Creep, by Radiohead

https://thesevenleggedcows.wordpress.com/2024/03/13/creep-by-radiohead

Social media is teaching people to do Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in reverse.

16 Aug 2023.

Over the last five years I’ve been reading about the trends in mental health on American college campuses. There are sky rocketing rates of anxiety and depression. Campuses are awash with demands for “safety,” by which many students mean that they should not encounter ideas they disagree with because it makes them feel “unsafe”. 

Everybody wants “trigger warnings” on things, to the point that Stanford University IT department asked staff not to use the phrase “trigger warning” because trigger warnings now trigger people. Students now regard their feelings as the ultimate guide to reality, leading staff to cull readings from the syllabus which might offend anyone. (Try doing courses in politics, criminology or bio-ethics without coming across some idea you don’t like.) Students at Harvard University and other law schools have asked professors not to teach the law on sexual assaults because it triggers people. But imagine, after all the efforts of feminists over the last 30 years to get reforms to court procedures to get fairer treatment of victims, (on which society still a long way to go) that law schools produce potential prosecutors and defense lawyers who have never studied a major part of the criminal law.

Watch here as a group of students storm out of a panel discussion, damaging sound equipment, shouting about fascism and Nazis because an evolutionary biology professor says that men and women have physical differences, such as average height, muscle mass and where body fat is deposited. “We should not listen to fascism. It should not be tolerated in civil society,” declares one student. “The women in there are brainwashed” shouts another. These students seem unhinged from reality.

Having returned to study in retirement, I have commented that I’m glad that we are not seeing this kind of dysfunction on Australian campuses. In a bio-ethics class, a couple of students suggested that the way to avoid some medical data contributing to negative stereotypes of women in certain situations was not to publish medical data broken down by sex. A lecturer pointed out that men and women have slightly different symptoms at the start of a heart attack, so failing to know this would actually disadvantage women. (Traditional descriptions of heart attack symptoms have been based on men because they have more sudden heart attacks than women, and their first symptom is often chest pains radiating into the left arm – an easy one to spot. Women somewhat more than men may present with back pains going into the neck and jaw, or pains that resemble gastric reflux and hence get misinterpreted see here.) Nobody stormed out of the room shouting about Nazis.

Saying that heavyweight boxers should not compete against bantam weight boxers is not ‘denying the humanity’ of heavy-weight boxers. Saying that a twice-convicted rapist like Isla Bryson should not be in a women’s prison (as occurred in Scotland earlier this year) is not denying anyone’s humanity. It’s not ‘TERF-ism’. It’s pointing out that Bryson is a violent, repeat sex offender who posed a risk to women prisoners, many of whom have already been victims of domestic violence or sexual offences. Vic Valentine, manager of Scottish Trans, didn’t want a blanket rule on where trans prisoners are located, but agreed that prisoners with sexual assault convictions who therefore posed a risk to women should not be placed in women’s prisons (see here.) Is it likely that the trans-male national spokesperson for a trans lobby group is himself a transphobic bigot? No.

 American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) in his book “The Coddling of the American Mind.” describes three types of thinking that are driving up rates of anxiety and depression among students: the belief that viewpoints you don’t like make you “unsafe” (and you therefore need to be protected from them), the idea that your emotions are a good guide to reality (rather than evidence or reasoning), and the belief that the world is a battle ground between good and bad people (and “your side” has a monopoly on virtue). See also this video which includes data on anxiety depression, and self-harm, among teenagers. This has all exploded since we have the first generation of teenagers who’ve never known a world without social media.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, one of psychology’s greatest success stories, teaches people to reduce anxiety and depression by replacing dysfunctional thoughts with more realistic thoughts. It says that our self-talk, the stories we tell ourselves inside our heads, determines our emotional reactions to things. Much of this dysfunctional self-talk is a series of cognitive distortions, some of which are listed here and here. CBT says we change our emotional states by changing our self-talk.

An example is this, taken from the way I’ve seen uni students react to getting a bad mark in an essay. 

Event	Catastrophising thought	More realistic thought
New uni student fails an essay	This is terrible. I’ll probably fail the subject. I’m probably not suited to studying at uni. It’s all hopeless. I’ll probably fail the degree. I might as well drop out of uni.	I got 12/30 for this essay. There’s still 70 percent of the assessment to go. I’m only 3 marks below a pass. I can easily make that up. I get help from an advisor about how to write better essays.

 An example more relevant to the American students above.

Event	Black and white thinking	More realistic thought.
Somebody holds an opinion I don’t like, on an issue that personally affects me in a serious way.	This person is a hateful bigot. Probably a Nazi. They want to erase my existence and deny that I’m human. They need to be crushed and destroyed. I should denounce them on social media. They are not fit to hold any position and I should demand they resign from their job.	People don’t normally think the way I do, so it’s not surprising when they don’t. A spectrum of opinions exists on most issues. There are real bigots in the world, but this person may not be one of them. I could try explaining why the issue causes me a problem. They may still not agree with me on some things, but most social change is incremental and I can make an incremental gain here.

There are articles on CBT here , here, and here.

Some of the standard distortions discussed in CBT are:

Catastrophising: (if someone disagrees with me on something, they are denying my humanity, they are a threat to my existence. If something goes wrong it’s a disaster. Everything will be awful forever.);

Mind reading: thinking we know what other people think when we have no evidence: (if they disagree with me, they must hate me.);

Black and white thinking: there are two types of people, good people who think like me and bad people who need to be denounced and opposed, and there’s nothing in between;

Thinking that your emotions are a good guide to reality: if I feel something, my feelings make it true. That’s all the evidence I need. I should always trust my feelings (when in reality your feelings are about the worst guide to reality you could find.)

The world consists of two types of people; good people who think like me, and evil bigots. If I feel unsafe, I must actually be unsafe. Disagreement means people are trying to treat minorities as non-human or “debate their right to exist”. There are actual Nazis in the lecture theatre.

How has such thinking, so detached from reality, occurred? Unfortunately looking at some current political debates through the lens of CBT shows us what is going wrong. Social media repeatedly exposes us to websites and threads that tell us what we already think, and promotes extremist tweets and posts that generate controversy. We have people constantly repeating to each other some of the distorted thinking that CBT exists to counter. Some people seem to be teaching themselves Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in reverse. This is entirely counter productive in political campaigns.

