Following up on my comments about Jon Del Arroz being discriminated against for his conservative politics (regardless that he’s a marginalized minority), here’s some interesting research about political views. Wait for it—these may be inborn. That means discrimination on the basis of political views may eventually be classified the same way as discriminating against individuals for other inborn traits like sexual orientation or skin color.
In recent years, researchers have started looking at what personality and emotional responses have to do with politics. In one study Kevin Smith et al. looked for emotional responses that they could use to identify conservatives and liberals. Conservatives, on the one hand, turned out to be more easily grossed out by pictures and tended to get emotional over people they disliked. Liberals, on the other hand, were less grossed out and tended to get more emotional over people they liked. Next, James Fowler et al. identified DRD4-7R, a variant of the gene that linked to novelty-seeking behavior as being linked to liberal views when combined with early socialization. Fowler made the point that political views can’t be tied to just one gene, but it does suggest how inborn personality can affect political viewpoints. Michele Vecchione et al. conducted a study in Italy that looked at people who voted conservative or liberal and classified them according to the “big five” personality traits. The results showed that people who rated high in the “openness” trait tended to vote liberal, while those so rated high in the “conscientiousness” trait tended to vote conservative. Another study of twins by John Alford et al. found that genetics clearly had a more significant influence on politics than socialization. Because people tend to marry spouses with similar political views, the researchers surmised, these traits tend to run very strongly in families.
Another interesting support for this viewpoint is the interpretation of personality tests. The DISC system, for example, breaks personalities down into four types: dominant, inspiring, supportive and cautious. People who lean to dominant and inspiring personality traits tend to be movers and shapers of change, while the supportive and cautious people, on the other hand, tend to be conservative, valuing security and stability. Besides this, the Myers Briggs test identifies 16 personality types, some of which actually include the descriptors “conservative” and “novelty seeking.” These personality types tend to be remarkably stable over time. They’re identifiable as early as kindergarten, and don’t change much after young-adulthood.
Enjoy classifying yourself through these links. As I recall, I tested out as a dominant and an INTJ.
thephantom182
Jan 18, 2018 @ 12:35:53
I’ve seen these kinds of Politics and MRI and/or Genetics!!! studies come and go the last 10 years or so, and I have the same problem with them as I do with the National IQ concept. Brain plasticity.
I’m a physical therapist. Part of my practice was neurological injuries. The whole basis of stroke rehab is brain plasticity. The brain can, and will, literally re-wire itself to compensate for parts that died. The exercises and movement therapy literally reshape nerve pathways in the brain, making new connections that were not previously there. That’s just physical exercise, right? Stand up, walk, sit down.
If your brain can compensate for parts of it -dying- I find it highly unlikely that mere genetics are going to have much effect on something as subtle as political preference. There’s no way.
Example, what political party is made of Aspergers people? Aspergers is a -major- neurological departure from “normal,” and it is hereditary. I can tell you, we aspies do not think the same as y’all normals, at all. We don’t thing the same way, and we don’t think about the same stuff. It is what makes us weird and annoying. Hence the appellation “nerd.” Wasn’t originally a term of endearment, right?
Are all aspies Conservative? Are they all Socialists? All some other weird partything that only aspies can get?
Different cultures! How about that? Canadians differ culturally from Americans. Is saying “eh?” at the end of a sentence hereditary? Limited cross-border pollination, y’know. Different pools of heredity. Americans can’t say “about” properly, could be in-born!
More research required, methinks.
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Contrarius
Jan 18, 2018 @ 13:44:53
@Lela —
First: typo alert. You said, “Fowler made the point that political views can be tied to just one gene” — but I think you mean can NOT be tied.
As for the rest —
There are also multiple studies showing that conservatives tend to be more fearful than liberals, and that making liberal subjects feel fearful leads to them making more conservative decisions. Also studies showing that certain brain structures related to fear, like the amygdala, tend to have different sizes in conservatives vs liberals. Knowing this about the correlation of fear and conservatism, it would be easy to formulate a hypothesis that people who are genetically predisposed to fear or anxiety would also tend to be more conservative than people who aren’t.
But, of course, it’s much more complex than that. There’s always nature vs. nurture effects, even in the most clearly genetic traits, and it’s very easy to erroneously jump from correlation to causation where no such jump is justified by actual evidence.
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Lela E. Buis
Jan 18, 2018 @ 13:49:02
Oops. Thanks, Contrarius. I fixed the typo.
I think you’ve got a good idea about the fear and how it affects politics. Also, people just don’t normally like change, especially as it impacts them.
