Voting Conservative/Republican

I've pondered before on the question of why some people's political preferences are as they are. Three of my archived posts, with interesting commentary beneath, from 2011, 2012 and 2014:

Political Preference - Brain Differences? Astrology in there anywhere?

LEFT-RIGHT

All in the Mind

Astrology apart, I can understand why the wealthy, and better-off land-owners, farmers, ranchers, lesser aristocracy (in the UK), or well-heeled professionals etc would vote conservative/Republican. I have never understood why everyday people of modest means at best, ranging to those in virtual poverty, would even consider voting conservative/Republican. They do. They vote conservative/Republican in droves.

I lived in various locations in the UK for more than 60 years, and in south-west Oklahoma for the past 11 years. Same thing happens in both countries, though I do believe it's more obvious here in the USA where, in certain areas, there exists more severe poverty.

Googling around the net, realising that many others must have puzzled over this same question, I found a few suggestions, which boil down, in a few words to:

Pursuit of aspirations, a bit of mild social climbing - mistakenly assuming conservatives will help lift them "up" to join, if not the golden ones, at least the rhinestone crowd.

The "I'm alright, Jack!" syndrome (well-known in the UK) prevalent in those who have secured a decent job and could not care less about other unfortunates, so vote conservative to ensure their taxes remain at lowest possible level.

Propaganda from radio, newspapers and TV (I'd add churches too, for the USA). Misguiding gullible, trusting folk whose knowledge of politics is skimpy, if any at all, and they lack or energy time to pursue more information, being hard pressed to work enough hours to feed their families.

A feeling that "liberals", who are often seen as "the elite" in the USA, look down on the less well-off and the poor, who then group together and vote "the other way", not realising that voting conservative/Republican is not going to change a darn thing - only make it worse!

Personally, I could never ever, ever, ever vote conservative/Republican - nor for any Democrat who is not truly of the left-wing (most of 'em here in the USA are really not of the left). Whether this is due to something in my astrology, or in my ancestral DNA of generations of serfs in feudal England, I know not.

All in the Mind

Steven Pinker, research psychologist and professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT and author of "Words and Rules", HERE asks :

"What is the missing ingredient — not genes, not upbringing — that shapes the mind?"
Anyone with some knowledge of astrology has an answer, though not one as to how the process works. Why not test a theory that broad astrological principles could be involved in the answer to that question? Astrologers, in cahoots with psychologists such as Professor Pinker, might discover something of value to both science and astrology.

Snip:

"If genes have any effect at all, it must be total. But the data show that genes account for about only about half of the variance in personality and intelligence (25% to 75%, depending on how things are measured). That leaves around half the variance to be explained by something that is not genetic........growing up in the same home — with the same parents, books, TVs, guns, and so on — does not make children similar.

So the variation in personality and intelligence breaks down roughly as follows: genes 50%, families 0%, something else 50%. As with Bob Dylan's Mister Jones, something is happening here but we don't know what it is.

Perhaps it is chance. While in the womb, the growth cone of an axon zigged rather than zagged, and the brain gels into a slightly different configuration. If so, it would have many implications that have not figured into our scientific or everyday way of thinking.... "

Extending those thoughts to the area of political mindset ~ a number of studies have found that biology may be linked with political orientation. Wikipedia has a page on the topic. David Sloan Wilson's article, posted in 2011, is an interesting read.

"Are Liberals and Conservatives Different Species? The Answer is Yes". The article left me feeling sad that astrology cannot command the $$$$$ required for an experiment such as the one he describes. If only more scientists would open their minds, experiments like this one could be modified to take in birth data so that it could be analysed by astrologers. Dream on!

A few extracts:

If men are from Mars and women from Venus, where do liberals and conservatives come from? They are so befuddled by each other that it is tempting to say different galaxies--or, to employ a biological metaphor, that they are different species. It turns out that the biological metaphor might be surprisingly close to the truth.

For years I wanted to study people in the same way that I am accustomed to studying beetles and fish--not just in the laboratory, but also "in the field" as they go about their everyday lives. I finally found my chance when I met Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the famous psychologist who is best known for his work on peak psychological experience (Flow) and who pioneered something called the experience sampling method (ESM).

The ESM is simplicity itself. People are outfitted with devices that beep at random times during the day, prompting them to fill out a short questionnaire recording where they are, what they are doing, who they are with, and a checklist of psychological states on a numerical scale....... We began with a multi-million dollar project that Mihaly had conducted with sociologist Barbara Schneider to examine how young people prepare to enter the work force. Thousands of American high school students had participated nationwide by providing extensive background information and being beeped for a week, for roughly 50 snapshots of their individual experience................

