It’s not so much about order versus chaos but rather the nature of order and chaos and how we define them. The assumption that liberals favor chaos (freedom) while conservatives favor order (oppression) is obviously flawed because it fails to explain liberals’ use of government to bring about their concept of order. Plus it’s usually conservatives — or more specifically, right-wing Nationalists (booyah!) — who advocate a more laissez-faire approach to socionics.

To the American right, social “order” simply means that people should behave themselves as civilized and enlightened human beings. This concept of order is compatible with freedom. In fact, freedom can’t exist without this kind of order. This kind of order does not require the individual to abandon their sense of identity to appease to the collective. That kind of order appeals to those who favor global government and totalitarianism (socialists, fascists, liberals, etc.).

In the mindset of a right-wing American (keep in mind that mainstream conservatives aren’t truly right-wing), a left-wing status quo represents fatalism, moral degeneracy, glorification of weakness and mediocrity, defeatism toward and appeasement of one’s oppressors, abolition of national sovereignty, and worst of all, abolition of individual identity. If being a rugged individualist is sociopathic, then we should all be sociopaths. In a world where humanity is oppressed by left-wing “altruists,” right-wing “sociopaths” become the ultimate champions of human liberty.

>>No World Order

I’ve come across articles and essays myself that present essentially the same information as in the discussions you highlighted in regards to the question of how certain groups in American culture define or perceive morality. And it seems in my experience the findings presented concerning what categories of social valuation Republicans and Democrats, for example, pay most attention to under the umbrella concept “morality” hold quite true…which as subtext, also says a lot I believe about both mine and NeoCon’s reasoning here.

Any argument over who cares “more or less,” in some over-arching socio-political sense, is pretty meaningless, and wasn’t ever my point to begin with in my responses. Rather, I wanted to point out (along with the false definition of social or personality psychology in the first place) this narrow-minded duality of “rationality vs. feelings”/”strength vs weakness”/”idealism vs practicality” that laced NeoCon’s original points from start to finish, and then was bolstered by other posters’ comments. Conservatives misguidedly accuse liberals of “caring too much,” liberals undeservingly accuse conservatives of “caring less” (an accusation I never endorsed here). Both assertions of course are biased and trivializing, but as a novice social psychologist and researcher, I think this portion in particular of the other blog discussion you highlighted, Altemeyer, hits on the root cause of these misgivings on both sides quite nicely:

“(I point out in that post that the Democrats’ two favorites basically characterize the gold standard of morality: The Golden Rule. Three of the Republicans’ favored tenets have nothing to do with – are often or mostly antithetical to – that rule.)”

Everyone can decide for themselves what “spheres of morality” they hold to be most important in their lives. But the laying out of Republicans’ and Democrats’ most typical moral valuations, seems quite accurate if you’re at all well read in American politics and sociology…and furthermore seems to mirror many of the ideological divides between “conservatives” and “liberals” more generally.

Check out Haidt’s TED talk, if you haven’t already.

You might also enjoy this conservative’s blog.

1) Never once in my response did I say about liberals that I believe “‘they are the ones who care, and conservatives do not.” Please read again. My point was that avowed conservatives often make it sound as if liberals care somehow “too much” in general and are therefore weaker and less practical because of it. Your post didn’t contain that exact statement, but you opened yourself up immediately to this line of criticism when you chose to make such bold (and, once again, false) statements such as “Many if not most of these fields are artistic endeavors, and/or are concerned primarily with feelings rather than hard facts or practical and technical matters.” The connection with your original thesis is that since liberals seem to predominate the “‘fields” mentioned above, liberals then are also the ones who predominantly care more for feelings above all else than with rational facts and technical matters. Not only is this an inaccurate and needless blanket implication with regards to one’s politics, it already rests upon one blatantly false assumption about the sciences anyway, leading to my next point…

2) Let me reiterate: adding “thoughts” and “behaviors” to “feelings” in your definition of social or personality psychology is not “going overboard.” Hardly. Rather it would have provided you and your readers the CORRECT definition of those fields of inquiry and study and should have been in your post to begin with. In other words, an accurate definition of social psychology would have read, for example: it is the study of thoughts, behaviors, feelings and other cognitive acts within the context of a society, culture or indeed any form of interpersonal relationship between between/among two or more individuals. This is a much closer to correct definition of this field of study than you gave anywhere in your original post. Again far from going overboard, you stopped short of what was called for. Presenting social psychology as “the study of feelings” and leaving it essentially at that is just incorrect. People need to be exact about such matters and I’m quite happy in reminding people of this.

Taken together these criticisms and refinements of your reasoning change the impact I think of your original post rather significantly, and add some more (perhaps undesired) complication to your original thesis about conservatives in social psychology. Ultimately, the argument that conservatives are excluded from social and personality psychology because of these fields’ nearly exclusive focus on “feelings” is faulty on a few fronts as elaborated in both my posts, and is a disservice as much to fellow conservatives as to liberals or anyone in between.

The system is too complex and not enough variables can be controlled.

Yes, we’ll all be much better off filling our heads with culture war opinion than attending to the social sciences. I do not believe there is a thinking person here who does not understand this to be sinister nonsense.

Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political choices, whether we’re left, right or center. In this eye-opening talk, he pinpoints the moral values that liberals and conservatives tend to honor most.

…you might call it the science of the study of feelings, especially as they are expressed in group dynamics (personality psychology does the same for individuals)…

I could have further refined it by adding “thoughts” and “behaviors” to the word “feelings,” which would have been the more traditional definition. But that seems overbroad to me: it’s not thoughts in general (social psychology doesn’t encompass the history of science or philosophy, for example) or all behavior, but both thought and behavior in relation to feelings. That doesn’t mean that every social science research paper deals with feelings (for example, if you consider criminology a subset of social psychology, it is far more behavior oriented; but there we are in a subject that is usually considered sociology rather than social psychology). No doubt there is a better definition than mine, but I haven’t seen one.

