Ezra Klein asks a really interesting question: a lot of research suggests that conservatives have a heightened sense that the world is dangerous, and a lot of the difference between liberals and conservatives comes down to this basic disjoint in our perception of the danger of reality. So why is it that conservatives tend to be less worried about the dangers of COVID, and liberals are the ones preparing to hide in their homes for as long as possible?
Unfortunately, it being Vox, while the question is interesting the answers pursued can be described as "Three theories of why conservatives are wrong." These are:
1) Liberals are acting out of care, as is their core value, while their fear is an expression of superior intellectual understanding of the science; conservatives, though panicked, are engaged in psychological transference of this panic to the economy because they are too afraid or too inferior to grapple honestly with the research.
2) Conservatives are expressing their fear through intensified partisan obedience to their leader, Donald Trump, who would like to downplay the virus.
3) Conservatives are showing fear, but are expressing it through their usual racism toward foreigners/outsiders rather than, like liberals, a wise and scientific approach to epidemiology.
Perhaps in some cases? But surely there are theoretical models that don't require assuming that conservatives are wrong.
1) Economic pressures differ: conservatives are much more likely to be small business owners or employees, whereas liberals are over-represented in government, academia, the press, and the tech sector; also, among workers likely to draw unemployment benefits. Conservatives are thus more likely to be feeling intense economic pressure without help. For liberals, a combination of continued pay and/or the ability to work from home is making 'stay at home forever' a more plausible option.
2) Liberals also feel partisan loyalties, especially to oppose Donald Trump. As we have seen elsewhere, especially in the Russia Collusion hoax, this can lead them to accept implausible storylines that might harm the hated enemy. They tend to see this as an expression of 'care,' because they view Trump as especially uncaring; but it is also an expression of injustice, as it leads them to do things like persist in calling people "traitors!" when in fact they have been shown to be falsely accused. There is no reason to think liberal partisanship is more rational nor more scientific.
3) Conservatives do tend to perceive threats more intensely, but they also tend to build their lives around modes of defending against those threats so they can be free, e.g., learning to carry a handgun and use it safely and effectively. In studying this threat, many conservatives have decided it really isn't an unmanageable danger: for example, the risk of death to a man of my age appears to be around 0.001%, concentrated on those with underlying health conditions that I don't have. While I want to take steps to avoid massive viral load exposure and/or the danger of carrying the disease to someone more vulnerable, I think it's both rational and scientific to learn from the data we've seen that this is a risk I can afford to run.
There may be other theories as well. Perhaps there are even theories in which neither side is 'right.'
23 comments:
Maybe I'm exactly as afraid of COVID-19 as the average liberal, but I don't think there's a way to make the whole world absolutely safe. In fact, I think some steps to increase one kind of safety only decrease another kind of safety.
I don't think it's the government's role to keep passing laws until they eliminate all risk in my life, even if it could, which it can't. I'm not eager to see the whole world turned into the kind of playground where, for safety's sake, at first you can't play on any of the most fun structures, and soon you can't play on any at all.
I thought of a ‘neither side is wrong’ scenario: we’re experiencing different risks. I was talking to a friend in NYC last night, where they’ve had 700+ deaths a day. We’ve had one total in this whole county.
Rural life is inherently less risky here. Conservatives are often more likely to choose a rural life.
Good answer, Tex. I was thinking something similar.
I would suggest that people who hold liberal views are more afraid because they perceive the COVID crisis as requiring a greater degree of central coordination than they see the government providing or as capable of providing. Conservatives are more comfortable with making the assumption that people will act in self-defensive ways, i.e. staying out of crowded places, and that private initiative will fill gaps if given incentives and not roadblocks.
Neither side is 100% right. Non-N95 masks don't do much good unless they are widely worn so some central direction to encourage masking wearing is required. Ineffective allocations of resources is a real problem when snap decisions are made centrally, such as the effort to build ventilators that turned out to be both surplus to requirements and not particularly useful when we probably should have put that effort into developing testing supplies.
That last is a point we made here at the time. Industry leaders are better choices to make decisions about how many ventilators to build because they understand the opportunity costs. It’s exactly the kind of question that centrally planned economies get wrong.
I think there's another difference. I'm very good in fluid environments, of figuring things out on my own, on the fly. In my experience, so are most Conservatives, whereas the liberals of my acquaintance generally see Government as the responsible entity.
Figure it out on our own--leave it to Government to (re)solve.
Self reliance--reliance on Government.
Which goes directly, and on a short path, to equal opportunity vs equal outcomes.
