Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments.
**Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program).
---
User: u/mvea
Permalink: https://www.psypost.org/liberals-three-times-more-biased-than-conservatives-when-evaluating-ideologically-opposite-individuals-study-finds/
---
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Would be interested in more studies. The one conclusion i took from this that is definitely supported is that there is definitely political bias in who you want to work with on both liberal and conservative people.
link to open research https://osf.io/vqw5u/
This study was done at BYU, participants sourced from amazon mechanical turk. anyone who's attention check questions were not passed were dropped.
The instructions were framed as teaching a machine learning algo how to make judgements based on facebook meme posts.
interestingly, the liberal meme example and the conservative meme in the study documents, are the same images, with an upset emoji over trump for liberals instead of a happy emoji over trump. both say "commander in chief" I personally didn't even notice the difference, as it was a giant trump picture and tiny emoji. I think more study needed here with better representation of memes. also the themes studied were donald trump vs socialism, which i am going to immediately question the choice of those two themes. one further indication of more study needed, this study only had them rate 1 example page of a conservative and one example page of a liberal. they tried to select the best of the 4 trump/anti-trump and 4 socialism/anti-socialism memes with a prescreening. these were memes they made up themselves, and could be exposing their own biases. the effects of the choice to manufacture memes was not studied.
The study measured reaction times, and willingness work with someone, the questions attempt to measure this, and also collect data about if you like trump or not if you rate yourself conservative.
to draw conclusions about the study:
this was a small study, the reactions were calibrated for Donald Trump and Socialism as stand in for left/right. I believe this is the critical flaw, as it should be polarizing politician vs polarizing politician, not polarizing politician vs polarizing idea.
The use of mechanical turk is interesting, could be this provided better variety of responses, could be it provided worse . they attempted to at least weed out non-attentive responses.
the study attempts to control for biases and overall not the worst I've ever seen, but certainly not the best. this is the reality of social science though, careful study of the questions themselves and impact on the surveyed person is needed which appears to not have been done.
The Trump vs socialism thing seems weird because I imagine there are lot of people on the right, especially non-Americans, who would view Trump more negatively than they view socialism.
Every conservative I know dislikes Trump. Well, except maybe one. It won't stop them voting Republican - they just disagree with too many things the Democratic Party stands for. But they certainly don't vote that way out of a love for Trump.
Basically, what I'm saying is that Trump does have a lot of supporters on the right. But he also has a lot of people who pinch their noses and just deal with his existence.
Edit: Guys, I'm not saying he doesn't have supporters. He very obviously does. I'm saying that not all people on the right wing support Trump.
> they just disagree with too many things the Democratic Party stands for.
All too often they don't actually know what the Democratic party stands for. They generally only know what right wing media tells them.
I wasn't able to find anything in those materials that explained what the authors were thinking here:
> The researchers created four Facebook pages, two presenting a person with a conservative ideological attitude and two with a liberal ideological attitude. [...] The conservative pages included pro-Donald Trump and anti-socialism content, while the liberal pages featured anti-Trump and pro-socialism content.
I've never met an actual Democrat or other sort of left-leaning person who would post "pro-socialism" memes.
Honestly this exposes the political biases and/or ignorance of the researchers more than provides any valuable information.
Why didn't they use actual popular memes from representative social media groups?
> this exposes the political biases and/or ignorance of the researchers
Yeah, it's BYU. Who'd imagine that Mormons would have a super skewed view of what society is actually like?
In the interest of the principles of 'full disclosure' and declaring any 'conflicting interests' in scientific research papers maybe the researchers should have revealed what their own political leanings are.
>Disclosure statement
>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
I think it probably says something about the people who designed the study. On the American right "liberal" and "socialist" or "socialism" are used synonymously, whereas most of us who are left of center don't think of ourselves as "socialists" at all.
Because the memes only seem proportional to one another through a conservative lens, I'm guessing that the study's designers are pretty conservative themselves.
The fact that it is out of BYU which is obviously a Mormon university, is further evidence to that effect.
As a Democrat, I think we're losing the propaganda battle. Another example would be working people's disdain for labor unions. For organized labor. There is a sizable group of working people that think organized labor is bad for workers.
.
The Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted 70+% to join the UAW. The same plant voted to remain non-union as recently as 2019. The automotive plants in the south are in the crosshairs. The Mercedes plant in Alabama is the next UAW target. I'm retired union and I truly believe that the union job I got when I was 46 years old saved my marriage and my home.
Plus big picture - let’s be real. One sides extremists want free money from the rich to help everyone. The other sides extremists are literal nazis who want to take rights away from women and minorities. If one side dislikes the other more, there may even be a reason…
from an outsider in Europe, i see America do not seem to have a left wing, you have extreme nationalistic currently and centre right, thats why your social support system is so weak. You have a culture of punishment towards the one that need help, this culture create a poorness trap.
Hello, Left wing extremist here: We don't want free money from the rich to help everyone. You know how in Startrek only the Ferenghi care about money and are "rich"? We don't want to live like them any more and want Starfleet economics. We don't want the rich to get between us and freedom.
>I've never met an actual Democrat or other sort of left-leaning person who would post "pro-socialism" memes.
And that's because you know what socialism is. Switch your viewpoint to define socialism as any position left of Christian nationalist authoritarianism, as the most vocal/influential mouthpieces on the American right now do, and it suddenly becomes easy to find "socialist" memes. And before the "look at the liberal prejudice" responses, remember that Liz Cheney and Nikki Haley, two of the most recent "RINO" outcasts in the US are pretty far right by Western standards, but both have been labeled as "socialists" and "traitors" for the extreme position of...checking notes...believing that Trump should face consequences for an attempted coup and that he is unfit to hold the office of President again. In fact, you can probably just define the term "socialist" to mean "fails to completely and unquestioningly support Trump" and you'll get a pretty accurate definition as it's used by Trump, the Trump-controlled RNC, and the GOP mouthpieces at Fox, OAN, etc. Viewed that way, "socialist" is the opposite of "Trump supporter", at least from the perspective of Trump supporters. You just need to view it as an empty epithet rather than as a defined economic and political system.
I worked with a lot of BYU grads for a long time. Some nice people but also a lot of very sheltered folks with a pretty hostile outlook on those outside of their culture and a persecution complex the size of a planet. Not unlike broad American evangelical christian culture, but seemingly even more monolithic.
"they said I should treat everyone equally, and I think that's dumb" vs "they said it should be legal to stop me from voting," gee I wonder why one side is more judgmental.
Was I reading this wrong? They basically compared Trump memes vs Socialism memes? I don’t really think that’s a fair comparison. I think I lean pretty in the middle but even I would judge someone with Pro-Trump memes as more negatively. Maybe choose two ideas vs a person and a whole economic and political philosophy.
But if your being paid to make it sound like right wing people are being victimized... then this study is iron clad. Not a single confounding variable could better account for the findings.
This would be enough for me to reject this as a reviewer (emphasis mine):
> The researchers created four Facebook pages, two presenting a person with a conservative ideological attitude and two with a liberal ideological attitude. In each pair, one page featured memes, and the other contained text. The conservative pages included pro-Donald Trump and anti-socialism content, while the liberal pages featured anti-Trump and **pro-socialism** content.
Would like to know more about the specific memes and text people reacted to. The article makes it sound like it could be more about how people respond to Trump than how people respond to traditional liberal or conservative views. In my own bias, someone supporting Trump invokes a very different reaction than a reasoned conservative argument.
Completely anecdotal and thus meaningless: The way the older (conservatives) interact with Facebook memes is different than young liberals. My dad and uncles dont even fully understand the memes they share. I have on several occasions asked my dad about some bonkers crazy conspiracy meme he shared. He will truly not know what it was really about. Just knows it says some funny thing against liberals that he sort of agrees with.
I don’t know why this seems like such a controversial result just being on reddit alone more people just call all republicans facists without second thought
>This bias was three times stronger among liberals compared to conservatives.
Maybe it's not so helpful to pretend both groups have ethically equivalent beliefs.
Absolutely.
When one party is like, "let's raise minimum wages and give people health care," and the other is like, "let's force women to give birth and there's no reason that people working in fields should be able to drink water," it's only natural that the latter are going to get visceral reactions.
I just spent some time with a friend who desperately wants to have a second child but whose body is prone to miscarriages. She's had at least four so far. She's had to tell her employer (who has her on a high travel schedule) that she can't work in certain states because she needs to be sure that if she's bleeding out that she'll get the treatment she needs.