...Everyone in our sample was an American, a teenager, and belonged to the same major religious tradition of Protestantism. In these respects they were culturally uniform. But some belonged to conservative denominations such as Pentecostal and others to liberal denominations such as Episcopalian. As Ingrid combed through the data, which involved tedious hours in front of the computer, the differences that began to emerge were astounding. It was as if these conservative and liberal religious youth were--different species.

Imagine the priceless information astrologers could glean from being included in an experimental survey like that one !

Recent articles have taken the same kind of research further: two are by Chris Mooney for Mother Jones website -

From 2013 -
The Surprising Brain Differences Between Democrats and Republicans
Two new studies further support the theory that our political decision making could have a neurological basis

Snip -

Republicans were using the right amygdala, the center of the brain's threat response system. Democrats, in contrast, were using the insula, involved in internal monitoring of one's feelings. Amazingly, Schreiber and his colleagues write that this test predicted 82.9 percent of the study subjects' political party choices—considerably better, they note, than a simple model that predicts your political party affiliation based on the affiliation of your parents.

From 2014
Scientists Are Beginning to Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative
Ten years ago, it was wildly controversial to talk about psychological differences between liberals and conservatives. Today, it's becoming hard not to.

Snip

That's pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one of the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Now, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade later, Jost and fellow scholars note that:

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety.

Astrologers might consider that a heavily emphasised Saturn, and/or its signs Capricorn and/or Aquarius = higher potential for a person to exhibit a more conservative mindset. Absent that emphasis there'd be plenty of leeway for a variety of other, more liberal preferences. There's obviously much more to it than that - still, it'd be a good place to start. Flowing from that, there'd be a possibility that time's cycles, mini-cycles, maxi-cycles and all between, as defined by planetary movement, in coordination with a given set of inherited genes, might incline the political mind of the newborn, when grown, to orient leftward or rightward.

(NEXT POST will be Wednesday's.)

LEFT- RIGHT

I've wondered for a long, long time, both during my life in the UK and since I arrived in the USA, how it can be that humans see matters of political importance in such diametrically different ways.....the black and white of it - the liberal and conservative of it, to attach available labels.

I attempted to write about the topic in April last year, in a post Political Preference - Brain Differences? Astrology in there anywhere?

If astrology "works", even at the most basic of levels, planet Saturn and/or its sign of rulership Capricorn (and possibly even its sign of rulership before Uranus was discovered, Aquarius), would have to be in some way more prominent or in a stronger position and without heavy conflict, in the natal chart of a dyed-in-the-wool right-wing conservative type. I don't have a view on what would likely be prominent in the chart of a strongly liberal left-winger, it's not as clear cut. Perhaps simply the absence of such astrological indications mentioned above would set political preference in the other direction?

Yesterday, How the Right Brain Works and What That Means for Progressives - an essay at Alter Net by Chris Mooney approached the topic (minus any astrology, of course). The essay draws on the author's book due to be published in April (The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality ) and on certain interviews.

The essay is interesting. I found several comments in the thread beneath it excellent assessments also. Two especially caught my eye:

From Perry Logan

A good way to frame it is to say conservatives in the U.S. have an incredibly strong herd instinct, whereas lefties tend to be weak or deficient in this area.

The Right are profoundly tribal. This intense group instinct affects both the emotions and the thought processes of conservatives.The most notable cognitive difference is that the Right's concept of truth itself is tribal--that is, conservatives only accept information/disinformation from conservative sources. Liberal or lefty sources of information are rejected out of hand. In addition, righties will categorize any unwanted or threatening information as being "liberal" or tainted.

That's why the Right can reject an entire scientific discipline--atmospheric science--for the simple reason that the information is unacceptable. Those scientists--hundreds of them, from all nations, all over the world--must be lyin' libs. The whole thing must be a plot.

Likewise, when I offer years of research and reviews from the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, which one might have thought an unimpeachable source, showing that guns are just as deadly and dangerous as common sense would predict, the gun guys just snort. "Harvard? What do they know?" and trot out some stats their cousin cooked up in the basement, which are more to their liking.

Lefties are not clear-eyed, objective observers, by any means. But in my experience, they are rarely capable of such a profound degree of cognitive bias.

The result of all this reality-filtering is that the Right literally have their own facts about everything. It's as if they lived in a parallel universe, where liberals are the cause of all our problems, if the world could only see. Those are some weird brains they have over there.

When I say the left are "deficient" in herd instinct, I don't mean it as a criticism. Our relatively weak herd impulse is one of our virtues, it seems to me. At the same time, it puts us at a distinct disadvantage in politics. We're not the great followers our rightward brethren are.

