So even if this were a survey with a statistically valid sampling mechanism, we can’t trust the results because we don’t know how large that sample size is.
– Even if we had a valid sampling mechanism and a sample size that let us draw valid conclusions, we still wouldn’t be able to trust this graph, because we don’t know the relative characteristics of the liberal and conservative subpopulations. Are the liberals younger, and conservatives older, and does empathy decrease with age? What other differences b/t liberals and conservatives could affect empathy scores? Education levels? Income? Size of town?
– You can’t use self-identified “liberal” and “conservative” markers, because the last sixty years of conservative hysterics have made it unpopular to identify as “liberal” and popular to identify as “conservative”, which means lots of people who don’t identify as liberals act just like liberals and lots of people who identify as conservatives don’t act at all like conservatives. That’s important for a graph like this, because assuming that there is an empathic gap b/t actual liberals and actual conservatives, if you let people self-identify then the liberal results will be much higher with less variance, and the conservative ones much lower with higher variance, than they actually are. Which is, probably not by coincidence, what we see in the graph.
Ok, all of the above could be corrected with the right methodological techniques. And I could be wrong about the methods used to create the graph (the blog post was very skimpy; perhaps all of this work is being done under the hood, as it were, although there’s no evidence of that).
But the following can’t be corrected by improving the survey techniques:
– That test of empathy is freaking insane in this context. Because the conservative movement has spent the last fifty years politicizing these terms. When Goldwater and Reagan and Gingrich and Paul and Limbaugh have been telling you all your life that with regards to public policy we can’t help people who refuse to help themselves, that’s going to color responses to statements like ““Sometimes I don’t feel very sorry for other people when they are having problems.”
Now it’s an important point to make that the conservative movement has been using this rhetoric for generations, and that it might have an effect on how people view public policy, but that doesn’t really tell us anything about how empathetic people are in non-political areas of their lives. These measures of empathy are gauging how people respond to political frames around the idea of empathy, not how empathetic they actually are.
– Just in general: this is a bullshit line of social science. For about twenty years now people have pimped out political and social psychology in order to have their names in papers and write popular books, using everything from stupid graphs like this to absolutely inane fMRI studies. Almost to the paragraph, they are just as wrong and filled with error as the graph above. (Of course there is good work being done in political and social psychology, but there is a distinct subset of people who take the (already fairly low) standards of the discipline and trash them to provide sound-bite arguments that back up social prejudices. It’s pretty easy to recognize examples of the form, and the Times article provides several.)
A quick look around this guy’s blog indicates he is clearly gunning for a public intellectual / talking head position, and the fact that he’s getting blog posts mentioned in the Times as a post-doc is an indication that he’ll probably succeed.
But unless he breaks radically with the people like Jonathan Haidt who have traveled this ground before him, he will continue to make outsized claims on faulty interpretations of shaky data.
Gian
@Ben Cisco (onboard the Defiant):
for paul ryan:
Matthew 6:24
King James Version (KJV)
24No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
FlipYrWhig
@Steve in DC: Totally correct. That’s why every conservative has a story about someone that they know, or someone they saw, using food stamps but with nails or hair done, or a fancy cell phone, or fancy sneakers, or fancy jewelry.
FlipYrWhig
BTW, I don’t think it’s the case that conservatives lack empathy entirely. But they badly lack the ability to extend empathy to people dissimilar to themselves. And that’s how all the special cases get piled up: “OK, my cousin is on disability, but it’s just temporary and he really needs it, it’s not like he’s deliberately asking for a handout sitting on his butt all day like the rest of ’em do.”. And why conservatives with a personal connection to a cause can be enlightened on that one issue, but when there’s no personal connection, it’s just, fuck ’em, life isn’t fair.
psycholinguist
Your initial methodological points are spot on, but I would note these guys have published in, for example JPSP, so they have either collected data in a better controlled environment, or they had some pretty damn good answers.
But I would take issue with your argument above, against the instrument. Isn’t that idea that political ideology has so colored their social perceptions going to have an effect on their behavior? If you’re right, and these guys now see questions as “Sometimes I don’t feel very sorry for other people when they are having problems.” as having a political component, I’d bet a dollar it is having an effect on their behavior in “non-political areas”, as in there are no nonpolitical areas left for that person, he or she is seeing a conspiracy around every nook and cranny.
Merp
psycholinguist,
The JPSP is better than most (all?) psychology journals in terms of the academic rigor they try and maintain in their accepted papers. But invoking the name isn’t much of a defense of any particular paper or scholar. They still publish stuff that reflects the problems of the discipline (as polisci journals do, as economic journals do; this is by no means specific to JPSP or psychology). And they still publish absolute clunkers (yes, I’m invoking the esp nonsense).
I haven’t looked at the other paper linked in the Times article, but it looks like it at least bites the “self-identified liberal/conservative” thing. And Haidt has earned the right to have everything he ever says or writes not be taken at face value.
As far as your second point, there is a huuuuuuuuuge gap between seeing those empathy statements in a political context and “having no nonpolitical areas left” and “seeing conspiracies around every nook and cranny”.
Two quick examples. If I show you a picture of a jungle and then ask you a couple words which describe elephants, you’ll say “grey, large, endangered”, etc. If I show a picture of the Capitol building and ask the same thing, you’ll say “venal, hypocritical, closeted” (or other adjectives describing Republicans). If the survey asked respondents for their political ideology and how involved they are in politics before the empathy questions, the same sort of “priming” is occurring as with the jungle and Capitol pictures. This is a huge problem in survey design.
