People like to think of political values as a cultural phenomenon. We commonly refer to the political conflicts of modern America as “the culture war.”
There’s a sense in which this is quite accurate. Culture and politics do relate to one another in a systematic way that I’d like to tell you about sometime. But ideologies and attitudes are not merely caused by culture. The values we espouse spring from a deeper well than the words of our parents, the songs we listen to, or the lessons we learn at school. It has long been known to science that political values are inherited to a significant degree, and we are now even identifying specific gene variants responsible for differences in political attitudes. It seems that, at least to some degree, our values are a manifestation of our selves.
So it makes sense to ask: How do these values relate to the kind of people we are? What are conservatives like? What are leftists like? What are all the others like? And what should our response be?
Survey Data
In order to investigate this question (and, OK, loads of other ones) we gave out a survey several weeks ago containing political and personality questions. Using this data, I was able to verify three factors of political values, together accounting for slightly under 48% of the variance:
The values and attitudes influenced by these factors were discussed extensively in a previous post. Though conservatism and libertarianism are pretty much what they sound like, a quick description of realism/idealism may help to bring new readers up to speed:
On the realist side we see euthanasia, abortion, utilitarianism, psilocybin, racism, hierarchies, and sex and violence online.
On the idealist side we have religion, democracy, equality, education, and a belief that most people are good, and that it’s fine for low-IQ individuals to have kids.
There’s been a lot of investigation into the other two axes. But most of that has been carried out by ignorant mainstream psychologists using primitive traditional Five Factor personality scales that are missing key measures of honor and prosociality known as Honesty. Most of the personality scales I was able to include in the survey were pretty brief, in part, because I wanted a lot of items to measure Honesty as clearly as I could. I had a strong belief in what I wanted to prove, here, and a lot of my readers won’t believe my claims without clear evidence—I seriously didn’t want to end up with p = 0.08 simply because of poor reliability in my Honesty scale.
My predictions
So, I expected that conservatives would be:
less imaginative (i.e. lower in Openness), as has been found over and over before,
more organized and disciplined (i.e. higher in Conscientiousness),
less intelligent (though I didn’t have strong expectation there), and most interestingly,
higher in Honesty than leftists.
Regarding realists, I predicted they would be:
lower in Honesty
lower in Agreeableness,
(weakly) lower in Extraversion, and
lower in Emotionality.
So that’s what I predicted.
Here’s what I found:
They may not be imaginative, but Conservatives are virtuous people
Decades of research have consistently revealed that conservatives are less imaginative and aesthetically sensitive than people on the left; at the same time, they’re more neat and orderly.1
So no surprise that I verify conservatism correlates negatively with Openness, (r = -.14, p = .013).
Similarly, no surprise that conservatism correlates positively with Conscientiousness (r = .15, p = .008).
These correlations aren’t big, and there are going to be plenty of exceptions. Some of my liberal relatives were pretty neat, for instance. But in my experience, four times out of five, the workplace perfectionist is going to be on the right.
Next up is the issue of mental ability. Psychologists have consistently found aspects of conservatism like religiosity correlating negatively with measured intelligence,2 and the early studies from the last century found higher intelligence on the left.34 But in my sample here, conservatism showed no significant relationship with mental ability. If anything, the relationship was slightly positive (r = 0.105, p = 0.07).
There are two explanations for this that I can think of. Either:
My two-question measure of mental ability was too crude to properly measure subtle effects.
Alternatively or additionally, the old negative relationships seen between mental ability and conservatism may very well have now disappeared or reversed.
Explanation #1 seems just about inevitable, but it doesn’t rule out #2, which strikes me as a much more intriguing possibility. Given the positive relationship we’re seeing lately between conservatism and mental health, it may be that modern leftism is becoming the same sort of uncool social phenomenon that Christianity has been for a century. Just as regimes in ancient China could lose the Mandate of Heaven, maybe entire political programs can lose the Mandate of Coolness? IDK.
But now we move onto the controversial part.
The expected relationship with Honesty came through crisp and clear (r = .17, p = .002) As usual, most of the respondents describe themselves as good people who care about morality and make an effort to do the right thing. But taken as a whole, conservatives still show more virtue than those of us on the left.
So despite what we on the left may have heard about Republicans being “The Evil Party” or science making a “link” between conservatives and evil, it’s very much the reverse.
Conservatives are better people? I don’t believe it!
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time people got annoyed with me for saying the very, very obvious. But this isn’t something I’m claiming out of thin air; this is what the data says. It isn’t something I’m finding suddenly and for the first time. It isn’t something I want to be true because I love conservatism. Frankly I find conservatism boring, depressing, and vaguely exhausting. I was raised as a churchgoing conservative, but my Openness was always just way too high; I can’t fit where I don’t fit.
