This Machine Can Tell Whether You're Liberal or Conservative

In the interest of not setting off a flame war, I'm going to point out that this phenomenon can be explained in at least two directions (the obvious one and the reverse) and leave it at that.

I would hope so, since divine anything is simply ignorant and doesn't belong in any moral toolbox.

I must be a psychopath :-)

"You can blame the general news media for being lazy and/or retarded. But the authors of the study are directly to blame for purposely skewing the results to the conclusion that conservatives are cowards.... When you write something, you must be aware of how people will read it. Since it is very obvious how this study will be taken, it is the authors' responsibility to prevent it from happening. Notice that they did not, anywhere write the equally plausible possibility that liberals inexplicably exhibit much less fear than would be expected"

Such improved discrimination wouldn't necessarily have been evolutionarily adaptive, it seems to me. First, there's the risk of false negatives: you might incorrectly dismiss a real threat. Second, such discrimination takes time that might be better spent fleeing (or whatever).

I can see that the optimal strategy might be to maintain a dynamic balance in the population between "discriminators" and "reactors". "Reactors" might get killed less often, but without a certain number of "discriminators" in the population, the tribe (or whatever) would fail to maximize its utilization of the environment and thus not compete well against neighboring tribes.

This was exactly my thought. It is actually unreasonable to be afraid of a photograph.

I would imagine that all people are subject to unreasonable levels of fear in various situations, but this does seem to show that conservatives may experience higher levels of unreasonable fear.

Many questions do not have answers that two-thirds of the country can agree on. For small questions, perhaps that's harmful. However, for large questions, it's definitely a feature of the system that the electorate is forced to deliberate until wider agreement is reached.

Are there issue in particular that you think are important yet avoided?

None taken; I find that a problem myself. Though I'd characterize it less as "avoiding issues that matter" and more as "over-inflating issues that don't, crowding out everything else".

When I look at politics elsewhere, though, I tend to see the same issue, just shifted elsewhere on the spectrum; I don't think this problem is unique to US politics.

If conservatism was purely about defending the status quo, it would be liberal to enact a flat tax, restructure school funding to work through vouchers, or replace social security with private savings accounts.

There are many other reasons that people are conservative or liberal. I would argue that the most prevalent are various flavors of identity politics.

My perception is that, in the U.S., the fiscal conservatives would be more logically aligned with the social liberals since the freedom to live as one wishes valued by the latter is more consistent with the small government ideals of the former. It seems that whether a person with such views ends up in the Republican or Democrat camp depends on if they are better able to hold their nose in the face of the odious social policies of the religious right or the equally odious and equally authoritarian fiscal and social policies of the Nanny statists.

Regardless of the reasons for the current situation, the study being discussed suffers from its poor choice of categories. As an example, consider abortion rights (a topic I chose to avoid politicizing the discussion further ;-). I fully support a woman's right to choose and for abortion to be safe and available. I've donated to Planned Parenthood in the past. However, I also think it is reprehensible to force people who believe otherwise to pay for such procedures. Am I a liberal or a conservative?