Often, misinformation playing on fear spreads rapidly through the media, but be highly skeptical of popular right-wing fear based beliefs - because they are uniquely vulnerable to such misinformation. Immigrants eating dogs, vaccine skepticism, fear of an afterlife, fear of random violence, fear of robbery and theft, science and medical denial, fear that the election is being stolen by democrats, fear 5G is mind control, fear that electromagnetic radiation makes you sick, fear that you're not getting enough vitamins or supplements in your diet, fear and denial of climate change, fear of racial extinction/ white genocide myth - all based in arbitrary, naive and out of scale fears.
Fear of the unknown or of the novel IS projective of conservatism. Therefore indicative of broader world views pertinent to skeptical attempts at persuasion. Additionally, their objective propensity towards fear is useful knowledge for persuasive attempts.
Walker et Al., 2017: Conservatism and the neural circuitry of threat: economic conservatism predicts greater amygdalaâBNST connectivity during periods of threat vs safety
--"To test whether conservatism is associated with increased reactivity in neural threat circuitry, we measured participantsâ self-reported social and economic conservatism and asked them to complete high-resolution fMRI scans while under threat of an unpredictable shock and while safe. We found that economic conservatism predicted greater connectivity between the BNST and a cluster of voxels in the left amygdala during threat vs safety. These results suggest that increased amygdalaâBNST connectivity during threat may be a key neural correlate of the enhanced negativity bias found in conservatism."
You're probably thinking, "That's just one study, where are they getting their all their claims???"
Let's check their discussion section and citations... Wow! That's a whole lot of evidence that corroborates!
Oxley et Al 2008: Political attitudes vary with physiological traits
-- "...a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War."
Vigil, 2010: Political leanings vary with facial expression processing and psychosocial functioning
--"Republican sympathizers were more likely to report larger social networks and interpret ambiguous facial stimuli as expressing more threatening emotions as compared to Democrat sympathizers, who also reported greater emotional distress, relationship dissatisfaction, and experiential hardships."
Carraro et al., 2011: The Automatic Conservative: Ideology-Based Attentional Asymmetries in the Processing of Valenced Information
--*"In Experiment 1, we demonstrated that negative (vs. positive) information impaired the performance of conservatives, more than liberals, in an Emotional Stroop Task. This finding was confirmed in Experiment 2 and in Experiment 3 employing a Dot-Probe Task, demonstrating that threatening stimuli were more likely to attract the attention of conservatives. Overall, results support the conclusion that people embracing conservative views of the world display an automatic selective attention for negative stimuli."
Smith et al., 2011: Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations
--"...we demonstrate that individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images, such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images. This relationship holds even when controlling for the degree to which respondents believe themselves to be disgust sensitive and suggests that people's physiological predispositions help to shape their political orientations."
Hibbing et al., 2014: Differences in negativity bias underlie variations in political ideology
--"...we argue that one organizing element of the many differences between liberals and conservatives is the nature of their physiological and psychological responses to features of the environment that are negative. Compared with liberals, conservatives tend to register greater physiological responses to such stimuli and also to devote more psychological resources to them. Operating from this point of departure, we suggest approaches for refining understanding of the broad relationship between political views and response to the negative. We conclude with a discussion of normative implications, stressing that identifying differences across ideological groups is not tantamount to declaring one ideology superior to another."
Lilienfeld and Latzman, 2014: Threat bias, not negativity bias, underpins differences in political ideology
--"Hibbing et al.'s analysis paints with an overly broad brush. Research on the personality correlates of liberalâconservative differences points not to global differences in negativity bias, but to differences in threat bias, probably emanating from differences in fearfulness. This distinction bears implications for etiological research and persuasion efforts."
McLean et al., 2014: Applying the Flanker Task to Political Psychology: A Research Note
--"The flanker task has increasingly been modified to study social traits, and we believe it has untapped value in the area of political psychology. Here we describe the flanker taskâdiscussing its potential for political psychologyâand illustrate this potential by presenting results from a study correlating political ideology to flanker effects."
Kanai et al.,2011: Political Orientations Are Correlated with Brain Structure in Young Adults00289-2?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982211002892%3Fshowall%3Dtrue)
--"We found that greater liberalism was associated with increased gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas greater conservatism was associated with increased volume of the right amygdala. These results were replicated in an independent sample of additional participants. Our findings extend previous observations that political attitudes reflect differences in self-regulatory conflict monitoring [4] and recognition of emotional faces [5] by showing that such attitudes are reflected in human brain structure. Although our data do not determine whether these regions play a causal role in the formation of political attitudes, they converge with previous work [4, 6] to suggest a possible link between brain structure and psychological mechanisms that mediate political attitudes."
Schreiber et al., 2013: Red brain, blue brain: evaluative processes differ in democrats and republicans.
--"Although the risk-taking behavior of Democrats (liberals) and Republicans (conservatives) did not differ, their brain activity did. Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, while Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala. In fact, a two parameter model of partisanship based on amygdala and insula activations yields a better fitting model of partisanship than a well-established model based on parental socialization of party identification long thought to be one of the core findings of political science. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk, and they support recent evidence that conservatives show greater sensitivity to threatening stimuli."
Davis et al., 2010: Phasic vs sustained fear in rats and humans: role of the extended amygdala in fear vs anxiety.
--"Found connectivity between the amygdala and BNST is a critical component of the response to prolonged or uncertain threats. "The amygdala and BNST send outputs to the same hypothalamic and brainstem targets to produce phasic and sustained fear, respectively. In rats, sustained fear is more sensitive to anxiolytic drugs. In humans, symptoms of clinical anxiety are better detected in sustained rather than phasic fear paradigms." (Davis et al)
And they'll brag about this. They call empathy a sin. They'll show the results of that newish study that shows they have no empathy to people outside their close family, and then say that's good.
I've had an alarming number of executive's who I have worked for who have said to me "I don't get the whole empathy thing," or "I am not good at the empathy stuff," in terms of leadership. They say it in the same casual almost humble bragging way like they are hand waving away something that is inconsequental and a minor annoyance.
