Physiological differences behind ideological differences? Wacky!

Don’t take this the wrong way; I have good friends that are both liberal and conservative.  I also believe that both sides have valid points that need to be considered.  I look at most national issues like this.  Lets say for example we only have $100 but we have $200 worth of bills to pay.  The liberal side would choose to invest in schools and health care.  The conservative side would rather spend it on the military and infrastructure projects.  Both sides have merit and valid justification on how they would like to spend the proverbial $100.  That being said here is my take on the link provided.

It has been my experience that liberally prone people for the most part live in more densely populated areas.  As a result these larger city areas have bigger crime issues to deal with providing the “dangerous neighborhoods mentioned.”

Most liberal voters in my state live in the New York City, Yonkers and Long Island areas.  Buffalo and Rochester seem to compete for second place followed up with Syracuse and Utica areas.  The rest of the state is rural and mostly agricultural specializing in dairy farms, orchards and renewable crops like corn.  At one point there were several small paper mills in the scenic areas that dotted the waterways employing around 100 people each.  These rural voters for the most part have voted conservative.

I would argue that a majority of these rural citizens are baby boomer aged Catholics or older that deeply support the liberal party having been in their prime during the Kennedy administration. Despite that fact they seem to vote more conservatively or are very torn between supporting the party vs. supporting specific issues (Abortion being the biggest example).

I am not saying that this is a blanket way to identify peoples voting habits but in the state of New York it seems to confirm what your link says about where what types of voters choose to live.

However, I don’t know, as I would say it’s biological.  If I had parents that were for example conservative that put me up for adoption as a child and I went to larger city I would have grown up “having seen it all” as the saying goes and would be less likely to be fearful in life.  I’m sure the same would be true if the opposite situation.

My second debate would be that people with like interests, outlooks, and opinions would naturally tend to migrate together.  Rural farmers I know enjoy hunting, fishing and generally the outdoors.  Friends I have that live in cities value their computers, X Box and Play Station 3.  Now without crossing a threshold that could possibly lock this topic lets just say that political and religious beliefs and habits can be grouped in similar like ways.

Now that I laid the foreground here’s my second debatable point.  If someone were an atheist, minority, liberal that enjoyed indoor hobbies I don’t think he or she would make many friends in a community with a strong WASP background that enjoyed spending their free time outside.  I know this is a stereo type so please forgive me I just trying to make the point that people would rather spend time with other people that have similar interests.  People like to be accepted by their peers and try to avoid places and situations where they would be the butt of all the jokes and/or the center of persecution.  Unfortunately or fortunately depending on the environment we spend our impressionable years we tend to be a product of our environment.  I find it hard to believe that it would biological.  If my mother was terrified of guns I have a good chance of inheriting that trait as well because I learned how my mother acted around them by observing her not because that was a genetic trait.

I’m sorry if I offended any one that wasn’t my intention I was simply trying to express that I don’t think their study was wrong just incomplete.  I feel that the examples I used were added to better explain my points.

LT

Don’t take this the wrong way, but this professor is whacked.  You cannot make a statement for the entire population based off a sample size of two sections of your statistics class and have it be even remotely viable to real life.

We’re talking at least a billion people.  Even if we were only talking about potential American voters (roughly 300 million) he is presenting us with a sample size of 46, showing them pictures and the ones who say they are scared of the picture he is saying are also conservative in nature.

It would be equally viable for me to go to the Illinois Department of Employment Security (IDES) which is where you get your unemployment checks, and ask people if unemployment rates of compensation should be raised or lowered?  And then ask them if they consider themselves conservative or liberal.

In other words, the sampling is incorrect for a scientific analysis, the data sets are not congruous between one and the other and the sample size is insufficient.

However, in demonstrating sampling for first semester statistics students, it’s a decent learning example to use.  (Same as demonstrating that 20 people in the same room probably result in 2 people having the same birthday.)

Oh I agree.  My ancestors were communists (really socialists, they helped found and create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and I am anything but socialist as anyone who has read me can attest!

So genetics probably do not play much of a role in your political orientation. (And sexual orientation in my opinion, or religions orientation.)

Life experience + environment + personality + reasoning skills (not whether or not you have them, but which ones you chose to use to come to a decision) = political/sexual/religious/organizational orientation.  Genetics plays no role whatsoever in these personal choice decisions.

The way I heard it, he showed his two sections of statistics certain images that people may consider scary and then asked them to rate how scared they were.  Afterward, he asked them their political orientation and attempted to correlate the two results showing one indicative of the other.

It’s this blatantly poor method of making a statistical analysis that is why he is getting all the attention, not because his study was insightful or overly accurate in determining your political leanings.

I should mention that I listened to Al Franken talk about this and I listened to Jerry Agar talk about this and both had similar messages. (One is seriously conservative the other is running as a liberal because he thinks there are no real strong liberals in Washington, so it’s not like I only got one side of the opinions out there.)  Both said basically what I said above.  Of course with different words and different focus. (One belittled him for slandering republicans, the other for calling democrats insensitive.)

I hear the word POLITICAL too many times… this must be political then by expo facto reasoning.

LOCKED