The ‘yes’ campaign didn’t win the same-sex marriage vote in 2017in Australia by accusing everyone else of being Nazis, or homophobic bigots. “You’re an arsehole. Now vote the way I want,” isn’t a good way to approach other people. Some of that happened. But the average voter was won over more by appeals to equal treatment, and by patiently explaining to some how gay people could be disadvantaged in a hospital settings or in a disputed will without legal recognition of the relationship, when the other person’s family disputed the relationship.

How then do normal people respond to rhetoric that seems to be completely detached from reality? It will be necessary to explain, over and over, that a variety of opinions is absolutely normal in any society. Nobody is trying to “erase your identity”. Someone who holds a differing opinion to you on Isla Bryson is not trying to destroy you. Men and women do have physical differences. Saying that men are on average taller than women, or knowing that men and women experience heart attack symptoms differently doesn’t make anyone a Nazi. No one is shoveling sexual or racial minorities into gas ovens. Repeating this numerous times may no doubt become tiring. But it has to be done. I don’t see another option. Political conversations need to be grounded in reality.

A few thoughts on Australia’s federal election.

This article explains the causes of the change of government in Australia last Saturday, and the consequences for the center / right / conservative  balance within the party that just lost power.

Australia had a federal election last Saturday (21 May 2022). While the results are not yet 100 percent clear, it is certain that the incumbent Liberal party lost numerous seats, possibly up to twenty. (For any Americans reading this, the word ‘Liberal’ has a completely different meaning in Australia to its use in America. The party that calls itself the Liberal party in Australia is a city-based party which spans policy position from the center-right through to deep conservative. It has traditionally claimed to be a “broad church” capable of holding a membership from the socially liberal (in the American sense) but fiscally conservative, through to the conservative-on-everything under one roof. (The expression “broad church” is not actually a religious expression, although it sounds like it. Think of it as “broad tent”). For historical reasons I won’t go into here, Australia has a separate rural-based conservative party, the Nationals, which is more conservative than the Liberal party.) Historically, the Liberals and the Nationals governed in a coalition.

The political spectrum in Australia looks like this: (text continues below diagram) (There’s no significance to the fact that I have two lines with the greens and the national on top of labor and liberal. It’s just a way of showing how the parties can overlap a bit on policy. )

As well as losing seats to the Labor Party, the Liberals also lost 3 or 4 seats to the Greens Party, [edit: the final number was four] and likely several to a group of independents collectively known as the Teals: a reference to the pale greenish-bluish color they used on their signage. [edit: the Teals got 10 seats] The Teal independents were all well educated professional women who had substantial careers outside of politics, and in many cases would normally have belonged to the centrist part of the Liberal party (the palest of those blue bits above).

What happened? After Australia suffered a devastating series of climate related disasters (bush fires and floods, whith the same areas sometimes being flooded twice, just after the first cleanups), many voters turned against the Liberals which have, at different times, been climate deniers, or were seen to be obstructionist feet draggers on climate issues, because they were chained in a coalition with the nationals, who hold some coal mining districts.  At one point the Prime Minister (Scott Morrison) waved a lump of coal around in the chamber, shouting something like ‘Don’t be afraid, it won’t hurt you.” The Liberal Party had also failed to introduce legislation for an anti-corruption commission, and the Liberals had appeared deaf to an outrage about several sexual issues, including sexual harassment and at least one allegation of rape of a staffer inside parliament house itself.
They also ran a woman candidate (Catherine Deves) with an anti-trans obsession in a centrist, socially progressive district, at the insistence of the Prime Minister. The district was the one directly across the Sydney harbor bridge from where the gay pride festival is held. This decision was simply jaw dropping. (It is generally thought that Morrison insisted on Deves as a sop to religious conservatives who thought that some other candidates weren’t conservative enough.) Deves became a constant distraction for the Liberals during the campaign, as more old deleted tweets of hers were discovered. So, innaction on climate, corruption, and sexual harassment had made many voters turn against the Liberals. In the words of one Teal, Zoe Daniels, “The Liberal Party lost its center. It left people like me with no one to vote for.” So when she was approached by some community groups to run as an independent, she agreed.

Because Australia uses preferential voting (what Americans call “rank choice” voting, what Wikipedia calls “instant runoff elections”) in the House of Representatives, and proportional representation in the senate, it may a week or so before the final results are known. However, the Teals, and in a couple of cases, Greens candidates have won in seats traditionally held by centrist members of the Liberal party.
This leaves the remaining portion of the parliamentary Liberal caucus with a deep problem. Before the election, the Liberal parliamentary caucus was only 25 percent women, compared to 40 percent of the Labor  caucus. The Liberals appear to have lost two and perhaps three gay members, one Chinese-Australian, their most prominent Jewish member, and one indigenous member (#). This leaves them with a less diverse party. The next likely leader of the parliamentary Liberal party is Peter Dutton, a man who comes across as humorless, right wing and with zero compassion. Without a complete revamp of the party, I don’t see how they will attract high quality female candidates similar to the Teals, because few professional women will want to stand under their banner. Historically, once in, independents have been hard for the major parties to dislodge.

The irony of this is that the people who have lost their seats are those who are in fact from the socially progressive end of the liberals, but they have suffered from being in the same tent as troglodytes because of the “broad church” doctrine.

When I saw the results come in on election night, and talk turned to who would be the next Liberal Party leader, I literally could not think of a single prominent Liberal Party female. (Their last Deputy Leader, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, left parliament three years ago.) They’ve got women members of parliament, and had some in the Cabinet but they haven’t been in the public eye, and the Prime Minister ran a one-man-band campaign. This turned out to be a disasterous mistake. Morrison , despite being a pentecostal Christian, appears to be a habitual liar. Personally, I wouldn’t believe Scott Morrison if he told me his name was Scott Morrison.

It also means that the incoming labour government will have to deal with a cross bench (*) which may hold the balance of power in the House of Representatives, and certainly will hold the balance of power in the senate, where the Greens will likely have 12 senators and a small non-aligned group, the Jaquie Lambie Network, likely have two. Even if labour get to 76 (a bare majority in the House of Reps) it’s in Labour’s interest for the new Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, to make the Teals look good, and keep them on-side, because if he loses a couple of seats in three year’s time, he’ll need them. Even if labour gets to 76, that’s only a majority of one in a 151 person chamber, and if they then supply the speaker, it’s exactly half of the seats on the floor (75/150) so they would still have to negotiate with the Teals and the Greens. [Edit: Labor got 78, which gives a bare majority after supplying the speaker. After supplying the speaker, it gives them 77/150 on the floor.]

