Wise Startup Blog

The statements above are pulled from research by some of the top brass of American science, and the studies were conducted in three successive periods, thus denoting a trend.

Luckily the results are not completely bashing on Republicans, so the results might be respected and noted upon instead of bashed as ‘spin’. There’s nothing worse than scientific research that is 100% one-sided, as it really hurts the cause since people are so used to all studies being biased.

Below are the studies and their conclusions, from the original Gawker article:

Conservatives Are Scared A Lot

Rice University Political Scientist John Alford published some research in the creatively named journal Science about a possible biological basis to liberalism and conservatism. Basically, “46 mostly white Midwesterners who self-identified as having strong political beliefs” were shown “threatening images” (“a large spider on someone’s face, a bloodied person and maggot-filled wound”). The conservatives were more scared, of all of the images. Or, as Newsweek puts it, “illegal immigrants may = spiders = gay marriages = maggot-filled wounds = abortion rights = bloodied faces. ” Liberals were not sensitive to the scary images. Which means they’re biologically inferior, because they’d die if a gay spider tried to abort their faces to death. Notable problems with this study: small sample, also wtf this doesn’t explain anything.

Conservatives Refuse to Believe “Facts”

The most upsetting and alarming research? Probably Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler’s backfire effect study. In that, the political scientists took two groups of volunteers and gave them the Bush administration’s prewar claims that Iraq was a threat and had weapons of mass destruction.

One group was given a refutation — the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration’s claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

Conservatives Have An Entirely Different Moral Code

This should bring you down, a little bit. Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist, wrote a lengthy anthropological investigation into why people vote for Republicans. It’s not the Thomas Frank “they are distracted by bullshit” explanation, though it is related: they have different cultural standards of ethics and morality! Liberals and college students define morality as “how we treat each other,” conservatives attach more significance to “supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.” Liberals recognize fairness and care as important moral virtues, conservatives add to that loyalty, respect for authority, and duty. The educated moral relativism worldview is fundamentally incompatible with the way like 50% of America thinks, and stereotypes about out-of-touch elitist coastal democrats are basically correct. Sigh.