{"id":17064,"date":"2012-09-25T00:01:58","date_gmt":"2012-09-25T04:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17064"},"modified":"2017-05-21T09:54:13","modified_gmt":"2017-05-21T13:54:13","slug":"its-not-just-your-imagination-libertarians-really-are-weird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/09\/25\/its-not-just-your-imagination-libertarians-really-are-weird\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s not just your imagination: libertarians really are weird"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Haidt at the Righteous Mind<\/em> summarizes a recent study published in PLoS ONE<\/em> which looked at the psychology of libertarians<\/a> (using conservatives and liberals as controls):<\/p>\n

The findings largely confirm what libertarians have long said about themselves, but they also shed light on why some people and not others end up finding libertarian ideas appealing. Here are three of the major findings:<\/p>\n

1) On moral values<\/strong>: Libertarians match liberals in placing a relatively low value on the moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity (e.g., they\u2019re not so concerned about sexual issues and flag burning), but they join conservatives in scoring lower than liberals on the care and fairness foundations (where fairness is mostly equality, not proportionality; e.g., they don\u2019t want a welfare state and heavy handed measures to enforce equality). This is why libertarians can\u2019t be placed on the spectrum from left to right: they have a unique pattern that is in no sense just somewhere in the middle. They really do put liberty above all other values.<\/p>\n

2) On reasoning and emotions<\/strong>: Libertarians have the most \u201cmasculine\u201d style, liberals the most \u201cfeminine.\u201d We used Simon Baron-Cohen\u2019s measures of \u201cempathizing\u201d (on which women tend to score higher) and \u201csystemizing\u201d, which refers to \u201cthe drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system.\u201d Men tend to score higher on this variable. Libertarians score the lowest of the three groups on empathizing, and highest of the three groups on systemizing. (Note that we did this and all other analyses for males and females separately.) On this and other measures, libertarians consistently come out as the most cerebral, most rational, and least emotional. On a very crude problem solving measure related to IQ, they score the highest. Libertarians, more than liberals or conservatives, have the capacity to reason their way to their ideology.<\/p>\n

3) On relationships<\/strong>: Libertarians are the most individualistic; they report the weakest ties to other people. They score lowest of the three groups on many traits related to sociability, including extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. They have a morality that matches their sociability \u2013 one that emphasizes independence, rather than altruism or patriotism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Haidt at the Righteous Mind summarizes a recent study published in PLoS ONE which looked at the psychology of libertarians (using conservatives and liberals as controls): The findings largely confirm what libertarians have long said about themselves, but they also shed light on why some people and not others end up finding libertarian ideas […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,10,53],"tags":[1129,550,139],"class_list":["post-17064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","category-politics","tag-iq","tag-libertarianism","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4re","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17064"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17066,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17064\/revisions\/17066"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}