Paul,
The results from both your personality study and what you write here are certainly are interesting. What are your thoughts about the city/rural divide in Republican/Democrat support?
Why you consider the "feeling" type of decision making to be inherently selfish (at least that is the implication of what you write). This is contrary to my understanding of the personality profiles.
Why is conflict inherently bad to somebody who's decision making falls more towards the "feeling" side than somebody who is more toward the "thinking" side?
We know where on this axis a psychopath would fall, and it is all the way over on the "thinking" side. What are your thoughts about that and what bearing does it have on how humane a group of people with a heavy "thinking" bias are likely to be? Would they, for example, be more likely to place financial gain ahead of any humanitarian concerns? Would they be more likely to use deception to get what they want?
What do you mean by the word progressive in this context? It almost seems by your description that Progressives are conservative and Conservatives are progressive (I just use the capitals here to distinguish the political labels from the literal meaning of the word).
Dionysus,
I model the person as a common information processing system with the dimensions of the Myers-Briggs corresponding to the appropriate filters. Feeling need not be "selfish", but it is a method of decision-making that does not extend very far from the individual. It is strongly affected by physiological factors of that particular individual. The feedback for the feeling type depend on patterns of information that fill the spectrum of perception and immediacy is required for this perception. (How does a person "sound" on the telephone as opposed to what they say -- what are their facial expressions, etc.?)
This does not mean that one method or the other is superior. That all depends on the situation. An unfeeling person would probably not make a very good artist. However, there is a limitation to feeling -- it does not extend well to dealing with logical fact patterns. On the other hand, it complements the thinking type well by providing a check against extreme departures in logic e.g. ideological extremism.
So we need both types. However, having one type or the other concentrated in the political parties does not seem healthy for the system.
I believe the red-blue divide in the US is due in part to the fact that these personality traits seem to be somewhat genetic or at least highly correlated within a family between generations. As time goes by and the system adapts, some people are drawn more to urban areas while others are drawn to more rural surroundings. This migration also seems to fit our understanding of feeling and thinking types (female v. male).
In the US, the word progressive has become "synonymous" with "liberal". I put the same question to those calling themselves progressive. They replied that there is no ideological distinction.
Feeling is a holistic pattern of thought. Where thinking can compartmentalize immediate social disagreement, feeling types are more shaken to the core by these conflicts. It seems to me that the level of conflict that can be tolerated is a function of social proximity. Thinking types agonize if they are in conflict with the abstraction of the wider world to a degree that feeling types do not. I should refine that idea to be dependent on social focal length.
IMO it is more correct to say that conservative values are based on rigid cultural biases and societal mores, whereas liberal values are based on compassion, empathy, and experience. (These are gross generalizations, of course; there are sensitive conservatives and liberals who are dickheads.) But IMO conservatives tend to lash out emotionally toward anything that challenges their cultural conditioning, whereas liberals react emotionally to things that violate their sense of fairness and justice.
Regarding "conflict," consider that liberals are more likely to value consensus, whereas conservatives are more likely to be intolerant of other views and take a "my way or the highway" approach. Reducing that to an acceptance of or aversion to conflict rather misses the point.
Maha,
You would have a better analysis if you were able to extract the self-imposed bias and just consider politics dispassionately as a system to be analyzed.
Assuming that one type is "bad" and another type is "better" is faulty. It is more correct to say that the system may operate more optimally with a different mixture of personalities between players.
The question is, "How do the players on aggregate, process information?"
Paul,
You said in your reply to Maha that "It is more correct to say that the system may operate more optimally with a different mixture of personalities between players."
When we look at the Thinking/Feeling aspect of the study, the liberals mean is very close to zero whereas the conservative is strongly postive. So,it seems that liberals are represented by a balance of both thinkers and feelers and that conservatives are heavily biased towards thinkers.
What ideas have you come up with about groups operating "more optimally" and would it be reasonable to assume that the liberal balance is more healthy for organisations/groups than the conservative bias towards thinking types?
As I wrote last time, do you believe that a group which is biased towards thinking is more likely to be manipulative and exploitative?
Look forward to your comments.
Cheers
Warwick
I forgot to mention that it seems you have distorted the findings in the article in which you discuss the results. You say: "We found that the primary intrinsic information-processing distinction between self-described progressives/liberals and conservatives was that liberals “feel” while conservatives “think”."
However, the results don't seem to support your conclusion. With mean scores very close to zero, liberals do both and can be described only as "feelers" relative to conservatives, but not in any absolute sense. Conservatives, however, can be generalised as "thinkers" based on your results.
I think the way you discuss the results is likely to lead to the misunderstanding that liberals have a feeling bias and conservatives have a thinking bias, which does not actually appear to be the case.
Here is the conclusion of the study: "Specifically, liberals are more feeling while conservatives are more thinking."
This is correct. The study shows the existence of a discriminant with an approximate strength of discrimination.
A lot of people get hung up with the categorical nature of the M-B typology. That's not the best way to look at it. The individual has a certain strength along the dimension with a distribution. A "feeling" person also "thinks" -- but not as strongly as a "thinking" person. So, the statement that conservatives "think" while liberals "feel" is a simplification of the discriminant, but it is correct and does drive through the point of the conclusions. It is not a categorical statement -- the context of the study makes that clear.