On election night people were saying this is the end of a two party system in Australia (+), but a year after the election there is no sign of a split in the coalition ranks, so that talk now looks a bit premature.

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Footnotes

The Teals ended up with 10 elected members.

(#) Re diversity, the Libs have lost gay members Tim Wilson and Trent Zimmerman, and perhaps Trevor Evans, Chinese Australian Gladys Liu, the Treasurer Josh Freidenberg (Jewish) and indigenous member Ken Wyatt (former minister for indigenous affairs). What remains looks rather wasp-ish.

(*) The term “cross-bench” is used for the independents and greens because the chamber is arranged in a U shape, with the government party on the right side of the speaker, the main opposition party on the left, and the independents in the middle or cross section of the U. The new cross bench in the HoR will be heavilly female.

(+) When people use the term “two party system” in Australia, they are effectively counting the Liberals and Nationals as one party, because they govern in coalition, and don’t run against each other if one has a sitting member in a district. The other party they are counting is Labour.

BOOK REVIEW, ‘Why I am not a feminist, a feminist manifesto.’ By Jessa Crispin. 2017

Jessa Crispin’s book is a provocative eye-opener with a lot of insights into current social conditions.  The title is of course, intentionally misleading. Crispin is a feminist who just doesn’t happen to like a lot of other feminists. But in the end, the book left me unsatisfied because of the lack of any action plan or suggested remedies for the problems she describes.

Crispin starts off with a hefty list of criticisms of current-day feminism, including claims that:

-There has been a focus on getting women into highly paid professional jobs, such as doctors and lawyers, which (she claims) does nothing for the vast bulk of women (pp. 26-30). Above a certain income level, she says, most women can solve their own problems with money, and lose interest in helping women further down the income ladder. Personally I think this a rather broad generalisation. Many people with high income and qualifications donate time to help others, such as lawyers who take pro-bono cases (i.e. do free work) for social causes.

-Western feminists are unconcerned with, or downright condescending and hostile to the things that are important to women in non-western countries, such as hijabs and other cultural traditions (p. 35).

-Some feminists have claimed that whatever a woman chooses, it’s a feminist choice, because feminism is about women having choices. To take a hypothetical example, if you choose to paint your toenails green, it’s a feminist choice, just because it’s a choice. This means (she says) that you can call yourself a feminist, and your actions feminist, with no real intellectual effort to them, and despite your actions posing no threat to the existing social order (p. 19, p. 44).

-“Self empowerment” (she says) is another word for narcissism.

-Feminists have adopted money as a measure of value, and hence applaud women getting into highly paid CEO jobs, despite this doing nothing to change the economic system as a whole. Women with good jobs can now buy their way out of the effects of patriarchy, and in effect, become part of the patriarchy (pp. 55-60). “We have replaced gender and race with money and power; you can buy your position in society rather than be born with the right genetics.” (p. 58) “Women are now active participants in this system and they are benefiting from it.” (p. 55)

-There is a campaign by many feminists to erase radicals like Andrea Dworkin from feminist history, and to make feminism “acceptable” to people who are not attracted to it. The result (she claims) is a bland mishmash of non-threatening pap (pp. 18-20).

-The demonising of other groups serves the principle purpose of protecting the in-group from having to face up to unpleasant aspects of themselves. Atheists can abuse religious people for being irrational (and thus not face up to their own emotionality in other parts of their lives). Americans can demonise Europeans for being weak and unimportant (and thus not face up to America’s lack of success in some matters), women can demonise men for being violent, so as not to have to look at those qualities, and their own capacity to do harm to others,  in themselves (pp. 73-78). I find the idea that the principle purpose of attacks on out-groups is to avoid self-reflection intriguing. I’ve always viewed attacks on out groups as a mechanism for creating in group solidarity, rather than a means to avoid self reflection. I may have been wrong on this.

-Current internet culture, she says,  in which minor disagreements are turned into “attacks” and calls for people to be dismissed from their jobs make debating ideas extraordinarily difficult. “Revenge has become an official part of feminist policy… the longer we stay trapped in this destructive dynamic, the less we are using our energy for something constructive… It’s a convenient outlet, outrage. We use it to avoid the hard work of self-examination.” (pp. 97-98). She criticises feminists who attack other people for using the “wrong vocabulary” when the “right” vocabulary keeps changing every couple of years (p.13).

– As women get into positions of power, society is not fundamentally changing, because most women (she says) are not fundamentally morally better than most men. Women judges jail innocent minority men and poor women just like male judges (p. 57), and “support institutional racism.” This is sometimes an unfair criticism. It’s juries who decide guilt in most criminal cases, and judges are required (at least in Australia) to follow certain sentencing guidelines, when setting jail terms. These guidelines exists to ensure some degree of consistency in sentencing between similar cases, and the gender of the judge should not be a factor in the sentencing.

Crispin’s attitude to men with questions is essentially “piss off”. I don’t have to explain anything to you, don’t email me or ask me questions, and don’t ask your female friends to explain feminist issues to you. Do the work yourselves. On this issue she adopts a slightly similar (but more far extreme) position as the Australian feminist Clementine Ford. (Ford at least holds panel discussions with male guests about the nature of masculinity.) Crispin’s attitude, I think, is counterproductive. Many changes that women have sought over the last 40 years have required legislation. In order to get this, male politicians had to be persuaded to change laws. Male lawyers (initially, they would have been male) in government departments had to draft the text of the proposed anti-discrimination legislation. Male heads of large companies and government departments had to agree to change institutional practices to make workplaces more friendly, (although many workplaces have a long way to go). For feminists to make progress they need to bring some proportion – not all, but some proportion – of the male population with them. In Australia, an average of one woman a week is murdered by her own partner, often just after she leaves him. The problem of domestic violence cannot be fixed without changing the attitudes of men.  Telling men to piss off and figure it out by themselves doesn’t seem like a clever tactic. I have a standing monthly bank donation to an organisation that assists women leaving domestic violence, and I and another ex-Victorian Treasury officer and I have done some statistics based reasearch for a major women’s organisation, but I avoid engaging with people online on any gender-related issue online because of attitudes like this. These are the only people of whom I can say, “I agree with your policy objectives, and I’ll donate to your causes, but I just don’t want to interact with you online.” If I need to discuss some gender related issue that’s new to me, I only do it with women I’ve known face to face for a couple of years. Gender, immigration and the links between politics and religion seem to bring out the worst in online conversations. Others have told me social media like Facebook or forums like substack just aren’t suited to nuanced discussions of contentious issues, and they may be right.

