From "The Unexpected Relationship Between Ideology and Anxiety/People with left-wing economic views are more prone to more anxiety disorders" (Psychology Today).
I got there via my son John's Facebook post. My comment over there — based on just reading the headline — was "Why is this 'unexpected'?"
I would expect left-wing orientation to go along with anxiety. Left-wingism seems to be more about feeling there are all sorts of problems and action must be taken or there's going to be a lot of pain and suffering. The conservative orientation seems to be more relaxed and confident that things will work themselves out as people go about dealing with their own affairs and that it's best not to experiment with improvements.
But I can see that conservatives are accused of having irrational fears about people who are not like them — outsiders, immigrants, people of other races and religions.
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Yes, perceiving the need for action and change reveals emotional engagement and agitation.
Conservatives tend to have one world view: Steady as she goes. Don't rock the boat.
Those on the left fall into:
- Burn it down, burn it all down. Tomorrow? Who cares?
- We need to do better and fix some major problems with the establishment.
- As soon as I burn down the establishment I can gain and keep power.
The last left-wing group includes the conservatives now out of power. Many are unaware, and many are merely unhappy for not having dictatorial/monarchic control.
Conservatives are used to getting attacked by progressives for anything they believe in. Just bring up reducing abortions in any conversation with a progressive and they will bite your head off.
"But I can see that conservatives are accused of having irrational fears about people who are not like them — outsiders, immigrants, people of other races and religions."
Are the accusations true? I think not. Conservatives--at least in America-- are careful about abandoning tradition and skeptical about attempts to reform and "improve" mankind. They are generally more careful about changing institutions that have proved their usefulness over time. They generally welcome newcomers who embrace the values of the USA's civic religion--natural rights and support for the Constitution. They would like to see some order in the process, and they are skeptical that the people walking over the border are better than the people following the legal processes for immigration.
In the USA, the Left always lives in Alabama in 1963. Alabama today isn't even Alabama in 1963. Those folks have moved on.
But I can see that conservatives are accused of having irrational fears about people who are not like them — outsiders, immigrants, people of other races and religions.
Except those characteristics are how left wingers see the right, not how the right actually is. People on the right aren't against immigrants. They're against illegal immigrants. And aside from Islam, I think most on the right are tolerant of other religions. They see Islam as a political doctrine more than a religion. As far as fearing or being non-accepting of people of other races, show me a lefty and I'll show you a bigot. I think the vast majority of racial hate comes from the left, not that there aren't pockets of right wing ignorance regarding race.
As a conservative, I have no problem with anybody who is a different race, or from a different religion. I have no problem with legal immigrants, but I am appalled by letting unvaccinated infected illegals spew into the country with no testing, whilst they are mandating and forcing Americans to comply...or they lose jobs and unemployment. Are they expecting the illegals to do the jobs they won't let Americans who have had covid, and refuse to take the shot do?? Talk about totalitarians. Progressives need to look in the mirror to see the Hitler likeness looking back at them, that they were accusing Trump of being.
Notice how the article obscures the fact that these neuroses actually run in the other direction by saying only that the issue is now "more complex."
Here is a fine example of the left's ideological tolerance for different points of view.
btw- Boulder-Denver area has a leftwing progressive Antifa-thug presence.
"People with left-wing economic political views had higher rates of anxiety disorder symptoms/People with liberal economic views tend to be higher in neuroticism and lower in conscientiousness than their conservative counterparts/The relationship between threat sensitivity and political ideology may be more complex than previously thought."
It's not more complex, they just had it backwards.
I’ll let y’all hash this one out but left wing activism stems not exclusively from anxiety but from a lack of control that leads to anxiety. Leftists invent infinite reasons to control others..
…and I’d agree there’s a conservative bent towards ‘outsiders’ but it isn’t irrational- it’s rather a response to constant threats from the people mentioned above. Conservatives believe in voluntary cooperation but also individualism. Lefties are threatened by both of those…
People who believe Government should provide for their every need and whim
at no cost are more disappointed and irritated than are those who accept responsibility for their own particular needs and problems.
¡Que sorpresa!
A good article on why these kinds of 'finding' are so unreliable is The Social Science Monoculture Doubles Down in Quillette.
Accusations of phobias are merely the means of avoiding discussion of the issues.
This goes all the way back to the bogus "authoritarian personality"-- traditionalists who resented and feared modernity. Adorno and the like in psychology and social theory fashioned a highly politicized explanation for natural human tendencies and preferences, and made it a debate-stopping hobby-horse of the Left since the '30s.
I always thought that the authoritarian personality existed across the spectrum, especially after hanging out with hippies for a while.
I bet it correlates causally with sex, not party.
“... conservatives are accused of having irrational fears about people who are not like them — outsiders, immigrants, people of other races and religions.”