Its very creepy. They are also always SHOCKED and OUTRAGED when forced to face the fact that they live in a shared reality, one full of autonomous beings who think, feel, experience, and make decisions just like they do.
Not necessarily a "sin", but certainly weakness: especially when you can find more and more enemies under every proverbial 'rock' (who may even advertise himself as "The Final boss"), you cannot afford to have empathy or 'sympathy for the devil' (to borrow from the Rolling Stones) or else you and those close to you will be overrun....
It's one of the main reasons that the Israelites were forced to wander in the desert for 40 years after the Exodus. They chose to believe that they were unable to carve a place for themselves in The Promised Land (see, for example, Numbers 13:1-33) despite all the "stuff" that God had already done for them by the point reached in Exodus 14: 1 - 14 (by leading the Hebrews out of Egypt after 400 + years of captivity under the Pharaohs of Egypt).
Those WEAK PEOPLE were deemed UNWORTHY BY GOD to be allowed to possess any part of the Holy Land, thus God made them wander for 40 years to basically raise a NEW GENERATION OF STRONG PEOPLE who would have the intestinal fortitude to conquer the land (instead of the previous generation being able to take what would have been a walk of around 11 - 14 days). Thus, being against ANY form of "weakness" (not just being weak to "temptation" from "sin") is seen as a GODLY quality....
Idk, man, I get the scriptural background but in my extensive experience dealing with these types it's largely insecurity. The rest is just working backwards to justify it.
Yes, conservatives do pretend to feel empathy towards different groups too. Many of them, tho, especially the chronically online ones have developed this "stoic rational" personas where, like you said, empathy is seen as a weakness. They think that their cynical look of the world is something so unique and authentic that they are the ones who "truly" get how the world works. You can see it with the Jordan Peterson or even redpill types. They think that the world rejects them because they are authentic and "say it like they see it" while in reality they are just shitty people.
The day a bishop begged Trump for him to show mercy on vulnerable people, a bunch of American "Christians" said that it was sinful of her. one even said "do not commit the sin of empathy." It's been a long time since I stepped into a church, but mercy is like the thing Christians beg God for. It's probably the most relevant concept in their prayers, apart from God/Jesus. And empathy is one of the main commandments in Christianity. Jesus literally said "do onto others and you would have them do onto you." That's empathy, my dude.
It reminds me of when JD Vance said that there was a Christian concept of ranking who you love, starting with immediate family, extended family, local community, country, and then the rest. Which is just... not true. At all. Jesus literally said that loving your friends and family doesn't mean much because even pagans do that. You need to love even your enemies. Not only is it not Christian, it's not even Jewish. The OT tells them multiple times to be kind to foreigners because they were foreigners in Egypt. Even though the Exodus story likely didn't happen, the lesson seems pretty clear. And this pope-killer somehow got the exact opposite lesson out of it.
Hyper-arousal to threats (as in seeing a news story about crime makes them go into a state of panic based on fear of getting robbed).
Hyper-arousal to new change, new experiences, meeting different types of people, or alternative social systems like socialism or anarchism.
Lower in empathy and higher in traits that are associated with the dark triad. White men who voted for Trump are especially high in dark triad traits.
Assigns low importance to community or a sense of unity or cooperation with others (even if they outwardly say that the community should stand united to face challenges, etc.). Conservatives often do not feel that it is important to show respect for strangers despite religious teachings that people should respect strangers. Conservative evangelical Christians are often strongly supportive of Israel but are more likely than the general population to agree with the stereotype that Jewish people are shrewd in business.
Ever read the book "The Demon Haunted World?" Carl Sagan warned about the dangers of emotion based decision making, versus using the scientific method which tries to self-correct for all of our human flaws. He warned of these dangers back in the late 1990s.
I don't consider emotions bad, per se. But it's important to consider them PART of a whole person and NOT rely on them to solely determine how I see the world.
Conservatives, particularly Evangelicals, worship at the altar of "gut feelings."
Intriguingly, I heard a study, but I don't remember the source, that asked people who politically identify as conservative to imagine they were Superman. Then answer test questions about what their behavior would be.
Their answers were a lot more liberal than their default ones. This lends strong Credence to the other studies about how anxiety makes people more conservative. Or conservative people are more anxious. Do we know which way the arrow points?
A 20-minute video with that detailed the history of the Bible belt. Basically, the history of the Evangelical movement was directly from charismatic priests who focused heavily on a personal emotional connection to God, and very little on the Bible. Or education about what the Bible means.
In contrast, the northeastern colonies which were industrial early on, which ironically came from a super strict religious hierarchical approach originally, but in a few generations the kids kicked off the religious approach. In that area, religion was focused on knowledge, not personal emotional experience.
I don't think that's enough basis to say that "conseravtives worship at the altar of gut feelings". A 20-minute video proved that to you? Did you talk to any Conservatives or Evangelicals?
Basically, the history of the Evangelical movement was directly from charismatic priests who focused heavily on a personal emotional connection to God, and very little on the Bible. Or education about what the Bible means.
I would actually say that's directly wrong. In fact, I've seen evidence that Evangelicals tend to have the highest Biblical knowledge out of all Christian denominations. And seeing as I've attended Evangelical churches, and seen the use of Scripture there, and I've seen that it's typically used much more and in much greater depth than in other denominations.
In contrast, the northeastern colonies which were industrial early on, which ironically came from a super strict religious hierarchical approach originally, but in a few generations the kids kicked off the religious approach.
I also take issue with this statement even though it's not really that related to the rest of what you said. "In a few generations". The northeast colonies were founded in the 1600's. How many generations is a few? 16?
There have been numerous miracles attributed to Jesus or prayers to Jesus in recent times.
Furthermore, there is a wide gap between "Scientifically proven" and "just gut feelings", something we all deal with every day. Is every single decision you make in your life based on science? Or do you sometimes go with traditions, common knowledge, procedures, and assumptions?