The Obots are very tribal, by the way. Obots--Obamacrats--are strikingly similar to wingnuts in their thinking and behavior. That's because Obots are not true lefties, but are members of personality cult centered around the Bammer.

And..... from a different angle:

Along Came Jones

I found this article interesting from a philological prospective but I am not so sure of it's practical use. While there are certainly differences in the extremes, those difference begin to dissipate when considering the total attitudes between the extremes. There has always been this difference and likely always be a difference. I also suspect that civility has had it's ups and downs and will continue to ebb and flow. However, I don't believe these differences account for the problems we face now or similarly in 1890 or 1920.

There is a percentage of a group somewhere between 5-10% that either works at cross purposes, is unsuitable, is delinquent, or what have you. If you start with this premise it becomes clearer the nature of most problems. The problem society faces is how to justly isolate this percentage so as not to impede the group.

To cut this short and offer a quick summary of today's conditions:

1. 95% of people will obey safe driving rules either by choice of peer pressure, while 5% will not. Thus the need for traffic laws to protect the 95%.
2. We have allowed a small percentage of people, many of which are psychopaths or sociopaths, to game our political, economic, and social systems. When judged by wealth alone many are at the upper levels of respectability.
3.This small percentage of wealthy misfits uses distraction to confuse the other 95%.

These periods of the 1890's, 1920's, and today are similar in this case and I am sure there are other similar periods in history. If I had to guess, it is generational in nature, ie: one generation of abuse followed by one of reform, one at rest. and one diminishing group diligence. It starts over again as the last generation that remembers dies off.

"...one generation of abuse followed by one of reform, one at rest. and one diminishing group diligence. It starts over again as the last generation that remembers dies off. That proposition would benefit from some research, astrological and otherwise - as would the original conundrum of why people seem to naturally gravitate left or right politically. Perhaps more posts on this, sometime, if I can get my head around the best way to do it.

Political Preference - Brain Differences? Astrology in there anywhere?

Humans seem to be naturally polarized politically, most remain entrenched in their views for a lifetime. Some research has been carried out.

Liberal? Conservative? Your brains are different, study finds , an article by by Andrew Duffy, at Vancouver Sun begins:

Liberals and Conservatives may have differences that go well beyond their opinions about what constitutes contempt of Parliament.

A British study suggests there are anatomical differences between the brains of opponents on the left and right of the political spectrum.

The study, published in the online edition of Current Biology, found people who identified themselves as liberal tended to have larger anterior cingulate cortexes, a region of the brain that monitors uncertainty and conflict. Those who identified themselves as conservative had larger amygdalas, a region that processes emotions related to fear.

Researchers say the physical differences reflect the nature of voters: Liberals tend to be more comfortable with uncertainty, conservatives are more sensitive to fear.

"Previously, some psychological traits were known to be predictive of an individual's political orientation," said Dr. Ryota Kanai of University College London. "Our study now links such personality traits with specific brain structure."

I began to wonder how this might pan out astrologically. Further light research brought me to a pdf file from Dept of Political science, University of Iowa Fear Dispositions and their Relationship to Political Preferences

Clip from pdf (click on it to see a bigger version)


So, where might we find correlation in astrology to this idea that fear drives conservatism?

Saturn and how it is positioned in one's natal chart, appears to be significant in the potential for conservatism. Coincidentally Saturn connects to fear as well.

For instance - just one example:

A person with Sun conjunct Saturn - part of the interpretation at Cafe Astrology says:

..... Generally, they come across as somewhat skeptical and pessimistic, cautious, and slightly reserved. There is a distinct streak of the conservative in these people. Some are rigid and strict, expecting others to live up to their high standards. However, most people with this aspect are simply very aware that life has its limitations.

More about the connection of Saturn with fear is set out in a piece by Beth Turnage, Saturn and Fear at Astrology Explored.

A little mythological background on Saturn

Saturn was the God Kronos, father of Zeus, who was known for devouring his offspring soon after being born. He did this because he feared that they would surpass him. But Zeus, who was protected by his mother, returned to face his father, and Kronos’ fears were realized through death. Similarly, if we clamp down on what we fear the most, eventually it destroy us. Saturn has been depicted as the punishing father, but also as the Grim Reaper, who cuts life short. Mortality is the ultimate restriction, and as Father Time, he is the wise one that inspires urgency in our quest to fulfill our life mission.
http://astrology.about.com/od/advancedastrology/p/Saturn.htm

In light of all of the above I'm wondering whether at some future date an enlightened statistician might include some astrological data in their researches on such topics as this. Assistance from a professional astrologer would be essential of course. When pigs fly......