SIO344: Is There More Perceived Consensus on the Right or the Left?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:12 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 344. I'm Thomas and Lindsay just made a noise. What's going on, Lindsay? Did something malfunction?

0:00:21 Lindsey: Nope, nothing malfunctioned. Carry on.

0:00:24 Thomas: Heard it. You all heard the noise, right? You heard it? We'll see. How's it going?

0:00:30 Lindsey: Are you looking for social validation of your perception of reality?

0:00:34 Thomas: Maybe. Wow, what a great expert tie -in. Does that have anything to do with any science thingies you may have run across lately?

0:00:36 Lindsey: Thank you. Entirely possible. I'll tell you all about this science thingy. First, I have a question for you. The term ditto heads bring back any fond childhood memories for you?

0:00:46 Thomas: Hmm. Yes. I know ditto heads. Fond. Exactly, Uh, but I, I will tell you that fucking song would the, He took that from Chrissy Behind and the Pretenders or whatever. It's like an actual good song, or at least it's a great bass line, you know, um, and that would bring back visceral memories of like summer days of like doing yard work and my dad just having the radio on, you know, and me just like not having any clue what anything was because I was a kid. Oh

0:00:58 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yep. Your parents did listen to Rush? Yeah, So did mine. So mine. Raised on Rush.

0:01:23 Thomas: God, yeah. Until, is until Fox News came along, and then there was less need for it. Mom, I think, still maybe did. I don't remember if my dad listened to Rush. I Rush Limbaugh quite a lot, so maybe he still did sometime when I wouldn't notice. That, yeah, because I probably would have been at school. So I probably only noticed the Fox News because that was on like after school kind of thing.

0:01:28 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, that as as a homeschooled person I got to listen to it all the time. It was really great. I have a lot of what I think I should call nostalgia. Portmanteau nausea nostalgia. Pretty good. Pretty Pretty good.

0:01:45 Thomas: Oh God. Ooh, that's Awesome. Wait, did you invent that? Whoa.

0:01:55 Lindsey: Think I did. Yeah.

0:01:56 Thomas: No way, the huge news, this just in, that's an incredible portmanteau or whatever the word is. That's That's awesome.

0:02:02 Lindsey: Thank you. Thank you.

0:02:03 Thomas: Nas, nostalgia, it all, it kind of sounds like it's nostalgia about Fast and the Furious and you're gonna hit the nos and like win the race by hitting it later for some reason. That doesn't make any sense and always make fun of this, sorry, no, nostalgia. Get the zh in there. I think that'll help.

0:02:20 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Mm, so a lot of nostalgia around mega dittos and Rush and stuff, for anybody not lucky enough to be in the know about this. Limbaugh fans called themselves ditto heads and greeted Rush with the phrase mega ditto's when they called into the show to communicate that they agree with him on literally everything. It's like shorthand, real cute, and The title of this article that we're talking about today is "Ditto Heads: Do Conservatives Perceive Greater Consensus Within Their Ranks Than Liberals?" Should be interesting. Nope.

0:02:40 Thomas: Interesting.

0:02:51 Thomas: Already, so we're talking about perception of that, but I guess you've also got to adjust for the reality of that, because I would just think that liberals would just agree with each other less, or think that people agree with them less. So it, how much conservatives think everyone agrees with them, right?

0:03:08 Lindsey: It's, um, mean, look, they at that, but their central question is about whether conservatives perceive that their political in-group has more consensus compared to political outgroups.

0:03:15 Thomas: Right, right. So Obviously you'd have to adjust for how much consensus there actually is, and I feel like you're already starting from less consensus on the left, um, interesting. Yeah.

0:03:20 Lindsey: It feels that way, doesn't it, yeah, that's a, that's a distinction that's very important, and they address it directly. And we're going to come back to that. Yeah.

0:03:25 Thomas: Yeah. Love it. Yeah.

0:03:32 Lindsey: But yeah, so the thrust of this paper is that folks on the political right hold a stronger bias to perceive their beliefs as shared by their political in-group compared to folks on the left. And so we're gonna get into why this might be the case in a second. But before we do, I want to highlight why I think this matters practically. Right-leaning people perceive greater consensus among their political ingroup than those on the left do, it's possible that they view participation in collective political action, like voting, for instance, to be more meaningful and likely to affect change.