The nature vs. nurture thing is interesting. I’ve noticed how this modulates personality in my family. I don’t know that nurture changes basic responses, but it does encourage people to think before they react, and sometimes they come down on a decision that’s contrary to their first impulse. I doubt that it will turn an extreme conservative to an extreme liberal, though.
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Lela E. Buis
Jan 18, 2018 @ 13:47:25
Phantom, they’re working on the research, it seems. I found several studies. One thing that’s common knowledge is that people get more conservative as they get older. I’d suggest this is because their investment in the past gets more important and they need to protect it. Also, the ground tends to shift, as I remain about the same level of liberal, but I’m constantly asked to support more and more extreme positions. That means I end up more in the middle on many issues.
The research also pretty much establishes personality as having something to do with politics, and personality is definitely hereditary. You can see the personalities repeat in a particular family. Some people are just more cautious about change and value the past values and institutions more.
I also think you’re right about brain injury and rewiring. This can lead to fairly radical personality changes. One article I looked at mentioned a person that became a creative genius after a brain injury. This isn’t the norm, though. Neither is the autism spectrum. Do you think Asperger would encourage one politics or the other? I sometimes suspect I’m on the extreme lower end of it.
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thephantom182
Jan 18, 2018 @ 15:08:47
Lela said: “The research also pretty much establishes personality as having something to do with politics, and personality is definitely hereditary.”
If I’m right about brain plasticity (I totally am ~:D ) then it doesn’t look good for personality being hereditary. You can change your “personality” by meditation, among other things. Weed does it too.
Aspergers, by comparison, doesn’t change at all. Its still there no matter what training you do. So some things, like Aspergers appear to be structural, as in hardware, whereas other things appear to be more programming, as in software. But then there’s other things that seem to be emergent, hardware plus software in dynamic interaction with environment.
And it is early days yet on saying which is which.
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Lela E. Buis
Jan 19, 2018 @ 00:10:16
I’m sure personality is hereditary. My personality repeats in the family, and you can see it immediately. There are differences, of course, in the way the DNA falls out and life experiences happen, but the personality is really persistent. I can see it in my cousins, too.
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Contrarius
Jan 19, 2018 @ 01:47:21
@phantom —
“If I’m right about brain plasticity (I totally am ~:D ) then it doesn’t look good for personality being hereditary. You can change your “personality” by meditation, among other things. Weed does it too.”
That’s a false dichotomy. Even the traits that we **know** are strongly influenced by genetics — like, say, height or eye color — can be altered by environmental input. Genetics and environment — nature and nurture — almost always work together to one extent or other, some with more nature and some with more nurture.
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greghullender
Jan 18, 2018 @ 17:22:51
Yeah. I’ve stayed the same, but the world has changed around me. These young whippersnappers just don’t know how good they’ve got it! In my day we had to go outside in the rain if we wanted to protest something–and it was COLD rain too!
🙂
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Lela E. Buis
Jan 18, 2018 @ 23:45:45
Ha. And I walked five miles to school in the snow. 🙂
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thephantom182
Jan 18, 2018 @ 18:56:22
Lela said : brain injury and personality changes.
Oh yeah. Phineas Gage is the classic example, the head injury he suffered turning him from a good man into a bad one. Leading to the research that produced the lobotomy surgery, if I remember that right.
I had a patient who experienced the opposite, this person turned from being a Type A prick into the nicest person you can imagine. Soft spoken and delightful.
I had a different patient who went from normal student to a person who actively sought out all the troubling shit you can imagine. Sex, drugs, crime, you name it she wanted it. She didn’t run out and -do- it all, weirdly, she just wanted to be where it was happening, kind of. Hang out with it. And the really strange thing was, she couldn’t understand why we were telling her it was a bad idea.
Another guy started wearing really weird clothing and lots of skull jewelry after a serious car crash. No reason, he just wanted to.
These personality changes were all effects of traumatic brain injury, either by car accidents, brain ischemia secondary to cardiac or vascular impairment, or in Phineas Gage’s case he got an iron rod jammed all the way through his head. So these changes are arguably hardware based, or emerge from hardware/environment interaction post hardware damage.
Lela said: “Do you think Asperger would encourage one politics or the other? I sometimes suspect I’m on the extreme lower end of it.”
A lot of SF/F types have a dash of Aspergers. They say “autism spectrum” now, but I’m old and cranky, I’ll stick with the old name. My thing is, you talk to ten nerds, you get twelve answers to that. I used to be full-on hippy spiritual monk guy, then I grew out of it. The world set me a bunch of problems unsolvable by hippy spiritualism. Aka I discovered it was mostly nonsense.