And really, this conservative advantage in personal virtue is something that I think any clear-thinking person just sees as totally obvious. Seriously what’s the stereotypical sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, share the wealth, quit punishing criminals, hate the police, kill babies pro-choice atheist like? When you think about all of us on the left, do words like “good,” “virtuous,” “prosocial,” “honest,” or “honorable” really come to mind?
I’m more left than I am right. And I’m an honorable person. This is something that’s driven home to me every day when I look around in bemusement at the holes other people dig themselves into by taking the cowardly way out, taking the shortcut, taking the low road, cooking the books, breaking the law, and cheating on their partner. While other people around me often seem to flounder and sink because of these dishonorable choices they make for the sake of the short term, my own situation has slowly improved decade by decade as I climbed this difficult, uphill slope life has been for me. But I’m just not always in very good company when I look around at the rest of the left.
And it gets even worse when I look at the realistic left.
Realistic people may be clear thinkers, but they are not virtuous people
Exactly as I predicted, realism correlated negatively with Honesty (r = -.14, p = .018). The relationship isn’t as strong as with conservatism, but it’s still exactly as I predicted.
And it also correlated negatively with Agreeableness (r = -.17, p = .003):
I expected to replicate a small negative relationship with Extraversion. It didn’t show up. Then again, my extraversion measure was pretty weak, consisting of only one item, so not much of a dissapointment here:
But now finally something that to me looks like good news: with lower overall Emotionality (r = -.21, p = .0003) realists are less confused by irrational sentiment and anxieties than idealists are. Though it still wasn’t a large relationship, this was the biggest relationship between personality and ideology to appear. Of course idealists will just say that realists are heartless, and that’s an equally valid interpretation.
Are realists just Machiavellian?
The short answer is sort of.
The overall pattern of personality correlations which we observe here with political realism will remind anyone with a background in the psychological research of Machiavellianism, at least a bit.5 And claims that political realism (or whatever you prefer to call it) is just Machiavellianism and nothing other than Machiavellianism have been around for forty years.6
It’s pretty obvious that these claims aren’t really correct; if they were, then Machiavellian items would fall clearly right at the top and bottom of the political map, which they don’t. Still, there is a small relationship there, and I doubt if Nicolo Machiavelli was hanging around with all the political idealists of Renaissance Florence.
But there’s another way of putting together these relationships.
Doers and Helpers
I’ve talked about male and female professions before; women are more involved in helping professions, and men are more involved in doing professions, right?
Well, interest in the masculine or realistic professions has shown these same kinds of personality relationships in my other research—if you’re a doer, rather than a helper, chances are your Emotionality, Honesty, and Agreeableness are on the low side. And when I think about the people I knew well who were either clearly idealistic or clearly realistic, the idealists were almost always involved in social professions (clergy, teachers, translators) and the realists were often involved in realistic professions (engineering, mechanic, computers, construction).
Definitely spending all this time working on houses lately, I can see why the sort of unsentimental, easily annoyed, what-matters-is-money attitude plays really well in construction, and not so well in, say, a kindergarten classroom. Maybe there was a reason the Communist revolution (a realistic movement if ever there were one) called upon the workers to unite under a banner of a hammer and a sickle.
Why are some people secular, and others religious?
So we know that values are, at least to some extent, an expression of deep, instinctive drives. And we’ve seen the way these drives relate to conservatism and realism. Last time we saw that realistic leftists are less dogmatic, and this time we saw that conservatives, and particularly idealistic conservatives, were more honest.
So as long as we’re talking about religious people and secularists, can we use this to explain what makes them believe the way they do?
On some level, I think this has always been used to offer these kinds of explanations. The classic religious explanation for the existence of unbelievers is to say that the community of believers has an understanding of the truth, but some people are led astray. We may prefer not to judge them for it. That’s not our place. But if we absolutely had to say, well, it would seem pretty obvious that morally upright people are more likely to remain on the straight and narrow. They won’t be so tempted into worldly relationships and situations, and are not only socially but spiritually better able to resist being led astray. So if some people make bad choices in life, those could very easy render them vulnerable to sinister influences which seek to pull them away from the light.
Meanwhile, if you haven’t heard it, people on the other side have had their own explanation all along as well. The classic secular interpretation is to say that the community of believers is locked into a deluded, prescientific worldview, one which has been shown clearly and repeatedly to be false. Some may continue to believe because it gives them comfort; some may continue to believe because it’s what they have been taught. But in this day and age the information is well known; biological and geological findings disproving religious myths have to be actively ignored. So the best explanation for religious people hanging onto outdated theological dogma is that they are dogmatic.
