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Do liberals and conservatives experience messages in a fundamentally different way? Photograph: Carlos Barria / Reuters/Reuters

(Preface: all of the research reported in this post has been done with American voters and not those in the UK, where equivalent research is lagging. While there may be some interesting correlates, conservatives in the UK differ in important ways from conservatives in the US.)

Believing what we are told is critical to our development as a species. It allows us to accumulate knowledge and build on it rather than having to learn slowly through trial-and-error or evolutionary selection.

Yet if you have too much credulity, you risk being deceived and taken advantage of. From childhood, we regularly manage this tension between what to believe and what to reject, and our decisions guide who we trust in the future.

There is a widespread psychological bias to attend more to negative messages than positive ones. They capture more attention, elicit stronger emotions and are more memorable. Some individuals are more sensitive to this negativity bias than others and pay higher precautionary costs. They may spend more time worrying or more money on security. Other people are less sensitive to possible threats and pay higher costs when hazards occur.

In recent years there has been increasing interest in whether there are measurable differences in values and personality between liberal and conservative voters. For instance, I have written before about the research showing that while conservatives and liberals hold the same moral ideals, they prioritise them differently. Liberals tend to value fairness while conservatives prioritise tradition and authority.

These are heterogenous groups, but the averages seem to differ reliably. Liberals and conservatives also score differently on personality tests. While liberals are, on average, more open-minded and novelty-seeking, conservatives are more conventional and well-organised.

In this months Psychological Science, Daniel Fessler and colleagues at the University of California examine whether individual differences in negativity bias might be associated with voting behaviour.

They established the political leaning of 948 people, mostly white men and women, by asking them how they felt about a range of social, military and fiscal issues. Respondents were then asked to rate a series of plausible but false statements on a scale from 1 (I am absolutely certain this claim is FALSE) to 7 (I am absolutely certain that this claim is TRUE). Half of these concerned a benefit (e.g. Eating carrots results in significantly improved vision) and half concerned a hazard (e.g. Kale contains thallium, a toxic heavy metal, that the plant absorbs from soil).

There was no difference found in peoples tendency to believe the benefit statements. However, the more conservative respondents were significantly more likely to believe the hazard messages than the more liberal ones. That is, their threshold for credulity to possible threat was significantly lower than the average liberal.

Based on the results, the authors propose that politicians alarmist claims will affect liberals and conservatives differently. While liberals are more likely to disregard them, conservatives are more likely to believe them.

The authors also imply that conservatives are more susceptible to fake news, especially where it concerns possible threats. In support they point to recent claims that right-wing audiences are more gullible to dis-information.

This seems unlikely. There are several, common psychological biases that underpin gullibility. Among others: the illusory truth effect repetition increases belief; the confirmation bias we seek out information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs; the continuous influence effect the tendency to believe false information even after it has been corrected and the bias blind spot the tendency to see yourself as less biased than other people. These are general psychological tendencies that we know are as common in the left as they are in the right.

The strength of a persons negativity bias likely reflects how dangerous they believe the world is and what strategies they think are necessary to protect against those dangers. Conservatives tend to side with authority and tradition to ward off danger, liberals with diversity and change.

The rest is here:
Negativity bias: why conservatives are more swayed by threats than liberals - The Guardian

BY: Cameron Cawthorne May 26, 2017 3:35 pm

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) spoke Friday at an LGBT rights event at the Pride Center at Equality Park of South Florida, where she touted how liberals in the Democratic Party only voted for the nation's defense spending bill for fiscal year 2011 so they could repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

"Don't tell anybody I told you this," Pelosi said, before explaining how she was able to get liberal Democrats onboard to support theNational Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, the annual federal law that specifies the Defense Department's budget and expenditures.

Pelosi described how in 2010 Democrats put an amendment into the NDAA for fiscal year 2011 that would repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the U.S. policy on homosexuals or bisexuals serving in the military for nearly two decades. She said Democrats had very few Republican votes to pass the bill with the amendment attached, so she had to approach the liberal faction of the Democratic Party, which she said never votes for the defense bill.

"I went to my Barney Franks, [Rep.] Barbara Lee [D., Calif.], [Rep.] John Lewis [D., Ga.], you name it, the liberal contingent in which I'm a member" Pelosi said. "And I saidto them, We are making history today.'"

Pelosi said she told them they were going to vote for the defense authorization billand that she knew Republicans were not going to vote for it becauseof the amendment repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

"Never. We never vote for the defense bill," they said, according to Pelosi.

The California Democrat recalled how party roles were reversed, with most Republicans who always vote for the NDAA not doing so because of the amendment, while many Democrats who never vote for the defense funding bill did so that year.