I hope “accused” is the operative word here. I don’t know what an “outsider” is, but I’m pretty sure that fears about the consequences of illegal immigration, black crime and Islamic extremism cannot be proven to be “irrational.”
OTOH, lefty fears about QAnon, white supremacists, Trumpers and even Covid cannot be proven to be rational.
The left is all about the feelz, not the reality.
Trigger warning!
But I can see that conservatives are accused of having irrational fears about people who are not like them — outsiders, immigrants, people of other races and religions.
And you buy into that tripe because why?
Almost all “conventional wisdom” for Progressives is 100% projection. That’s the only way the “unexpected” headline (tagline?) makes sense.
The left sometimes derisively use the accusation of fear when criticizing the right and libertarians. If projection is a real thing, this would be an example. They see taking action and preparations to defend oneself as an expression of fear.
Arguments against 2nd amendment rights are often framed as such. Likewise, the so called Red Scare could more accurately be framed as a prudent expression of the need for defense against a very real, expansive, leftist authoritarian threat.
This is a pet peeve... I may be repeating previous comments.
I would add that there are more Christians among conservatives who believe that God is ultimately in control and trust Him for the future.
I've not seen an adequate explanation of why the conservative fears are irrational.
Isn’t there a pretty direct correlation in reactions to the pandemic?
Liberals: more fearful, mask-wearing, lockdown supporting, vaccine mandaters,etc etc （”higher threat sensitivity”)
Conservatives: less fearful, disliking masks, lockdown skeptics, anti mandates….etc.
ie, agreeing w Althouse: “why is this a surprise?”
I’d add: Liberals: lean pessimist. Conservatives: lean optimist. Fair?
"But I can see that conservatives are accused of having irrational fears ..."
That label "conservatives" is stretched like a cartoon rubber band to brand a multi-faceted group that includes thoughtful libertarians and "Liberals" in the classic sense like me. As usual, i am falsely described and falselt accused. "We" in america are routinely caricatured, "Accused" by drama-loving paranoid Lefties and our opportunistic media.
who cares now anyway?
it's Year Zero.
the rancid ruling class won.
"we" are the Uyghurs now.
I can see that liberals have irrational fears about people who are not like them — Republicans and independents who vote for Republicans.
“There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery. Then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved. . . . After all we have been through. Just to think we can’t walk down our own streets, how humiliating.”
–-Jesse Jackson
sensitivity should not translate to anxiety without awareness of not able to act or know what to do
OH!
it's an "Unexpected Relationship Between Ideology and Anxiety", because prejudiced, bigoted left-wing people have "accused" conservatives "of having irrational fears about people who are not like them — outsiders, immigrants, people of other races and religions."
Well, There You GO!
if, as left-wing bigot; you project your bigotry and prejudices towards conservatives;
Then Conservatives MUST BE evil!! Since You've ACCUSED them of it. Damn the facts!
Serious Question
What ARE these "irrational fears" that conservatives are accused of having?
Not only are conservatives more relaxed about the future because they think things will work out, they think they can handle a lot of contingencies. Serious first aid, self-defense, changing a tire, starting a generator, situational awareness...provides a level of confidence against various things that may happen. Don't need the government to go all Mickey Mouse playground safety director.
But wait -- I read somewhere that deplorables are more prone to using violence to handle personal issues. Up to and including murder.
Oh, I remember where, now. Althouse told us that just a week ago.
So how could that be if, as she writes above, "the conservative orientation" is more "relaxed and confident that things will work themselves out..." ?
A puzzlement indeed, reconciling such divergent views.
Has any social psychologist ever tried to analyze the role played by feelings of guilt in determining political beliefs? That would be interesting.
What ARE these "irrational fears" that conservatives are accused of having?
Off the top of my head:
Suppression of free speech
Confiscatory taxes
Stolen elections
Inner city chaos
Permanent lower classes
Government mandates
Marxism is all its disguised forms
Corporate media as Democrat shills, etc.
No good modern liberal believes that these fears are real.
What I call "the Karen affect" is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Specifically, while not every Democrat is a mask/vaccine/lock down zealot, every mask/vaccine/lock down zealot seems to be a Democrat. If a person is paranoid or insecure in society (like a Karen) then that person tends to look for "experts" for guidance through any difficult societal problem and excoriates any non conformists to the party line. That's why you often hear Karens expressing an earnest desire for Covid nonconformists to die/be denied medical treatment/be fired from their jobs even though they, themselves, are vaccinated and masked and only remotely affected by Covid nonconformists. That's why they are perfectly okay with putting masks on traumatized two year olds. They are not capable of analyzing or countering perceived threats to their own health, so they turn Nazi on people who are both capable of and comfortable with making their own decisions, given the absence of rock solid evidence to the contrary. You'll notice on the pages of this blog that the Karens continually cite only newspaper articles or studies that tend to confirm their own paranoia or anxieties and ignore any counter evidence, no matter its source. Karens will always be with us and they'll always be progressives.
