Depression is an odd thing. It is one of the most debilitating ‘diseases’ that mostly goes unseen.
A depressed person can appear normal and even someone in a severe depressive state can hide how bad it is. This is why suicides can surprise so many people, sometimes as if it came out of nowhere. Some depressives can hide their depression from their own awareness, burying themselves in work or distracting themselves with addiction.
It is also one of the least sexy of the mental illnesses. It’s not as fascinating as schizophrenia or multiple personal disorder. It only reaches the level of melodrama if depression is of the bipolar variety. But unipolar depression is actually rather boring. The only time it becomes romanticized is in the writings of famous authors, especially if they are alcoholics who kill themselves.
As for normal people, depression is more likely to increase one’s invisibility, because the depressive withdraws from the world, sometimes to the point of becoming unemployed or even homeless. The depressive, when pushed to the extreme, can become an isolated non-entity. The depressive rarely commits suicide in direct fashion (surprisingly difficult to achieve), instead preferring to slowly kill themselves through lack of taking care of their own basic needs. Sustaining bodily existence isn’t always a central concern for the severe depressive, whether or not they commit self-harm.
Still, for someone familiar with depression, there are some aspects of it that fascinate. The withdrawl from the world isn’t just social but also psychological. Experience loses meaning and emotion. The world can feel empty and lifeless. The sense of self shrinks, sometimes to the point of disappearing. At the lowest of low points, depression swallows the person whole. It can be a truly stark state of mind, everything cut down to its minimal essence, even the voice in one’s head gone silent and no outside voice able to reach into that silence.
As one person described it, “Because I had no self. No safe space inside. Just despair.” The self ultimately can’t function in isolation, as relationship is the lifeblood of our humanity. It is utter alienation, disconnection between self and other, and so disconnection within the self, an implosion of one’s existence: “Alienation—feelings of estrangement from some aspect of a person’s existence (nature, others, and self)—results in loneliness, emptiness, and despair and is the antithesis of Heidegger’s being-in-the-world.” One then inhabits a dead world.
This seems the opposite of something like schizophrenia. In schizophrenia there is a conflation of or blurring between self and world. Rather than loss of meaning, there is an explosion of meaning. Voices don’t stay contained to self or other. It’s true that schizophrenics can experience depressive symptoms. But I suspect it it is a far different kind of experience. Interestingly, treating schizophrenia can lead to depressive-like symptoms as side effects:
“Also, the antipsychotic medications used to treat schizophrenia may produce side effects which are very similar to depressive symptoms. These side effects may include limited spontaneity in the person’s speech and movements, restlessness, and a negative mood.”
This is what fascinates me, anyway. I don’t know schizophrenia on a personal level. But I do know depression. The problem of depression is the opposite of not knowing how to differentiate the real from the imaginary—the mundane reality feeling all too real to the point of being stifling, a sense of unavoidable and irresolvable actuality, just is. If anything, imagination gets shut down or submerged into the background. Some have argued that this is depressive realism, most specifically in terms of self-awareness and self-assessment, what is and has been, although the evidence is mixed. Even an optimism proponent like Martin Seligman, in The Optimistic Child (p. 296), discussed the merits of pessimism:
Supporting evidence for depressive realism can flooding in: Depressed people are accurate judges of how much skill they have, whereas non-depressed people think they are more skilful than others think them to be (80% of American men think they are in the top half of social skills). Non-depressed people remember more good events than actually happened and forget more of the bad events. Depressed people are accurate about both. Non-depressed people are lopsided about their beliefs about success and failure: if rewards occur – they claim the credit, the rewards will last and they’re good at everything; but if it was a failure, you did it to them, it’s going away quickly, and it was just this one little thing. Depressed people are even handed about success and failure.
The unipolar depressive has fewer extremes of emotional affect (i.e., emotional numbing and flattening) and so maybe fewer other extremes as well, which could express as ‘moderate’ (i.e., emotionally detached) views and opinions, the unipolar depressive simply not getting all that excited about and emotionally invested in externalities, a pervasive disinterest and indifference. This may have something to do with why political moderates are less happy than political extremists, the latter tending toward partisanship and dogmatism (the loyal followers and true believers). In turn, this might be why liberals are less happy than conservatives, as liberalism (specifically as liberal-mindedness) predisposes one to questioning the status quo, doubting social norms, challenging authority, and pushing boundaries.
In a world dominated by a status quo of extremists (extreme in attitude and demagoguery, not in breadth of political spectrum), the moderate liberal will be the least happy person around. Or is it the least happy will simply turn to moderate and liberal views, not out of ideological principle but just basic psychological bias? Either way, when extremists are in power, moderation becomes a radical act and so moderate in that case doesn’t mean centrist and mainstream. The problem, as always, is the loudmouthed and sometimes violent extremists get all the attention, and they are more zealously motivated to take power and enforce social norms. The moderate too often remains silent or is silenced, because to speak out is to become a target of extremists and those who will openly support moderation and defend moderates are unfortunately too few.
In this context, there is an insightful commentary about depression and autism, in the context of nerd identity:
“Communal belief – social reality – and the sacrednesses that it produces are precisely the powerful layers of distortion that we are likely to notice (and hence have a chance at seeing through). We are less able than normal humans to perceive social/sacredness reality in the first place, and to make matters worse, we are addicted to the insight rewards that come from trying to see through it even further. Autism is overrepresented in our community; depression, too. Autism is associated with a reduced ability to model other brains in the normal, social way; this failure carries even into modeling the mind of God, as autism is inversely linked to belief in God. The autistic person is more likely than the neurotypical to notice that social reality exists; we might say the autistic person gets a lucid dreaming reality check for the great social dream with every inscrutable (to him) human action he witnesses.
“Mild depression removes pleasurable feelings from everyday life; it interferes with a mechanism for sacredness-maintenance distinct from the theory of mind path autism blocks. Meaning is deconstructed in depression; social connection is weakened. Ideas and things that for normal individuals glow with significance appear to the depressed person as empty husks. The deceptive power of social and sacredness illusions is weakened for the depressed person (as are certain other healthy illusions, such as the illusion of control). This is not necessarily a victory for him, as self-deception is strongly related to happiness; the consolation of insight may not make up for the loss of sacredness in terms of individual happiness. The characteristic that distinguishes us is not necessarily a good thing. Our overdeveloped, grotesque insight reward seeking is likely maladaptive, and is probably not even doing our individual selves any good. Extremists – those most capable of perceiving social/sacred reality – are happiest.”