There’s obiously something to both of these positions; realistic leftists are more flexible thinkers, and idealistic conservatives are more morally steadfast. But how do we accommodate both findings?
Accomodating both findings
My perspective is that belief in a meaningful, orderly universe where we have a clear purpose, and our moral drives match a deep underlying meaning, resonates with most people, at least to some degree. Just look at this histogram of Honesty scores:
Like virtually all psychological variables, the scale is arbitrary; for these graphs I normed everything so that the midrange would be at 0. That means the lowest possible score was -7, and the highest was 7, with a standard deviation of around 2.5. But the median for Honesty is 2; almost nobody describes themselves as being on the low end.
This isn’t a fluke. Whenever I give out these kinds of surveys, it always turns out that the typical respondents describe themselves as being more honest than not. What about people describing others? Same deal.
If it were only that we described ourselves as honest, that might easily have reflected some kind of bias. But when we see ourselves as honest, and when we see everyone else as honest too, then it starts to look more likely that these answers are reflecting something genuine about us.
And frankly I believe what they say. Taken as a whole, the average person may be pretty stupid,7 but no way are they dishonest. They say character is the way you behave in the dark; but despite law enforcement never having been more than a fraction of a percent of the total population throughout the 21st century, crime has been more or less under control. The overwhelming majority of people don’t exploit one another nearly as frequently as they could. If people really weren’t honest on average, you’d need to have everyone under constant surveillance to keep them from killing and eating each other. We take this kind of thing for granted because this is just normal. If aliens landed and had a look around, they might be seriously confused by the cell phones everybody carries around (at least I am) but they’d probably not have too much trouble getting the picture that our tendencies are more prosocial than antisocial overall.
There’s something very human about this. Morality and meaning are a big deal for us.
So ceteris paribus, we gravitate naturally towards the kinds of ideals and teachings found in the world’s major religions. Granted, some of the overtly unscientific teachings of religions may be increasingly unpopular. The only people I know of who still believe in a 6000-year-old Earth are pretty hard core religious fundamentalists, like those Amish who sell vegetables at the farmer’s market. But all the rest—ideas about life being a precious gift, humanity having a higher calling, life having a purpose, hedonism is bad for the soul, morality is a critical aspect of what makes us human—all the rest are things we give up very reluctantly.
The greater our dogmatism, the less able we are to reflect on those ideals. But the greater our Honesty, the harder it is to reflect on them clearly and dispassionately.
So the idealist right is burdened with some people who are more dogmatic and inflexible than they really should be, but they also have a bigger share of people for whom those ideas about goodness and rightness really resonate—they have a bigger share of genuinely moral people. And overall, they seem to manage all right. (Although one way or another, the secular world is always a looming threat, and having to face the possibility of losing their children to apostasy is pretty scary. They do have more kids, but they’re not always able to hang onto all of their children. And as some people have mentioned, they sometimes seem to have trouble protecting their little ones from sexual predation.)
Meanwhile, the realist left represents a different kind of coalition. On the one hand, there are those of us who really care a great deal about getting at the truth in the clearest way we can. Never mind what we might want to be true. If the truth contradicts deeply held beliefs, that’s too bad. For us, taking a stand in favor of evolution, or euthanasia, or prostitution, or psychedelic drugs, or whatever is what we do because we’re trying—really trying—to be intellectually mature, to face the world on its own terms, and make decisions that fit best with the situation that actually exists.
But on the other hand, there are plenty of realistic leftists who seriously don’t care at all.
And the lessons I think should have been learned from a hundred years of political research, and a hundred years of dreadful history perpetuated by the realistic left, is that political power isn’t always worth the price you have to pay for it. Some things are worth more than ideology. Some things are more important than the question of whether or not someone else shares your values.
(In case I’m not being blunt enough, here, you can click this link which will take you to a 1966 article from a leftist publication about how wonderful Joseph Stalin was, and never mind that he was a mass murderer. They gave him a pass because he supported political values they liked, and my point is that this was stupid and also crazy of them. A bad person who agrees with 99% of your values is still a bad person!)8
There was a time, I suspect, when the idealistic left understood this. I hope they can relearn it someday, the way I know it. Speaking genuinely, the religious right is my political opposition, but there are religious conservatives I am proud to have worked alongside of, and whom I’m lucky to have had the opportunity to visit and exchange ideas with. This isn’t empty sentiment; last Christmas I gave my Amish friends a hand-crafted board game that took many hours for me to make with my own hands (and some sinful electric power tools). These people stand for just about everything I oppose, but I don’t begrudge them their passion for what they believe, let alone deny their humanity.