Eric Hines
Viewing the world as a dangerous place means one has to develop methods of assessing and dealing with risk. Otherwise one would be paralyzed with fear all the time. Is that what we are seeing? The young healthy people wearing their useless homemade masks and staring at the world with worried eyes and reporting their neighbors? Never having worried about anything real, just a lot of abstractions like global warming and obscure injustices, all of a sudden they are confronted with a real, albeit minor, threat. And they don't have any experience weighing the risk.
1) Liberals are acting out of care, as is their core value, while their fear is an expression of superior intellectual understanding of the science; conservatives, though panicked, are engaged in psychological transference of this panic to the economy because they are too afraid or too inferior to grapple honestly with the research.
Over the years, I have observed many politicians and "experts" with Ph.Ds. make easily refutable statements on Latin America- an issue I am fairly knowledgeable about. Basically I dig for data.
As a result, I laid low and accumulated data on the pandemic- about which previously knew little.
While there are innumerate people throughout the political spectrum, I suspect that there are more on the left side. I looked at daily deaths and daily cases, and made several conclusions. 1) As new cases are to a degree a function of testing, one should not pay a lot of attention to them. 2) daily deaths have a lot of fluctuation through the week- generally dropping on the weekends- it makes more sense to look at 7-day averages (some call them rolling averages.)
The 7-day average peaked on April 15-21, at 2,208 deaths. In nearly a month, to 14-20 May, the 7-day average has fallen 39%, to 1,351 deaths.
Selective 7-day average of COVID-19(Winnie the Flu) deaths
15-21 April 2,208
22-28 April 1,961
29 Apr-5 May 1,858
6-12 May 1,632
13-19 May 1,402
14-20 May 1,351
Those numbers tell me it is time to ease up, Gretchen.
Regarding the "superior intellectual understanding of science" that liberals claim, this is just one more example of an ignoramus condescending, which is my decades-long experience of liberals. And a primary reason why I left the left.
Liberals "acting out of care." Tom Lehrer had something to say about that.
We are the Folk Song Army
Everyone of us CARES
We're against poverty, war, and injustice,
Unlike the rest of you squares.
Corona virus USA
New York and Pennsylvania are experiencing out of proportion death rates with COVID-19 precisely because of policies enacted by their Governors to force nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients. A move that (while not provably intentional) put the most at-risk population squarely in the greatest amount of danger for infection and re-transmission. Florida, a state with both more population and higher populations of elderly residents made the opposite ruling forbidding COVID-positive patients to be accepted at nursing homes, and Florida has MUCH lower infection and death rates.
I will not accuse the northern Governors of trying to kill more people, I think that's overheated rhetoric. But their completely insane decision to force the one type of location that most obviously should NOT be exposed to COVID-positive patients to accept them was (at my most generous) an idiotic bungle of the highest order. Literally there cannot have been one public health official worth a tinker's damn who could not have forseen the outcome of such a decision.
Otherwise one would be paralyzed with fear all the time. Is that what we are seeing? The young healthy people wearing their useless homemade masks and staring at the world with worried eyes and reporting their neighbors?
Dan Crenshaw's Fortitude talks about this, among other things.
Eric Hines
The north is not trying anything. They are under authority. They have their orders. This is war after all.
Raven, i did call demoncrsts turning their neighbors in. Just was 2007 to 2015
Perhaps one element is that conservatives tend to take a more traditional view of life and faith ("no one gets out of here alive" among other things), and that makes them more aware of the secondary effects of the lock-downs (there are some people ill or sick unto death, but my neighbors' kids are running out of food and we need to do something) as compared to progressives (this is deadly and we need the government to do something before we can)?
That's a very short-hand version of what would probably be a long, meandering post over on my blog (but not this week. This week is sorting out someone else's in-house gradebook program, textbook inventory, and other things.)
LittleRed1
"Literally there cannot have been one public health official worth a tinker's damn who could not have forseen the outcome of such a decision."
Wouldn't that rise to the level of reckless endangerment or criminal negligence?
I think all of you have hit on things that all contribute to the dynamic. Good points.
Left the hardware store an couple hours ago, the clerk was mentioning a customer who was complaining about the other customers not wearing masks.
This is like some sort of mentally ill control fantasy. Everyone has to conform to the diktat of the insane. Reading of all the odd bans and orders and countermanding instructions, I am reminded, and to my chagrin cannot remember who said it (Dalrymple?) that propaganda was not so much designed to influence behavior, as to force normal humans to act and accept things which they KNEW to be irrational, so as to break down their morale. Certainly the weird strictures the state gov's have issued fall into that realm.
Raven, it's more like the armageddon/prophecy talk about separating the chaff from the wheat, the goats from the sheep.
