We'll guess your brain's political ideology | Hacker News Reader

We'll guess your brain's political ideology

chartsme.com

16 pointsweatherlight22 comments

To save you the effort of taking the entire survey to find out the methodology (disclosed on the last page), here it is:

How does this work?

A 2014 study[1] concluded that people who were more prone to disgust are more conservative and tend to align with the republican party. But, why?

Some scientists believe it's ancestral and that the adverse reactions were used to protect primitive ancestors from contamination and disease. This way a person wouldn't confuse drinking water with dirty pond scum.

The study measured participants' brain response to "disgusting" imagery using an MRI. The study could predict party affiliation with up to 98% confidence. The questionaire on chartsme.com uses Jonathan Haidt's disgust scale[2] in lieu of MRI and imagery, so results are likely far less accurate. Watch TED Talk[3] to learn more or read "Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust".[4]

[1] http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(14)0...

[2] http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/disgustscale.html

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YL3LT1ZvOM

[4] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0262015587

What other personality traits are correlated with political ideology? Are these studies worth taking seriously?

For example, according to the (corrected) study [1] conservatives are higher in "social desirability and neuroticism", while liberals are higher in "psychoticism".

[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajps.12216/epdf

Looks a lot like this quiz scores based on openness to experience thinking in terms of OCEAN. Those who have a greater openness to experience tend to be more liberal.

You could compare popularity of policies amongst types of voters and look to see what of the other personality traits influence those decisions.

Fiscal conservatism, for example, doesn't sound like a case of openness but rather conscientiousness. Spending within your means, keeping a budget and generally being organised financially is a conscientious activity.

Issues surrounding immigration could be down to both openness and neuroticism. The fear of culture erosion, terror attacks and such would align with lower openness and perhaps higher neuroticism in some cases.

As a side note I've been turning over the role of dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, cortisol and adrenaline in voting decisions. The common tactic of fear mongering threatens security - how does that influence the activity of the aforementioned neurotransmitters? Is there a method of campaigning that will counter act it? Its very interesting looking at elections through this lense.

This website seems to be intended for an American audience. As someone not from the US, it would be great if they changed the last page to say "Your brain is more Liberal" or "You have a liberal ideology" instead of "Your brain is a Democrat"

All part of that i18n!

I come from a country which is considered socialist by American standards, and I find I don't even relate to US Democrats because they're too far right. Even the most conservative party in my country is more left than US Democrats are.

Complete BS. This prediction algorithm said i was 78% liberal/Democrat. Have voted for most conservative candidate in every local, state, national election for 38 years.

Yep. I received a similar score (73% liberal) and consider myself in-between Libertarian and Conservative. The test is totally bogus.

The theory is not BS, read the paper. The researchers found they couldn't predict accurately using only conscious ratings like a survey. However the fMRI was stunningly accurate.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(14)0...

No libertarian?

Yup. Said I was a democrat. Not a chance

My experience also

Totally missed on me. But things involving natural processes don't disgust me much.

which way did it guess?

It most probably said he's a liberal while he identifies as a conservator.

Could be why many of my conservative friends would be disgusted to go to a liberal talk, whereas many of my liberal friends would be very interested to go to a conservative one.

That could also be because of the bias toward open-mindedness amongst liberals. Conservativism is defeated most effectively by the opening of the mind to new ideas, new thoughts, and differing opinions.

Except the Regressive Left is doing a good job proving they aren't all that open minded. The new liberal coming out of college campuses from safe spaces is not open minded at all. So perhaps in the past Liberals could make the claim of open mindedness, but not today. Especially when conservatives are banned from speaking on college campuses, not to mention being banned from social media.

Wow. So, those who disagree with you would be totally on your side if they just weren't so darned ignorant. The rubes. They just haven't been exposed to the right facts!

... It seems to me, perhaps we have found one liberal who needs to be more open-minded and charitable with his intellectual opponents. Perhaps they have some right ideas and thoughts as well.

I find exactly the opposite in my circle of influence: my conservative friends are actually more open to arguments from people who disagree with them, and are more likely to _understand_ the opposing viewpoint than are the people I know who are liberal.

Conservatives are actually more aligned with "classical liberalism", though, so maybe the generalization is kinda right, but not like you intended.

This was all about disgust and a lot of these questions were about blood, guts and death. So, I guess it would rate doctors in general as liberal?

Utterly wrong ('76% democrat') for this British 'small c' conservative.

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