But even if that didn’t happen, certain phrases themselves have become politically primed because of the consistent way they have been used in political culture over the past few decades. Consider these phrases from the empathy questions: “concerned feelings for people less fortunate”, “feeling very sorry for other people when they are having problems”, “someone being taken advantage of”, “imsgine how things look from other people’s perspective”, “feeling pity for people being treated unfairly”. These are all phrases that are used with ironic contempt by our friends Limbaugh, Malkin, Loesch, Levin and at World Net Daily, Protein Wisdom, National Review, etc. They are held up as objects of contempt and ridicule on a daily basis on dozens of sites by hundreds of commentators. Someone who reacts to them on a political basis is not guilty of having political ideology control every aspect of their life or of seeing conspiracies everywhere, because that language has been associated with a political context. An example that might hit closer to home is this: around 2004, how would you react to the statements, “when I am in a difficult situation, a strategy I like to use is adapting to win” and “an important quality of a leader is to act as a decider”.
Another observation in the same vein that isn’t as strong but still probably acts on the results somewhat is that the empathy statements that don’t have those talk radio phrases have phrases that are almost hilariously stereotypically politically correct. There are five different ways of saying “seeing things from another person’s perspective”, “putting myself in another person’s shoes”, etc. There are also descriptions that, while describing empathy, also describe effeminate men. “I consider myself a soft-hearted person”, “after seeing a play, I have felt as though I were one of the characters.” Etc. If someone reacts negatively to stereotypically PC rhetoric, or doesn’t want to associate themselves with an effeminate masculinity, they will react negatively to those statements. That doesn’t tell us anything about that person’s empathy.
And, really, this is my fundamental problem with a large swath of psychological research. Common tools used to get at psychological concepts just do not support the kind of conclusions that researchers want them to. If you think I have a ghost of a point with the above paragraphs, that’s really bad news, because I’m using broad, well-worn and time-tested concepts that have been shown to consistently influence people’s responses to surveys. There are probably ways that things we know about, like anxiety about the economy or concern about the state of popular culture, that influence this stuff but aren’t considered because it’s too onerous/unlikely to go chasing after all the concepts like that. And slightly subtler concepts probably have just as much influence, if not more so, on people’s responses to this type of stuff, but we don’t even have the technical language to describe the categories of what those concepts might be.
That’s not to say psychological research is useless, or that everything the JPSP publishes is crap, but it does mean that we have to keep our eyes open when we encounter this stuff and take most everything with several kilograms of salt.
Off-topic: on the off chance that you know any interesting blogs or summaries of current psycholinguistic research, lay ’em down, I’d be interested.
pluege
there is something wrong with an analysis that shows conservatives ever more empathetic than liberals. The left side of that graph is fecocted.
I’m a little suspicious of the sudden rush to “prove” that if our political process is irretrievably borked, it’s all down to what’s broken in our individual brains.
politics is an expression of society. Society is a collective expression of its individual members. If politics is broke, look to its source.
MonkeyBoy
@Merp:
Do you know of any scholarly takedowns of Haidt?
I’ve read his latest book and saw some of the positive and negative media buzz about it but those discussions were seriously lacking in depth – I got the impression that most of the people talking hadn’t read the book.
MaxL
I don’t know of a direct reply to Haidt from a peer, but John Gray is very eloquent in his takedown here:
http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/102760/righteous-mind-haidt-morality-politics-scientism
Also, too, Evolutionary psychology deserves every bit of skepticism it receives. It’s a lot of grandiose and neat sounding conclusions with little if anything except conjecture to back them up.
That isn’t to say they are all irredeemable crap; Haidt et al have some findings to back themselves up, but it can get lost in their own noise. Here is a place to look:
faculty.virginia.edu/haidtlab/articles/manuscripts/graham.nosek.submitted.moral-stereotypes-of-libs-and-cons.pub601.pdf
psycholinguist
@Merp:
So, I’m going to maintain that you are overreaching here – yes, absolutely question wording and order etc. are going to have effects on how a question is interpreted – Fritz Strack and Norbert Schwartz have been demonstrating that for years about social science research, c.f. their 1991 paper
Base rates, representativeness, and the logic of conversation: The contextual relevance of “irrelevant” information N Schwarz, F Strack, D Hilton, G Naderer
Social Cognition 9 (1), 67-84.
That paper is a thing of beauty, they sling a monkey wrench into Kahneman and Tversky’s much cited work on base rate neglect in decision making, showing that question order, wording, etc. often drives the effect (and they are social psychologists).
My point is that if you are activating those primes you claim are being activated – i.e. if “poor” and “needy” are bound strongly to “lazy” and “black” in your semantic network, well, that tells you something useful in itself. Think of it as the implicit association test for assholes. and now I get to go out on my limb and claim that I bet it has a significant effect on their behavior as well, because they can’t see a poor person without also thinking lazy, they can’t see a sick person without thinking “sinner” etc. And 10 to 1 these people are also off the charts in terms of “just world” thinking.
As far as good blogs/sites for psycholinguistics,nothing is jumping to mind. I did just finish Kevin O’reagan’s book on consciousness and it is a short and very engaging read if you enjoy philosophy of vision/perception kind of stuff.