0:04:03 Lindsey: As you bring up, this, right, issue of perceived consensus is a separate issue from actual political consensus, which is also important. Think, and that a lot of us have the sense that there might be more division on the left than there is on the right. And this is an empirical question that we'll come back to. But regardless of whether there genuinely is more uniformity or consensus on the right in terms of their stances on issues, believing that there is could have practical consequences in terms of motivating action. So there could be this kind of like self-fulfilling prophecy happening that's actually making the right more effective than the left at getting out the vote and things like that.

0:03:59 Thomas: Yeah yeah There any distinction made, I know you're going to go through the methodology for hours and hours. Is there, is there any distinction made between like leaders versus just other kind of members of the party, or is it just anybody? That they only reason I bring it up is I'm not sure if people on the left necessarily think that people on, like, just voters on the left don't share the same views as much as people on left seem to think that like politicians on the left don t share their views enough. I think, maybe.

0:04:41 Lindsey: Ours.

0:05:06 Lindsey: Mean, I've heard both concerns raised, haven't you? That, you know, the left is eating itself and all of a sudden.

0:05:08 Thomas: Yeah, that's true. But right. But I think for the concern about like electing leaders and feeling confident in it, it feels like you could could almost divide it up a little bit by that. So, I was just curious if they did.

0:05:18 Lindsey: Mm -hmm. They don't. No. Concern here is whether they perceive consensus with like other voters. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that's that's the so what of this paper, they're suggesting that the right is more effective at motivating collective action, not necessarily because of something that I think is genuinely difficult to change, like achieving actual political consensus, but rather because of something that maybe could be somewhat easier to change, like increasing the perception that other people in your political party agree with you. And So if these researchers are right, then there's, I think, some clear practical implications of their results that we why would conservatives be more motivated to perceive consensus among their political in-group? There's some classic work in social psychology suggesting that people in general are motivated to have beliefs verified by other people, especially by other people in our in-groups, regardless of ideology. So this is just like as a general human motivation. And I think everybody can probably identify with this to some degree and generate examples of times when they found it reassuring to be able to turn to someone and be like, did we just see the same thing?

0:05:27 Thomas: Okay.

0:05:47 Thomas: Interesting.

0:06:23 Thomas: Oh,

0:06:23 Lindsey: Or like, I crazy? Or no?

0:06:23 Thomas: Yeah. I can't think of anything like that. No, not like when, you know, murderers let out of prison or anything. Anything remotely like that at all.

0:06:32 Lindsey: How did I know you were going there? Yeah. Yeah, right. So to be able to turn to someone and have them say, oh yeah, no, totally. I see things the same way. We're on the same page. Being able to verify our perceptions and beliefs with other people satisfies an epistemic need. So the sense that we hold beliefs that are true, and it also satisfies a relational need. It feels good to share beliefs and values and opinions with the people that are important to us. For example, I think the importance of seeking out other people who are atheists might be a salient example for some people, especially if you live in a really religious area. Know, it's very isolating to feel like you're the only person you know who holds a important belief around something. And it's Very Reassuring to Find Your People.

0:07:01 Thomas: Yeah.

0:07:13 Thomas: I was going to say the kind of belief really seems like it matters or I guess the reaction to the belief. Like if it's something like atheism where a lot of people have a really negative reaction to it, it feels like it would be more important to like find those people who agree with you maybe.

0:07:28 Lindsey: It's kind of interesting because in the research around this question, it has been observed for very important beliefs, like we're talking about here, so like, you favorable know views toward preferred political candidates, religious views, things like that, like, uh, people tend to, to valuation of sharing those kinds of perceptions, but they also show this on more trivial aspects of experience, so like the sense that other people have the same tactile experience that you do when they hold a stone, right? Precisely.

0:07:53 Thomas: Oh, or like when they see a dress that's either blue or whatever the hell it was. The other one, I don't know. I only saw blue, so I don't know what the other one was.

0:07:57 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Blue. And black, gold, and white, yeah, saw them.

0:08:04 Thomas: Gold.

0:08:04 Lindsey: Both it-

0:08:04 Thomas: Where'd you find the gold? I don't get, I only found the blue. I don't know where you people found gold.

0:08:09 Lindsey: Yeah, I can switch between them, it's, I don't know, yeah.

0:08:11 Thomas: You could switch between them? Holy crap.

0:08:13 Lindsey: I can switch back and forth. Between the two perceptions, yeah.