This relates to defensive pessimism. It isn’t just about an attitude but also behavior. Depending on the task and context, defensive pessimists can be as or more effective than strategic optimists. But it is true that optimists will be more successful specifically in fields where selling oneself is a priority to success. A pessimist will be honest and accurate in their self-appraisal, not always a recipe for success in a Social Darwinian (pseudo-)meritocracy.
As such, optimists are better able to make positive change from within the system. They have a less antagonistic relationship to the status quo and to the ruling authorities that maintain the status quo. They look on the bright side of the way things are, looking for opportunities to exploit rather than fundamental problems to explore. So, they are more likely to be successful in socially acceptable ways. They’re less likely to rock the boat.
Major changes that challenge the entire social order and dominant paradigm, however, would require a different kind of mindset. That is where depressive realism might have the advantage. Many radical and revolutionary thinkers were highly critical and often antagonistic. They saw what was wrong with the present, which motivated them to imagine alternatives.
This could explain someone like Thomas Paine—he came to be hated by so many, even as he was proven correct in his visions and fears of the fate of the United States. His critical attitude was too demanding and uncompromising. He cut right through the bullshit and so had a way of making many people feel uncomfortable and irritated. In common parlance, he was an asshole with a sharp tongue.
Nothing ever seemed to quite work out for Paine in his personal life, with much unhappiness from early on and into his old age, a failure by mainstream accounts. He was profoundly dissatisfied with the way the world was. This is what fueled his outrage and made him a visionary, not a mere optimist. But, oddly, I don’t think he ever wanted to be a radical—like John Dickinson who also was Quaker raised, Paine spent his life trying to moderate a world of destabilizing and often horrific extremes. Such moderation is rarely taken kindly and, by both extremes, is seen as extreme. Religious and atheists, reactionary right and Jacobin left— they all attacked him with equal fervor.
Depressive realism can shut down imagination. But not always. Sometimes depression opens up the vista of imagination by forcing one to question hidden biases and assumptions. It forces one to stand back, which allows the opportunity to see a greater view. Seeing reality in the present more clearly can lead one to see reality in entirely new ways.
Seeking the first kind of change will tend toward happiness. The second kind less likely so. But there is more to life than happiness.
For the new year, here are some positive perspectives based on recent studies.
I’ll offer an excerpt about how racial bias can be lessened, but the article also discusses other issues such as empathy and altruism. This goes against what cynics and determinists are always arguing. We aren’t naturally racists. Like so many other attitudes and behaviors, racial bias or its opposite are dependent on many factors, both factors we control individually and factors we control as a society.
We aren’t fated to ignorance and mindlessness. We aren’t mere puppets of genetics and culture. We always have a choice. We always have the opportunity to learn and improve. Being realistic can mean being optimistic, depending on the reality we choose to create.
Racial bias in policing is at the forefront of our national news. So it was heartening this year to see a study that found bias could be reduced through training in mindfulness—the nonjudgmental moment-to-moment awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, and surroundings.
Adam Lueke and Brian Gibson of Central Michigan University looked at how instructing white college students in mindfulness would affect their “implicit bias”—or unconscious negative reactions—to black faces and faces of older people. After listening to a 10-minute mindfulness audiotape, students were significantly less likely to automatically pair negative descriptive words with black and elderly faces than were those in a control group—a finding that could be important for policing, which often involves split-second assessments of people.
Why the connection between mindfulness and bias? Mindfulness has the power to interrupt the link between past experience and impulsive responding, the authors speculate. This ability to be more discerning may explain why another study this year found that people who were high in mindfulness were less likely to sink into depression following experiences of discrimination.
As we reported back in 2009, numerous programs have successfully helped officers become aware of their own unconscious biases. But by specifically looking at the effects of mindfulness training—even just 10 minutes’ worth—these new studies point to innovative techniques that might help prevent fatal mistakes from being made in the future.
“During the war, we all learned to stop looking for reasons why things happen.”
Those are words from the ending monologue of How I Live Now. The movie is about World War III. The storyline concludes with the conclusion of fighting and the return to living. It is shown through the very personal view of someone still very young. The viewer, like the protagonist, has no understanding of the war. It came and went, as if a force of nature with no human meaning.
My thought, upon hearing that monologue, was that there are always reasons. One may not like or comprehend the reasons, but they exist. She speaks these words in reference to death and violence that is, from her perspective, best forgotten. Completely understandable.
A retreat from reasons or from reason entirely is a natural response to the utter shattering of what had previously seemed like a reasonable world, a society of law and order, of stability and certainty, of family and community. All gone in an instant, as nuclear war begins and martial law is declared.
* * * *
I imagine revolution would feel very similar, maybe even more traumatic than even a nuclear bomb going off in a nearby major city leading to a World War. What is so horrifying about revolution is that it is the enemy from within, the danger lurking among us. Even revolution far away in a foreign country poses the threat that revolution might be contagious.
There is a strange dynamic of reason and unreason. When it comes to what feels like mass chaos, no reason ever seems satisfactory. Yet, in the case of the French Revolution, Reason itself was blamed by the counter-revolutionaries. It’s not as if the counter-revolutionaries lacked reasons of their own or lacked the capacity or desire to reason when it served their purposes. Many of the criticisms of Reason ironically take on the appearance of being reasonable.
The fearful vision of ‘Reason’ is an imagined demon haunting the collective mind. It’s symbolic of or, maybe more accurately, a conflation with something greater. But what is it pointing towards? Also, what makes the reasons of the revolutionary supposedly different and more dangerous than the reasons given by their opponents?
* * * *
The world is full of reasons. What the revolutionary does is question and challenge the reasons that have become unstated assumptions. Most reasons that motivate us go hidden and those in power wish to keep them hidden. That is the secret of power and its Achille’s heel. To question and challenge this is to pull back the curtain and show what is behind. This action, to those with power or aligned with it, is in itself an act of violence, even before a single drop of blood is shed.
Reasons can be scary things. The best and worst within humanity is motivated by reasons of all kinds. There is always a reason, usually many reasons. What revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries both understand is that ideas have power. A reason unleashed can destroy or transform entire societies. And, once unleashed, it is impossible to put it back in Pandora’s box.
It isn’t the violence of revolution that is so horrific. States in non-revolutionary times regularly commit more violence than any revolution. The fear is that reason will lead to unreason, that an ideal will lead to a Reign of Terror where the outcome is uncertain. The fear is the uncertainty. The everyday violence of police and militaries is predictable and known. Most of the time, we humans prefer the familiar, like an abused child who returns home everyday to a parent who both beats them and feeds them. It is all the child knows. To stand up to the abuse would lead to possibly unforeseen consequences.