It also seems odd that the book contains no discussion of sexual harassment in the work place or male violence in the home. Given the lag between writing and publishing, the text may have been finalized in 2016.  #Metoo began in October 2017, so I can’t expect the author to deal with that specific movement. But these are  very odd omissions.  My reaction here is probably influenced by the fact that I read the book the week that there had been a case in Australia of a father murdering his three children by dousing them in petrol and setting them on fire in their car, and then killing his separated wife.

Her criticisms of other feminists remind me of a perennial problem in the left: that many people on the left hate each other more than they hate their supposed conservative enemies. (When I was in the ALP 30 years ago, it was a common jokey observation that a factionally committed person often hated the person sitting next to him or her at a branch meeting more than they hated the conservatives.)  Conservatives – especially in the US – seem to be able to band together to resist change, or push their own agendas, far more effectively than people on the left can band together to promote change.                                                                                                                                                                    Finally, Crispin’s book ends with no clear program about what needs to be done next: say the three to five most important goals that feminists should focus on over the next ten years. She talks about the need to ‘tear down the system,’ with no advice as to exactly how this is to be done or what the replacement will look like.  It’s an interesting book, but in the end, it reminds me of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto; a lot of denunciation of the existing system, with no description of what the replacement should actually look like.  

Richard Snow

18 October 2020

A few thoughts about Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian Psychology professor, has become famous recently for his YouTube videos and his opposition to what he called enforced speech in Canadian Bill C18. This post is a reaction to a few aspects of Peterson’s pubic lectures and YouTube videos. It doesn’t claim to be a comprehensive assessment of everything he’s said.

First, the negatives. I don’t like Peterson’s tendency to link ethics with religion, as tho one needs to be religious to have ethics (although he avoids saying this directly).  I also don’t like the overuse of mythology, ancient stories and psychoanalytic archetypes. If I were to edit his book “Twelve Rules” I think I could remove 1/2 of the text without losing any of the meaning.  Nor do I like his rule about “get your own life in order before you try to change the world.” None of us has our own lives totally “in order.” That would prevent any political activism.

Some of his rules are things people should follow: “Tell the truth, or at least stop lying.” “Be precise in your speech.” “Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.”

However, some of the dislike directed at Peterson is directed at him because he correctly describes some findings from psychology that contradict the majority thinking of the last 40 years.

Men and women score differently, on average, for many personality traits:

• Openness (openness to new ideas and experiences, curiosity, being imaginative),
• Conscientiousness (being prepared, organized, efficient, diligent),
• Agreeableness (willingness to compromise, taking other people’s feelings into account, being diplomatic),
• Extraversion (being energetic, outgoing, talkative, seeking company) and
• Susceptibility to negative emotions (especially anxiety, anger, and depression, and mood variability).

Those are referred to as the “Big Five” personality traits.

Men and women also differ on average from each other on a scale of “interest in people vs interest in things.” Women score higher than men in all of these traits. Of course, most of these traits are distributed on a bell curve, so there’s a considerable overlap of two bell curves, one for men and one for women, but with a differing means (average values).

These personal characteristics are a bit like height. Height is a variable you can measure along a scale and put on a graph. Like many qualities it’s distributed like a bell shaped curve. The most common height is at the center, and as you move away from the average height, the number of people at that height starts to drop off, a little, then it drops off rapidly until you only have a small number of people who are very very tall or very very short.

Centre for Disease Control, 2018, Health Statistics No 122

To understand some of the things Peterson says, people need to understand that if you have two bell curves, one to the right of the other, it only takes a small difference at the center to make a very large discrepancy at the extremes in the ratio of people from the two groups who are very very x or very very not x. In the case of height (to take a non-ideological issue), the average female adult in North America is 65 inches tall. The average male is 70 inches. That’s only a difference of 8 percent. There are lots of women taller than some men. The two graphs have a large overlap. But if you move a further 5 inches out from the male average and ask “who is it that taller than 75 inches,” men outnumber women by a large margin. If you move 5 inches to the left of the female average, and ask, “Who is shorter than 60 inches,” it’s almost all women. There is a spectrum, but one spectrum is to the right of the other.

(Looking at the graphs, you find the number of men above 75 inches by looking at the area under the blue curve to the right of the yellow- orange line at 75 inches. The number of women above 75 inches is the area under the red line  to the right of the orange line. For those shorter than 60 inches, you look at the areas under the curve to the left of 60 – the green line.)

This property applies whenever you have two bell curves, one to the right of the other. It doesn’t matter whether you are measuring height, weight, or how far two groups of kids (one older than the other) can throw a tennis ball. A small difference in the average  in the middle produces very large discrepancies in the number of members of the two groups out at the extremes. In psychology tests where people are given chance to cheat in games, men cheat more than women. They also lie about it more than women. Men have, on average less concern for the effect of their actions on others (i.e. are less agreeable.) Who are the people who lie a very very lot, break lots and lots of rules, and really really don’t care about the effect of their action on others? Mostly men. They are the sociopaths (correctly referred to as having anti-social personality disorder). Male sociopaths outnumber women by about 4 to 1.

Men score higher than women on interest in things vs interest in people. Women score the opposite. But who are the people who are very very interested in things not people, or very very interested in people not things? That’s like asking who is very very tall (the right hand end of the axis) or very very short (the left hand end). Who gets the PhDs in psychology in the US? 75 percent women. Who gets  the PhDs in engineering? Mostly men.

Women score higher then men, on average, for agreeableness. Yes, there’s an overlap Yes, there are some men who are more agreeable then some women.  But this time the women’s bell curve is to right of the men’s. So who are the very very agreeable people? Mostly women. Who are the very very disagreeable –  those who like to rock the boat, and will debate with others? Mostly the men. What effect does it have on wage negotiations when professional women are  changing jobs? Or at annual salary reviews? You guessed it. But some people hate  that Peterson says this in public. (Jordan has run classes for professional women on assertiveness training and how to negotiate about salaries. )

But most people have never done a unit of stats. Peterson talks about this, but most people won’t get it because they can’t visualize the graphs. All they hear is “he’s reinforcing stereotypes! He’s talking in binaries!” But some people don’t want to believe that differences between the sexes exist and occur in every society where tests have been done. I think Peterson does a terrible job of explaining  this, especially in TV interviews where you can’t bring in a bunch of graphs and props, and the interviewer often has no statistical training.

