Liberalism and Psychology

You know, I have a few liberal commenters other than Mudkitty that spend a lot of time looking for things they perceive as contradictions on my part, or as "straw man" arguments, and the like. Gentlemen, I enjoy reading your commentary. It gives me a good laugh, and an insight into your ignorance.

One of them even accused me of being "uneducated" and not understanding what the scientific method is. If education means taking your viewpoint in life, then you can keep it.

However, I am educated, and contrary to your opinions, I don't only surround myself by Christian/Conservative news material. In fact, I often listen to NPR (gives me not only a good laugh sometimes, but insight), and I have a whole slew of liberal acquaintances and friends (hence, why I feel I can speak for the left in some cases).

Anyhow, some recent reading of mine (I am a voracious reader) in a Journal of Psychology (I don't subscribe to many of the opinions of psychology because more often than not it is in direct opposition to my Christian belief system) I was reading I found an article regarding a study that may explain Liberalism's tendency to make poor decisions.

I have been proclaiming for a while that the Left tends to make their decisions based on the emotional aspects of issues. "The poor children" "The poor women" etc. Now, before all of my lefty readers get all freaky, I am not saying that I don't care about the women and children, or people dying, or the horrors of war. I agree with you that I would rather have peace than war, but appeasing the enemy is nothing less than disasterous. Anyhow, back to my hypothesis, I believe that Liberals act upon emotion without thinking out all aspects of their decision. In other words, their emotions of how terrible war is, or what not, influences their ability to use logical reasoning to the point that rather than being deductive and logical, they make poor decisions, and even turn to hatefullness to proclaim their belief systems.

The Research Article I was reading in Psychological Science, 2004, Volume 15, Number 11, pages 745-752 (how's that for citing my sources?) is titled "Reasoning About Emotional and Neutral Materials - Is Logic Affected by Emotion?". To clarify, I don't normally read Journals of Psychology, Social Studies and History is more my cup of tea, but my wife is studying Psychology (just a couple classes away from her degree) and often I wind up reading her material, sometimes to help her with her homework, and sometimes because an article or subject catches my eye. Anyway, the experiments set out to investigate whether people reason differently when they reason with positive or negative emotionality as opposed to neutral emotionality.

Common sense has always prescribed that emotions have the ability to impair logical reasoning, and that a cool head is more rational than a hot head.

The investigators in this article desired to prove that wrong, believing that emotions promote sound thinking, rather than hinders it.

Of course there has to be some kind of degree of emotion, for that is what backs up one's belief system. Compassion, or anger, or whatever, is normally the root of a belief. But, being in an emotional state (positive or negative), according to this study, caused participants to make erroneous decisions.

Now, let's get back to Liberals. They tend to be the ones acting out on emotion before stopping and thinking about their decisions. Cindy Sheehan is a great example. The Anti-War Protests with the hate-filled speech and despicable acts is another example. Rosie O'Donnel's common comments that fill us with confused laughter, is yet another.

As for myself, emotion plays a limited role. I am not saying I am without compassion or emotion, only that when it comes to my politics I try to keep a level head when considering my positions. However, what does play a large role is a strong sense of right and wrong, and looking to tomorrow, which affects my decision making greatly. Ultimately, I have thousands of reasons for supporting our troops, supporting the war on terror, and having a willingness to support going into Iraq where I believe lived a powerful allie of terrorism. Thousands of reasons. Each of them died on 9-11-2001.

And for another reason for my view point, watch this video of Reagan on Gawfer's site.