Still, there are those who do stand up to abuse. In politics, these sometimes become revolutionaries. They have their reasons, of course, but ultimately it is the unknown that excites them or gives them hope. They refuse to accept the status quo, what is established and known.
* * * *
As argued by revolutionaries of centuries past, this world is for the living, not the dead. This is why many revolutionaries believed no social construct (whether property, patent, or law) should outlive the lifetime of a single generation. That is what defines democracy in its only true form. It’s the ideal of establishing revolution itself as the norm, every generation its own self-ruled governance, the future’s unknown made into a familiar element of present society.
No reason is a sacred cow, no matter how long it has been passed on nor how deeply institutionalized. It is easy to attack the other guy’s sacred cow, but to be consistently principled is something entirely else. This principled stance is what made the counter-revolutionaries so fearful of ‘Reason’. They realized that revolutionaries would make no exceptions, that if possible they would follow justice to its inevitable conclusion.
Conservatives and libertarians will judge harshly the views of opponents, even going so far as demonizing them. They say taxation is theft, except for the tax laws they favor and when used to fund their preferred policies and programs. They say that the state is oppressive, except when it’s oppression against their enemies and against convenient scapegoats. They say that government is the problem, except when it supports their agenda and serves their interests.
Liberals can have similar problems, although typically being more subtle in their hypocrisy. Liberals don’t tend to argue for principle, come hell or high water. Liberals at least openly admit that they aren’t against any of these things on principle. Their principle, instead, is moderation. They are less concerned about taxes, governments, and states as general categories, while being more concerned about what purpose these serve, what ends result. The failure of liberalism is within this moderation. The weakness of liberalism is a fear of going too far and so never going far enough. Liberals, pathetic and weak as they can be, often play into the hands of their adversaries. This is taken as excusing them of blame for their own failure.
Conservatives and libertarians might have a point in their complaints, if they were only to act as though they genuinely believed what they said. If conservatives followed their principles without exception, that could be seen as admirable and liberals might then merit the criticisms lodged against them. But, in that case, conservatives and libertarians would then be radicals instead.
Principled consistency is the sole possession of the radical. Only those willing to go to extremes are willing to both acknowledge the unanswered questions and demand they be answered. The answers, the ideals, the reasons they offer may be deemed wrong or undesirable, but it is harder to accuse them of avoiding the difficult problems that afflict both left and right.
* * * *
Those who wish to escape reason often turn to God or Nature. They say that is just the way the world is. They refuse to take responsibility for their own beliefs. Instead, they project their beliefs outward, just as they project their fears. Still, to less extreme degrees, we are all resistant to the demands of reason. Human capacity for reason is imperfect, but it is nonetheless very real. Reason exists within human nature as much as does reason’s failure.
No matter what our response, in this post-Enlightenment age, we all live under the dominion of reason. Revolutionaries won that battle, even as they lost the war. The new order of reason we’ve inherited is battle-scarred and shell-shocked. In the light of reason, even when a mere candle flame in the dark, our collective madness has a hard time hiding its true nature. But what are we to do with this unsavory knowledge? We can reason ourselves literally to the moon. What reason hasn’t achieved is peace and justice. We use reason to build more devastating weapons and yet we can’t find a way to reason ourselves into not using them.
Faced with self-induced horror, our instinct is to deny reason, to escape the sad truth that it would whisper in our ear, to blame the light for what it causes us to see. Yet to say there is no reason leaves us also without hope. There can be no return to Eden’s innocence. Existing without reason is not a choice available to us. But where will reason lead us? What reason, what ideal and hope will we put forth as a guiding light?
Our reasons form the path we take. This is why we should choose our reasons carefully and with awareness. The reasons we give for the past will determine the reasons that shape our future. There are always reasons and maybe that is a reason for hope.
Basically, I do believe such presently uncontrollable factors as genetics do have a disproportionate influence on human experience and behavior, but I’m not sure how disproportionate it is. This is something I’ve thought about a lot over the years and I did enjoy Seligman’s book even though I’m uncertain about his optimistic conclusions. I want to look further into the happiness research to see what the latest evidence is showing.
C4Chaos touches upon how happiness fits into religion. Here is the statistics(from the link in C4Chaos‘ blog) that relate to happy zealots(ie extremists):
Source: 2004 General Social Survey
I would add the morality angle. What has troubled me over the years is how the ideal of The Good is inextricably tangled with feeling good. And, yet, I sense they aren’t identical even though there may be an influence. If there is an influence, does the influence go both ways? I can imagine how feeling out The Good may help one to feel good. But by seeking to feel good can we feel out The Good?
Here is an insightful paper that relates: http://www.ksharpe.com/Word/EP20.htm
The Sense of Happiness:
Biological Explanations and Ultimate Reality and Meaning
Kevin Sharpe
I do think there is a connection between discontentment and questioning, and also between discontentment and creatively seeing possibilities. This translates as unhappy people are more motivated to ask new questions and to seek new answers. Of course, there is a point of too much discontentment and unhappiness that shuts the mind down.
I’ve read one of Seligman’s books. His view is that human choice is greater than genetics. The limitation of his writing is that its basically pop psychology and its only moderately backed up by research. One thing I remember is that pessimists have a more realistic perception of reality, but optimists have more ability to create a different future. Its funny that the optimists delusion is what makes them effective, but you don’t want to ask them for objective understanding. On the other hand, the pessimist knows precisely what is going on, but doesn’t know how or feel capable of changing it. (Interestingly, I’m a depressed person and I value the straight truth more than anything including happiness… which conforms to this view.)
However, despite the pessimist’s useful ability to see reality clearly, Seligman believes that everyone should strive to be optimistic. He does concede that society needs a few pessimists to ground the optimists’ vision. But, as I remember, he seems to optimistically think that the strengths of pessimism can be carried over into a more optimistic attitude.
Steven Pinker comes at it from a pure scientific perspective. He limits himself to what the research says. And his book isn’t meant as inspirational writing. I haven’t read his book, but I have recently come across some of the research done on happiness. Here is an interesting one: http://www.psych.umn.edu/psylabs/happness/happy.htm
Happiness is a Stochastic Phenomenon
David Lykken and Auke Tellegen
University of Minnesota
Psychological Science Vol.7, No. 3, May 1996
Abstract
“Happiness or subjective wellbeing was measured on a birth-record based sample of several thousand middle-aged twins using the Well Being (WB) scale of the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ). Neither socioeconomic status (SES), educational attainment, family income, marital status, nor an indicant of religious commitment could account for more than about 3% of the variance in WB. From 44% to 53% of the variance in WB, however, is associated with genetic variation. Based on the retest of smaller samples of twins after intervals of 4.5 and 10 years, we estimate that the heritability of the stable component of subjective wellbeing approaches 80%.”