"So there they go down the center aisle, John Lewis, Barney Frank, Barbara Lee, you name it, all down there to make history and vote for the first time in their careers for the defense bill." Pelosi said, reflecting on the vote in an excited tone.

"I want you to know that some people made some sacrifices they did not expect to make in the interest of passing the [defense bill]," Pelosi added.

Former President Barack Obama signed the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Repeal Act into law in December 2010.

Read more:
Pelosi: Liberals Only Voted for 2011 Defense Spending Bill so They Could Repeal 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' - Washington Free Beacon

Whether its tagging legitimate news stories they disagree with as fake news or launching increasingly-violent protests to shut down opposing viewpoints, its clear: the left is gearing up their war on free speech.

Like most wars premised on indoctrination, young adults are the ones being overtly radicalized. Protected by tenure, radical leftists seemingly dominate most institutions of higher learning. Once a free marketplace of ideas, todays academia seems increasingly a modern inquisition against any who challenge the increasingly cult-like radicalism being infused into the minds of college students. According to a recent Gallup survey, a whopping 72% of college students now think the government should ban all offensive speech. What they find offensive, of course, is any remark outside of politically-correct liberal orthodoxy. And they protest riot for it.

These arent your fathers college protests. Todays mob rule on campus is something new.

At Californias Claremont McKenna College, protesters blocked the entrance to a campus building to prevent conservative author Heather MacDonald from speaking. Despite being a well-respected commentator, left-wing radicals justified their anti-intellectual actions by claiming to be preventing fascism and racism from taking hold in America. Undeterred, MacDonald entered in secret through a back door. When she arrived on stage, however, she found the hall nearly emptybecause the mob also refused to let anyone interested in hearing her ideas enter the building.

At Middlebury College in Vermont, a protest against economist Charles Murray turned ugly. A self-righteous mob of 150 students violently attacked conservatives as they attempted to leave an auditorium, injuring the professor who was interviewing Murray. Students at Middlebury pay $60,000 a year to live in an enclave where totalitarian-style tactics are encouragedso long as they toe the liberal line of thinking.

Most recently, students at Evergreen State College berated a biologist and demanded his resignation, after he objected to an event in which all white students were asked to leave campus for a day. When this liberal-but-not-enough professor tried to engage in thoughtful discussion, he was shouted down and a student screamed, We dont care what terms you want to speak on. This is not about you. We are not speaking on termson terms of white privilege. This is not a discussion. You have lost that one. Encouraged by radical mentors, old liberal ideas of tolerance and free speech are being washed aside by young adults who deny even liberal-but-not-enough supporters a voice.

While colleges bend over backwards to cater to demands from the likes of Black Lives Matter in the name of politically-correct diversity, nothing has been done to protect conservatives who simply want to share such crazy ideas as personal freedom and responsibility. Neither Claremont, Middlebury, nor Evergreen have moved to suspend or expel a single student for silencing, and even violently attacking, conservatives. In the eyes of todays collegiate faculty and administrators, conservative speech isnt really worth protecting.

Some conservatives are beginning to fight back, however. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam signed a bill last month to restore free speech and equality by making it illegal for colleges to disinvite speakers based on their political beliefs and banned universities from charging conservative students more in fees to host speakers, under the pretense of needing increased security to protect them from mobs.

In California, a Republican-sponsored bill currently being debated would end the restrictive free speech zones at Californias public universities. This proposal would allow anyone to speak freely anywhere on campus isnt it shocking they cant? Liberals administrators would no longer decide when and where students can speak their minds. Similar bills are slowly advancing in a handful of other states. But despite these signs of progress, its clear the lefts public war on free speech is only continuing to grow.

The overt leftwing war on the open mind isnt just on campus. Major social media players are suppressing conservative speech while elevating liberal viewpoints. Facebook and Twitter actively work to change how people receive information about the world. Twitter seems to constantly ban conservative celebrities, like Milo Yiannopolous, for attacking the left, but when high-profile liberals wish death to conservatives, like Kurt Eichenwald did last month, nothing happens.

Hypocrisy rules the day when the left-leaning judges and juries of online speech control what information regular Americans have available to them.

Facebook, in their quest to combat the fake news they think snatched the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton, has employed far-left fact checkers in order to determine what news is correct. Like fact-checkers at liberal newspapers, the results have been predictable: numerous legitimate conservative-leaning news sites have been deemed fake news because they dont kowtow to the prevailing liberal media narrative. Even worse, small platforms for speech and the trading of ideas have been simply relegated to the bottom of Facebooks algorithm, if allowed to exist at all. Despite Silicon Valleys praise for disruptors, Facebook and their ilk appear hellbent to keep the liberal media complex as the status quo.

