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(study) Left views emotions as feature of rationality; conservatives view it as a bug

#1
C C Offline
Liberals view emotions as a feature of rationality, while conservatives view it as a bug, study finds
https://www.psypost.org/2023/02/liberals...inds-67609

INTRO: A series of three studies has found that political liberals tend to see emotions as more functional than more conservative people. This comes in spite of the fact that more liberal participants reported less emotional well-being. The research was published in Motivation and Emotion.

Over the past few decades, society in the United States has become more polarized. Liberals and conservatives have come to report more animosity towards the other group than warmth for their own group. Both studies and casual observations indicate that at least some of this polarization might come from the way they see and evaluate the importance of emotions.

The commonly endorsed stereotypes about the two political orientations also revolve around their attitude towards the importance of emotions. According to these stereotypes, liberals are seen as “bleeding-hearts,” emphasizing the importance of emotions, while conservatives are seen as cold, emphasizing a lower value assigned to emotions.

Conservative memes expressing scorn for liberal emotions such as “Facts don’t care about your feelings” and “America runs on liberal tears” also emphasize this difference. The authors of the new research see this contrast between the two political orientations as differences in their beliefs about how functional emotions are.

“We define functional as beneficial for individuals for adapting to the environment or attaining their goals,” they explained. “Traditionally, emotion was often portrayed as a dysfunctional reaction that derailed rational thinking and signaled weakness and vulnerability. Unemotional stoicism was idealized as a sign of rationality and maturity. Recent academic approaches, while acknowledging that emotions are not always helpful, portray emotion as an essential suite of processes that evolved to guide people’s thoughts and plans in a manner that helps them achieve their goals.” (MORE - details)



People of different opinions process political data differently
https://www.economist.com/science-and-te...ifferently

INTRO: That those who lean to opposite ends of the political spectrum think differently from each other is obvious. That such differences show up in brain scans is intriguing. Brain scanning is a low-resolution approach to studying neural activity, incapable of seeing how the cells which do the actual thinking are connected to each other. Yet, using this fairly crude technique, two groups of researchers now claim to be able to distinguish the neural responses of left- and right-wingers... (MORE - missing details)
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#2
Syne Offline
(Feb 6, 2023 12:21 AM)C C Wrote: A series of three studies has found that political liberals tend to see emotions as more functional than more conservative people. This comes in spite of the fact that more liberal participants reported less emotional well-being.

That really tells you all you need to know. The people who most think of emotions as a decision-making asset are the most beleaguered with self-reported emotional problems. IOW, the priority they place on emotions, likely in the form of biasing their decisions, may them more susceptible to, at the very least, assuming their emotions meaningfully define the state of their lives, rather than just being the fleeting impressions they mostly are.

They fail to realize that humans relied more on emotion when we didn't have a rational understanding of things. Literally regressive, even in their thinking.
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