The Differences Between How Liberals and Conservatives Respond: What Can We Learn?

[everlasticity]

This articles has some interesting findings on how liberals and conservatives respond differently to positive and negative stimuli. Lets discuss and see if we can't take something away from it.

http://news.yahoo.com/conservatives-liberals-dont-see-eye-eye-literally-132412890.html

This is what I have to say about fluffy bunnies and open wounds. I like fluffy bunnies, except at the expense of others. I am quite squeamish to the open wounds of others, but not my own.

[LawnWake]

In the new study, Dodd and his colleagues had 48 adults who were strongly conservative or strongly liberal look at a series of 33 pictures. Some of the pictures were pleasant, such as that of a fluffy bunny. Others, including a picture of a maggot-infested wound and another of a man with a spider on his face, were downright disgusting.

While the participants looked at the photos, researchers monitored their skin conductance, a measure of minute changes in sweating that reveals how excited and emotional someone feels, in this case, about a given image. They found that, consistent with other studies, conservatives responded more strongly to the negative images.

HAHAHA. God. I noticed that I was making a visibly disgusted face when they described the maggot infested wound, but didn't move a muscle when they described the fluffy bunnies. Hahahaha holy crap.

I also read that when someone looks away midconversation, liberals tend to look away too out of curiosity, whereas conservatives keep looking at the person because they 'don't like being told what to do'. Which also applies to me.

Funny.

[AlexAmore]

Hard to come to conclusions but I'll take a crack at it.

Liberals biologically focus on the positives. Give poor people money, sounds good. Help the environment with government subsidies, sounds good. Free healthcare, free education...ect. All sounds great and Jesus Christ anybody who's against that could only be a monster.

So conservatives come along and somehow are able to find negatives to these Christ-like initiatives sponsored by the saints of our time. Well thats gonna take some learning and "focusing" on what the unintended consequences are. Through that exercise of focusing on the negatives of positive initiatives you develop a deep understanding and a knack for abstract thinking. It takes an abstract thinker to realize a problem doesn't always need a solution from powerful people but will work itself out. Hard to explain to people until you develop that mindset.

At a Ron Paul rally a man talking to my liberal grandpa said libertarianism is like learning a foreign language, you can talk and sound foreign but it's only when you begin to think in that language have you become fluent or in this case a libertarian.