Christopher Alan Lewis, John Maltby and Liz Day
“In general, no significant associations were found between religiosity scores and happiness scores. However, both higher intrinsic orientation scores and positive religious coping were significantly associated with higher scores on the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire Short-Form. It is proposed that these differential findings are consistent with the theoretical distinction between subjective and psychological well-being. It is suggested that when religiosity is related to happiness, it is related to psychological well-being, which is thought to reflect human development, positive functioning and existential life challenges.”
“In the 2004 General Social Survey, 35 percent of people who said they were extremely liberal were very happy (versus 22 percent of people who were just liberal). At the same time, a whopping 48 percent of people who were “extremely conservative” gave this response (compared with 43 percent of non-extreme conservatives). Twenty-eight percent of people squarely in the middle – “slightly liberal” to “slightly conservative” – were very happy.”
“A happiness edge enjoyed by the extremes persists even if we control for the other relevant forces like income, education, race, religion, and so on.”
The conclusion of this author is based on 3 factors: evidence showing extremists as more happy than moderates, evidence showing conservatives as more happy than liberals, and evidence showing the religious as more happy than the non-religious. He notes that conservative extremists are the happiest of any political sector and implies the connection with how vocally religious this group of people are. Hence, religious zealots are happier.
The conclusion is fairly straightforward. Any disagreements would be with the research he uses as evidence. Is it accurate?
I haven’t read all 4 parts completely but I wonder if this is true all the time. In other words, could the extreme be happy right now because of current conditions in our country? Extreme left: “Change is coming, yoo-hoo!” Extreme right: “We have beaten off terrorists and liberals for 7 years, who would have thought?!”
– Posted by Marcus Lynn
4. May 14th,
2008
11:55 am
Interesting… but isn’t it likely that anyone who rates themselves as “extremely” anything is likely to have strong views in general, and therefore more likely to put “very happy” rather than just “happy”. It would be interesting to see the above graph with numbers of people who are “very UNhappy”
– Posted by Charles
17. May 14th,
2008
2:15 pm
To follow on what frankenduf(14) said:
Psychological studies have shown that when people believe they have control over their lives and actions, they are happier; whether or not they ever exercise that control. Could it be that extremists, because they are more likely to be “acting out”, feel that they are in greater control? Moderates, on the other hand, “moderate” their views to accomodate multiple other points-of-view; in essence, ceding control, and increasing their discomfort.
A second, not necessarily contradictory, explanation would be that cognitive dissonance causes most frustration. Other psychological studies have shown that the more extreme our beliefs, the more likely we are to attribute facts that belie our worldview to chicanery, and the more likely we are to become emotional rather than analytical in response to statements that contradict our ideas. Byt this theory, extremists will become angry, per frankenduf, release anger, and thus avoid unpleasant cognitive dissonance by avoiding considering inconvenient truths.
– Posted by misterb
33. May 16th,
2008
7:04 am
This analysis misses one significant point.
Combined with those in the “moderate” camps, left and right, are those who can’t bother to have strong political opinions. Among these are those who are depressed, clinically or otherwise.
This subset of depressed people can completely skew the numbers when it comes to associating happiness with political fervor.
– Posted by Greta
36. May 18th,
2008
11:47 am
2 comments:
#1: Depressed people tend to have a more accurate self-assessment of their abilities and performance. (I really hate to say “studies show…”, but they do. It’s a simply psychological experiment: give people a task to do, then ask them to rate their own performance.)
It’s certainly been my experience as well….
#2: Well, duh! The message of the study is not that conservatives are happier, it is that IN THE USA, conservatives are happier. It’s an easy bet that in a liberal society, the happiness distribution would be reversed. Anyway you cut it, compared to other nations, the US is politically & religiously conservative society.
So, yeah, you analyze the data controlling for income, education, race, religion, etc, so that you can conclude that conservatives are happier folks, but the results are only valid in the USA!
Yes, interesting… but what to make of it?! I find research about this very intriguing, but I don’t have the capacity to really understand it. Statistics are so easily interpreted with one’s bias. Seligman interprets it one way but there is no objective reason for him to interpret it that way. He gives it an optimistic slant and he is probably the happier for it whether or not he is correct. 🙂
i have similar reservations to you about this whole optimism thing…
and yes, like archaeology where “rocks are plastic” or in other words, diggings can “reveal” many things depending on the assumptions of the scientist or interpreter, statistics can mean pretty much anything. So, IMO are often meaningless
Here are some articles from The New York Times that caught my interest (I do look at other news sources such as The Wall Street Journal, but for whatever reason The New York Times seems to have more articles on subjects of interest to me). Anyone who is familiar with my blog will notice that these articles relate to subjects I often write about.
About 300 people attended a memorial service Wednesday for James Pouillon, who was slain Friday while protesting abortion.
Paul Sancya/Associated Press
Mary Jo Pouillon sang at a memorial service for her slain father, anti-abortion protester James Pouillon, in Owosso, Mich. on Wednesday
I’m always saddened by killings based on ideology whether or not I agree with the ideology of either side. A random killing by a gang or a crazy person seems less evil. Ideological killings seem so evil because the killer often rationalizes their actions as good.
There was nothing particularly interesting about this article except for one line.
His killing is believed to be the first of someone protesting abortion, and at the memorial and a vigil later outside a Planned Parenthood office, he was praised as a symbol of dedicated action.
That is utterly amazing. He was the first anti-abortion protester to be killed. On the other hand, anti-abortion protesters regularly kill abortion doctors. Why did Damien Cave leave that important detail out? There are two extensive Wikipedia articles about anti-abortion violence.
Why is this one murdered anti-abortion protester a symbol of dedicated action? Are all of the doctors, nurses, receptionists, and security guards who died in supporting abortion (or simply doing their jobs) also symbols of dedicated action? Going by the Wikipedia articles, anti-abortion protesters have committed hundreds of incidents of violent attacks, death threats, murders, attempted murders, kidnappings, bioterror threats, property crimes, bomb threats, bombings, arsons, vandalism, and trespassing. Most of those, of course, were committed in the US.
This reminds me of protesters who try to protect nature and animals, but the situation is in reverse. Evironmentalists and those against animal testing have never killed anyone in US history. However, these protesters have been the target of numerous threats and acts of violence leading to many deaths and injuries. Why is that? Why are conservatives (social conservatives in the case of anti-abortion protesters) more prone to violence than liberals? The most violent liberal protesters ever in US history were the Weather Underground and even they never killed anyone. The Weather underground used bombs, but were always careful that people wouldn’t be harmed. Contrast that to anti-abortion bombers who specifically target people.