Most of have believed that many differences between men and women were socially produced and would be reduced as societies became more gender equal. The interesting findings recently in psychology, first discovered in 2001 by Costa and McRae, is that the difference in average values between men and women for numerous personality variables become bigger, not smaller, in more gender equal societies. This is the reverse of what most of us (including me) have all expected for the last 40 years. In fact several studies using data banks of  hundreds of thousands of people in at least 46 countries since have confirmed that what we expected  is not true. The average difference between men and women on various psychological test gets bigger, not smaller in more gender-equal societies. This is not Jordan Peterson’s research, but I’ve read some of the papers, and he describes them correctly. (Link below.)

Immediately below are two scatterplots of five from the article by Mac Giolla et al,  2018, which is the latest study to confirm the 2001 findings. ).Each scatterplot has a set of light points (females) and dark points (males) with a line of best fit for both. The vertical axis (the first graph shows a score for agreeableness)  is the average score for that personality trait in a country, and the horizontal axis is a measure of gender equality for that country. Each dot is the average score for males or females in that country. As you move from left to right, the lines of best fit for each gender separates, i.e. the average difference between men and women gets greater, not smaller. I can’t lift the graphs one at a time, but here is a screen shot of two. I recommend you look at them in the original article.

Source: Mac Giolla 2018

The only two personality characteristics where women and men get closer to each other in more gender equal societies are interest in casual sex, and belief that material assets in a prospective mate are unimportant. Women move towards the men’s average position in these two characteristics out of 26 that have been studied (see links below).

Some feminists (perhaps equality feminists  as opposed to difference feminists – link below), aren’t going to like being told that a core belief about social conditioning that we’ve all held for the last 40 years is wrong. However I’ve not found any papers in psychology that contradict these findings.

Many people don’t like Peterson pointing out that in more gender equal societies, there are a smaller percentage of women doing STEM degrees than in less gender equal societies. (See below: the graph with a measurement of gender equality for different societies on the vertical axis and the proportion of women in stem degree on the x axis. Source in footnotes).

To the best of my knowledge, there is no dispute about the data. In less gender equal societies doing a STEM degree may be a leg up the income ladder for girls, but in more gender equal societies you don’t need to study something not in accordance with your real interests to be economically secure. (Some people reading this won’t like what I’ve just said, but take a look at the data. Link to an article which explains it more is below.) Essentially Peterson says that if you remove barriers to girls studying what they want (and he says you should) you shouldn’t then be surprised if still more women do psychology or biology and more men study engineering and the non-biological sciences. He says that this is not a problem that needs fixing, people are simply choosing what they are actually interested in. Some viewers don’t want to believe that there are any actually differences between the sexes.

A lot of the literature on gender difference from medical science and psychology needs some understanding of stats to read correctly. However, at my local university one can do sociology and gender studies without taking a single unit of stats. This shocked me when I was told this by a fourth years honors student in sociology, who told me that “bell curves are highly problematic, you know.” When I asked her who said this, she replied “Lots of people.” This is almost shoot-yourself-in the-head- level stupid. If this is typical of gender studies students in other universities (and look at Melbourne and Monash Uni’s website for gender studies  shows no compulsory stats) then we have a problem. (I think, by the way this is also a problem with the Politics Philosophy and Economics degree at my local university. Two units of stats would be good, because if you work as an economist, you’ll be using a lot of stats generated by other people.)

Peterson also says that to say you are a Marxist should be as shameful as saying you are a Nazi, as Marxists governments have killed more people that Nazism last century. (The average estimates I’ve seen online seem to be about 100 million for Marxists governments, taking into account all the revolutions, purges, pogroms, gulags and artificially created famines. The average estimate for the Nazis is a total of 70 million for WW2.) Some people on the left might find this offensive.

Peterson often refers to “Radical feminists,” without specifying whether he means this term in the sense that it is used in feminist literature: radical feminists as opposed to liberal feminists or socialist feminists etc, or whether he means very lefty shouty feminists that he might encounter on campus (who sometimes disrupt his public talks. In a TV interview this might be natural, since the time (and the interest of the viewers) may not allow for spelling out these differences. However in his recorded lectures he could (and I think should) specify this so we could better understand who he is criticising. This is a serious omission for a guy who says “be precise in your speech.”

Peterson also claims that there’s no such thing as a real atheist. He seems to hold that people who say they are atheists really secretly have some concept of a god, or they couldn’t be moral.  “Without God everything is permitted.” I think this is nonsense. people follow moral rules for two reasons: one is that societies need a certain set of rules in order for the society to function. Don’t steal, don’t murder, pay  your debts, keep promises. Without rules like this you don’t have a society. The second source of ethics is empathy. I don’t want to live in a society where murder, rape or torture are common because I can imagine that these things cause great suffering, and  they repulse me. Parents teach their children ethics by saying, “How would you like it if someone did that to you?”

I observe that most denunciations of Peterson are not very sophisticated. The critic merely says, “He’s a crock,” without tackling any particular statement of his. This tendency to “papal pronouncements” is unfortunate. One female friend has criticized Peterson because he criticizes feminism, but fails to offer any suggestions about how to make it better (given that most of would agree feminism has legitimate goals.) This seems a valid criticism.

Peterson spent about 20 years studying authoritarian personalities and political systems, especially Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. He dislikes identity politics, because it leads to tribalism, and in his words, “tribalism never has a good outcome.”

I also think that we should treat people’s opinions as special only when they speak about things they have some specialist knowledge of. Actors and actresses are not experts on politics, and psychologist are not experts on climate change or economics. People can express any opinion they like, but we have no obligation to treat their opinions as having any special status.

Some of the dislike of Peterson is a  (in my view) a legitimate reaction to the use of old mythology and symbolism that most people don’t appreciate. Some of the reaction against him is a reaction to the fact that he criticizes the radical left more than the radical right. This may be because his job as an academic has been made more difficult by the campus left where he teaches: we tend to attack those who attack us. Some is a reaction to the fact that he’s saying some things people just don’t want to hear, but which are based on research that has now been replicated several times. And some is based on the fact that a lot of people just don’t understand the stats.