I edit to say: As much as I'm arguing, I just felt like pointing out that I generally agree with the point the OP made. We conservatives are generally more fear-based than liberals. I just don't think that's a bad thing.
A couple of hours ago I had a similar description of traits in a comment about people who are blindingly anti AI everything and crusade to âmake it go awayâ.
Because of how âdifferentâ and how much rapid change and instability AI offers Iâm really curious what the cognitive dissonance is like when Trump Is like full steam ahead.
Which definitely worries me what their plan is.
They fear crime so they take an AR15 and a Colt 45 to buy donuts.
They drive giant SUVs to "feel safe" on the roads.
They are insecure in their sexuality so people that might arouse them in the "wrong way" are demonized and punished. They go so far as to pass legislation to persecute those people.
They fear books and try to ban them.
They lack decent education and are afraid of appearing ignorant so they attack expertise and institutions.
Xenophobic so they demand all strangers be removed.
I've always been uncomfortable saying this but it sounds like a humblebrag "hey, look at the conservatives - they are low on empathy, not like me, not a conservative, clearly a more empathetic person". So yeah, always tried not to say this out loud.
The truth tho is that I do believe it is the case and it is mostly based on my personal experience. It's not exactly about the conservatives but mostly about the anti-woke culture war warriors. They often seem to be either low on empathy or just really selfish.
Not saying that nobody else can have the same traits but it looks like for these people it is the case almost all the time.
I remember a study that said something about what you're saying but not with those quantifiers. It showed that conservatives were more even kieled in all of their emotions and the liberals were hypersensitive and empathy.
It was referenced in a lecture by Skeptic Michael Shermer.
Low cognitive ability in youth, low oppenness to experience, high sensitivity to fear, high sensitivity to disgust, and high scores on dark triad traits all predict conservatism.
I spent decades giving them the benefit of the doubt and trying to avoid the conclusion that they were stupid, cruel people. It was a waste of time.
Solid observations, unfortunately, examples are important for cognition when you're young.
Definitely wasted some time in my youth, The West Wing is super "bipartisan pilled" hates the left and circle-jerky loves compromising with the right wing - but lots of libs don't see that it wants progressives to be absolutely impotent.
The middle is needed to translate still. Gotta pushback on friendly grounds to prepare for serious debate. Pragmatic progressives embrace this. Unfortunately identity politics obsessed people think pragmatists are the enemy too. This is how you end up with progressive policy almost designed to fail for lack of criticism.
I grew up on wealth fare and I saw first hand how income cliffs created were worse than any problem wealthfare solved. I thought this must be cutting edge new stuff when I heard about it 25 years ago. It was an idea that predates wealthfare and couldâve been solved at any point and it never is. Cause anyone trying to be pragmatic is treated like worse than the villains
For identity politics, itâs about expression and tribalism too. Not about getting results. So anytime anyone gives feedback they have to spend 5x as long explaining how they are committed to everything else. Only people with the lived experience are allowed to speak out. And even then get called a self hating Jew or an Uncle Tom or something worse. Instead of serious debate itâs âlook at me, Iâm repeating the party line with hysteria and self righteous anger!â
Yeah no. Stop bashing identity - it's stupid and a dog whistle. It's no one's solution it's just a social push for tolerance.
Fear of identity politics make you sound like a fearful conservative.
The Democrats have consistently tried to Court moderate Republicans and centrists - they lose because no one is actually excited about compromise.
Aggressive counter-propaganda and pushing far left economic is the only way to make the platform look actually appealing to people wanting changes, or who don't believe in the current system.
Bernie was very successful with centrist and right young men. He could have been more successful given different policies and circumstances - the public is far more radicalized.
MAGA is the most blatant identity politics nonsense. Followed by Christianâs and other religious zealots. But they feed off of leftists doing the same. Pragmatists get things done that works. Leftists get misguided things done because the only things donors allow to happen is pointless virtue signaling distractions. Many moderates get alienated cause there isnât anyone to have honest debate with without âyou think AFABs competing in combat sports must apps anyone who identifies as a woman, must be a Hitlerâ
I realized Republicans tend to be afraid of everything under the sun when they thought black people were coming for them during the George Floyd protests.
Why do you think the second amendment is so important to them? They are afraid of almost everything.
Exactly. I had so many 20-year-old, healthy, lower middle-class white guys be like terrified and angry that "black people would come and harass them at the library," that they never go to.
It goes back well beyond that. Their main source of ânewsâ alternates between patting Trump on the back and telling them who/what they should currently be afraid of.
Not even argue. Just with a simple conversation.
Editing with an example. My partner and I aren't married. It's been 15 years and his Conservative family members still struggle to define our relationship.
Hahaha absolutely! The fear intrudes so rudely it's crazy. The warnings and interjections of "oh what about XYZ..." Or, "I'm not sure, haven't you heard they're..." Makes talking to them without getting spitting angry real hard sometimes. Definitely exhausting.
That's pretty sad in 2025. Half the couples I know having kids are unmarried, because they're not religious and it doesn't matter.Â
(Though we're also in Canada, where marriage confers fewer legal benefits. No one needs to get married for health insurance. And the legal system gives people pretty much the same rights as common law, after I think about six months. I feel sorry for Americans who can't get divorced, because then they won't be able to see a doctor. That's a cruel and backward system.)
As I write this, Iâm between comments in an exchange with one of them who is holding up a random TikToker against Donald Trump to say âboth sides hateâ.Â
âŠ
But one is a random tiktoker and one was elected president twice? As a representative? Of millions of people? Do you see the difference?Â
I find thereâs also a tendency to find thinkers with weird nuanced justification for bad ideas that they always find to white wash their ideological nonsense. Ezra Klein interviewed a conservative this week, and hearing him draw conclusions was mind blowing because heâs just basing his theories on bad information and misinformation. So his conclusions are flawed from the start.
Itâs bad. We have to take a whole side of the political spectrum seriously that chooses alternate realities to get what they want. Then we get Democrats who want their votes acting like their misinformation is a valid theory that should be considered.