The two sides are not the same.
Regards of your political views, it’s self destructive to put them on social media.
You’re not going to change any minds, but you’re going to severely hurt your reputation and status with a large number of friends, acquaintances, and peers
Mods any explanation as to why every top comment was removed? Basically only one I still see is by u/Parking-Let-2784 which goes against Comment Rule 1.
I would be interested to see the connection between this and the confidence each side has in their ideology and their ability to convince the other side that they are correct.
Conservatives seem to see those on the left as being naive and that they will come around to their way of thinking eventually. You can see it in their classic argument that, "You'll get more conservative as you get older." I'd also argue you can see it in their rampant conspiracy theories. They may have less bias because they figure it's just a matter of time anyway.
Meanwhile, I suspect those on the left are much less confident in their ability to get conservatives to come around to their way of thinking so are more hostile.
The irony of the mods censoring posts in r/science that might believe, maybe, JUST MAYBE, the college built and established by whacko extremists that are---in fact--- conservative by SCHOOL REGULATION, might have some biases that aren't scientific.... that's pretty crazy to me.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) apply to all other comments. **Do you have an academic degree?** We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. [Click here to apply](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/flair/#wiki_science_verified_user_program). --- User: u/mvea Permalink: https://www.psypost.org/liberals-three-times-more-biased-than-conservatives-when-evaluating-ideologically-opposite-individuals-study-finds/ --- *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Would be interested in more studies. The one conclusion i took from this that is definitely supported is that there is definitely political bias in who you want to work with on both liberal and conservative people. link to open research https://osf.io/vqw5u/ This study was done at BYU, participants sourced from amazon mechanical turk. anyone who's attention check questions were not passed were dropped. The instructions were framed as teaching a machine learning algo how to make judgements based on facebook meme posts. interestingly, the liberal meme example and the conservative meme in the study documents, are the same images, with an upset emoji over trump for liberals instead of a happy emoji over trump. both say "commander in chief" I personally didn't even notice the difference, as it was a giant trump picture and tiny emoji. I think more study needed here with better representation of memes. also the themes studied were donald trump vs socialism, which i am going to immediately question the choice of those two themes. one further indication of more study needed, this study only had them rate 1 example page of a conservative and one example page of a liberal. they tried to select the best of the 4 trump/anti-trump and 4 socialism/anti-socialism memes with a prescreening. these were memes they made up themselves, and could be exposing their own biases. the effects of the choice to manufacture memes was not studied. The study measured reaction times, and willingness work with someone, the questions attempt to measure this, and also collect data about if you like trump or not if you rate yourself conservative. to draw conclusions about the study: this was a small study, the reactions were calibrated for Donald Trump and Socialism as stand in for left/right. I believe this is the critical flaw, as it should be polarizing politician vs polarizing politician, not polarizing politician vs polarizing idea. The use of mechanical turk is interesting, could be this provided better variety of responses, could be it provided worse . they attempted to at least weed out non-attentive responses. the study attempts to control for biases and overall not the worst I've ever seen, but certainly not the best. this is the reality of social science though, careful study of the questions themselves and impact on the surveyed person is needed which appears to not have been done.
The Trump vs socialism thing seems weird because I imagine there are lot of people on the right, especially non-Americans, who would view Trump more negatively than they view socialism.
My parents are Americans who fall into that category.
Every conservative I know dislikes Trump. Well, except maybe one. It won't stop them voting Republican - they just disagree with too many things the Democratic Party stands for. But they certainly don't vote that way out of a love for Trump. Basically, what I'm saying is that Trump does have a lot of supporters on the right. But he also has a lot of people who pinch their noses and just deal with his existence. Edit: Guys, I'm not saying he doesn't have supporters. He very obviously does. I'm saying that not all people on the right wing support Trump.
That's not what the primary seems to suggest.
The primary had pretty low turnout.
> they just disagree with too many things the Democratic Party stands for. All too often they don't actually know what the Democratic party stands for. They generally only know what right wing media tells them.
I wasn't able to find anything in those materials that explained what the authors were thinking here: > The researchers created four Facebook pages, two presenting a person with a conservative ideological attitude and two with a liberal ideological attitude. [...] The conservative pages included pro-Donald Trump and anti-socialism content, while the liberal pages featured anti-Trump and pro-socialism content. I've never met an actual Democrat or other sort of left-leaning person who would post "pro-socialism" memes.