What is interesting is that liberal protesters are often threatened, harmed and killed by people working for the government or large corporations. The reason for this is that liberals are more likely than conservatives to clash with authority probably because conservatives by nature are more subservient to authority (which can be explained using the research into boundary types which shows that thick boundary types are more likely to be promoted in hierarchical institutions). Maybe I’m being unfair, but it seems to me that conservatives for whatever reason are more likely to turn their aggression towards private citizens (i.e., those they perceive as being below them rather than those they perceive being above them).
Actually, I wonder how true it is that conservative protesters are less likely to confront and conflict with authority. There are some conservative protesters that are aggressively confrontational to the powers that be and they tend to be libertarians especially of the religious variety, but maybe that says more about religious extremism than conservativism. I was also thinking about how libertarians (such as farmers and other landowners) will support environentalists against the government and big business (such as when the government wants to take or otherwise use their land).
The odd thing is that Fox news was during the Bush administration so critical of protesters. But now that a Democrat is in power they support and actively promote protest. However, the protesters of Bush were often libertarians. Why does the conservative party have an uncertain relationship with libertaranism. When it comes to protesting, libertarians became identified with liberals because it’s often impossible to tell them apart and even the protesters don’t necessarilly make this differentiation.
So, there are two questions. Why are conservatives reluctant towards becoming involved in protesting and often critical of protesters? Why are conservatives the most violent protesters when they do become involved?
I really loved this article. It goes against commonsense, but I must admit it’s the type of thing that has always made sense to me. I’m just happy when research supports my own intuition. 🙂 However, I have no special power of intuitive knowing. If you’ve studied widely the subject of psychology, I doubt you’d be surprised by this research.
In recent years, social psychologists have begun to study what they call the holier-than-thou effect. They have long known that people tend to be overly optimistic about their own abilities and fortunes — to overestimate their standing in class, their discipline, their sincerity.
But this self-inflating bias may be even stronger when it comes to moral judgment, and it can greatly influence how people judge others’ actions, and ultimately their own.
Heck, you don’t even need to study psychology. Just observe people and this holier-than-thou effect is fairly obvious. There really is nothing surprising about the fact that moral judgment has a personal bias. That’s just basic human nature. However, self-awareness of one’s own human nature isn’t inherently of human nature… or, to put it simply, most people are oblivious to their own biases.
A quote from the social psychologist David Dunning is more intriguing.
“But the point is that many types of behavior are driven far more by the situation than by the force of personality. What someone else did in that situation is a very strong warning about what you yourself would do.”
That is something that is so important that it can’t be over-emphasized. Social conservatives always worry about moral relativism, but what their ideology misses is the actual psychology of moral behavior. People should think twice before judging someone else. If you had the same experiences and were in the same situation as another person, you’d probably make the same choices. In this light, righteousness isn’t very moral in and of itself. Compassionate awareness and humility is more likely to lead to tangible moral results. I would guess that the more righteous someone is the more likely they’re to act against their own stated beliefs. This is partly why outspoken evangelists become involved in socially unacceptable sexual activities.
“The problem with these holier-than-thou assessments is not only that we overestimate how we would have behaved,” Dr. Epley said. “It’s also that we blame every crisis or scandal on failure of character — you know, if we just fire all the immoral Wall Street bankers and replace them with moral ones, we’ll solve the problem.”
And that is exactly what moral conservatives believe. This attitude comes up all of the time in the comments of the local news website. The more different someone is the more likely they’re to be judged harshly for their failings. It’s easy to dismiss the situation of another person when you’ve never lived in that situation. Also, people tend to want to take credit for the advantages they were given in life and claim it as “moral character”.
In experiments as in life, the holier-than-thou effect diminishes quickly when people have actually had the experience they are judging: dubious accounting practices will appear less shady to the person who has had to put a good face on a failing company. And the effect is apparently less pronounced in cultures that emphasize interdependence over individual achievement, like China and Spain.
It’s hard to be humble and compassionate if you’ve never experienced difficulties and suffering, and even then you’ll tend to only sympathize with the specific difficulties and sufferings that you’ve experienced. I always get irritated by people who judge others for something they’ve never personally experienced. That is one of my pet peeves.
I appreciated the last comment about “cultures that emphasize interdependence”. I’d assume that those cultures also emphasize sympathy because it’s through sympathy that interdepndence is encouraged. On the other hand, I should point out that research also shows that interdependent cultures tend to isolate individuals and so the sympathy that is encouraged might be very narrow. Anyways, an interdependent culture would certainly value personal humility over personal righteousness.
One practice that can potentially temper feelings of moral superiority is religion. All major faiths emphasize the value of being humble and the perils of hubris. “In humility count others as better than yourself,” St. Paul advises in his letter to the Philippians.
Yet for some people, religion appears to amplify the instinct to feel like a moral beacon. In a 2002 study, [ . . . ] the students in this highly religious group considered themselves, on average, almost twice as likely as their peers to adhere to such biblical commandments as “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The study also found that the most strictly fundamentalist of the students were at the highest end of the scale. “It reminds me of one of my favorite bumper stickers,” said Dr. Epley, of Chicago. “ ‘Jesus loves you, but I’m his favorite.’ ”
This reminds me of a long post I wrote trying to come to terms with Christians relationship with morality (Morality: Christians vs. Jesus). I was comparing research done on the type of person who supports torture with the teachings of Jesus who was tortured. The extremely interresting fact was that Christians were largely in favor of torture. This seems rather odd until you consider the larger context of Christian history and modern fundamentalism. This article adds even further data to explain this situation. The more ideologically religious one is the more one is likely to judge oneself favorably and presumably more likely to judge others less favorably. This might be explained partially by the way a religion creates a clear sense of an in-crowd and an out-crowd. And the person not a part of the group is inherently less worthy (and this attitude is probably responsible for a fair amount of the violence in the world).
For all that, an abiding feeling of moral superiority is intrinsic to what some psychologists call self-enhancement. So-called self-enhancers think that they’re blessed, that they’re highly appreciated by others and that they’ll come out on top. And sometimes they do, studies suggest — especially in life-or-death crises like 9/11 and the Bosnian war.
“Self-enhancers do very well, across the board, on measures of mental healthin these situations,” said George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia.
But in the mundane ebb and flow of life, an inflated sense of personal virtue can also be a minefield. “Overconfident stock traders tend to do worse; people buy too many gym memberships,” said Dr. Dunning, of Cornell. “In the economic realm, the outcomes are not so good.”