But my point about the softness of the science applies not only to social psychology, but to much of psychology and sociology as well. It also applies to a fair percentage of medical research. It potentially applies to most research with human subjects, and it is not a flaw of the researchers (although certainly they sometimes commit errors) but is inherent in the subject matter itself. The system is too complex and not enough variables can be controlled.

As for the rest: you have touched on a common misconception among liberals (and a source of their earnest moral arrogance): they are the ones who care, and conservatives do not. I would submit that both care deeply, but conservatives disagree on the remedy. For further elucidation, please do yourself a favor and read Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed. It’s an excellent book on the subject.

That’s not true and it’s not at all fair. It’s an extremely glaring oversimplification to say that “liberals don’t take the long view” or “don’t care about taking the long view”. Excuse me, but that is exactly how I look at the world: in the long term. I always have and I always will do so, exactly BECAUSE in order to help as many people as much of the time as possible, you HAVE to take the long view. It is essential…always. Yes, I also want to help those who are more unfortunate than others and this is generally speaking a (and please note, not the ONLY) priority of mine…but the point is it should be everyone’s priority, regardless of how loudly you want to shout that you are conservative or liberal or something else. In other words, this way of thinking isn’t somehow exclusive to liberals or conservatives or libertarians or any such label you want to throw at people, and I cringe a little (ok, a lot) when people try to make it sound like it is.

Conservatives I read or listen to so often make it sound like caring about the fortunes of others…ALL others, to be exact…is somehow a shame or an embarrassment – it’s a dirty thing and it’s “just not practical, dear”. That’s not what they say, of course, but that’s the feeling I’m often left with…including after I had finished reading this very post by NeoCon. To that I say…no actually, this is what empathy is and it’s a natural human trait…thankfully…and believe it or not, people including liberals are actually capable of feeling a wider empathy for others in the world AND taking a long view of matters IN THE WORLD. It’s a shame people don’t seem to understand this point in the all-too politicized and insular minefield of American politics.

In addition to the above, I wanted to re-post here a response that I originally wrote in another venue pertaining to the original blog entry. My mother shared the blog entry by NeoCon on Google with myself and some others and I wrote a response there about certain other aspects of the arguments presented that I’d like to share here as well:

I really have to point out something about this article that to me, having studied at some point or another a rather wide range of arts and letters ALONG WITH psychology and the like, is rather irksome. To quote:

“Personality and social psychology is a research science, but of the exceedingly soft variety; you might call it the science of the study of feelings, especially as they are expressed in group dynamics (personality psychology does the same for individuals), and as such it would be no surprise it would appeal disproportionately to liberals.”

Characterizing personality and social psychology as merely “the science of feelings” is just plain false, which is all the more bothersome here because the author seems to be using this assertion in such a pejorative manner. Yes, psychology and the other social sciences are fundamentally very different “sciences,” I would agree, from the so-called hard sciences of physics or chemistry or the like…in spite of all of academia’s efforts to dress psychology up in statistics and experiments and such:-) BUT personality and social psychology are hardly just the “science of feelings” and anyone who truly believes otherwise either hasn’t been paying attention or, clearly, hasn’t ever actually studied psychology!

Part and parcel of these branches of psychology, of course, is a study of emotion as pertains to human behavior. You can’t study human beings, so far as they can be “studied,” without studying also their feelings. Clearly. But just as clearly, what we traditionally term “feelings” or “emotions” are not by any means the ONLY components of one’s personality and patterns of behavior in social contexts. There is a whole lot more to us, and therefore social or personality psychology, than that! This is immediately evidenced in the very same quote the author of this post tries to use to damn social psychology…in the very first sentence shown: “How do people think about, influence, and relate to one another?” This is the central question in the society’s mission statement it would appear…and so I ask, how in the least is this only about feelings? I guess I read it rather differently than the author of this post…

On top of all this, though…I’m really at a loss as to how anything about the author’s assertion that “social/personality psychology = feelings” is related to the thesis that started the post, which is that conservatives feel all excluded and whatnot from the academic or professional circles of personality and social psychology. I’m sorry, but…what was the connection here again? “Personality/social psychology = exclusive concern with feelings = more liberals = less conservatives.” I don’t really get it…

I don’t have a blanket suspicion of qualitative research. I think the Haidt story is a great development.

If Neo-con were to pursue a PhD in social psychology and after five years publish a doctoral thesis on Palin-hate syndrome, would you dismiss it out of hand because of its undeserved veneer of hard science?

I suspect you’d read it in a comfortable chair with a glass of scotch.

Social psychology is volatile stuff and you’re indulging in it, whether you admit it or not, leveraging your own veneer as a therapist to lend credibility to your assessments, for a very large audience indeed.

Academics recognize the harm that conclusions drawn in the social sciences may cause and so apply robust mechanisms to safeguard against publishing unsubstantiated opinion.

Presumably you were an academic, once upon a time, and you understood the hazards and the social responsibility.

He reminds me of Zach, a noted Global Warmist that goes around talking about the IPCC’s “scientific authority” and how there is a “scientific consensus” that Global Warming exists. Any other authority that says otherwise, any other scientist that says otherwise, can’t be true because they don’t gib with the “consensus”.

Social scientists have easily sled into the region where they believe themselves gods on earth, invested with the power to play with the lives of lesser mortals. It’s because they lost their humility and their recognition of their proper place.