“Aspies” contains a subset of people who solve puzzles. I solve 3D mechanical things, like what shape fits through a cross, a square and circle. I’m not miraculous at it, but some people are. Others are programmers and mathematicians. The higher up the food chain of programming talent you go, the more aspies there are.
James Damore is a perfect example of a programing, problem solving aspie. He’s -weird-. What people flatly do not understand about guys like this, is that they do NOT see the world like a normal person does. They see something else.
Damore, confronted by Google’s push to get more women in high-level engineering, did not see a public relations campaign with a bunch of virtue signaling and various managers trying to get noticed by higher levels. He took it seriously. He did a bunch of research, found out what all the psych data said, talked to is fellow engineers, talked to his girlfriend… he solved the puzzle! Then he wrote his dreaded memo, to present his findings. Which were what they were, that’s not the important part. The important part is the process.
An aspie, faced with a political question, will treat it as a puzzle and solve it. They can’t interact with it as a social issue, figure out all the social angles on it. They don’t do social. They don’t -notice- social.
Damore had no idea the explosion that was going to happen. He thought he was contributing some solid research to the company, which as far as he could see sorely needed it.
Now, if he had talked to the -janitor- about it, even that guy would have told him “don’t do it!!!” Normals have social circuits. The dullest normal knows not to confuse the issue with facts when the Big Bosses already told you how it is going to be.
Aspies don’t understand that. They think the boss will appreciate the new information and adjust course to accommodate it. Because why would anyone do the wrong thing on purpose? Aspies solve the problem.
James Damore is not a Conservative. He probably self-identifies as a Liberal. Damore did what they told him to do. Then found out there was a whole social nuance that he had missed. Oops.
Aspies make good policy wonks and legal boffins. You find them in both parties, Democrats and Republicans. When one party begins to diverge sharply from Reality (TM) I expect you start to find less aspies in it, but I’ve seen no studies on that.
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Lela E. Buis
Jan 19, 2018 @ 00:04:46
You’re talking about the engineering department, right? No social graces at all. 😉
Really, that’s an interesting theory about Damore. I wondered what had set that off. Interestingly, he’s now filed a lawsuit alleging discrimination. We’ll have to see how it goes.
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thephantom182
Jan 19, 2018 @ 14:33:30
I’ve been at the University of Waterloo engineering a few times now with Young Relative, the Nerd is strong with them. And you find things like two obvious Aspies arguing Conservative vs. Socialist all over the place. Engineering leans Conservative, those guys know that Hope and Change will not keep a bridge from falling down and they won’t keep your cloud server running. Contempt for Artsies is part of the Engineering culture. Their undeclared motto might be “If you can’t measure it, it’s not science.” The program mascot is a huge pipe wrench.
And they’re such dorks. Oh, my Ghod.
But they do one thing supremely well. They know what the hell they’re talking about. If Engineer Boi opens his mouth, he’s been doing some reading. The big sport is burning down bullshit. Somebody says something that ain’t so, some other kid will be laughing and pointing. Being wrong is a major sin among engineers. Because it kills people. The bridge falls down, somebody can die. Server crashes and takes down the hospital lighting system, somebody can die.
Damore is a software engineer. He’s part of that culture. If his mouth is open, he can defend what’s coming out of it. With numbers. There’s math involved.
The Google culture is militant about contributing to the company. If you see a solution to a problem nobody else thought of, you are -supposed- to put it on the Google intranet. Its part of the deal when you work there, because Google embraced the Lockheed “Skunkworks” philosophy. The guy driving the rivet into the Blackbird’s engine cowling has something important to say to the lead engineer. Like “it doesn’t fit!” Open communications speed things up and reduce stupid expensive snafus.
Damore addressed what he saw as an expensive snafu. “This isn’t going to work” is an important piece of information. He’s trying to make it work.
One never knows with legal cases, because legal is its own little universe where water can flow uphill. But Real World, I’d say he’s got a clear case of politically motivated harassment, discrimination and improper termination of employment, defamation, and damage to his personal and professional reputation.
Not to mention unforgivable discrimination against him based on his Aspergers. At a tech company, that’s unforgivable. On the level of the NBA banning Michael Jordan because he’s tall.
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Micael Gustavsson
Jan 31, 2018 @ 07:47:10
Younger people experience change as something positive; their bodies and minds are still growing, and thus they have a gut feeling that change is good. Older people experience change as negative, their bodies and minds either dont change at all or are decaying, so their gut feeling will be that change is bad. I
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Lela E. Buis
Jan 31, 2018 @ 09:19:22
I agree that there’s a difference in perspective between young and old. For one thing, older people have more to protect, like jobs, income, children, retirement etc. Change can threaten these things.
However, this doesn’t explain the existence of young conservatives. I notice there are a bunch of them out there right now.