This reminds me of research done on pessimism and optimism. Optimists are more successful in many fields and there are many advantages to being an optimist such as better health. However, pessimists have a more realistic assessment of the actual facts and also a more realistic assessment of themselves. A pessimist may sound like a cynic, but they might be more likely to consistently act according to their own sense of morality.
An important point I’ve read about before is the following.
But a vast majority of people rarely, if ever, act on such urges, and their susceptibility to rude fantasies in fact reflects the workings of a normally sensitive, social brain, argues a paper published last week in the journal Science.
It’s normal to have “abnormal” thoughts and fantasies. It’s because people worry about these kinds of things that they become so prominent in the workings of our minds. The person who acts on such horrible thoughts may actually think and fantasize about it less than normal. However, these thoughts do have influence.
The empirical evidence of this influence has been piling up in recent years, as Dr. Wegner documents in the new paper. In the lab, psychologists have people try to banish a thought from their minds — of a white bear, for example — and find that the thought keeps returning, about once a minute. Likewise, people trying not to think of a specific word continually blurt it out during rapid-fire word-association tests.
The same “ironic errors,” as Dr. Wegner calls them, are just easy to evoke in the real world. Golfers instructed to avoid a specific mistake, like overshooting, do it more often when under pressure, studies find. Soccer players told to shoot a penalty kick anywhere but at a certain spot of the net, like the lower right corner, look at that spot more often than any other.
[ . . . ]
The researchers had about half the students try to suppress bad stereotypes of black males as they read and, later, judged Donald’s character on measures like honesty, hostility and laziness. These students rated Donald as significantly more hostile — but also more honest — than did students who were not trying to suppress stereotypes.
In short, the attempt to banish biased thoughts worked, to some extent. But the study also provided “a strong demonstration that stereotype suppression leads stereotypes to become hyperaccessible,” the authors concluded.
None of this is exactly new insight, but the point is that research is starting to prove it. Psychologists and parenting gurus have been telling people for a long time to state things in the positive because the mind doesn’t understand a negative. To the subconscious mind, the phrase “don’t think” simply translates to “think”. Any self-aware person realizes the truth of this.
The point of taking this type of research into consideration is that it can be helpful to give people perspective. People shouldn’t be so hard on themselves. There is nothing wrong with you for having strange thoughts. If you’re worried about acting on dark fantasies, your worrying demonstrates that your unlikely to act on them. However, if those urges become too strong, I’d recommend seeking help. When the voices tell you to kill someone, please get a second opinion.
I was just recently writing about this topic and this author in my blog (Punishment/Reward, Good/Evil, Victim/Victimizer). This article is about contingent love as a method of parenting (and I think this topic has direct bearing on the above article about moral righteousness). One can question the morality of contingent parenting, but the practical side of it is simply whether it works or not.
This raises the intriguing possibility that the problem with praise isn’t that it is done the wrong way — or handed out too easily, as social conservatives insist. Rather, it might be just another method of control, analogous to punishment. The primary message of all types of conditional parenting is that children must earn a parent’s love. A steady diet of that, Rogers warned, and children might eventually need a therapist to provide the unconditional acceptance they didn’t get when it counted.
Any reward always implies a potential punishment. Even if the punishment isn’t overt or even intentional per se, what is the effect of this contingent love?
It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed. [ . . . ] Those mothers who, as children, sensed that they were loved only when they lived up to their parents’ expectations now felt less worthy as adults. Yet despite the negative effects, these mothers were more likely to use conditional affection with their own children.
[In another study] giving more approval when children did what parents wanted was carefully distinguished from giving less when they did not.
The studies found that both positive and negative conditional parenting were harmful, but in slightly different ways. The positive kind sometimes succeeded in getting children to work harder on academic tasks, but at the cost of unhealthy feelings of “internal compulsion.” Negative conditional parenting didn’t even work in the short run; it just increased the teenagers’ negative feelings about their parents.
I’m a fan of research. Most people ground their opinions in ideology rather than facts. Of course, the data has to be interpreted. There are always other interpretations, but even so an interpretation is only as good as the data it’s based on. I don’t believe parents should simply submit to experts to tell them what to do any more than they should blindly submit to any other authority figure. Parents should trust their own experience to an extent, but research can help us to understand the larger context of our experiences. Any parent should take this kind of research very seriously.
In practice, according to an impressive collection of data by Dr. Deci and others, unconditional acceptance by parents as well as teachers should be accompanied by “autonomy support”: explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.
The last of these features is important with respect to unconditional parenting itself. Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children — whether they feel just as loved when they mess up or fall short.
I liked these ending comments. This answers the crticisms of those who would oppose unconditional parenting. It doesn’t simply mean to let kids do whatever they want, but it means having a sympathetic and understanding of one’s child. The idea is that if you want respect from your children then you should treat them with respect. If you want to teach your children how to be loving, how to be open and trusting, then you should teach by example. One has to decide about one’s priorities. Is it more important to force a child through fear (or withholding of love) to respect one’s authority or is it more important to raise a happy and well-balanced child?
In a new paper, a pair of statisticians at the University of Vermont argue that linguistic analysis — not just of song lyrics but of blogs and speeches — could add a new and valuable dimension to a growing area of mass psychology: the determination of national well-being.
“We argue that you can use this data as a kind of remote sensor of well-being,” said Peter Sheridan Dodds, a co-author of the new paper, with Christopher M. Danforth; both are in the department of mathematics and statistics.
“It’s information people are volunteering; they’re not being surveyed in the usual way,” Dr. Dodds went on. “You mess with people when you ask them questions about happiness. You’re not sure if they’re trying to make you happy, or have no idea whether they’re happy. It’s reactive.”
But I do have some criticisms. Emotional expression may not be equivalent to emotional well-being. The ways of expressing emotion may change, but I’m unconvinced that the basic level of emotion has changed. Even so, I wouldn’t be surprised if such a change has occurred. I do share the excitement of these researchers but I also share the opinions of the skeptics.
“The new approach that these researchers are taking is part of movement that is really exciting, a cross-pollination of computer science, engineering and psychology,” said James W. Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas. “And it’s going to change the social sciences; that to me is very clear.”
Researchers who specialize in analyzing mass measures of well-being are skeptical about what a content analysis of pop culture can really say, at least as a stand-alone measure.
“The approach is interesting, but I don’t see any evidence that the method produces a valid population-based measure of well-being,” Uli Schimmack, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, wrote in an e-mail message.
One issue is that pop culture and mainstream media have changed which might be the actual result of this apparent change in emotional well-being. Media was more controlled and self-censored in the past. There are more indie musicians who get their music out now than in the past. There are more people voicing their opinions through non-traditional media. So, maybe this only demonstrates a shift in censorship of emotional expression.
