A Reflection on the Haidt Studies

This is seven years old but worth a return visit, especially as we approach another festival of animosity, also known as an election year.

In other words, conservatives understand liberals better than liberals understand conservatives.  More precisely, conservatives’ version of liberals matches liberals’ version of themselves better than liberals’ version of conservatives matches conservatives’ vision of themselves.

This is an important finding for many commentators on the Right because it gainsays one of the central claims of liberals, that is, that liberals are more open-minded, empathetic, imaginative, and tolerant than conservatives are.  The study indicates, rather, that when it comes to facing the other side, liberals lean toward caricatures and extreme cases, and this tendency rises the more liberal they are.

Why might this be so?  My speculation is that it has nothing to do with intelligence or moral condition.  Instead, it is because of an outcome of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s.  In broad outlines, what happened was that in politics we ended up with more polarized but still dynamic debates, controversies, struggles, elections, etc., but in areas of culture, the liberal side won.  It was a firm and sound defeat for conservatism in public schools, the art world, entertainment media, higher education, journalism, and every other sphere of cultural activity.

The triumph was so pronounced and widespread that the natural thing happened.  People who occupied those spheres came to believe that their ideological stance was the natural and right and just one.  They had so much dominance and so many like-minded people around them that, after a few years, they simply took the liberal position as ordinary and proper, and at the same time regarded those remnants of conservatism as feeble holdovers of a benighted time.  After a few years, they believed, those remnants would disappear.

This is a formula for complacency and self-regard.  It explains, too, the results of the study above.  Why bother to pay attention to an outlook that is so discredited, obsolete, and outrageous?  Why grant any respect to a position that nobody with any respectability holds?