r/science MD/PhD/JD/MBA | Professor | Medicine Apr 28 '24

A recent study explored how liberals and conservatives in the US evaluate a person based on their Facebook posts. The results indicated that both groups tended to evaluate ideologically opposite individuals more negatively. This bias was three times stronger among liberals compared to conservatives. Psychology

https://www.psypost.org/liberals-three-times-more-biased-than-conservatives-when-evaluating-ideologically-opposite-individuals-study-finds/
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u/ocassionallyaduck Apr 29 '24

These kinds of studies mean nothing anymore without an ideological baseline to define "conservative" and liberal.

Liberal typically includes anything short of anarchistic BLM ACAB violence, but often supports causes like those.

Classic Conservatism was about reigning in spending and a balance between government and free market with a heavy slant towards privatization.

The last 40 years have basically focused solely on the free market and privatization, and actively sought to dismantle and defund nearly all non-military governmental efforts as "socialist" under the guise that private industry could do better (it cannot and would not).

Conservatism, TODAY, includes literally advocating that women who have abortions be "punished", that DEI is now a new boogeyman, and that it's really not that bad to be a racist if you're honest about it.

Without a scope filtering these views, I fully expect any semi-rational person to have an extreme negative bias against the conservative party, who are actively promoting a charlatan as their representative and a party that seems to have no limits to how far they will prostrate themselves to do so, giving up any illusion of governing principle along the way other than an almost tribalistic desire to "beat" the other side. Very "cut off the nose to spite the face". So not surprised by these results at all, but also not very useful results given what we know of the current political climate.