The Psychology of Conservatives

[Abhorrent]

Churro the Viscous-

Conservatives don’t need to rely on reality to prove any points. They have “faith”.

[Peter_Kropotkin]

I have spent years studying conservatives and these are my observations.

First. They are negative, fear driven. For a conservative the world is a scary place.
Second. The future holds little interest for conservatives.
They walk into the future by facing the past and walking backwards.
they fixate on the past to the determent of the future.
Third. they have a firm belief in god.
Fourth. They rely on emotion, not rational thought.
Very women like in that respect. If it feels right, it must be right.
Fifth. They have no use for the rational or logic. They fear intellect.
Sixth. They fear change.
seventh. They are great obstructionist. Anything to slow down progress or change, anything.
Eighth. They are unable to adapt to change. Dinosaurs could adapt better than conservatives.
Ninth. The time period they long for is the middle ages. Think about it.
Tenth. You don’t know what to do, ask a conservative, then do the opposite because
they will ALWAYS be wrong.

Kropotkin

[Knox]

This is garbage. Everything that’s true about conservative psychology is true of liberal psychology. The reason is that the issue is “idealogical dependancy,” i.e., the need to be right, which leads to narrow-mindedness and is born out of fear and selfishness. Both sides are equally guilty.

[amor_fati]

@The Gay Science

Add lies – When people in France began to attack the Aristotelian unities and others therefore began to defend them, one could see once again what is to be seen so often but what people hate to see: one lied, mendaciously inventing reasons for these laws, simply to avoid admitting that one had become used to these laws and no longer wanted things to be different.

The same process occurs, and has always occurred, in every prevalent morality and religion: the reasons and purposes for habits are always lies that are added only after some people begin to attack these habits and to ask for reasons and purposes. At this point the conservatives of all ages are thoroughly dishonest: they add lies.

^

[Fent]

Although I cannot speak for the Conservatives in the US, here in Australia the Conservatives seem to be solely driven by hate and fear.
Their ‘philosophy’ (I use that term loosely) revolves around lambasting and blaming all the evils of the world on certain groups. One day it’s the Muslims, the next it’s homosexuals, the day after it’s the Aboriginals, then it’ll be the Labor party, then the Greens, Academics and so on. They’re always casting blame and have little to no capacity for self-reflection, let alone self-betterment. They live in a 19th Century Romantic mindset - if we just do away with the Muslims, Aboriginals, homosexuals etc. then all will be good with the world.
Deep down they are people that have had a very disappointing life. They have failed again and again at their goals, and are oversensitive to any sort of criticism. It’s no wonder that all their ‘thinking’ (again I use this term loosely) springs solely from hate and fear. It’s basically a form of self-compensation; hating others relieves their pain.

[Xunzian]

The Politics of Fear

By Constance Holden
ScienceNOW Daily News
18 September 2008
Why do people have the attitudes they do toward social issues such as welfare, abortion, immigration, gay rights, school prayer, and capital punishment? The conventional explanations have to do with their economic circumstances, families, friends, and educations. But new research suggests that people with radically different social attitudes also differ in certain automatic fear responses. Political scientists say the work is evidence that certain attitudes are conditioned by fundamental traits of temperament, which could help explain why it’s hard to get a donkey or an elephant to change its coloring.

Quite a bit is known about the physiology of response to threat, and some of this can be measured by simple noninvasive tests. So the researchers, headed by Douglas Oxley of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, decided to test the idea that liberal and conservative (or “protective”) social beliefs are related to individuals’ sensitivity to threat.

The authors first conducted a random telephone survey of Lincoln residents to find some who held strong political opinions. Then 46 selected respondents were invited to come in to the lab and fill in questionnaires to reveal political beliefs and personality traits. Participants were then given two types of tests to measure physiological responses to threat.

First, they were attached to equipment to measure skin conductivity, which rises with emotional stress as the moisture level in skin goes up. Each participant was shown threatening images, such as a bloody face interspersed with innocuous pictures of things such as bunnies, and rise in skin conductance in response to the shocking image was measured. The other measure was the involuntary eye blink that people have in response to something startling, such as a sudden loud noise. The scientists measured the amplitude of blinks via electrodes that detected muscle contractions under people’s eyes.

The researchers found that both of these responses correlated significantly with whether a person was liberal or conservative socially. Subjects who had expressed a high level of support for policies “protecting the social unit” showed a much larger change in skin conductance in response to alarming photos than those who didn’t support such policies. Similarly, the mean blink amplitude for the socially protective subjects was significantly higher, the team reports in tomorrow’s issue of Science. Co-author Kevin Smith says the results showed that automatic fear responses are better predictors of protective attitudes than sex or age (men and older people tend to be more conservative).

How are body and belief connected? The authors point out that family and twin studies have revealed strong genetic influences both for liberal-versus-conservative views and for people’s sensitivity to threat. They speculate that the correlation could have something to do with the patterns of neural activity surrounding the amygdala, the seat of fear in the brain.

“These findings are extremely important,” says political scientist James Fowler at the University of California, San Diego, who has been doing research linking certain gene variations to political activity. “In essence, the authors have filled in a ‘missing link’ between genes and brains on the one hand and psychological personalities and political attitudes on the other.” He adds that the subject pool is limited to “a handful of white subjects from Nebraska, … but many great ideas start with a simple test.”

The editors suggest the following Related Resources on Science sites:
In Science Magazine

REPORTS
Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits
Douglas R. Oxley, Kevin B. Smith, John R. Alford, Matthew V. Hibbing, Jennifer L. Miller, Mario Scalora, Peter K. Hatemi, and John R. Hibbing (19 September 2008)
Science 321 (5896), 1667. [DOI: 10.1126/science.1157627]