But somewhere along the line, the idealistic left forgot this. Coincidentally, that may have happenned as soon as they came to power in America. And now that they have, what will they do with that power? Will they remember the lessons of tolerance and respect they once knew? Will they remember the humanity of their own opponents next time they meet a Trump supporter, an anti-masker, an opponent of immigration, or a racist? Or will they continue to cancel the opposition and deny their opponents rights afforded to other people? Will they continue to demonize and vilify everyone who doesn’t toe their line, all the while insisting that the taint of their enemies is so virulent that it can never be wiped clean?
And if they do continue? If they just keep pressing onward, further and further, as far as they can, then where do they think it will end? Seriously, when your political opponents have no virtues—when to oppose you is simply to be evil—how can it ever end?
So I wouldn’t be shy about admitting that conservatives are, taken as a whole, a little bit more honest than we are on the left, taken as a whole. Give credit where credit is due. It’s the right thing to do, and who knows? In the long run, the possibility exists that it may even turn out to have been the necessary thing to do.
Jost, J. T. (2006). The end of the end of ideology. American psychologist, 61(7), 651.
Zuckerman, M., Silberman, J., & Hall, J. A. (2013). The relation between intelligence and religiosity: A meta-analysis and some proposed explanations. Personality and social psychology review, 17(4), 325-354.
Carlson, H. B. (1934) “Attitudes of undergraduate students.” Journal of Social Psychology, 5, 202-212
Thurstone, L. L. (1935) The vectors of mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lee, K., & Ashton, M. C. (2005). Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism in the Five-Factor Model and the HEXACO model of personality structure. Personality and Individual differences, 38(7), 1571-1582.
Stone, W. F., & Russ, R. C. (1976). Machiavellianism as tough-mindedness. The Journal of Social Psychology, 98(2), 213-220.
I mean, what percent of the population can so much as take the derivative of a polynomial?
I’m pretty much ignoring libertarian vs paternalistic values in this post. But communism looks pretty paternalist or authoritarian, and I’ve always been pretty libertarian, so yeah, IDK how fair it is for me to criticize Stalin as being somehow one of my ideological compatriots. But seriously, he was such a bad person. Did you hear about the time when Stalin’s own son Yakov attempted suicide, and then when he failed, Stalin mocked him by saying he couldn’t even shoot straight? What a guy.
Wow, sounds like we could have some interesting letter exchanges :)
Okay, I read the whole thing.
I've been through a similar progress when I was about 30 (couple of years after consciously choosing to be a doer)(previous to this I thought I could change the world by reading books).
Consider the use of paretheses with (words words) as notes to self.
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At the section "Accommodating both findings" I stood in a similar place for a while looking for a sign, umm-&-arrh-ing, but I had a deep distrust of animism/structuralism/gnosticism/just-so explanations.
This was the mid-90s so chaos terminology had been around for a decade in the popular literature, I was looking for an emergent “thing”.
I knew the word met meeting.
Also evolution, why does a population survive with a variety of options. Social insects do not do this, how do we do it?
In particular how is that a pool of useful responses to situations are maintained (as a type of unused until needed insurance) across the generations (we sort of know how it is transmitted outside of genetics by waving our hands at the word culture).
At this point I read the work of a conservative Catholic anthropologist called Mary Douglas. (brace yourselves its another quadrant mapping thing).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_theory_of_risk
(If you read Mary Douglas you will find what you have said in other words/frames).
The key point for me was not the accuracy of the mappings but three points:
① Bias (we are partial beings) with regard to perceptions of risk (existential risk)
(in this framework bias in perceptions of risk [to morality/nature]) which provides the movements the terrain allows, and does not focus on singular points(of view) on the landscape, which are seen as accessories or fashionable spas. Place to watch and bee seen.
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(the mountains on the landscape is often what we measure/climb and seek to justify – because it is there)(and then confuse fitness with rightness because it suits us).
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(We measure outcomes of a process-- how tall, how intelligent, how honest.
Often when we do so we are given to create just-so stories -- that hill is there becasue the devil threw it there in anger (don’t be angry), or regret/disloyalty/nostalgia turned her into a pillar of salt (obviously).
Worlding can be taught in the physicality of the landscape as well as who you live with/against -- the story about the devil once ‘moral’-ised helps you keep an eye out for psychopaths when the lions and lice have been dealt with.