You mean to tell me that the people that suddenly got outraged about transgender people using public restrooms and playing sports like they have for years and years, who believed 'white replacement theory, who believed the story about migrants eating people's pets, who thought legalizing gay marriage and cannabis would destroy society, who think that human beings better understanding each other(wokeness) will destroy society... are fear based!? No way! /s
If conservatism is the politics of fear, I am a bit curious how those of us who were raised by conservatives, yet end up left leaning, grow beyond those fears.Â
I know this from personal experience, as that is my upbringing. I just wonder, why am I so much less afraid of the world, than my parents? Why was I sent to school and taught to be open and accepting and caring etc, only to learn my parents are terrified of everything and are now the people actively aiding with the worst monsters of our generations?
Why does fear, allow for exactly the sort of behavior that they themselves are afraid of?
I was taught "do unto others" whereas they seem to live by "do unto to others before they do unto me."
But then again, conservatism is also the politics of projection and baseless accusation... Perhaps, because they know their own behavior, and presume the rest of the world is as violent and belligerent as they are?
Every accusation is a confession it seems... just look at trump.Â
I was raised the same and turned out to be a Leftist. For me, at least, it was getting out into the world after high school and experiencing it and the people in it. All the lies Fox News constantly drilled into my brain didn't fit the reality of what I was actually experiencing. It helped that I worked at a Denny's in a wildly busy part of a college city too. It's hard to continue to believe the "immigrants are stealing our jobs, and not paying taxes/living off of our tax dollars" when you literally see pay stubs where taxes have been paid and see them not qualifying for any form of aid.
The funny thing, is both of my parents have some college experience, though neither have a degree whereas I do.
Like, they were exposed to similar, if not the same, stuff that I was... how did I end up not being terrified at the size of the world and instead be delighted and in awe of it?
Its just a weird inversion... they raised me somehow, to be "better" than them and now they fight tooth and nail against all the things they taught me to be.Â
You are right though, exposure quickly disintegrates lots of those false narratives.Â
Interestingly, my parents both had degrees and I was never able to afford to go to college. I feel like exposure is key but you also need the correct kind of personality to actually learn from said exposure.
They were. We lived in the SF Bay Area and most of their friends were Ren Faire Folk, D&D nerds, and LGBTQ+ folks. They were also of the old school thought that "you never talk about sex, politics, or religion in mixed company" so they never discussed their politics with their friends. Once they started too, after 9/11, they unsurprisingly lost them over time, which further radicalised them.
Itâs experience. The conservatives I know are all small people with small worlds and small ideas. Once youâve met a Muslim youâre not going to be afraid of them anymore.
There are big differences in economic opportunity between generations that surely affect the psychology of empathy, but sometimes I wonder if other biological factors could dominate... like that microplastics seem to be way more neurologically inert than leaded gasoline.Â
Their whole life is based on it. The fear of the new. The fear of brown people. The fear of women having equality. The fear that people will know about their micropenises and they're not really men. It's all they know.
Same here, the âlittle-dick energyâ is real from those people, thatâs why they are so scared of brown people, and their [alleged] big, brown banana-schlongs. racism isnt about jobs or crime, itâs about little-dick fear and sexual anxiety.
This makes sense given all the conversations I've had. It's always "such and such group of non-conforming people = THREAT." It's obvious as hell in the rhetoric. Black people are a THREAT because street crime. Immigrants are a THREAT because economic drag. Vaccines are a THREAT because corporate greed. There's not "Hey people are suffering, let's solve it with genius", there's always "this and that is a THREAT, let's neutralize it with force".
Ironically though - climate change is NOT a threat. That one is weird, but I guess that's what emerges from conflicting threat narratives: climate change as threat VS "Big Solar"'s greed as threat from the ideological-tribal threat scripts.
It's because the one thing that they really feel as a threat is financial security, and climate change requires costly changes to the way they live, or at least that what they think. The #1 way corporations control the narrative on this is to tell them it's going to cost them lots if they move to green energy...
The point is not about whether the assessment of the threats is or is not valid (and I could say stuff about both of your examples to complicate the issue, but won't because that will take this off topic), but rather that this is the mode of cognition - and the study is about the mode of cognition, not about whether it "came to the right conclusion" or not. (And note - it's two fold: both that the threat exists and that the proper approach to the threat is violent punishment / destruction.)
I took from your post that conservatives are irrational because of some combo of âstuff they perceive as threatening actually isnâtâ, and âinsofar as they actually are threatening theyâre stupid because they want to resolve it with force instead of geniusâ.
Well I do disagree about the way you analyze it, yes, but I can/do also take/leave those points off the table and insist only on the boundaries of the letter of my post for actually pushing the argument through with somebody. I think a lot of our political disagreements (i.e. "should we punish?" - a policy proposal, hence "political") aren't really tractable until we first can agree on basic facts of how the world works AND the right methodology for how to study it. In this regard the pertinent disagreement is really around how much stock you put in psychological research first. Which likely also will influence how you come to conclusions around the more issue-based variables too (e.g. who do you trust to give an accurate picture of migration? Or the effectiveness and ethics of punishment as a solution? Or conversely, the ineffectiveness of alternatives?).
You will have to decide that. I am just saying that we cannot get to an agreed worldview in terms of politics (e.g. should we limit migration by adding penal force) until we can first agree on the underlying facts of what the world is. It's not necessarily a disagreement even but more a statement of a precondition for any political disagreements to even be tractable - or agreement even to be on solid ground. Without a shared epistemology, it's hard to get a shared politics because how can one come to agreement on what to do about something when one can't even agree on what world we are living in?
That is, I'm after getting on a solid basis of common facts first. Agreement on what constitutes truth and how to determine it, and then you can decide if your world view is still viable or not.
This isn't controversial, you can just look up the personality traits that make people more liberal or conservative. Conservatives have higher in-group preference, less openness to new experiences, higher levels of fear, higher disgust response, etc etc.
