PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: Rush on November 11, 2024, 05:40:47 AM
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https://x.com/datepsych/status/1855857713680625878
The psychology of disowning your family after the Orange Man gets elected:
1. Human beings have evolved a strong tendency for in-group loyalty (and at least a moderate aversion to out-groups and “enemies”). This can’t really be overstated. The decisions we make, as “rational” as we believe them to be, always have a big underlying emotional component. People get into physical fights over teams that are totally inconsequential (think of football hooligans). People are even willing go to war with relatively little information. People also overperceive threats from out groups and hostility from out-groups (basically they think the other side hates them more than they do).
2. People also overperceive outgroup homogeneity. They see the enemies as a sort of uniform mass of ideology rather than a collection of diverse individuals. They think the red-voting grill dad who wants cheap groceries is the same as Super Hitler 2000. They will even invent rationalizations for why red grill dad “ackshully” is the same as Super Hitler 2000 because those are congruent with perceptions of high outgroup homogeneity.
3. Liberals have higher rates of mental illness than conservatives on average. Liberals score higher in traits like neuroticism. The difference is quite substantial and it isn’t just a small portion of the left. A lot of people on the left are suffering from mental health problems and high negative emotionality.
4. Haidt’s moral foundations: liberals score lower in in-group affiliation and in purity. These are traits or dispositions that influence loyalty to families. Liberals are less family-oriented. They are less likely to put close in-groups (like family) above strangers (liberals have a more universalizing ethics). This is also why they distinguish less between foreign immigrants and citizens.
5. Liberals were less happy with their families before the election. Related to points 3 and 4, but for many on the left, the election is just one more point of conflict in an already-strained relationship. These are not people who had great relationships cutting off their family members. Sometimes the psychology of something is obvious - they didn’t love their families very much, maybe they didn’t even like them much.
6. Ideological beliefs matter, but I always say ideology is more of a superstructure onto personality. Personality is a scaffold that draws people into ideological beliefs. Individuals with more extreme ideologies are more likely to isolate and reject family members. You do see this in extremists on both ends of the political spectrum, but the more ideologically extreme someone becomes the more they fail to relate to both the political “normies” - the moderates - and the people on the opposite side. Everyone is an enemy, even family. Many of the people disowning family aren’t your blue-team grill dad - they aren’t mid-range liberals on the ideology scale - they are people who have embraced actual extremist beliefs. They may be sympathetic to actual foreign terror groups, supportive of violent domestic “protests,” or people who would like to see a quite literal “decolonization” and overthrow of the government. They may be racial supremacists who see themselves in a racial conflict against “whiteness.” Voting for the opposite side is almost as if you treasonously ratted out their underground revolutionary cell in the LARP of their minds.
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I have two sons, two DILs a grand-daughter and three grand-sons. Only the youngest grand-son cannot vote. I can assure you everyone except my oldest son voted for Kamala and we all still talk to each other and my wife and I love all of them. Asked my son when his daughter went far left, he said during her first year in college.