Measuring honesty may not help us understand how the world was made, but we ‘know’ (as you say/show) that without it there is no world (morality/nature). It needs no other explanation or gene.
I disagree that what we know is what we think it is, I think we have seen the mountain that the good one has thrown.
Which is why I agree that it is up to us (even in notions of conscience we see this (subjugated as it is to a hierarchy)). This is why we both feel the existential fear (the perceptions of risk) so strongly and why we cannot think realistically about the others among us, without whom there is no world at all.
The saviour and the threat are the same. It drives us crazy, at times of bad-worlding, when we are given to believe in the worst among us. This is what gives dogma a bad name. It is dogma that gives traditional maintenance a bad name. And can also make the threat look like a saviour and not a devil.
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I’ve argued that currently novelty is the traditional form in the arts -- since the later 1800s if not before. Tradition is usually not associated with novelty, but it can happen. (From 2012 https://formeika.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/the-unmaking-of-conceptual-art/ )
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Doubled-down the notion of honesty is called truth (a doctrine based on the rite of honesty). (((Science has a whole further set of rituals and routines and surveys which meet/discuss/ their way into truth things.))
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②
Healthy societies (good world-building) maintain a range of options and do not go doctrinal (do accept that people enjoy just-so stories but do not let them be enforced literally) however this egalitarian/openness impulse has its limits (starvation may make the openness less possible when children's brains/pscyhes have been starved during a childhood of famine or drug-fuelled neglect, then we throw-back to more primative [sic] ways). Some conservative thinkers even see hierarchy as natural, well, more natural than openness to equality, and thus more moral. (Like I’ve said elsewhere values are like vowels https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/choose-cultural-or-bayesian-morality/comment/44232359)
To do good worlding & world-building one has to both maintain what one has and be able to adapt to changes, and both require resources. How doe we maintain them? "Culture" answers that.
“Culture wars” are about those human resources, obviously there is a mismatch here, we have never had it so good. Everyone should be feeling ‘relaxed and comfortable’, virtuous and generous… should never be at war.
Now our various responses to perceptions of risk are resources too, and maintaining them without using them (when they are not needed directly) also requires resources, there is a trade-off here, for war destroys them, discussion creates them. Are both not forms of argument by other means?
(Recently I've learned ritual is a way of managing human resources, which is why emperors/dictators love to control/channel/be-top-dog it.) (Hierarchies are a way to subjugate resources, and stop civil war, but even so are not necessarily the best way to maintain a variety of resources through time, even if only because hierarchies are only one resource among others).
The maintenance of varied resources: physical ,cultural and psychological ---is done through argy-bargy: meals, meetings, feasts and masses -- holidays and confrences -- where we decide and recognise things both small and important as we both self and world among others. This type of maintenance is done through the activities of exchange and recognition, in both market and place. Rituals by other means.
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(The split between big life events and the everyday maintenance - which have become increasing distanced from each other ---because economics --in market and place--- which has got rid of the lions and the lice and replaced them with psychopaths and covert narcissists(opportunistic infections??) only encourages culture wars as they turn people's preferences into a niche-cult of flying monkeys.
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③
the hope for good is the world-ing that arises out of all of that, it does not exists unless we make it, and we must do that together—
(and not ‘must’ as in ‘should’, ‘should’ just makes us do it day to day and on big days of birth death and marriage)
…and we will still create a world, if badly, as long as we survive, and we are surving… just…???
yes
Yet, it is the perceptions of constant existential risk to (morality/nature) that cause us to go berserk when we do not world well and fail to talk with each other, both in agreement, in ritual and in discussion, and so then fail to reflect, and realise that in talking to each other we are worlding well.
There is a story about this called Henny Penny (Chicken Little). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny
(Narcissists and psychopaths always intervene to separate us from each other, and concierge information flows, this Machiavellian technique is not realistic in the long term. The world returns after a cycle of violence.
The world is always there if only because we argue about it. The world is not real, how could it exist otherwise?
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Narcissists and psychopaths gain power in any/all systems, they are the untrue neutrals among us, they have no biases except their self-as-world, by controlling informations flows and human resources (ritualistic & doctrinal) so they can amass both doers and maintainers, are able to combine do-gooders and do-badders and always commit to worlding-badly. Not just in cults but in whole organisations and cultures and countries.
Machiavellian techniques are not realistic in the long term. and this is possibly why impetuousness cannot be excluding/selected against from the dark triad, This is why we haven't yet wiped ourselves out.)
cross-link https://whyweshould.substack.com/p/i-read-the-whole-thing-in-defense