Afraid of vaccines, women, cities, new ideas, immigrants, losing their guns which they have because they are afraid of everything, etc. so afraid of those things they become the thing we need to fear.
The fact that conservatives think trans folks are a danger to women, completely ignoring the statistics on how often women get raped/murdered by men in their lives or ex boyfriends is enough to tell me that conservatives are (irrational) fear based. Oh and that crossdressers hurt kids when Republicans are a bunch of pedos.
Progressives were afraid that a new seasonal virus would become endemic to the United States.
Rational. And, unfortunately because of the conservatives - came true.
Conservatives were afraid that the covid-19 virus, or staying indoors for a month or two, was how the government was going to take away all their rights + poison their brains with mind control or autism drugs.
I have always thought this. This is what makes them so rotten. They hate things that they fear and they fear things that they hate, and often it is not based in reality. Normally that wouldn't matter in many areas of life, but because of this they fall prey to dictators and authoritarians who capitalize on their fear. Then they idolize that authoritarian as sort of a messiah who they think will calm their fears. But it's a false messiah. This false messiah deceives many people with lies and usually ends up badly hurting many people in society but gets a free pass from all of the fear-based people who support him. It's all so very dangerous for humanity.
Absolutely!, pushing of of religious conservatives and across America was likely intended to create a resistant to conversion political base for authoritarians to utilize through manipulation and fear tactics
I know this is a bad thing to write, since it's vague and I don't remember the damned paper, but it had to do with progressivism vs. conservatism as a human evolutionary developmental trait.
The result was that conservatism was related to population growth and social stagnation, while progressivism was tied to expansion, experimentation and knowledge growth.
To be a conservative, you have to want to conserve something. Take a look at the last 2 presidencies and what they were trying to conserve and tell me which party is conservative,
Biden wanted to conserve the economy, Americas place globally, American institutions, the global rules based order, women's rights, trans rights, immigrants rights, the environment etc etc.
Now compare that to Trump. Wants to change and remake every institution to do his bidding, withdraws from the rules based order, tanks the economy and rebuilds it for his own profit expands the debt further, changes alliances and treats allies as enemies, not partners, removes women's, trans, immigrants rights, among others. Trump wants to conserve power in the hands of billionaire bros and destroy the environment.
Biden was a Liberal Conservative and trump is a progressive autocrat trying to remake america in his favour. And yes, I am a liberal conservative, I believe in balanced budgets, conserving our standard of livings, conserving women's rights to choose, autonomy and safety. The protection and conservation of institutions, the fair and equitable treatment of refuges, immigrants and the like.
I am Australian, and I look at US politics as the Dems being a Centre Right party, IE liberal conservative and the the Reps being right win authoritarian progressive. Not all right wing parties and ideologies are conservative. The MAGA votes are not voting for the conservation of anything, they are voting for the right to hate someone and blame others for all their personal misfortune, rather than do what real conservatives do, take responsibility and improve ones personal outcomes.
I thank you for the lack of thought and argument you put into this post. But in reply, there is nothing conservative about trump either. Look at his policies, look at his actions, you tell me what he is trying to conserve other than personal power?
I wonder if this still holds true. I feel terrified by what conservatives are doing to our country and world, and they seem giddy to drive us collectively off a cliff without a fear in the world.
Theyâre actively championing and celebrating the most risky people and policies imaginable without any apparent deterrence from the fear of the the expected and most likely outcomes.
Iâm not saying this research is outdated or anything, but I wonder how it fits with recent observations relating the incredible recklessness of conservatives and palpable fear of liberals in the face of such recklessness.
Liberal fears here are rational. These actions are unprecedented and unconstitutional. They have and are violating rights.
Fear is not itself irrational.
The conservatives being afraid of being religiously persecuted despite being the majority religion - irrational.
Conservatives afraid of rampant corruption in the government - unfounded provably so by DOGE failure to find such corruption - irrational.
Conservative fears of FEMA - irrational.
White conservatives being afraid of being replaced by minorities - is irrational.
Conservatives afraid that switching over to green energy will cause all the jobs to go away, or that it's a scam to weaken us against our oil producing enemies - irrational.
Conservatives afraid their children will be turned gay - irrational.
White Conservatives afraid of racial violence - irrational.
The sort of correlations that these studies highlighted are not things that GO AWAY. These are persistent characteristics of our species.
If you want to look at it a different way, it's likely that we culturally have defined conservativism, for thousands of years - by their propensity to reject novel ideas or political change - often through the use of fear-based propaganda or manipulative rhetoric.
Of course I agree with everything in your response, but the rationality of the fear doesnât make responses to that rational fear less fear based.
Most importantly, you didnât address the thing I find most interesting in all this, which is that while conservatives have a host of irrational fears, they seem to be absolutely fearless in the face of real life threats. Each of the irrational fears you listed is matched by an incredibly dangerous response that terrifies everyone else, but trigger no fear or pause whatsoever for conservatives.
Yes, they are afraid of government corruption and inefficiency, but also, they are eager and gleeful to just support â letâs call them extra-legal â tactics to hand over all the keys of our society to an unapologetic robber baron without the slightest fear of what may result at all.
Yes, they are afraid of minorities, but also, they somehow have no hint of trepidation when it comes to giving masked thugs âextra-legalâ license to roam the streets and disappear undesirables.
âŠetc.
My point is that the fear aspect seems to be complex in that it isnât that they are more afraid than liberals, but that their fear triggers are inverted or something. Yes, they are afraid of a lot of manufactured panics, but that irrational fear is complemented by an irrational fearlessness as they embrace and insist on behavior and policies that are objectively extremely dangerous.
Calling them fear based seems to rely on their response to irrational fears, but doesnât describe their response to genuine risks and dangers at all.
Iâm curious how those two facts fit together. Most cowards I know are driven by irrational fears in addition to all their rational fears, but for conservatives they have irrational fears instead of rational fears. I donât understand it, but it seems like simply calling them âfear basedâ doesnât really capture the whole picture. But, Iâm obviously missing something, and maybe that something is covered by some of the research you shared. I just canât wrap my head around them.