In my link above - Please notice the Antifa symbol in red paint on the truck.
"my body my choice" - scrawled by zit faced thug prgo-bois.
"New Study Shows Sun Rises in the East."
My own experience (limited, to be sure) is that nearly all of the left-leaning people I know are unwilling to eat indoors in restaurants, even though they are fully vaccinated. None of the relatively few conservatives I know even hesitate to do that. Like Ann, I didn't find the survey result surprising.
I certainly feel anxiety about the resurgence of statism. If you think that irrational, Google "Democide."
I don't think conservatives generally think "that it's best not to experiment with improvements". What conservatives oppose is rushing headlong into wholesale changes that have not been thought through. Liberals are rarely proposing "experiments".
Is there any proof that where woke is in charge life for the average legal resident has improved?
As a conservative, I want to believe, but I don't. I think the truth is that people get anxious about different things to different degrees depending on how much they think those things are a risk or are at risk. Take a cross-section of any society at any point in time, and you could survey it in such a way as to make one or another demographic stand out. But in aggregate over time, I don't think we're all that different, underneath our ideological labels. We're all still human.
It seems to me the causation goes the other way from how it's described in the article. People with neurotic tendencies (in my experience) worry about lack control over their lives. They worry about the future and about all the troubles in the world. It would be natural for them to gravitate toward a political movement that promises to use government to solve all the problems.
This also ties into the idea that people start out on the left and drift rightward as they get older. When I was in college, I worried a lot about the future. Coincidentally, I was described as a "college liberal" by my mother. I moved to the right as I realized you could be happier and more successful if you managed things for yourself.
"I don't think conservatives generally think "that it's best not to experiment with improvements". What conservatives oppose is rushing headlong into wholesale changes that have not been thought through. Liberals are rarely proposing "experiments"."
Chesterton’s Fence
These studies are usually pretty bogus and grossly over-interpreted.
They usually find something like "42% of people with characteristic x are z, while only 39% of people that are not x are z," which is usually interpreted as "people with characteristic x are z while people without characteristic x are not z."
Example: "42% of conservatives are highly likely to be concerned about dying in a car accident, while only 39% of moderates and liberals are," gets distorted into "conservatives live in fear of dying in a car accident."
In a room with a 100 conservatives, 100 moderates, and 100 liberals, it would be impossible to notice the difference without a very careful survey, and so the practical usefulness of these kinds of studies are pretty much nil.
Let's just skip over the question of whether it's rational to oppose the importation of hundreds of thousands of people who do not share our basic beliefs in democracy and the rights of women to freely go about their business alone, if they desire and of gays to even exist. At least have an answer for these questions.
Wow, this explains a lot. I'm usually skeptical of psychological studies, except when they confirm my presuppositions. Then they're okay!
What makes a fear irrational? Who decides that? I fear what I fear. It's nobody's business to judge that.
Of course the claims that conservatives are higher in threat sensitivity are made by
people with left-wing economic political views.
Neurotic projection is a fundamental part of being a lefty.
I searched on Google Scholar to see if social psychologists have done any studies investigating the impact of feelings of guilt on political views. Not surprisingly, I didn't find any. Two papers that I found seemed relevant, one by political scientists and the other by an economist: Jenifer Chudy, Spenser Piston and Joshua Shipper, "Guilt By Association: White Collective Guilt in American Politics," The Journal of Politics, Volume 81, Number 2, July 2019; and Gilles Le Garrec, "Guilt Aversion and Redistributive Politics: A Moral Intuitionist Approach," Economics Discussion Papers No. 2013-53, Economics: The Open-Access, Open-Assessment E-Journal (2013), available at http://hdl.handle.net/10419/83640. What do you think a fair, non-biased survey or experiment conducted by social psychologists would show?
Bob Boyd: "Of course the claims that conservatives are higher in threat sensitivity are made by
people with left-wing economic political views.
Neurotic projection is a fundamental part of being a lefty."
This is demonstrated daily by Althouse lefties Howard and LLR Chuck.
I think a large number of college educated people who are well compensated for jobs which lack identifiable attainable goals suffer from imposter syndrome. Naturally this makes them anxious.
"I think a large number of college educated people who are well compensated for jobs which lack identifiable attainable goals suffer from imposter syndrome. Naturally this makes them anxious."
Interesting.
I had very identifiable goals in my career: grants. No grants, no money, no lab, no students. I still would occasionally feel like an imposter, but it was easy to talk myself out of it. I was almost always "funded".
But I can see that conservatives are accused of having irrational fears about people who are not like them — outsiders, immigrants, people of other races and religions.
Well, of course. When your positions are garbage, and the other side's positions are not, you have to beat up on straw men ("homophobia!" "xenophobia!").