Clearly, women face real discrimination in the workplace, sexual harassment and male violence. These things are real and should be  fought against. I admire the women who have come out against Harvey Weinstein. But if all these things were fixed, and you still found that more women were doing psychology and more men were doing engineering,  Peterson says don’t be surprised. It may just be people doing what they actually want.

Richard Snow

Updated 14 January 2012.

READING

A video of Jordan Peterson at the Oxford Union. This video is a good place to start if you don’t know much about Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bRDbFU_lto

A link on women in STEM degrees, and one source of the graph above: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/02/does-gender-equality-result-in-fewer-female-stem-grads

The original 2001 study that differences in personality measures get wider in more gender equal societies:  Costa, P Terracciano, A and McCrae, R 2001, ‘Gender Differences in Personality Traits Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 81 pp 322–331

A psychology journal article on the differences in psychology tests between men and women: Giolla Erik Mac and Kajonius Petri J. 2018 ‘Sex differences in personality are larger in gender equal countries: Replicating and extending a surprising finding’, International Journal of Psychology, 11 September 2018 https://doi.org/10.1002/ijop.12529

The most recent (2018) study on sex differences in more gender equal societies: Mac Giolla Erik and Kajonius Petri J. 2018 ‘Sex differences in personality are larger in gender equal countries: Replicating and extending a surprising finding’, International Journal of Psychology, 11 September 2018 https://doi.org/10.1002/ijop.12529

Personality differences between girls and boys emerge about age 12 and assume their adult values by age 17. De Bolle, Marleen, 2015, “The Emergence of Sex Differences in Personality Traits in Early Adolescence: A Cross-Sectional, Cross-Cultural Study” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol. 108, No. 1, 171-185

A newspaper article which discusses the topic of gender differences being wider in more gender equal societies, without the maths: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/patriarchy-paradox-how-equality-reinforces-stereotypes-96cx2bsrp

An article on the trend to women choosing not to study stem in more gender equal societies (without any complicated maths): Khazan, Olga, 2018, ‘The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM’ The Atlantic, Feb 18, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/

Women with Turner’s Syndrome (a missing second X chromosome, sometimes called 45 X0s,) tend to have higher extraversion and lower negative emotionality than normal 46XX women.   Boman, Ulla 2006, Personality traits in women with Turner syndrome, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, Vol. 47, pp. 219–223 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9450.2006.00510.x).

Females with Congenital Andrenal Hyperplasia (CAH: excessive sensitivity to male sex hormones in the womb) are considerably more interested than are females without CAH in male-typed toys, leisure activities, and occupations, from childhood through adulthood. Beltz, Adriene “Gendered occupational interests: Prenatal androgen effects on psychological orientation to Things versus People” (also reviewed in Blakemore et al., 2009; Cohen-Bendahan et al., 2005); adult females with CAH also engage more in male-typed occupations than do females without CAH (Frisén et al., 2009)

Identical twins tend to vote the same way (more so than non-identical same-sex twins) indicating a genetic influence on the attributes that underpin voting behaviour: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/15/do-our-genes-tell-us-how-to-vote-study-of-twins-says-they-might    The “big five personality traits” are heritable (i.e. can be inherited): Funk Carolyn L.  2012 “Genetic and Environmental Transmission of Political Orientations Political Psychology,” doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9221.2012.00915.x

Personality traits influence choice of fields of study.  Vedel, Anna 2016, “Big Five personality group differences across academic majors: A systematic review” Personality and Individual Differences, Vol. 92 pp 1–10.

A link to a summary of mine of some articles from psychology on gender differences.

https://richardsnowwriter.com/…/do-differences-between…/

Wikipedia’s article on Difference feminism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_feminism

Wikipedia’s article on Equality Feminism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equality_feminism

[1] I can’t give an overview of different strands of feminism in this short post. However, Wikipedia’s article on Equality Feminism claims that “Equality feminist theory is the extension of the equality of the male and female into theoretical and philosophical fields of thought. At its core, equality feminist theory advocates for the equal standing of both men and women in terms of desires, wants, goals, and achievement. Thus, from this viewpoint, the basis of human nature outside of culture is androgynous, neutral, and equal.” [Emphasis added] In its article on Difference Feminism, Wikipedia states that difference feminism “holds that there are differences between men and women but that no value judgement can be placed upon them and both genders have equal moral status as persons.”

Do differences between men and women disappear in more gender equal societies?

SOME NOTES ON MAINSTREAM PSYCHOLOGY STUDIES ON GENDER DIFFERENCES
There has been discussion in some media articles recently about gender differences between men and women, and whether those differences are inherent or created by society. I’ve tried to summarise below the evidence from psychology about which differences between men and women are consistent across cultures, and which persist or are increased in more gender equal societies.
Below is a link to a journal article by Mac Giolla which takes measurements of personality differences in men and women in several characteristics (agreeableness, contentiousness, openness to new experiences, extraversion, and neuroticism, the latter defined as variability of moods and tendency to experience anxiety, depression, and frustration ) – qualities that are commonly used in psychology descriptions of personality, and are referred to as the “big 5.” If you scroll down to Figure 2 in that article, you’ll see five scatterplots. Each scatterplot has a set of light points (females) and dark points (males) with a line of best fit for both. The vertical axis is the average score for that personality trait in a country, and the horizontal axis is a measure of gender equality for that country. Each dot is the average score for males or females in that country. As you move from left to right, the line of best fit for each gender separates, i.e. the average difference between men and women gets greater, not smaller.
I can’t lift the graphs one at a time, but here is a screen shot of two:

From Mac Giolla 2018.
A paragraph in the results says, “The results indicate that women are typically more worried (Neuroticism), social (Extraversion), inquisitive (Openness), caring (Agreeableness) and responsible (Conscientiousness) than men, and that these differences are larger in more gender equal countries.” (Emphasis added.)
This is the reverse to what most of us have been led to expect over the last 40 years. Most of us have been lead to believe that personality differences are bought about by social conditioning, and if we lived in a more gender equal society, these differences would be reduced. This is not what the data shows.
The discussion shows correlations between higher gender equality in a country and increases in the differences between the sexes in the relevant variable. The “mean” is another word for arithmetic average. The degree of correlation is shown by “r” where zero would mean no correlation and 1 means a perfect correlation.
The article by Khazan (2018) includes a scatterplot of women in STEM graduates vs gender equality for several countries.