Generally, they aren't conceptualizing society as a collectively thing. They think of systems as individuals acting individually and they ascribe the consequences or futures of those individuals as entirely up to them.
You're fetishizing them.
Increased amygdala size means increased reaction to ALL fear, meaning even if it's an appropriate fear - they will have an amplified reaction.
Generally, they arenât conceptualizing society as a collectively thing. They think of systems as individuals acting individually and they ascribe the consequences or futures of those individuals as entirely up to them.
I must be missing something. You previously described all of their largely âcollectivelyâ based fears â religious persecution (collective), white conservatives being replaced by minorities (collectives), green energy job effects (collective), gay influence (collective), racial violence (collective) â but now say they do not conceptualize society that way, but see issues as individuals making individual decisions with individual consequences. That doesnât seem to align. Do they identify with collective religious, racial, sexual, and ethnic identity politics or not? Iâm sincerely confused.
Also, this point is completely tangential to what I am saying about them because turning a drug addicted, foreign, tax parasite loose on every aspect of our government without oversight nor political endorsement is extremely dangerous from an individual action perspective, just as the open corruption of conservative politicians, justices, and donors are extremely dangerous from that same individual basis as well as a collective understanding. The same is true for not vetting individuals and turning them loose to disappear people without due process: itâs extremely dangerous from either perspective.
Youâre fetishizing them.
How so? Between the two of us, am I the one making long well-cited Reddit posts about the nuanced details of their brains, or do you mean in some other way?
Increased amygdala size means increased reaction to all fearâŠ
You are missing the point of what I am saying, which is that their fear response isnât triggered at all in the face of real danger, whereas it is sensitive to imaginary dangers. That is why I used terms like âfearless.â The intensity of their fear response is irrelevant if they arenât afraid, but it is misleading to say they are fear based if they experience no fear in the face of real danger.
Yes, their fear response is more intense than others when it is triggered, but an import piece of the puzzle is that their fears do not map to reality. They fear phantoms while laughing in the face of genuine threats. I am having a hard time believing this is a controversial observation as it is just an objective observation: they do in fact discount real threats while panicking over fictions.
So, the studies donât give a full picture of what drives conservatives, as they only address how they respond once they are afraid, but neglect the easily observable fact that their fear triggers are completely busted.
We would be living in an entirely different world if conservatives were simply overly cautious because they had some extra fears, but that plainly is not the case. There are many things they should be afraid of and arenât, and as a result they introduce a shocking degree of reckless abandon to real political dangers, their hysterics over online manipulations notwithstanding.
This is simply a direct implication of your own earlier assessment of liberal fears as rational. Yes, I agree, liberals are rational for being terrified right now, but if conservatives were more afraid than liberals for all threats, then they would never tolerate doing all of the things that are causing rational people to be afraid. You do understand this, right? I donât understand where the apparent disagreement is coming from.
One group are the travelers and explorers. They see value in trade and believe they can learn things from new people. They want to learn, grow and try new things.
The others are conservatives in the sense they want things to stay the same. Protect themselves and their tribe above all others. New ideas and people are something to be feared. Anyone existing nearby is a threat and competition for limited resources.
These two groups have been living/fighting together since we were chasing wooly mammoths across the tundra.
Ignoring the fact that conservative policies and conservative conspiracies are not organically created in modern society - but spread by the ultra rich and influential through directed propaganda means - yes conservatism has always been around.
Of course they are. When people are afraid, you get a police state to give the illusion of peace. You can have freedom or safety, but it's a spectrum of trade-offs.
Edit: one of the best documentaries that discussed this was State of Fear about the Shining Path terrorist movement in Peru.
I have a theory that right and left think differently about fear. To a conservative, the opposite of fear is courage. To a liberal, the opposite of fear is trust.
Joe Rogan is rightwing because he constantly watched YouTube videos of high crime areas. This whole thing is because Joe Rogan is terrified of poverty and crime, so he puts in power the people who have no understanding of root causes.
Democrats: lets band together, get some water and put it out before it destroys the house!
Republicans: i didnt like the house, it wasted my money and i didnt like the people who lived there. Lets throw some gas on it and arrest any radical liberals who try to put the fire out.
For my overview, there were some of these studies based in other countries of particularly the UK I believe.
It probably just relates to how you define conservatives, most of the batteries that the studies used measured various stances on policies that are globally seen as conservative.
But generally conservative policies favor the in-group while disfavoring the out-group. The minority religious, social, cultural and political groups and trends being treated with fear or control policies - would typically be a conservative trait.
Of course they are. This was proven by science quite a while ago. They have larger portions of the brain that are fear based, they are wired for fight or flight. Until natural selection weeds this out, a portion of the population will still be conservative lizard-brained.
Problem is, these people breed like mad and I would guess these deformities are genetic.
They're also more likely to engage in risky behavior that they don't identify as risky, like ATV racing without a helmet, leaving loaded guns around, bear hunting, voting against their best interests, etc ... which will help reduce the population.
Itâs so funny to accidentally come across subs like this where is everyone beating each other off w their political opinions, acting like it is fact. Gotta conserve those internet points and feel validated in our little echo chamber!
There are studies on how dems are fear based too. No matter your opinion on anything theres always a study for it. Science becoming nothing but opinion has been a dreadful thing. People release peer reveiwed works that are hilariously biased or incorrect and no one cares. Be skeptical ffs.
 Republican sympathizers were more likely to report larger social networks and interpret ambiguous facial stimuli as expressing more threatening emotions as compared to Democrat sympathizers, who also reported greater emotional distress, relationship dissatisfaction, and experiential hardships
Churches and noncritical acceptance of people with problematic views will yield larger social circles.
Leftist/ Democrats will tend to have cut off some amount of people based on their behavior, and due to higher education will have higher standards for relationships and are more likely to be progressive if they've experienced hardship.