I’m impressed by the quality of journalism in this article. The subject matter a bit different from the other articles in this post, but it’s related. It’s about how the common person participates (or not) in US democracy, and how this could change. So, it’s about human relationships. More importantly, it’s about challenging the hierarchical territory of politics where democracy only exists in name (btw I see this issue of hierarchical politics loosely related to the hierarchical style of parenting that promotes contingent love). It’s a serious issue to consider whether democracy is doomed to be forever controlled and manipulated by the money and power of corporations and special interest groups. It’s hard to imagine what a real democracy would even look like. Some people claim a direct democracy where the average person’s opinion actually counts is an impossibility…. or even dangerous as the general population if given power supposedly would just turn into a mobocracy.
PERHAPS the biggest big idea to gather speed during the last millennium was that we humans might govern ourselves. But no one really meant it.
Exactly! Ideals are always nice. They make for good political fodder and an effective method for subduing the masses… as long as they forever remain just ideals.
The headlines from Washington today blare of bailouts, stimulus, clunkers, Afpak, health care. But it is possible that future historians, looking back, will fixate on a quieter project of Barack Obama’s White House: its exploration of how government might be opened to greater public participation in the digital age, of how to make self-government more than a metaphor.
I’ve been of the opinion for some time that we are in the midst of a major socio-political shift in our culture and probably in the world in general. Technology is utterly transforming the world and we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. With the technological generations coming into power and taking over the workforce, we are going to see a massive jump in technological innovation of the likes that hasn’t been seen in recent decades. The industrial age and the modernist ideals it fostered are still very powerful, but a new paradigm has finally gained enough power to challenge it. It’s been a long time coming, but the massive size of Boomers slowed down this shift. Gen Xers have been working in the background building the infrastructure of the Information Age and now we have our first Gen X president. Obama won by appealing to the youth which offers us a glimpse of what we’re going to see in the near future when in 2012 the Millennials will dominate the presidential election. The US is no longer controlled by the Boomers, but the Boomers are far from being out of the game. There will be some major generational clashing in the next decade.
President Obama declared during the campaign that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” That messianic phrase held the promise of a new style of politics in this time of tweets and pokes. But it was vague, a paradigm slipped casually into our drinks. To date, the taste has proven bittersweet.
I’m not sure it matters that Obama lives up to his promise. The important point is the promise was made. The sweetness of it may be undermined with the bitterness of politics as usual, but still the sweetness once tasted creates a hunger. Any promising ideal will usually fail when it’s first proposed. If one looks to history, it can take centuries for a good idea to really catch on and succeed. Without a revolution to overthrow the government, it takes time to change established politics. However, technology may speed up this process.
Federal agencies have been directed to release online information that was once sealed; reporters from Web-only publications have been called on at news conferences; the new portal Data.gov is allowing citizens to create their own applications to analyze government data. But the most revealing efforts have been in “crowdsourcing”: in soliciting citizens’ policy ideas on the Internet and allowing them to vote on one another’s proposals.
During the transition, the administration created an online “Citizen’s Briefing Book” for people to submit ideas to the president. “The best-rated ones will rise to the top, and after the Inauguration, we’ll print them out and gather them into a binder like the ones the president receives every day from experts and advisors,” Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, wrote to supporters.
It sounds good in theory. LOL The author describes the results of this gathering of public opinion. It may not seem inspiring, but I’d rather hear people’s actual opinions no matter what they are. Even if the average person’s opinion is completely stupid, that is still a good thing to know. Maybe the public isn’t capable of more serious opinions until their collective opinion is taken seriously.
There is a lively debate in progress about what some call Gov 2.0. One camp sees in the Internet an unprecedented opportunity to bring back Athenian-style direct democracy. [ . . . ] The people in this camp point to information technology’s aid to grassroots movements from Moldova to Iran. They look at India, where voters can now access, via text message, information on the criminal records of parliamentary candidates, and Africa, where cellphones are improving election monitoring. They note the new ease of extending reliable scientific and scholarly knowledge to a broad audience. They observe how the Internet, in democratizing access to facts and figures, encourages politician and citizen alike to base decisions on more than hunches.
But their vision of Internet democracy is part of a larger cultural evolution toward the expectation that we be consulted about everything, all the time. Increasingly, the best articles to read are the most e-mailed ones, the music worth buying belongs to singers we have just text-voted into stardom, the next book to read is one bought by other people who bought the last book you did, and media that once reported to us now publish whatever we tweet.
Yes, it’s a strange new world. The question is does this actually open debate. Do people just listen to the crowd and follow along? Do people just get stuck in their own self-created niche where everything caters to their biases? There are definite dangers.
Another camp sees the Internet less rosily. Its members tend to be enthusiastic about the Web and enthusiastic about civic participation; they are skeptical of the Internet as a panacea for politics. They worry that it creates a falsely reassuring illusion of equality, openness, universality. [ . . . ] “Many methods and technologies can be used to give voice to the public will. But some give a picture of public opinion as if through a fun-house mirror.”
True it creates an illusion, but politics at present just creates another kind of illusion. Choose your illusion, as they say. From my viewpoint, the risk is worth it because the opportunity is increased (as are the stakes).
Because it is so easy to filter one’s reading online, extreme views dominate the discussion. Moderates are underrepresented, so citizens seeking better health care may seem less numerous than poker fans. The Internet’s image of openness and equality belies its inequities of race, geography and age.
Now, there is a criticism that resonates deeply with me. I get annoyed by how few moderates choose to voice their opinions and I get annoyed that so many ideologues feel it’s necessary to announce their every thought. The internet is a specific medium that attracts a specific type of person. The internet is Social Darwinism in action where thoughtful debate isn’t always fostered. It takes effort to encourage people to relate well, but the ease of the internet doesn’t lend itself to people going to this effort. People often make their quick rude comments and the people running the site are too busy or lazy to moderate such trolling and other anti-social behavior.
Lies spread like wildfire on the Web; Eric Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, no Luddite, warned last October that if the great brands of trusted journalism died, the Internet would become a “cesspool” of bad information. Wikipedia plans to add a layer of editing — remember editing? — for articles on living people.
This sounds like fear-mongering to me. The great brands of trusted journalism aren’t going to entirely die out. The ones that do die out will be replaced by new ones. People want good journalism and anyways the quality of journalism was suspect long before the internet. People have been looking for alternative journalism for much of this past century and now the opportunity is here for alternative journalism on a large-scale. It will take time for all of this to develop, but it will develop because the demand is there.