0:08:16 Thomas: Can do that with a lot with With the like, very easily with the stuff that's like the old woman and the, you know, young person. But that one was so like, it's color. I don't know how you switch colors in your mind. That's crazy. Are you just having like a picture yourself and a kaleidoscope? Are you having like an LSD trip all the time? Like is the sky changing colors on you? Are your

0:08:23 Lindsey: -hmm. Yeah.

0:08:36 Lindsey: I do a lot of drugs, so

0:08:40 Thomas: Surroundings just swimming all the time? How could you change colors that you're perceiving at will? That's Crazy to me.

0:08:40 Lindsey: Um. Way I did it with this was that I imagined that the, um, exposure, I was imagining that the exposure was different in the photo, yeah.

0:08:54 Thomas: That's wow. That's incredible.

0:08:56 Lindsey: Thanks, I, yeah.

0:08:57 Thomas: I can't believe we haven't talked about this. That is really interesting. I don't know how you do that.

0:09:00 Lindsey: Practice. I don't know, um, yeah, so, so this seems to be like a very general motive, strong motive, people. One important point here is that, um, this is often about like perceptions of consensus because a lot of the time we don't have direct access to others' beliefs or perceptions. And so we're satisfying these needs to share reality through inference a lot of the time, right? So imagining that you have the same experience that I do when we look at that photo of the dress or whatever, right. A lot of that is going to be inference for a lot of things, right,

0:09:30 Thomas: And just can't really know, for, we, it's the old thing that every kid gets interested in where it's like, well, the same thing that you and I call red, like there's no way to know that that's actually the same thing, really. It's just something we've labeled red. It's kind of interesting.

0:09:37 Lindsey: Right. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Right, we can, uh, ask people about their beliefs at least, but yeah, for those fundamental aspects of experience, we'll never be able to, to any kind of direct, um, access. And even with beliefs, right, not often asking people directly about these things, you're sort of making inferences based, so there's evidence that this is a general motive. But of course, there's going to be individual differences in the extent to which people experience that motive. And the author suggests that political conservatism in particular might predict motivation to perceive consensus because of some past research on the epistemic and relational motives of political conservatives.

0:10:16 Thomas: Hmm.

0:10:16 Lindsey: So epistetic motives, and this has come up in a couple of episodes so The evidence suggests that conservatives have stronger desires to attain certainty, order, stability, and closure than liberals. We've regarding relational motives, conservatives value conformity and loyalty and group cohesion more than liberals, so given that they're higher on those sort of sets of needs that drive the need to have one's beliefs shared or socially verified, it follows that they might also show greater to perceive consensus. Consensus specifically among their -group. So domain of that would be their fellow conservatives.

0:10:24 Thomas: Right. Yep. Interesting.

0:10:47 Thomas: Mm -hmm.

0:10:53 Lindsey: The researchers predicted that this perception of stronger in-group consensus give conservatives an edge in their sense of collective efficacy. That is their sense that their side is better to come together and achieve political action, which in turn, they predicted, would be associated with greater intentions to do things like vote. So, we alluded to a minute ago, they're suggesting a kind of self -fulfilling prophecy, whereby perceptions of cohesion and political efficacy actually create more effective group action.

0:11:02 Thomas: Mm -huh. Yeah. Great. Another innate advantage that the evil people who want to take away abortion have. Awesome. Win

0:11:27 Lindsey: Cool. But, I you think this also potentially suggests something that we could do about it, if they're right, right? Think that these are perceptions that we could change.

0:11:35 Thomas: The midterms. You're right.

0:11:37 Lindsey: Yeah. Wait, what?

0:11:37 Thomas: No. Well, yes, but also no.

0:11:39 Lindsey: Yeah, looking for any edge of optimism here, I don't know. So a summary of the questions that we're going to be trying to address with the results of the studies that they describe in this paper. So first, do political conservatives in the US show a greater desire to perceive their beliefs as shared, particularly with other conservatives? Second, do ideological differences in the motivation to perceive shared beliefs affect actual perceptions of in-group consensus? And is that perception independent of actual consensus, which is the question you raised?

Then finally, do perceptions of in-group consensus predict intentions to engage in collective political action, specifically intentions to vote? So in their first study, they examined whether political conservatism was associated with motivation to perceive beliefs as shared by others, particularly in their in-group, and perceptions of in-group consensus. So they recruited 107 participants through MTurk, which is a platform that researchers can use to recruit online samples for their studies.