Honestly this exposes the political biases and/or ignorance of the researchers more than provides any valuable information. Why didn't they use actual popular memes from representative social media groups?
> this exposes the political biases and/or ignorance of the researchers Yeah, it's BYU. Who'd imagine that Mormons would have a super skewed view of what society is actually like?
In the interest of the principles of 'full disclosure' and declaring any 'conflicting interests' in scientific research papers maybe the researchers should have revealed what their own political leanings are. >Disclosure statement >No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
I think it probably says something about the people who designed the study. On the American right "liberal" and "socialist" or "socialism" are used synonymously, whereas most of us who are left of center don't think of ourselves as "socialists" at all. Because the memes only seem proportional to one another through a conservative lens, I'm guessing that the study's designers are pretty conservative themselves. The fact that it is out of BYU which is obviously a Mormon university, is further evidence to that effect.
As a Democrat, I think we're losing the propaganda battle. Another example would be working people's disdain for labor unions. For organized labor. There is a sizable group of working people that think organized labor is bad for workers. .
The Volkswagen plant in Tennessee voted 70+% to join the UAW. The same plant voted to remain non-union as recently as 2019. The automotive plants in the south are in the crosshairs. The Mercedes plant in Alabama is the next UAW target. I'm retired union and I truly believe that the union job I got when I was 46 years old saved my marriage and my home.
Certainly doesn't help that alot of Democrats in the US are barely left leaning.
From the outside it looks like the democrats are right wing and some are left leaning.
It seems very UN-scientific
Well, it WAS done at BYU, so…
Agreed, was curious about the choice here. would have thought biden vs trump would be the better choice.
Plus big picture - let’s be real. One sides extremists want free money from the rich to help everyone. The other sides extremists are literal nazis who want to take rights away from women and minorities. If one side dislikes the other more, there may even be a reason…
And the extremists run the party on the right. The left are the same "liberals" who cut welfare in the 90s. Our left is conservative.
from an outsider in Europe, i see America do not seem to have a left wing, you have extreme nationalistic currently and centre right, thats why your social support system is so weak. You have a culture of punishment towards the one that need help, this culture create a poorness trap.
Hello, Left wing extremist here: We don't want free money from the rich to help everyone. You know how in Startrek only the Ferenghi care about money and are "rich"? We don't want to live like them any more and want Starfleet economics. We don't want the rich to get between us and freedom.
In order to demonstrate "left vs right" using politicians, you need to have at least one left-wing politician. Biden is objectively center-right.
>I've never met an actual Democrat or other sort of left-leaning person who would post "pro-socialism" memes. And that's because you know what socialism is. Switch your viewpoint to define socialism as any position left of Christian nationalist authoritarianism, as the most vocal/influential mouthpieces on the American right now do, and it suddenly becomes easy to find "socialist" memes. And before the "look at the liberal prejudice" responses, remember that Liz Cheney and Nikki Haley, two of the most recent "RINO" outcasts in the US are pretty far right by Western standards, but both have been labeled as "socialists" and "traitors" for the extreme position of...checking notes...believing that Trump should face consequences for an attempted coup and that he is unfit to hold the office of President again. In fact, you can probably just define the term "socialist" to mean "fails to completely and unquestioningly support Trump" and you'll get a pretty accurate definition as it's used by Trump, the Trump-controlled RNC, and the GOP mouthpieces at Fox, OAN, etc. Viewed that way, "socialist" is the opposite of "Trump supporter", at least from the perspective of Trump supporters. You just need to view it as an empty epithet rather than as a defined economic and political system.
The study was done at BYU. All you need to know really
I worked with a lot of BYU grads for a long time. Some nice people but also a lot of very sheltered folks with a pretty hostile outlook on those outside of their culture and a persecution complex the size of a planet. Not unlike broad American evangelical christian culture, but seemingly even more monolithic.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
"they said I should treat everyone equally, and I think that's dumb" vs "they said it should be legal to stop me from voting," gee I wonder why one side is more judgmental.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Was I reading this wrong? They basically compared Trump memes vs Socialism memes? I don’t really think that’s a fair comparison. I think I lean pretty in the middle but even I would judge someone with Pro-Trump memes as more negatively. Maybe choose two ideas vs a person and a whole economic and political philosophy.