The system operates more optimally when both players are seeking Pareto optimal solutions. The division of personality types between parties where one party is feeling relative to the other is hopefully a transient phenomenon. This is assuming that external goods exist to be had. That seems evident. Therefore, this division of personalities between parties does not seem optimal.
Paul,
You base a lot of your comments in the articles relating to this subject on how liberal decision making is affected by the fact that they are feelers rather than thinkers. This is not supported by the data. Liberals are a balanced group along this axis whereas conservatives are a biased group. So, if the "division of personalities between the parties does not seem optimal" then presumably you think that Republicans should recruit more "feelers"? Is this correct or do you, for some reason, think that the conservative bias towards "thinkers" is more appropriate than a balance of "thinkers" and "feelers"?
For example, you wrote
"The moral viewpoint of the progressive is not primarily a function of his perceived action on the environment. His judgement of good and bad action is more directly a result of his internal harmony, i.e. "feeling"."
Which is a distortion of your findings. Assuming your interpretation of the personality types is correct, your data tell us that about half of the progressives act as you've described above and about half of them would act according to your description of conservatives. Is this correct or have I missed something? This is just one example from what you've written; there are other instances in which you comment on the decision making of liberals as if they are "feelers" which is simply not supported by your data. On average they are more towards the feeling end of the spectrum than the conservatives are but I believe it is an inappropriate interpretation of the data to conclude that liberal decision-making is therefore based on "feeling". Individual liberals are as likely to be “thinkers” as they are to be “feelers”. Surely it would be more appropriate, if talking about individual liberals, to say that you couldn’t make generalisations, and when talking about liberal organizations, to say that the decision-making is likely to be based on a combination of “feeling” and “thinking”. Do you agree?
It seems to me that the way you have chosen to interpret the data is heavily biased because you favour the conservative viewpoint. It seems to me that you haven't really written a descriptive explanation of the data, you've written a subjective interpretation of the data.
What are the statistics in terms of "thinkers" and "feelers" in the broader US population? Forgive me if you've already discussed this I've either missed it or forgotten it.
Warwick,
The blogreader study does show that partisan liberals are statistically more feeling than partisan conservatives given that the respondents of the two primary sites are representative of their political groups. This last assumption can be challenged and for that reason a wider study would be preferable. However, on the face of it, there seems to be no reason to suspect that the sampling is not representative.
Again, it is the discriminant that is important -- not the absolute value of the axis. The test of the hypothesis is between two means. It does not matter what the values of the means are precisely. Since politics deals with policies that are abstract and applicable to wide populations, utilitarian calculations generally produce the best results. It is a distortion to imagine that a person can "feel" the better policy. This might apply for that one person, but what "feels" good for one is very likely not to "feel" good for another. The scope of analysis of the feeling person makes this judgment impossible.
All individuals seek a stable cognitive state (minus some exceptions). So the feeling individual will seek coherence in feeling (which relies on their personal state of physical well-being) while a thinking individual will seek logical coherence. The thinking individual will be more likely to sacrifice physical comfort in order to achieve mental coherence than the feeling individual. Again, this is consistent with demographic analysis of the US parties. Please remember that when I speak of types, I am referring to relative types -- not absolute MB types.
There are some statistics available as far as MB types in general. I have not found any survey that I was satisfied with yet. The MB test sites will generally have an approximate breakdown. Note that the analysis of the data is a mechanical process. There is no room for interpretation. In fact, if anyone would like to run an analysis themselves, the data can be had by request.
Well, we may have to agree to disagree as I disagree with essentially everything you just wrote, including the assumptions on which you base your conclusions. You come across to me as someone on the far "thinking" side of the spectrum trying to use whatever information you can find to justify your pre-formed political opinions as opposed to someone on the thinking side using data and logic to form political opinions. You consistently mischaracterise those who are different from you, right from the assumptions up to the conclusions and, based on past discussion, ignore those you mischaracterise when they tell you you're wrong and explain why.
Here's an example
"The thinking individual will be more likely to sacrifice physical comfort in order to achieve mental coherence than the feeling individual."
This is completely unsubstantiated but you state it as if you've reached this conclusion based on sound reasoning and information. Tell me, how does this relate to, say, people who spend weeks in tree platforms as part of protests against logging or travel half way across the world to stand in front of bulldozers to prevent the destruction of houses of people they don't even know? Many of the people who do these sorts of things are on the "feeling" side of the spectrum because they see what they perceive as injustice and they have enough empathy with the victims that they are willing to place themselves at significant physical risk and discomfort in order to do what they can to help.
Like so much of what you write, this comes across to me as written by somebody who has an agenda and has many theories about how people work but has essentially no idea how people who are different from themselves operate. This implies a lack of empathy and "feeling". People are extremely complex and aren't very logical in general, if you try to rely purely on logic to understand human behaviour you will be eternally frustrated.
“You’re not thinking, you’re just being logical”
Niels Bohr
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