Their sample was mostly women, so 72 out of those 107 participants were women, and participants ranged in age from 18 to 64, with an average age of 35. The task that they used to assess motivation to perceive beliefs as shared and perceptions of consensus required participants to view a series of 30 images of young white men, for participants were randomly assigned to guess one of two things

0:12:59 Lindsey: About the man in each photo. So half of the participants guessed whether the man was gay or straight. And other half of the participants guessed whether the man was born in November or December.

0:12:59 Thomas: How much white genocide was happening? What?

0:13:15 Thomas: What? What? So that's a control because it's like nothing, or What?

0:13:18 Lindsey: Kind It... Of... Yeah, so they chose those judgments in particular, because they expected there to be more consensus on the judgments of sexual orientation among conservative participants, and no particular consensus on the judgments of birth month. Should be more or less random, right? Like guessing November, or December, unless they like super believe in astrology or something.

0:13:33 Thomas: Yeah. You would you would think yeah But

0:13:36 Lindsey: Um, yeah, so one of them, they should actually see some degree of consensus among conservatives, and one of them, they shouldn't.

0:13:42 Thomas: Like sorry I always think of this, if I were a person in the study and someone asked me a guess, where they're born, they'reborn November, December, I would just say, no, that's not a thing to guess. I Was there an option of like, that's the stupidest question I've ever heard, how do you, so you're just filtering for people who think there's some way to guess that?

0:13:56 Lindsey: No, can't opt out. No, it's, I mean, so I, I don't think they provided language here about specifically what their cover story was for this, but like a lot of times with with these studies, they're like, we're interested in what people can accurately judge from faces. So like, look at these faces and, you know, make your best guess about whatever factor they're looking at.

0:14:15 Thomas: Hmm. Oh, interesting.

0:14:23 Lindsey: It's silly, but like, yeah.

0:14:24 Thomas: Yeah. Just really, I don't think I could even answer. That's weird. I don't, why, Okay. I crazy?

0:14:32 Lindsey: You're not crazy.

0:14:33 Thomas: Why am I the only one who wouldn't answer a nonsense question? Or like, if there is no answer, I'd, cause I'd be like, well, what is this data? I don't want to mess up data by putting an answer at random that doesn' t have, but I guess if if that's kind of what you want, right? And answer at random. Okay.

0:14:46 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, pretty much. And they probably put language in there that's like, you fine if you don't have a strong sense or whatever, just, you know, make your best guess or go with your intuition or whatever. So they used these two judgments because they expected them to differ in terms of the degree of actual consensus, which is going to allow them to tease apart some interesting things in their results about actual versus perceived consensus. So after making all of their guesses for all the photos, participants also indicated their estimate regarding what percentage of participants overall made similar judgments to them about the photos.

0:14:54 Thomas: Okay, oh, I got a good answer for the month one, roughly 50%. But I guess that's the point, right, because maybe some idiot's like, oh, everybody agrees with me that this is a December born person.

0:15:21 Lindsey: Okay, Okay. That's a good estimate. Right. You would expect some variability around that. Yeah. So, so they can indicate between 0 and 100% of other participants in general that judge the sexual orientation or birth month of the men in the photos the same way that they did. They gave that same estimate for participants in general, as well as participants who share their political views. So, obviously, yeah, this is their measure of perceived consensus.

0:15:33 Thomas: Wow.

0:15:53 Thomas: So they're like, so They would ask me, like, how much do you think progressives think this guy was born in November, whatever. I'd be like, green, because there's not, I just don't, there's no answer to that that makes any squirrels, I don't know, there's, what, what do you want, interesting, would say, I guess. I would say 50.

0:16:00 Lindsey: Uh -huh. Yep.

0:16:10 Lindsey: I mean, you would say 50%. Yeah, that would be the mathematically correct answer to that because you're guessing. Yeah. Yeah. This is their measure of perceived consensus. They've got this measure among people in general and also people in the in -group. And additionally, they also had participants estimate consensus among people who did not share their political beliefs. So they asked them what well, they phrosed this one a littlebit differently. So instead of saying, like, what percentage of people who don't share your beliefs agree with you, they

0:16:11 Thomas: Yeah, Okay, Right. Yeah. Yeah. Be Like, I bet those assholes think he was born in December. Don't they, typical cuckservatives. Hmm Huh.