People who are not mature enough spiritually, will be downgraded or they will repeat the grade. In order to graduate, requires certain things, such as mastering or learning lessons in life. The purpose of the DS is to keep people from graduating, thus keeping them enslaved in the "school" that has special rules.
Just a minor separation like a political disagreement, does not qualify for a divine prophecy or message. Human politics are of little interest to the sons and daughters of god.
Earlier, when you posted about dangerous activities that lead to great memories, I had the thought that doing things like that give you a better risk assessment capability - where those who remain safely tucked away somewhere don't develop that.
Would independent minded individuals be more apt to try out things on their own and develop this?
Well that was the issue we were debating. Does practice build skill at crossing dark forests? Or did you just get lucky, and mistake that for experience you could rely upon?
It was interesting to see the dilemma posed as a question of avoiding discrimination against COVID patients who wanted to enter a nursing home--as if they would not just as soon have stayed in the hospital, and as if the movement were initiated by them instead of by hospitals who wanted to free up beds. At first I assumed the hospitals were just afraid of not having enough bed for needier brand-new patients, a worthy enough goal, but then there were ugly stories that the hospitals' real motive was to ditch low-paying Medicaid patients into nursing homes. When the reasons for these policies become murky enough, it's harder to discount the nastier motives attributed to them. It's hard to take seriously the idea that Cuomo or his minions genuinely pushed this incredibly dangerous policy in order to avoid discriminating against COVID-positive patients.
At a minimum, if patients needed to be moved to nursing care from hospitals, the nursing homes should have been given time and resources to send up isolation wards.
conservatives tend to take a more traditional view of life and faith
Yup. Understanding transcendence correctly--and that there is a meaning to living that is NOT materialistic in the broadest sense--is something many (not all) Conservatives understand and accept.
Hospital workers in large urban areas are disproportionately liberal, so I don't think "fear" is a good characterisation of their attitude, at least. That language is creeping in even here.
There is likely a rural/urban, conservative/liberal correlation in the C19 beliefs, but I'm not sure we can call either the driver of the other. If the risk really is reduced in less densely-populated areas, then it isn't really courage to go out more or be in favor of opening your area, it is simply an assessment of risk. When one goes out and sees more people, one is more likely to see some being complete jerks, same as on the highways.
Hospital workers in large urban areas are disproportionately liberal, so I don't think "fear" is a good characterisation of their attitude, at least. That language is creeping in even here.
It's not clear what 'fear' means phenomenologically in this political psychology context; it's just noted as a motivating factor, rather than a description of one's felt mental state. One is motivated by fear/concern/awareness-of-threat, another person is not so motivated; whether the motivated person is cringing in fear or rationally thinking through a response to the concern is not spelled out.
The point is that it's usually thought to be a motivating factor for conservatives, and yet here it seems the other way around. So you have the usual alternatives that you have in psychology: assert that the hypothesis is really true, and the person who appears not motivated by fear is really employing a defense mechanism like repression or projection; assert that the hypothesis is true, and the fear is exactly what is manifesting the apparently non-fear-motivated response; or try to explain why the hypothesis (usually true!) might not be holding in this case.
You could also throw out the hypothesis, which is what we would do if a hypothesis didn't pan out in say physics. "Well, maybe those models weren't really true after all." That's not on the table in the Vox piece, any more than a model in which the conservatives aren't wrong (and, usually, inferior and/or wicked).
I think my favorite of the left-favoring interpretations is a variation on hypothesis-affirming-with-an-exception. ‘Of course we are motivated by fear in a pandemic! That’s only rational. Conservatives are just usually more motivated by fear because they’re afraid of stupid things, like home invasions and armed robbery. But when the danger is real, of course the more rational people will be more motivated by fear.’
The psychology argument is that the conservative approach survives just because it provides an evolutionary advantage, though. I’m not sure the hypothesis can hold up if it turns out that the extra motivation only exists when dangers aren’t real. What evolutionary advantage is gained by being fearful in good times, and it when things are really bad?
On a ironic note, I am that guy you saw on the aircraft a year ago, the sole white male wearing a mask on the flight. The guy who always washes his hands on returning home from shopping, and avoids buffet counters.
I don't do a thing different than normal, I don't wear a mask out and about because there is no risk to speak of in the open. Yet they, the masked and fearful, think I am reckless. And their masks! You have seen them, about as effective as a colander! Even IF the idea was worthwhile, the implementation is childishly foolish. The damned things are not protective gear, they are a talisman. Read, you idiots! Do the math! Yikes. Friday. Time for a drink.
Prepare for the second wave hit. Analysis of celestial fate points to before sep 13 2020.
The utopia requires humanity to repent. Which requires everyone to see what they face. The ddarkness. Hearing it from random people online like y is not enough.
Post a Comment