Blogger Patrick Henry was right! said...
What makes a fear irrational? Who decides that? I fear what I fear. It's nobody's business to judge that.
If you fear things that have almost no chance of happening, and most likely will cause little damage if they do happen, then your fear is irrational.
And so are you.
It's everybody's business to judge that. Because you're going to propose "fixes" to the things that you fear. But if your fear is irrational, we're going to rightly ignore your proposals
That goes back to Richard Hofstadter associating conservatism with "status anxiety" back in the 1950s and 1960s. Conservatives and right-wingers were supposed to be fearful of losing their place in society and falling behind. You can still see this in writing about politics today.
I don't go along with the "Blame Everything on the Frankfort School" talk, but Hofstadter did owe a lot to Adorno and The Authoritarian Personality. Hofstadter, Daniel Bell and others "refined" the theory, saying that status anxiety could also happen when people had suddenly risen in society, as well as when they had fallen or were afraid of falling, another example of the search for a theory that will explain everything, even when the opposite of the expected result occurs.
There's a core of truth in the theory. Conservatives are people who are afraid of losing what there actually is (or what they have, as leftists put it), while radicals and liberals are inclined to go after something new and not be deterred by the risks involved. There's also a lot of smugness in the theory. Risk and fear are a natural part of life and to dismiss concerns with possible negative outcomes because one feels oneself to be secure in one's position is shortsighted and can be dangerous.
Moreover, Hofstadter apparently didn't see that the same theory applied to himself and his peers, as well as to other people. He had risen precipitously in status, and he and other professors and intellectuals were afraid of losing their position in society. It's not just conservatives who are afraid of falling behind or being left out.
Today, we can see that progressives are also fearful. For many of them COVID and climate change are the top issues. Another legacy of the Fifties and Sixties is the idea that only rightists can be truly authoritarian. We're seeing that that's not true either.
"...I can see that conservatives are accused of having irrational fears about people who are not like them — outsiders, immigrants, people of other races and religions.
It's called projection.
If you're anxious and afraid all the time, that becomes the most obvious explanation for anything you can't be bothered to understand.
Accused Althouse. Accused. Accused by those same emotionally driven anxious folks. You have been around us enough to see the depth of our racism and xenophobia. Why repeat such drek?
Trey
I find that those on the Left tend to patronize minorities and call conservatives “racists” for insisting everyone be treated the same - as an individual. Policies and stories abound of the Left lowering standards for certain groups: affirmative action, college professor getting suspended for refusing to lower standards for blacks, blaming any inequality on the amorphous ‘systemic racism’ or ‘white supremacy’. But what they’re doing doesn’t show respect for minorities, and the compassion they champion often results in long term misery for the minorities they care about (ostensibly).
I used to think what one thought of human nature laid the foundation for each person’s ideological bent. Conservatives thinking human nature is bad, so beware. Liberals/progs think it’s good, so children are wise. So much that has happened lately has challenged my youthful rumination - how to explain the lockdowns, cancel culture, Defund the Police movement, etc? Those authoritarian, fascistic and anarchic movements, respectively - seem only to reveal contempt for humanity, regardless of what one thinks of human nature.
I see the birth pangs of grievance fueled dictatorship looming, and it can come either the Left or the Right at this point.
"conservatives are accused of having irrational fears about people who are not like them — outsiders, immigrants, people of other races and religions."
Note that accusation includes the unspoken presumption that such fears are in fact irrational, because fragmenting our culture and breaking down societal trust couldn't possibly be bad.
Could it be that progressives making assertions and arguments are so rarely challenged that when they are they can't handle it, because they were unprepared for the possibility they'd be challenged, because they did not expect that anyone would care challenge their assertions?
Conservatives know damn well they are almost certain to be challenged (if not outright attacked). And therefore they are far more likely to be prepared for the expected challenges (or shout-downs, or whatever)?
Conservatives and classical liberals believe that our immigration laws should be enforced, not ignored, should not be overruled by executive fiat and certainly not undermined by activist groups going down to Central America to foment law-breaking and asylum and benefits fraud, all of which leads to the abuse of many thousands and deaths of hundreds on the immigrant trail.
If we want immigration laws changed, this is the job of Congress - get a house majority and 60 votes in the Senate and a President on board and have a party. But let’s not waste any time passing laws that our leadership has no intention of enforcing.
Yes, conservatives are "accused". They are routinely slandered with all manner of nasty, vile, vicious accusations. There isn't any evidence to support the defamation, but liberals have never been much interested in evidence.
The progressive mind is insecure, requiring every problem having an obviously easy answer. Real world, cost vs benefit decisions is the source of the anxiety and why authoritarian government is always desired
The progressive mind is insecure, requiring every problem having an obviously easy answer. Real world, cost vs benefit decisions is the source of the anxiety and why authoritarian government is always desired
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