0:16:43 Lindsey: Asked what percentage who don't share your political made judgments that agreed with each other. They were assessing, like how much consensus do do you perceive in your political outgroups, essentially? Yeah. Finally, they asked two questions to assess participants' desire to share reality, which was how important is it that you see the world in a similar way as the people who generally share your beliefs? Desire to share reality. And then, of course, they measured political ideology. So a scale of one extremely liberal to nine extremely conservative, participants were placing themselves on that spectrum. To note that these are all U.S. participants, by the way.

0:16:49 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Hmm. Right.

0:17:20 Lindsey: If they'd used a multinational sample, this language of liberal versus conservative might have been a little ambiguous as to whether they're generally tapping left -leaning or right -leaming people. How did they analyze their data? Of course, they constructed linear regression models. Obviously, they did. Yeah. Like the last 17 million papers that we've covered have used used regression. It is a little weird.

0:17:26 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Doy. Why would one not use it, wow.

0:17:44 Lindsey: A good question. One should always use it. Constructed linear regression models to examine whether political conservatism predicted desire to share reality and perceived in-group consensus. As hypothesized, they found that conservatism predicted stronger desire to share reality with other politically like-minded individuals. So who rated themselves as more conservative also said that it was more important to them to see the world in a similar way as the people who share their beliefs. Conservatism also predicted more perceived consensus with their political in-group in terms of those facial judgments. And, and you're going to like this, this was true for both the sexual orientation judgments and the judgments of birth birth month. And,

0:18:24 Thomas: All Right. Here's what I want to know, how, this be a confounding thing of like, well, actually the real problem is that conservatives don't understand statistics at all, and that's it, or numbers, there's got to be a little bit of influence there, yeah.

0:18:39 Lindsey: Yeah, maybe, I dunno, like their, their inference is they're that, just thinking that they're going to make the judgments in the same way that they do, but if come to the table with the thought that, like, okay, maybe there is something non-random going on with the judgments of whether they're born in November or December, then you're asking a different question, I guess, than one about probability. But yeah, so yeah, so conservatives, greater perceived consensus on both of these types of judgments, both sexual orientation and judgments of birth month, and this was despite the fact that actual consensus was only higher among conservatives for the sexual orientation judgments, not the birth month judgments, which obviously were random, right?

0:19:17 Thomas: What, did more of them think the guy was straight, because they just think there's more straight, where is the opposite, what was that one where it's like conservatives think that the the Party is made up of like 80% black people, 50% gay people, you know, like they overestimate all that. Remember that? And actually liberals do it too, where they think conservatives are all Koch brothers, but like, it's not quite as bad as the other thing.

0:19:33 Lindsey: Right. Yeah. I mean, so, so way that they analyzed the consensus thing, it wasn't about just like the frequency of the judgments, they were actually looking at whether that there was consensus On the responses that they were making. Conservatives are perceiving more consensus than liberals on both things. On One can realistically expect there to be some degree of consensus among conservatives about, right? Right? Because sexual orientation judgments are a politically relevant judgment, unfortunately. Also perceiving more consensus on things where there is no consensus and no reason to think that there would be any consensus, like birth month. Another thing to note is that conservatism only predicted more perceived consensus with fellow conservatives. So with their political in -group, conservatives did not overestimate, perceive more consensus than liberals did with people in general.

0:19:47 Thomas: Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

0:20:25 Thomas: Like, Like in other words, they didn't predict that you and I would share more views on the birth month.

0:20:32 Lindsey: When you compare conservatives conservatives to liberals, they overestimating the degree of agreement with people, in general, differently. Like conservatives aren't overestimating that more than liberals are. They're only overestiminating consensus within the in -group. Yeah. We've got all the pieces here so far. Conservatives are reporting stronger motives to share beliefs than their in - group, and they actually perceive more consensus among their political in -groupe than liberals do, even on judgments for which consensus is not there and on which you wouldn't expect consensus to be there. So next, the researchers put those pieces together in a mediation analysis to see if the relationship between political ideology and perceptions of in -group consensus is explained by the greater desire that conservatives have to share beliefs. So they're sort of, you know, putting forward this motivated reasoning account, right? And they found that, in fact, it does. So the relationship between being more conservative and perceiving more consensus among one's in - group was statistically explained by the increased desire to perceive reality as shared. So their central findings. They also looked at outgroup consensus, and they found that conservatives perceived less outgrouped consensus than liberals did, but

0:20:45 Thomas: Okay.

