Disgust, Authority: Conservatives, Liberals

I'll tell you, as much as I find myself immersed in these controversies and battles of the "culture wars," I still couldn't tell you what a "conservative" or a "liberal" is. You read definitions but in reality people don't conform to them well.

A couple of years ago, John Dean came out with a book where he had gone back to the social-psychological research following World War II, an influential book by Adorno called The Authoritarian Personality. Dean's observation was that the conservatives typified by the Bush administration were authoritarians, that that was their defining quality.

It seems interesting to me that you can't tell what a person's political inclinations are by looking at them. Conservatives don't really dress more conservatively than liberals, or have neater haircuts, or walk straighter, or anything. Examples: Ted Nugent, Alice Cooper... A lot of times you are shocked to be talking to someone and discover their beliefs.

Somehow Americans line up on two ends of the field. We end up with two political parties, or at least two major ones, opposed to each other, but from a certain perspective it is hard sometimes to see the core philosophy that holds each team together and guides their choices. I think that's partly because both sides are fighting to win, and so they expend effort on targeting the opposition, rather than addressing the issues.

Some psychologists are finding personality differences between conservatives and liberals. The Nicholas Kristof had a story in the NYT yesterday:

If you want to tell whether someone is conservative or liberal, what are a couple of completely nonpolitical questions that will give a good clue?

How’s this: Would you be willing to slap your father in the face, with his permission, as part of a comedy skit?

And, second: Does it disgust you to touch the faucet in a public restroom?

Studies suggest that conservatives are more often distressed by actions that seem disrespectful of authority, such as slapping Dad. Liberals don’t worry as long as Dad has given permission.

Likewise, conservatives are more likely than liberals to sense contamination or perceive disgust. People who would be disgusted to find that they had accidentally sipped from an acquaintance’s drink are more likely to identify as conservatives.

The upshot is that liberals and conservatives don’t just think differently, they also feel differently. This may even be a result, in part, of divergent neural responses. Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal

I hate that headline. It could have said, "Do Other People Disgust you? If So, You're a Conservative." Oh well, I guess we know what kind of headline writer they have.

Skipping down ...

One of the main divides between left and right is the dependence on different moral values. For liberals, morality derives mostly from fairness and prevention of harm. For conservatives, morality also involves upholding authority and loyalty — and revulsion at disgust.

Some evolutionary psychologists believe that disgust emerged as a protective mechanism against health risks, like feces, spoiled food or corpses. Later, many societies came to apply the same emotion to social “threats.” Humans appear to be the only species that registers disgust, which is why a dog will wag its tail in puzzlement when its horrified owner yanks it back from eating excrement.

Psychologists have developed a “disgust scale” based on how queasy people would be in 27 situations, such as stepping barefoot on an earthworm or smelling urine in a tunnel. Conservatives systematically register more disgust than liberals. (To see how you weigh factors in moral decisions, take the tests at www.yourmorals.org.)

There was some debate in the field a few years back about the basic emotions, and disgust got added to the list. Most emotions are blends of the basic ones, and the basic ones are distinct -- disgust earned its place.

I went to a Citizens for Responsible Whatever meeting once where they started out by showing videos of bizarre guys prancing around in tu-tus and acting outlandish and weird. The whole point was to induce a feeling of disgust for gay people, there was no other reason to show that. Once that emotion is established, negative stereotypes are consistent with it, and it appears to make sense to endorse policies that that are detrimental to gays. The first step is to elicit disgust, and everything else follows from that.

I'm afraid it comes down to this:

“Minds are very hard things to open, and the best way to open the mind is through the heart,” Professor Haidt says. “Our minds were not designed by evolution to discover the truth; they were designed to play social games.”

The amazing thing is that those social games ratchet us upward toward truth. There is profit in truth, that is, when someone conveys accurate information to another then the other can coordinate activities with them, to the benefit of both -- it's just a social game. Over centuries and millenia the information has become ever more refined, with the result being technological advances and advances in scientific knowledge and even philosophy and the arts. Logic has been discovered and studied, but there is no evidence that it plays any important part in human cognition.