The more gender equal the society, the fewer women take STEM degrees. Why? She says that one possible reason is that in very gender unequal societies, taking a STEM degree is a sure path to a higher income for girls, whereas “Countries with the highest gender equality tend to be welfare states, [with] a high level of social security… It’s not that gender equality discourages girls from pursuing science. It’s that it allows them not to if they’re not interested.”
The article by Brooks summarises a book by David Schmidt, a professor of evolutionary biology. Schmidt compares cross-country data on gender differences for 28 characteristics. In 20 of the characteristics, the differences between men and women grow bigger in more equal societies. Two characteristics narrow in more equal societies (the tendency to value resources in a mate, which become less pronounced for women in more equal societies, and interest in casual sex, which increases for women in more equal societies, both bringing women closer to men.) Six characteristics don’t change. Brooks says, “Likewise, men score higher than women for the “Dark Triad” traits of Machiavellianism, Narcissism and Psychopathy. Gender equity has the salutary effect of reducing each of these three rather nasty traits, but it does so more for women than for men, resulting in wider sex differences.”
The article by De Bolle looks at personality differences between boys and girls in 23 cultures. The differences are consistent across cultures and emerge around age 12 and converge to adult levels around age 17. The differences emerge around puberty.
Overall, moving to more gender equal societies doesn’t reduce differences between men and women. It increases them. This is hard to understand if differences are produced by ‘the patriarchy’ and social conditioning. On the other hand, it’s easy to understand if there are actual differences between men and women that incline them towards different fields of work or study. More gender equal societies are usually higher income societies, with social safety nets, which means there is a lower cost to doing what you actually want to do.
Now to anticipate some objections. Someone is likely to say, “These are only averages, it makes it sound like all women are more agreeable than all men.” No it doesn’t. Take height (and I’m using height because no one has an ideological position on height, so it’s easy to explain something about graphs without an ideological battle.) We all know that men are on average taller than women. We all know that there is a spread of heights around the average. The next diagram shows the average heights for men and women in the US. Men have an average height of 70 inches with a standard deviation of 4 inches. Women average 65 inches with a standard deviation of  4 inches. Where the two graphs cross at 67-68 inches, there are roughly equal numbers of men and women. But look what happens as you go out to the right or left.

If you have two groups of people where the average measurement is different, and the standard deviation (the degree of spread) is even roughly similar, out at the far left and far right of the graph, there will be a large discrepancies between how many members of each group have (or lack) that quality to a very strong degree. At and above 75 inches, tall men vastly outnumber tall women . At and below 60 inches, short women vastly outnumber short men, by the same margin. This will be similar in anything that can be measured along a scale where the two groups differ on the average and which have the usual bell shaped curve. In the case of height, an eight percent difference in the middle (5 inches over 65) results in differences of about 19:1 in the ratio of tall men (over 75 inches) to tall women. If you ask “who is shorter than 60 inches, women outnumber men by about 19 to 1. (You find the ratio of how many men or women are above 75 measurement by look at the area under the graph to the right of the line at 75 inches. You find the number of men or women shorter than 60 inches by looking at the area under the graph to the left of 60 inches.)

This has implications for other traits where men and women differ at the average. If men are on average more narcissistic than women, the will be many more very narcissistic men than very narcissistic women.
Evolution may have selected for women to be nurturing, since that maximizes the chance of a child surviving.  But it means that there will be large differences in the number of women and men who are very nurturing or very indifferent to the needs of others. This is not the same as saying, “all women are more nurturing than all men.” There is a spectrum for both groups , and a difference at the centre means a large difference in the numbers who are very very x (nuturing) or very very not x.

The fact that a difference  exists  doesn’t tell you why the difference exists. For that you have to go elsewhere. One aspect in which men and women differ is “orientation to things” versus “orientation to people.” Exposure to androgen – a male hormone – in the womb (because of a medical condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia  or CAH)) makes girl foetuses become girls with a higher than average orientation to things, so there appears to be a hormonal basis for this difference (Beltz 2011). As Beltz says:

Consistent with hormone effects on interests, females with CAH are considerably more interested than are females without CAH in male-typed toys, leisure activities, and occupations, from childhood through adulthood (reviewed in Blakemore et al., 2009; Cohen-Bendahan et al., 2005); adult females with CAH also engage more in male-typed occupations than do females without CAH (Frisén et al., 2009)

If there are some jobs which call for a certain quality or aptitude, and that characteristic has a different mean (average) for men and women, there will be a large differences in the number of people who have (or lack) that quality to a strong degree (i.e., out at the left and right of the curve). If men score higher on “interest in things” and women score higher in “interest in people,” and there are some jobs which suit people who have that quality to a strong degree, (e.g., engineering vs child care or social work) then men more will be attracted to some jobs and women to others. It’s not a binary, and no sensible person would claim it is. You can (and should) remove obstacles to girls pursuing engineering (if they want) but creating a more gender equal society doesn’t bring about equality of outcomes.

In the case of many jobs, differences in personality attributes between men and women doesn’t really matter. Most jobs don’t require you to have some personality characteristic to an extreme degree. But some do. Engineers tend to be very interested in things, rather than people. Social work, psychology and medicine tend to attract people who are more interested in people rather than things. (You’d hope so, right?) For a discussion of how different personality types are attracted to different university courses see Vedel 2016, or Ali, which is a non-mathematical discussion of Vedel. Law and economics appear to attract people who score low on trustworthiness and concern for others.
To talk as though apparent differences between men and women are “binaries” which we should reject because ‘binaries are wrong’ is to criticise a straw man. Nobody in psychology claims they are binaries. However even when there is a large overlap, there will be an imbalance in the number of men or women exhibiting a characteristic to a high degree. There is no contradiction between saying that men and women can both be narcissistic (or agreeable or tall) and saying that there are gender difference in whether those qualities are exhibited  very strongly i.e. i the number of people out at the edge..
Costa, Terracciano and Mcrae (2001) summarize differences in gender across 26 cultures in surveys of 23,000 people.
To sum up: men and women score differently in various aspects of personality. Those differences appear to be consistent across numerous countries and cultures. The qualities involved are not binaries. They are measured along a scale. The differences are greater, not less, in more gender equal societies. This is the opposite of what most of us have believed for the last 40 years. If patriarchal oppression makes girls be more agreeable, contentious etc, it is unclear why the differences between men and women would be greater in more gender equal societies.