0:21:43 Thomas: Okay. That's the thing that I think I accidentally said a second ago. Okay. So that, I think that's what, I thought the last thing was, but in case anyone was confused. Oh,

0:21:58 Lindsey: Orientation judgments, not for birth month. Month. So only for the politically relevant judgment. Conservatives to a greater degree than liberals perceive there to be more disagreement among their political outgroups about politically relevant judgments.

0:22:10 Thomas: That's interesting.

0:22:11 Lindsey: It is interesting.

0:22:12 Thomas: I, yeah, I would have thought that it would almost, the same kind of dynamics would lead you to be like, ah, the other side all thinks this thing.

0:22:12 Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. I'm glad you said that because I had the exact same thought when I read this. And that is a real thing. You effect called the outgroup homogeneity effect. Yeah, we tend to see our in groups as more diverse than we see out groups, Their results don't actually allow... Speak to that because two effects here that seem like they might compete with each other a little bit, right?

There a way to reconcile them potentially, and we don't know which is true because I don't have access to like the kinds of numbers from their data that I would need to see this, but the outgroup homogeneity effect suggests that, like, if I ask a conservative, um, much how is there among other conservatives versus how much census is there among liberals, right, going to say that the liberals as the out group are more more homogenous. That would be the out -group homogeneity effect. That's not the comparison that they're making here. Comparison that they'RE making is if you ask a conservative and a liberal, how much consensus is there in your in -group? Conservatives are going to say that there's more consensus in their in - group than liberals

0:22:26 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Yeah. Hmm. Oh. Yeah. Okay. Yep.

0:23:27 Lindsey: Say there is consensus in their in group. So that's a different comparison, right? Like what they are getting is that, that difference about perceptions of the in-group, that's not actually incompatible with the outgroup homogeneity effect, they

0:23:29 Thomas: Yep. Got That Yeah. I Thought you also said there's a question about: did they not ask Mitch McConnell how much he thinks that you and I agree about the guy being born in a month? If you ask Mitch McConnell how much he thinks you and I agree, this study is evaluating that difference between that and how much we think Mitch McConnell and other conservatives agree. So if, if both groups think there's more consensus in the out group, then that's going to be equal, right? Could be equal, all

0:24:05 Lindsey: Right, if conservatives and liberals are both looking at the out group, it could be that both of them are seeing the outgroup as more homogenous, but These results are not saying is that conservatives necessarily see the in-group as more homogenous than they see the out-group. That's not the implication. It's just that they see more consensus their in-group than liberals see among their end-groups.

0:24:12 Thomas: Yes.

0:24:26 Thomas: So that is essentially what I was just saying. But because I was saying instead saying if they're roughly equal, then it would show up as roughly equal. But it wouldn't tell you the fact of the matter. Or it would just tell you the difference in perceptions of the two groups about the other groups, right?

0:24:28 Lindsey: Okay. Okay, that's exactly right. Yes. So just to to summarize all this, what conservatives to perceiving more consensus within their in -group than liberals are perceiving within their end group, and conservative more than liberals are perceiving there to be more disagreement in their outgroups than liberals are perceaving in their out groups. But what they're not showing is that conservatives are perceving there to be more consensus in their in -group than there is in the outgroup, if results are entirely consistent with the possibility that conservatives think that liberals have more consensus than conservatives do.

0:24:42 Thomas: Yeah. Um Yeah.

0:25:17 Lindsey: It's just that, like, you, they're judging the consensus their own in-group, there might be these differences in the degree of consensus. And that still matters, right? Like, conservatives or liberals perceive there to be more in-group consensus, still is going to have impacts on the things we're saying are important, right. But I don't want people to get impression the that conservatives, you, motivated to perceive each other as like totally in lockstep and not perceive outgroups that way. Cause that's not actually what their, what their results are showing.

0:25:17 Thomas: Hmm. Okay. Um.