Perhaps most menacingly, the Internet’s openness allows well-organized groups to simulate support, to “capture and impersonate the public voice,” as Mr. Fishkin wrote in an e-mail exchange.
Ah, yes. This very well may be the biggest danger of them all. The new technologies allow for manipulation and propaganda on a scale never before possible. The workings of the internet are so subtle that most people don’t even notice the inherent biases to search engines. Also, it’s hard to tell if a website is trustworthy or even who is running and funding it. Even so, there is more info than there ever has been. The difference of todays technology is that it allows people to research something if they want to. However, the average person has little desire (not to mention time and energy) to research most things. If manipulation succeeds in todays world, it’s because of willful ignorance. As long as people are willing to unquestioningly accept lies and deception, then there will always be those willing to supply it. But this has always been true no matter what kind of technology is used.
There is no turning back the clock. We now have more public opinion exerting pressure on politics than ever before. The question is how it may be channeled and filtered to create freer, more successful societies, because simply putting things online is no cure-all.
Damn straight! There is no turning back. Full speed ahead be it utopia or dystopia. It’s a brave new world, baby. However, I don’t see too much reason to worry about it mainly because worry won’t alter the change that is happening. We all might as go along with the flow. Instead of struggling against the inevitable, let’s save our energies and keep our eyes open. Democracy needs to be able to adapt and that is true now more than ever. Also, democracy needs vigilance.
To end on a humorous note, I shall reward anyone who made it all the way down to the bottom of this post.
Source: 2004 General Social Survey
Access: Public 
Marmalade 
Nicole said
wow. very interesting. i wonder why people think zealots are happy? the ones i know are a pretty miserable lot actually…
Marmalade said
Good question. There is a lot of research out there, but I’m not a scientist. Here is one paper that looked particularly interesting.
Religious orientation, religious Coping and happiness among UK adults
Christopher Alan Lewis, John Maltby and Liz Day
“In general, no significant associations were found between religiosity scores and happiness scores. However, both higher intrinsic orientation scores and positive religious coping were significantly associated with higher scores on the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire Short-Form. It is proposed that these differential findings are consistent with the theoretical distinction between subjective and psychological well-being. It is suggested that when religiosity is related to happiness, it is related to psychological well-being, which is thought to reflect human development, positive functioning and existential life challenges.”
Here is from the link in C4Chaos’ blog:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/the-politics-of-happiness-part-4/
“In the 2004 General Social Survey, 35 percent of people who said they were extremely liberal were very happy (versus 22 percent of people who were just liberal). At the same time, a whopping 48 percent of people who were “extremely conservative” gave this response (compared with 43 percent of non-extreme conservatives). Twenty-eight percent of people squarely in the middle – “slightly liberal” to “slightly conservative” – were very happy.”
“A happiness edge enjoyed by the extremes persists even if we control for the other relevant forces like income, education, race, religion, and so on.”
The conclusion of this author is based on 3 factors: evidence showing extremists as more happy than moderates, evidence showing conservatives as more happy than liberals, and evidence showing the religious as more happy than the non-religious. He notes that conservative extremists are the happiest of any political sector and implies the connection with how vocally religious this group of people are. Hence, religious zealots are happier.
The conclusion is fairly straightforward. Any disagreements would be with the research he uses as evidence. Is it accurate?
Marmalade said
Here are some comments from this section in the series that C4Chaos was linking to:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/the-politics-of-happiness-part-4/
1. May 14th,
2008
11:43 am
I haven’t read all 4 parts completely but I wonder if this is true all the time. In other words, could the extreme be happy right now because of current conditions in our country? Extreme left: “Change is coming, yoo-hoo!” Extreme right: “We have beaten off terrorists and liberals for 7 years, who would have thought?!”
– Posted by Marcus Lynn
4. May 14th,
2008
11:55 am
Interesting… but isn’t it likely that anyone who rates themselves as “extremely” anything is likely to have strong views in general, and therefore more likely to put “very happy” rather than just “happy”. It would be interesting to see the above graph with numbers of people who are “very UNhappy”
– Posted by Charles
17. May 14th,
2008
2:15 pm
To follow on what frankenduf(14) said:
Psychological studies have shown that when people believe they have control over their lives and actions, they are happier; whether or not they ever exercise that control. Could it be that extremists, because they are more likely to be “acting out”, feel that they are in greater control? Moderates, on the other hand, “moderate” their views to accomodate multiple other points-of-view; in essence, ceding control, and increasing their discomfort.
A second, not necessarily contradictory, explanation would be that cognitive dissonance causes most frustration. Other psychological studies have shown that the more extreme our beliefs, the more likely we are to attribute facts that belie our worldview to chicanery, and the more likely we are to become emotional rather than analytical in response to statements that contradict our ideas. Byt this theory, extremists will become angry, per frankenduf, release anger, and thus avoid unpleasant cognitive dissonance by avoiding considering inconvenient truths.
– Posted by misterb
33. May 16th,
2008
7:04 am
This analysis misses one significant point.
Combined with those in the “moderate” camps, left and right, are those who can’t bother to have strong political opinions. Among these are those who are depressed, clinically or otherwise.
This subset of depressed people can completely skew the numbers when it comes to associating happiness with political fervor.
– Posted by Greta
36. May 18th,
2008
11:47 am
2 comments:
#1: Depressed people tend to have a more accurate self-assessment of their abilities and performance. (I really hate to say “studies show…”, but they do. It’s a simply psychological experiment: give people a task to do, then ask them to rate their own performance.)
It’s certainly been my experience as well….
#2: Well, duh! The message of the study is not that conservatives are happier, it is that IN THE USA, conservatives are happier. It’s an easy bet that in a liberal society, the happiness distribution would be reversed. Anyway you cut it, compared to other nations, the US is politically & religiously conservative society.
So, yeah, you analyze the data controlling for income, education, race, religion, etc, so that you can conclude that conservatives are happier folks, but the results are only valid in the USA!
– Posted by Dennis
Nicole said
interesting… i think there is some amount of truth in each comment… so who can say really what it all means?
Marmalade said
Yes, interesting… but what to make of it?! I find research about this very intriguing, but I don’t have the capacity to really understand it. Statistics are so easily interpreted with one’s bias. Seligman interprets it one way but there is no objective reason for him to interpret it that way. He gives it an optimistic slant and he is probably the happier for it whether or not he is correct. 🙂
Nicole said
i have similar reservations to you about this whole optimism thing…
and yes, like archaeology where “rocks are plastic” or in other words, diggings can “reveal” many things depending on the assumptions of the scientist or interpreter, statistics can mean pretty much anything. So, IMO are often meaningless