Empathic Conservatives and Moralizing Liberals: Political Intergroup Empathy Varies by Political Ideology and Is Explained by Moral Judgment

[nanana]

[think before following links] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672231198001

[nanana]

I found this to be counterintuitive thus interesting. However, it does fit with my empirical experience. There are vast differences within the cohorts but in this current era liberals seem to be more likely to get mad when people don’t take their simple worldviews at face value, and conservatives are more likely to think of liberals as well-meaning but naive, and maybe a bit loose with other people’s money. However, these qualities I mentioned can manifest in both conservatives and liberals, with a cohort of conservatives having simple dogmatic views, and many liberals having the ability to live in a complex real world where slogans don’t always work. I like the point that a higher % of Democrats think the Republicans have done harm than % Republicans who think the Democrats have done harm.  I have some additions: 1) I hypothesize that a higher % of liberals think people are fundamentally good and thus find it harder to deal with people who may fail this standard in their eyes, whereas conservatives may have a higher percentage of people who see human nature as flawed so expect less perfection; 3) in my experience SLIGHTLY more liberals than conservatives take their party leaders’ speeches at face value and don’t research whether the actions match; 4) more liberals seem to take media at face value and be less aware of how propagandized they are than conservatives (who are equally propagandized but have had more recent upsets with the propaganda stream); 5) liberals seem to measure their empathic muscle by finding the person least like them and turning them into a symbolic test of empathy, whereas conservatives seem to measure their empathic muscle against the majority, their families, etc.  Do others find this study counterintuitive? Any other hypotheses? Do you find the study convincing?

Edited yesterday at 02:02 PM by nanana
Corrected some bad autocorrects

[viking8x6]

This is a fascinating study; thanks for posting it!

 

[TT2025]

I scanned the study briefly and for me, It works as expected (on the conservative-liberal line). In historical and also contemporary perspective conservatives tend to be oppressive in nature. Liberals in their essence tend not to..

So if you are liberal you should be expected to be oppressed by the conservative folk in broader terms. So less sympathy to oppressing group is, I would say, natural.

I can be wrong but I can't remember any dictatorship which was or is liberal in nature. All of them are 'conservative' (rigid structures and believes, usually allies to religious fundamentalists).

Sorry but I myself can profess more empathy to teacher wanting to teach theory of evolution than some kind of fundamentalist zealot...

[nanana]

15 hours ago, TT2025 said:

conservatives tend to be oppressive in nature

@TT2025 I respectfully disagree that this applies to conservatism in general, think it is maybe true for social and religious conservatives but not as much for economic and libertarian conservatives. I would also say that as a non-liberal in a very liberal city and with many liberal friends, I  find them very likely to make very oppressively uncurious assumptions that everyone agrees with them because they are of course right about everything.  I  am not completely sure how you are using the term "oppressive," so you may not agree that this kind of environment is oppressive.  There were many liberal regimes in the Middle East that imposed a more western liberal morality (women's rights, etc.) on a much more conservative population that I think could count as dictatorships, e.g., Algeria, Afghanistan, etc.  I think it is highly human not to have a universal stream of empathy, but liberals are frequently characterized as leaning towards universal values and conservatives are frequently characterized as having more immediate values.  (It is very hard to generalize about these topics since the cohorts are SO big and build off of local histories and issues.)