0:25:46 Lindsey: Right. Right. So takeaways from the first study, conservatives exhibit stronger motivation to share reality with politically like -minded individuals. And that motivation is in turn associated with greater perceptions of consensus among other political conservatives. And this is true for both politically relevant judgments and politically irrelevant judgments, which is interesting. Second study had the same basic setup as study one with their participants making judgments about faces, but they added a new judgment and they also measured participants' perceptions of collective efficacy. So they're going to try to replicate the relationships they found in study one between political ideology and motivation to perceive shared reality and perceptions of shared reality. But those perceptions translate into a perception that your political in -group is better at coming coming together to achieve political action.

0:26:05 Thomas: Oh.

0:26:35 Thomas: Okay, why?

0:26:36 Lindsey: So had 150 U.S. participants, again, recruited from MTurk. Were 94 women. So again, the sample was majority women, average age of 34. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 65. addition to making judgments about sexual orientation and birth month, like they did in the first study, participants also guessed whether the men in the photos ate fruits or ate vegetables.

0:27:00 Thomas: Is that an either or? Oh.

0:27:02 Lindsey: It wasn't. It was two different items. Sorry, I said that weirdly.

0:27:04 Thomas: Do you think this guy's a fruits guy or a vegetables guy? Yeah.

0:27:10 Lindsey: Actually would have liked that better because this seems, so

0:27:11 Thomas: And they're like, "We'll help you out, he eats a lot of tomatoes," and they're like, "I don't... Oh god, I don't know how to answer that." Yeah.

0:27:21 Lindsey: Yeah, this one seems weird to me because they added it as another judgement that both isn't politically relevant and shouldn't exhibit any particular consensus, since according to the authors, there are no pervasive stereotypes about whether people eat fruit or eat vegetables. I this is right, but I feel like, but

0:27:29 Thomas: Yeah. I think that's right, if it was was like meat or vegetables, then probably, but like fruit or vegetables? Oh.

0:27:41 Lindsey: Again, it's not binary. It's just like how, so was an item that's like, how likely is this person to eat fruit on a scale of not at all likely to very likely?

0:27:46 Thomas: Oh. I I See.

0:27:49 Lindsey: And same for vegetables.

0:27:49 Thomas: I see. I see. Yeah. I guess the vegetables one then you could see, yeah, especially because we know of diets that certain people have that involve not eating vegetables. Yeah.

0:27:54 Lindsey: And I feel like if my attention is called to that particular judgment, yeah.

0:28:04 Lindsey: Like, yeah, in a post post -carnivore world, or carnivore diet world, I should say, which Jordan Peterson's daughter is a big fan of. No, I don't that I, well, I dunno. Their results support what they're saying, so I guess I should let it drop. But like, if it was me, I feel like I would probably be looking for health cues or something to make this judgment.

0:28:17 Thomas: Do Yeah, yeah, so maybe ask something that's like totally neutral. Does this person and eat, you know, sourdough bread or wheat. I don't know. Even that might, you know.

0:28:26 Lindsey: Yeah. I donno. Right. Yeah! I would be more like, Like, I don't know. Anyway, so, you in study one, they assess desire to share reality and political ideology using the same questions. And additionally, they assessed collective efficacy for one's political in group, using six items that were adapted from the self efficacy scale. So the original version of the scale has items like, quote, I will be able to achieve most of the goals that I have set for myself.

And it assesses self -efficacy, or the sense that you have the ability to overcome adversity and achieve your goals. Modified the items on this scale so that the statements referred to the political in -group instead of the self. So, for example, quote, my political party will be able to achieve most of the election goals, I .e. electing candidates, that it has set for itself. Context, participants were responding to these items in the context of the 2012 12 electoral campaigns. So the 2012 general election was coming up at the time of, yeah, this paper came out in 2014. This is a little bit old. Were collecting data sort of in the lead up to the 2012 General Election. And so what did they find? So first of all, they replicated the results from study one. So conservatism, again, positively predicted both a stronger desire to share reality and greater perceptions of consensus among the political in -group. And this was true for judgments of sexual orientation and birth month, again. And also it was true für judgments of how likely each target was to eat fruits and vegetables. Yeah.

In study one, actual consensus was higher among conservatives than liberals for the judgments of sex orientation, but ideology did not predict actual consensus for birth month or for food preference judgments. So again, the significance of this comparison is that the perception of consensus that conservatives are demonstrating does not seem to be tracking real consensus. They're just showing,

0:29:29 Thomas: Oh, this is old. Oh Okay, yeah.