By attacking any outsider voice offering a new perspective as fake news, liberals are showing that they no longer want to debate. Today, the leftand, increasingly, some on the rightbegin and end with anonymously-sourced denials and ad hominem attacks. They wont debate ideas, or engage with those who espouse them, because, like the college radicals who claim people are racist fascists in order to justify shouting them down, they have predetermined what is and is not a legitimate discussion.

A free society is predicated on free speech and free association democracy can only persevere if everyone can speak their mind, even if some find it offensive. If conservatives dont start fighting back soonat rallies, on social media, and at the ballot boxfree speech as we know it may only apply to the liberal elites, their corporate allies, and their growing throng of mindless collegiate brown shirts.

The rest is here:
Liberals Launch Their Latest War On Free Speech - The Daily Caller

New York Times

Liberals Wanted a Fight in Montana. Democratic Leaders Saw a Lost Cause. New York Times The Democratic defeat in a hard-fought special House election in Montana on Thursday highlighted the practical limitations on liberal opposition to President Trump and exposed a deepening rift between cautious party leaders, who want to pick their ... and more »

See the original post:
Liberals Wanted a Fight in Montana. Democratic Leaders Saw a Lost Cause. - New York Times

Liberal observers must pay $199 plus tax for the honour of watching the rival Tories elect a new leader. (Cole Burston/Bloomberg/Getty Images)

The Conservative Party of Canada is breaking age-old tradition andnot welcomingLiberal MPs to attend their convention this weekend free of charge.In an e-mail exchange Thursday night, Liberal communications officer Braeden Caley hadlodgeda request for observer accesswithConservative communications officer Cory Hann, saying:

..we are wondering if the Conservative Party will continue previous practice of allowing a limited number of observers at your leadership convention this weekend We are looking to have 2 Liberal Members of Parliament and 1 party official join for parts of the event, and as you will know, a number of media outlets are hosting perspectives from a variety of parties on site.We would appreciate you clarifying this tonightand like I mentioned, we would continue to reciprocate on the same number of observers for Liberal conventions.

Hann denied the request. The Liberals requested free passes, he told Macleans by email on Friday.I did not have free passes to provide. Standard practice is to trade passes for policy conventions. Still, asthe e-mail exchange shows, the Liberalsoffered to return thegesture at future policy conventions or leadership eventslike the one this weekend.The two Liberals planning to attend were MPs Adam Vaughan and Francis Drouin. Hann says they could buy passes to the event like members of the public, for $199 plus tax.TheGritssay its absurd for the Tories to demand one party to pay another partyan unprecedented move that discourages them from attending.

Im at a loss for words, and Im not normally at a loss for words, said Vaughan. The Conservatives sort of like to turn turtle, and look inwards. They have a history of trying to operate in a secluded environment all the time, and I guess they havent been able to shake that. He explains that observing helps gather information on competitors. Youre always curious to see the up-close workings of the opposition to see where theyre going, so you can get there before they do.

Canadian politicians have long had the freedom to snoop at each others gatherings. Granting cross-party observer status is considered a gesture of transparency.Conservatives including Jason Kenney and James Moore have attended national Liberal conventions since 2004, as have NDP Olivia Chow and Nathan Cullen. At the 2016 national NDP convention, the Liberals Randy Boissonault kept watch.

In this case, the Conservatives seeminhospitable solely toward Liberals; New Democrat Alexandre Boulerice will attend the Conservative convention on Saturday with his press secretary, Sarah Andrews, who says theyve been told theyll have free passes waiting for them when they arrive.They are reversing a long precedent and closing up shop even more than Harper did, says Braeden Caley of the Liberals.It makes one wonder about the more extreme agenda that the party is bringing forward with these leadership candidatesand what they have to hide.

RELATED: The highs and (many) lows of the Conservative leadership race

Sometimes, inter-party spying goes too far. In February, an undercover caucus member of the B.C. Liberals was accused ofattending an NDP youth meeting and videotaping the gathering of10 young people. She then secretly recorded these youths, using a cell phone she tried to hide on her lap, David Eby, NDP housing critic, toldThe Tyeeafter the fact. Eby accused the operative of pretending to take a phone call when it came time for a group photo. He said she posed as an NDP youth when really she was trying to dig up dirt for the election.

But official observers are generallya symbol of civildemocracy, and Vaughan notes that theyprovidein-personaccess to alternative opinions for journalists. The phenomenon predates the Internet, when it wouldve been more difficult for the media to talk toopponents who werent on site. As a former reporter,Vaughan says, Im not sure whose lives theyre trying to make miserable. With access to Liberals at the Tory convention, he adds, we [would] have less cranky journalists hanging around.

Vaughan is still scheduled to speak in a TVpanel discussion and do interviews withseveral news outlets inside the venue this weekend. Im assuming Ill be able to be escortedthrough the crowd, he says.

The rest is here:
Tories to Liberals: pay up, or don't come to our convention - Macleans.ca