There is no contradiction between saying “men and women can both have quality x” and saying that “there are many more men or women who are very very x, or very very not x.” Gender equal societies reduce the disadvantages to women pursuing classes or jobs that actually interest them, so if a job attracts or requires a very strong degree of some quality, the sexes may, and do, select differently.
Richard Snow.
14 Oct 2018

Ali, Aftab, 2016, ‘New study finds link between ‘Big Five’ personality traits and which subject students study at university’ The Conversation, June 21, 2016 https://www.independent.co.uk/student/student-life/Studies/new-study-finds-link-between-big-five-personality-traits-and-which-subject-students-study-at-a6846996.html#r3z-addoor [This article is a discussion of Brooks, Rob, 2016, ‘Gender equity can cause sex differences to grow bigger’]

Beltz, Adriene et al, 2011, ‘Gendered Occupational Interests: Prenatal Androgen Effects on Psychological Orientation to Things Versus People’ Hormones and Behavior Volume 60, Issue 4, September 2011, Pages 313-317 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3166361/

Charles, Maria, and Bradley, Karen. 2009 ‘Indulging our gendered selves? Sex segregation by field of study in 44 countries.’ American Journal of Sociology Vol. 114 pp. 924-976. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19824299

Costa, P Terracciano, A and McCrae, R 2001, ‘Gender Differences in Personality Traits Across Cultures: Robust and Surprising Findings’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Volume 81 pp 322–331

De Bolle, et al, 2015, ‘The Emergence of Sex Differences in Personality Traits in Early Adolescence: A Cross-Sectional, Cross-Cultural Study, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, ‘Volume 108(1), January 2015, p 171–185

Giolla Erik Mac and Kajonius Petri J. 2018 ‘Sex differences in personality are larger in gender equal countries: Replicating and extending a surprising finding’, International Journal of Psychology, 11 September 2018 https://doi.org/10.1002/ijop.12529

Khazan, Olga, 2018, ‘The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM’ The Atlantic, Feb 18, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more-gender-equality-the-fewer-women-in-stem/553592/

Vedel, Anna, 2016, ‘Big Five personality group differences across academic majors: A systematic review’ Personality and Individual Differences Volume 92, April 2016, Pages 1-10 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886915300921?via%3Dihub

A newspaper article which discusses the topic of gender differences being wider in more gender equal societies, without the maths:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/patriarchy-paradox-how-equality-reinforces-stereotypes-96cx2bsrp

New article on why the US can probably never be invaded

I’ve just added a new article to “New International” magazine on why the US could never be invaded. The reasons may not be what you think:

https://newinternational.net/2018/04/02/could-the-us-ever-be-invaded/

Are social connections a form of corruption in China?

Interesting article hear by DR Michael Baron, who obtained his PHD at Curtain University and now lectures in Businessat  Charles Sturt University on how he believes westerners misunderand the use of  ‘social connections” in China.

https://newinternational.net/2018/02/10/guanxi-why-we-should-try-to-understand-the-chinese-way-of-life-rather-than-criticize-it/

 

 

New online magazine launched

I have launched a new online magazine, New International Weekly, with articles on:

The dynamics of modern sea piracy

 

 

Australia’s tortured path to same-sex marriage  

 

 

How is Japan reacting to the rise of China?

 

 

 

Will Japan renounce its pacifist constitution?

 

 

 

 

 

test

Where Does Moral Thinking Come From?

Jonathan Haidt tackles a big question in his book ‘The Righteous Mind.’ Haidt, a psychology professor who has done stints as a speech writer for democratic politicians, looks at why democrat and republican voters in the US seem never to agree on almost any moral issue.

After doing extensive opinion polling and interviewing voters to get their reactions to hypothetical moral situations, he finds that people seem to take five factors into account in forming moral judgements. These are: (i) Is anyone injured by an action? People generally avoid doing harm to others, and see it as wrong. (ii) Fairness. – not cheating, not taking more than you are entitled to.  (iii)  Loyalty to a group. This comes from our early origins as tribal creatures.  People who show disloyalty to  organisations, sporting teams, the army or their country are often condemned. (iv) Respect for legitimate authority. (v) Showing respect for ‘sacred’ objects, such as national flags, or religious objects, and avoiding ‘dirty’ or contaminated things.  A person who places a lot of weight on this factor will disapprove of burning national flags, and, for example, disapprove of the photograph ‘piss Christ’, by Andres Serrano, which shows a crucifix in a jar of urine.  More details are available here  here  here.

Interestingly, when Haidt asks American voters to rate themselves on a seven point scale where 1 represents a very liberal (in the American sense of progressive or democratic voter ) and 7 represents very conservative, he finds an interesting result. Voters who rate themselves as 1 on that scale use criteria (i) and (ii) in their reasoning, but give almost no weight to the other three. And as you move across the political spectrum, the emphasis on  the last three factors rises steadily People who rate themselves as very conservative give all five factors roughly equal weight.

Some of this jells with other things I’ve read elsewhere. For example, conservatives are usually strongly opposed to pardons to people like Chelsea Manning who leaked documents from the army. This relates to criteria of loyalty and respect for authority. I’ve read that having strong reactions of disgust at photographs of ‘unclean’ objects such as meat with maggots, or a person treading in dog poo is a strong predictor of voting conservative – this relates to the criteria about avoiding things that are seen as disgusting.

Haidt claims one reason why democrat politicians fail to appeal to conservative voters is that their speeches and advertisements only ever appeal to criteria (i) and (ii), and leave out the other two. He tried to persuade democrat politicians to include more of the last three factors in their speeches, with limited success. Progressive and conservative voters are, in a very real sense, speaking a different languages.

Haidt also discusses the role of religions in moral thinking. He believes they act as reinforcers of moral values by giving  a stamp of approval to rules that promote social cohesion, such as don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie or cheat, or commit adultery, and so on. All societies have these rules, because you need them to keep harmony ain a primitive society that relies on group harmony to be able to function. All religions promote these rules because in Haidts view, that’s what religions are for.

It’s an interesting read, and I strongly recommend it.