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Micael Gustavsson
Jan 31, 2018 @ 09:38:38
In some contexts, political conservatism can be the change option. Also, may explanation was why young and old populations leaned a certain way. Individuals will differ.
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Lela E. Buis
Jan 31, 2018 @ 12:41:28
I’ve been commenting that I don’t think my political views have changed that much over the years, but the political landscape has shifted, making me constantly more moderate, and in some cases downright conservative. I don’t agree with the bullying tendency of current liberal identity politics, which is often directed at liberals who aren’t extreme enough.
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Contrarius
Jan 31, 2018 @ 17:08:33
@Lela —
“ I don’t agree with the bullying tendency of current liberal identity politics, which is often directed at liberals who aren’t extreme enough.”
Of course, we can say the very same about conservative identity politics. For just two small examples, it was not liberals who invented terms like RINO or cuckservative.
Again, to me the problem looks like one of extremism on BOTH sides, not an issue restricted to one or the other.
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Lela E. Buis
Jan 31, 2018 @ 17:15:30
I agree. I just said “liberal” because that’s how I described myself just above. The Identity politics trend is what has me withdrawing from the liberal camp and moving into the moderate one. I turn out not to be very popular within the current neoliberal movement.
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Contrarius
Jan 31, 2018 @ 17:24:37
I think I have actually become more liberal with age — after all, the first political campaign I ever volunteered for was for John Anderson, a more-or-less Republican. But there definitely are problems with extremism on both sides.
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Kathodus
Jan 18, 2018 @ 14:47:17
I just read an article about people suddenly becoming “geniuses” after an accident. I have no memory of where I read it, or I’d post a link (not a genius, here).
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The Phantom
Jan 28, 2018 @ 20:02:46
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-the-life-sciences/article/effects-of-physical-attractiveness-on-political-beliefs/D5214D0CAE37EE5947B7BF29762547EE
New evidence! Conservatives are prettier than Liberals (duh!) and that means they have no sympathy for the less fortunate. Because reasons.
Hey, this is Science! Don’t you question our intentions, dammit!
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Contrarius
Jan 28, 2018 @ 21:06:10
@phantom —
Telling quotes from the study you cited:
1. “The ‘attractiveness premium’ is particularly prominent in low information
elections and for uninformed voters.”
2. “Because attractive individuals benefit from social interactions and are generally given more attention and granted more expertise, their passage through life may be ‘easier’ (compared with less attractive individuals). Therefore, on average, they may not recognize the challenges others face in life…. In a sense, attractive individuals have a blind spot that leads them to not see the need for more government support or aid in society….. Having not faced the challenges of other citizens, more attractive individuals should be less supportive of remedying these challenges for the general public.”
Other quotes from the same study, supporting Lela’s original question:
1. “recent scholarship has suggested that many political orientations and behaviors are influenced by genetics”.
2. “In his discussion of neuroscience, innate behavior, and brain development, Marcus uses an analogy of a book that parallels our thinking about the interplay between genes and socialization. ‘Nature provides a first draft, which experiencethen revises.'”
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The Phantom
Jan 28, 2018 @ 21:36:43
Calvin, you really can’t take a hint can you?
Push off.
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Contrarius
Jan 28, 2018 @ 21:40:49
@phantom —
“Push off.”
No.
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The Phantom
Jan 29, 2018 @ 11:15:11
What, are you fighting over the last word now? Dang. That’s remarkably lame.
You want the last word Calvin, go ahead and explain how the study I posted -as a joke- is in any way scientifically defensible. Be sure to include lots of links and proof and stuff like that. Charts too. Charts are good. And math, that’s always impressive.
Meanwhile I’ll have a new unrelated and irrelevant objection ready, and ignore all your work.
Actually no, I can’t be bothered. Tell me about the open forum thing again, that was awesomely stupid.
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Contrarius
Jan 29, 2018 @ 15:03:22
@phantom —
“What, are you fighting over the last word now?”
Nope — simply reminding you yet again that you don’t actually have any power to curtail my posting decisions.
You know, there’s a wise old saying to the effect that you should never issue an order that you can’t enforce. Doing so just makes you look silly.
Not your sandbox, phantom, not your rules.
“go ahead and explain how the study I posted -as a joke- is in any way scientifically defensible.”
Why should I? You are the one who has made claims about the study, not me. Personally, I don’t especially care about the study’s conclusions one way or the other. I simply got interested enough — after YOU cited the study — to read through the (rather long) intro to the study, and found a few relevant quotes.
If you don’t like the implications of the things you post, then perhaps you’d be better off not posting them in the first place? Just a thought.
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