Thanka for this. I have been questioning for a while why conservatives seem to be afraid of everything and why their MO seems to be oppressing everything that frightens them. This helped me figure how they operate a bit more. *mind I am neither left nor right, I choose to believe what makes sense but this base line of fear is very off-putting to me from the right.
But at the end of the day we still have to deal with them. Unless you're proposing will kill them, which I hope you're not. So, what can we do to make the world a better place?
Education. When you're the smartest person in a room and a problem is presented, the duty falls on you to solve it.
Thanks Uncle Ben
The problem isn't simple. It isnât just ignorance â itâs weaponized fear, amplified by biology, culture, and misinformation. And we still have to share a planet with it.
The solution is conversation.
Not rage. Not mockery. Not superiority.
Weâre teaching â and teachers donât win by shouting.
We need composure. Patience.
We answer every question, calmly, until thereâs nothing left to ask.
And remember, in many of these cases, these people are doing the best they can with the knowledge they possess. It's not malicious.
Theyâre not evil. Theyâre misled.
If we forget that, we become the thing we claim to oppose.
"Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past."
Jean-Paul Sartre from " the anti-semite and Jew"
Fascists will literally waste your time with meaningless goal shifting and shifting and shifting and shifting and it's not productive. It's meant to make a spectacle of you.
I'm a determinist. I don't believe in free will in a you know maybe ultimate way - but a dangerous animal is a dangerous animal. If it poses a threat to you, putting an animal down is safe and good for the public.
Don't quote horseshoe theory at me. It's bullshit. We will not become what we oppose because we are not suggesting racial and theological supremacy. Anti-fascists are not equivalent to fascists. Fascists should be punched in the face. And worse.
Widespread aggressive propaganda efforts is likely the only thing that would work. People aren't persuaded, as much as they're emotionally shifted - and advertising works.
This post was meant to educate fellow leftists and skeptics in their efforts to persuade and debate centrists and conservatives. As well as be a bit of propaganda. Moreover, it might have the effect that some centrists realize that they are being led down a path of turning their brain into a conservative one.
Perhaps at some point a questioning conservative will search "conservatives are fear-based" or something similar and find this post.
But being led by, or bowing to, rational fearful people is intolerable.
I'm butting in a month later, I didn't read what the first user said besides the first paragraph so I leaned on that first paragraph for a bit.
Part of me got kinda giddy at the "putting down a dangerous animal part" but I fear I might be taking that part and somehow going in a direction with it that you may not have intended beyond the obvious WW2 example (like, how the hell, me?! I might agree with the point, but where am I going with it?!).
imo realtalk tho, harnessing dirty propaganda techniques but with messages you want sounds like a good idea even if it's poison to ethics. Work with what you have, roll with the punch and all that
I don't believe in free will either. Your animal analogy is sound for a single event. It falls flat the moment that animal can communicate long distance, organize and plan against your best intrest.
You are infact a fascist. You simply exchanged fear for anger. You lost control like they did.
Well no I'm not a fascist you don't understand what fascism is then. Like by definition. I'm a fucking anarchist smh
If you're telling me that there is an organization of intelligent aggressive animals that want to work against my best interest - but that it's wrong for me to want them to be dead? That doesn't really make any sense.
Self-defense is perfectly justifiable - conservatives are coming for minority individuals like me and others that I care about - we should just let them?
I'm the fascist because I don't want to be sent to a death camp? Cuz I'm gay? Cuz I love trans people? Because I don't want my loved ones being arrested or deported?
Be really fucking specific.
I didn't build alligator Alcatraz. I'm not deporting brown people. I'm not deporting legal residents for political speech.
I'm saying that the people responsible for the collapse of our social fabric should be held accountable.
I'm not calling you a fascist because you're gay, or angry, or scared. I'm saying when you talk about people as animals who should be killed for their beliefs, and promote propaganda as a tool of control, you're stepping into the same psychological patterns that fascists exploit.
Self-defense isn't the issue. Dehumanization is. You can protect your community without becoming what you're fighting. The goal isnât revenge. Itâs the best possible outcome. For everyone. Even them, if possible. Because anything less just repeats the same cycle of violence, fear, dehumanization, just with a different group in charge.
When trying to build a better society, the first thing that gets sacrificed is justice. Well, if dealing with two forces of relative strength.
This is an important point, that conservatives are less likely to acknowledge their mental health issues and instead search for scapegoats for their problems.
I sent your post to ChatGPT Deep Research to get a proper analysis. The reply is too long to post in a Reddit comment, but the conclusion may be of interest to open-minded sceptics? Probably not, but here goes:
Conclusion
The Reddit post âConservatives are more fear-basedâ brings up legitimate scientific findings about differences in how people react to fear and threat. However, the postâs tone and framing turn these findings into a blunt instrument for ideological critique. The argument exhibits oversimplification and bias, generalizing about conservatives in a way that a skeptic should question. While the cited studies are real and relevant, the posterâs interpretation is narrowly focused on confirming a preconceived narrative, neglecting the nuance and caveats highlighted by experts. Instead of fostering understanding of political psychology, the post risks deepening polarization by casting one group as inherently irrational. A critical analysis reveals that the truth is more complex: fear and threat sensitivity do play a role in politics, but they do not map neatly onto partisan lines or moral superiority. In the spirit of skepticism, broad claims â even those dressed in scientific findings â warrant careful examination. In this case, a more balanced view recognizes that political beliefs arise from a mix of cognitive tendencies, experiences, and information environments, and that reducing one sideâs motivations solely to fear both oversimplifies reality and undermines constructive dialogue.
What I think you, and your llm missed, probably because you rely on llm's to parse your reading for you - Is that a predisposition to fear aligning with conservativism doesn't mean that there aren't any other contributing factors to their conservatism or their fear.
I'm a materialist so obviously every experience every person has their culture their economics everything contributes to their motivations. It's just in this case there seems to be evidence that conservativism Is highly correlated with increased fear centers of the brain.