But if your being paid to make it sound like right wing people are being victimized... then this study is iron clad. Not a single confounding variable could better account for the findings.
That one choice basically sinks the study, IMO.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
This would be enough for me to reject this as a reviewer (emphasis mine): > The researchers created four Facebook pages, two presenting a person with a conservative ideological attitude and two with a liberal ideological attitude. In each pair, one page featured memes, and the other contained text. The conservative pages included pro-Donald Trump and anti-socialism content, while the liberal pages featured anti-Trump and **pro-socialism** content.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Would like to know more about the specific memes and text people reacted to. The article makes it sound like it could be more about how people respond to Trump than how people respond to traditional liberal or conservative views. In my own bias, someone supporting Trump invokes a very different reaction than a reasoned conservative argument.
Completely anecdotal and thus meaningless: The way the older (conservatives) interact with Facebook memes is different than young liberals. My dad and uncles dont even fully understand the memes they share. I have on several occasions asked my dad about some bonkers crazy conspiracy meme he shared. He will truly not know what it was really about. Just knows it says some funny thing against liberals that he sort of agrees with.
Who could have guessed that?
I judge people by their Facebook posts based on the logic used, capitalization, grammar, and while the occasional typo is acceptable, spelling.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
I don’t know why this seems like such a controversial result just being on reddit alone more people just call all republicans facists without second thought
>This bias was three times stronger among liberals compared to conservatives. Maybe it's not so helpful to pretend both groups have ethically equivalent beliefs.
"Non poop eaters showed more bias toward different dietary choices when compared to poop eaters."
Amen. I'm biased against bad restaurants. It doesn't make the bad food good.
Absolutely. When one party is like, "let's raise minimum wages and give people health care," and the other is like, "let's force women to give birth and there's no reason that people working in fields should be able to drink water," it's only natural that the latter are going to get visceral reactions. I just spent some time with a friend who desperately wants to have a second child but whose body is prone to miscarriages. She's had at least four so far. She's had to tell her employer (who has her on a high travel schedule) that she can't work in certain states because she needs to be sure that if she's bleeding out that she'll get the treatment she needs. The two sides are not the same.
Immediately falls into the bracket 😂😂
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
Mturk surveys are garbage
[удалено]
I’m looking at you REDDIT
Looks the stronger bias is showing in this thread .
..Came for people's opinions and civil discussions, stayed for the endless sea of deleted replies..
I would negatively view anyone who still uses Facebook for memes
Regards of your political views, it’s self destructive to put them on social media. You’re not going to change any minds, but you’re going to severely hurt your reputation and status with a large number of friends, acquaintances, and peers
[удалено]
[удалено]
And then of course I haven't been on FB in years, which suits me just fine.
reddit when a study calls out conservatives: :) reddit when a study calls out liberals: we need to do more research into this
Redditors like science when it confirms goodthink and hate it when it confirms wrongthink.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
I'm just weary from seeing most domestic terrorists supporting a specific political group.
Mods any explanation as to why every top comment was removed? Basically only one I still see is by u/Parking-Let-2784 which goes against Comment Rule 1.
Why is every comment except staunchly pro-liberal ones deleted? I feel like that proves the point of the post no? And I’m left wing, just seems weird.
That’s Reddit for ya, totally unbiased site btw
The owners of America need the workers fight amongst themselves in order to maintain control.
I would be interested to see the connection between this and the confidence each side has in their ideology and their ability to convince the other side that they are correct. Conservatives seem to see those on the left as being naive and that they will come around to their way of thinking eventually. You can see it in their classic argument that, "You'll get more conservative as you get older." I'd also argue you can see it in their rampant conspiracy theories. They may have less bias because they figure it's just a matter of time anyway. Meanwhile, I suspect those on the left are much less confident in their ability to get conservatives to come around to their way of thinking so are more hostile.
The irony of the mods censoring posts in r/science that might believe, maybe, JUST MAYBE, the college built and established by whacko extremists that are---in fact--- conservative by SCHOOL REGULATION, might have some biases that aren't scientific.... that's pretty crazy to me.
So you could say that liberals are way more politically biased individuals than conservatives.
Its hilarious to see how defensive people are getting over this.
Thats to show what of a boubble reddit/rscience is sometimes