L v. R

Not surprisingly, people on the political left and right, however you care to define them, see the world rather differently. This stems in part from a different set of values, in part from believing a different set of facts, and in part a totally different view of how to view the world. There are more things, of course, but these three are enough. What’s funny, though, is that we even have a different understanding of how the other side views our views. Or, to quote this article:

[quote] In his remarkable book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, Haidt recalls a telling experiment. He and his colleagues Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham sought to discover how well conservative and what Haidt terms ‘liberal’ (ie: progressive) students understood one another by having them answer moral questions as they thought their political opponents would answer them. “The results were clear and consistent,” remarks Haidt. “In all analyses, conservatives were more accurate than liberals.” Asked to think the way a liberal thinks, conservatives answered moral questions just as the liberal would answer them, but liberal students were unable to do the reverse. Rather, they seemed to put moral ideas into the mouths of conservatives that they don’t hold. To put it bluntly, Haidt and his colleagues found that progressives don’t understand conservatives the way conservatives understand progressives. This he calls the ‘conservative advantage,’ and it goes a long way in explaining the different ways each side deals with opinions unlike their own. People get angry at what they don’t understand, and an all-progressive education ensures that they don’t understand. [end quote]

No surprise, the one liberal I showed it to disagreed strongly. But this is the same neighbor who doesn’t think there was any significant left-wing violence in the 20th C, because the gulags etc. were all “authoritarian violence.”

Comments are pretty good, too.

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