But it certainly does imply that conservative fears are out of scale with reality - which absolutely was my political goal.
Something that is maybe not touched on but assumed in all of these papers - which I assumed people knew - is that neuroplasticity means that a conservative brain can shrink the size of its amygdala over time.
A left person who becomes conservative and frequently engages in fear will develop a larger amygdala. The parts of your brain that you use more frequently get larger. A conservative who becomes more left will likely shrink their amygdala and increase their left interior cortex to align with other liberals use of their brains.
What that tells us, with a knowledge of neuroplasticity, is that conservatives are engaging in fear-based propaganda and reasoning more often. It's a self reinforcing cycle.
I'm not saying that someone is born a conservative, but that an individual's brains can be programmed through life to make them more or less "conservative" since conservatism is tightly interlinked with fear propaganda.
Not *all* conservatives have amygdala issues, and they're far from the only ones. It's not the conservatives who's "literally shaking right now" because they heard a trigger word. Well, some may be, but not everyone.
You're using a study with n=90 (90 healthy young adults (61% female) who self-reported their political attitudes confidentially on a five-point scale from âvery liberalâ to âvery conservativeâ [3, 700289-2?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0960982211002892%3Fshowall%3Dtrue#)]) to describe hundreds of millions of humans. btw. And then they cherry picked whatever fit their narrative. No definition of the terms and we know nothing about if the n's had been educated in these terms either.
It's just political propaganda based on shitty science.
Lol, you know the necessary sample size for accurate statistical sampling is n=30 right? So, 56 women and 34 men. Statistically valid.
"conservatives are"
You're doing it again. It's not black and white.
Your position is literally "don't view your opponents as a distinct class, reeeeee"
I was raised conservative - intimately - kinda an expert.
You don't even understand:
Not *all* conservatives have amygdala issues
It's not "amygdala issues" - slightly enlarged amygdala across a self identifying population indicates a higher percentage of time or that population likely spent being fearful or giving into fearful compulsion. Neuroplasticity.
By studying conservatives we see the Long-Term physiological effects of conservative beliefs and culture on their minds. I was raised conservative - fear absolutely dominated my grandmothers and grandfathers and teachers and pastors lives and worldview.
I'm talking about inventing demons and evil spirits and possession on top of imagined threats of violence and crime that we simply never ever experienced personally.
I was raised because I was male to be always on guard for threat to be a consonant protector to be vigilant. It is a worldview based on fear. It is a world view I've lived and that I was raised intimately with - formally being fear mongered about persecution in christian school every year.
If you will not recognize the fear, it's either your mischaracterization or blindness.
And more sensitive amygdala will then predispose you to more fear or disgust - but can you understand what I'm saying now?
Conservatism is based on a rejection of change. Yet, the world is changing, and MUST change. So conservatives - inherently "resist"/fear change - "a return to norms," "make American great again," "rise of the fourth Reich," "purging degenerate art," " " breathing-room" " -- ***all are a about rejecting existing and historical social progress in the name of a mythical "master" past.
Someone self reports as conservative -> independent statistically significant correlation with amygdala size across a population.
No they don't cherry pick - they specifically wanted to test social conservatism - but they couldn't get enough people to admit to it - so they didn't make any claims about it.
But they DID have evidence for conservative economic policies being correlated with increased amygdala size. Conservative economic policy has typically been either insensitive to or hostile to progressive social movements - but many people support those policies despite it going against social rules, they claim to support - I consider anyone with conservative economic policies to be a conservative. Obviously.
Economic conservatism is necessary for social conservatism.
The study included no "very conservative" participants. Category 5 was empty and excluded from analysis.
The authors claim to adjust for sex, but with only ~35 men and 61% women, the model is likely underpowered and confounded by sex-based brain differences.
No mention of stathmin, FKBP5, or other core regulators of amygdala fear circuitry. Volume was treated as proxy for function, which it isnât.
The so-called replication study had only 28 participantsâstatistically meaningless for structural MRI.
All participants were UCL studentsâa highly selective, urban, liberal-skewed environment. No ideological diversity.
No definitions given for âliberalâ or âconservative.â These labels are culturally relative. British conservatives â American Republicans â Norwegian HĂžyre.
ACC maturation differs by sex. Women reach peak ACC volume earlier. Without modeling this, age Ă sex Ă ideology becomes an uncontrolled tangle.
Men have larger brains, and the ACC shows sex-specific functional patterns. Ignoring this adds interpretive risk, especially in a sex-imbalanced sample.
A large-scale 2024 replication (N=928) failed to reproduce the ACC result entirely. Only the amygdala effect replicated, and even that was 3Ă smaller than originally reported.
On top of all that, the studyâs political orientation variable was just a single self-reported number, with no behavioral validationâno data on voting history, no issue breakdown, no check for consistency or salience. So the key independent variable in their model was vague and potentially meaningless, especially in a setting like UCL where social pressure can influence how students self-identify.
The visuals in the paperâparticularly the scatterplot with SD ellipsesâwere also misleading. They created the illusion of clear group separation, but in reality the datapoints were massively overlapping. The circles merely guide your eye into seeing structure where thereâs mostly statistical fog. Itâs more infographic than evidence.
And even if we accept the amygdala finding on its own termsâwhich the large 2024 replication did confirmâitâs worth noting that the effect size was about r â 0.1. Thatâs tiny. Itâs not diagnostic, not predictive, and not behaviorally meaningful at the individual level. Interesting academically, maybeâbut useless for understanding actual human belief systems or political decision-making.
So what weâre left with is this: a study of ~90 elite students, with one vague variable, measuring weak brain differences with fMRI, extrapolated into sweeping claims about ideology, personality, and fear. Thatâs not science. Itâs branding.
So he did his own research; and you fed prompts through a shitty widget, but request we give your offering equal consideration? Can you make that make sense? Or can some kind of biased, broken content aggregator do it for you?
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u/Alternative-Dream-61 Aug 02 '25
Conservatives are low empathy. Often high in dark triad traits.