0:30:25 Lindsey: You greater perception of census in general, even for these random sort of judgments. And they also replicated the finding that this relationship between political ideology and perceived in-group consensus was mediated by the motivation to share reality. So again, conservatism is predicting motivations to to perceive consensus, and this in turn is predicting greater perceptions of consensus.

0:30:48 Thomas: Then we're gonna link it up with if they think Romney's gonna win kind of thing.

0:30:51 Lindsey: We go. That's Exactly what I have next in my notes. So in terms of the novel finding that they're adding in this study, they ran another mediation model to examine whether political ideology predicted perceived collective efficacy of the political in-group and whether that relationship was explained or accounted for by the motivation to perceive reality as shared and the perception of shared reality. And they found that it did. So conservatives exhibited greater collective self-efficacy than liberals.

And this was statistically explained by the fact that conservatives were more motivated to perceive shared reality and thus perceived greater in-group consensus. New result provides evidence for sort of the so what, that all well and good that conservatives are more motivated to share reality and that that predicts more perceived consensus among the political in-group than liberals seem to demonstrate. But why does that matter?

These motives and perceptions seem to be predicting an increased sense among conservatives that their political party is likely to be efficacious in achieving its political goals. And past work on self-efficacy suggests that people with higher self-evicacy are more likely to do stuff. So if conservatives feel more collective efficacy, they might be more likely to in collective action like voting, because they, more so than liberals, perceive that behavior as effective. That's a big thing to add here. Their third and final study, they replicate the results of the first two, they add one more measure, which is intention to vote in a major upcoming

0:30:52 Thomas: Oh God.

0:32:18 Lindsey: Election, specifically the 2012 general election.

0:32:20 Thomas: Just got more and more depressing as it went on. And THEN they added likelihood to storm the Capitol and it was the whole thing.

0:32:28 Lindsey: That is study four. Yes, no. So they're going to look at ideology as a predictor of motivation to share reality, actual perceptions of consensus, and collective efficacy for one's political party. And they're going to see whether that chain of variables predicts whether people say they intend to vote. And so this is really the money shot, right? They're going going to see if this chain of desires and perceptions ultimately predicts more intentions to do something, you to vote.

0:32:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:32:55 Thomas: Drum roll. Oh no, not yet. Okay. Just love your foreplay, don't you? You just want to make it as wait to see.

0:33:00 Lindsey: Do. Who doesn't? Else are we going to get up to that 90 minutes of moderate to visit? Whatever. Additionally, they, got it. I didn't need to finish the word.

0:33:09 Thomas: Shouldn't have bailed on that joke. That was good. Okay, yeah, you said enough. That's fine.

0:33:15 Lindsey: Yeah. Additionally, they added an experimental component to this study. So, instead of just measuring desire to share reality, they actually manipulate it. And this will allow them to make stronger causal claims about this variable than they could make with just the correlational results that they had in the first two studies. So, had 311 U.S. participants, of them were women. Age was 33 years, and ages ranged from 18 to 70. Once again, empty example. Lot of what they do here is similar to of the first two studies, so they're still doing the facial judgments and measuring desire to share reality and perceptions of consensus and ideology with the same items. But prior to all those tasks and measures, they do something new. They randomly assign participants to one of three conditions that should either decrease, increase, or not change participants' desire to affiliate with other people, which past research suggests will increase their desire to perceive their realities is shared. Those two variables are related to each other. Had participants imagine that they were returning from a weekend trip with friends and either feeling overwhelmed by the amount of social contact. And,

0:34:25 Thomas: So we're introvert extroverting in here? Yeah.

0:34:29 Lindsey: Of capturing sort of prototypical reactions of introverts and extroverts. Yeah, they come back from the weekend trip. They feel overwhelmed by the amount of social contact. They receive a phone call from a friend, wanting to see a movie together, and they asked the participants to write several sentences explaining how they would tell their friend that they needed time alone to unwind and stop feeling socially overburdened.

0:34:48 Thomas: So, on. They answered a phone call? Well, you're already, this is already only boomers you've already eliminated us from the

0:34:53 Lindsey: Was 2012, like it was only boomers that were alive then. So yeah, so this task of sort of imagining and then writing about this particular kind of feeling should decrease desire to affiliate temporarily, because it's priming feelings of social satiation and overwhelm, it should decrease the desire in turn to perceive consensus. The researchers expect here to have downstream consequences on these other variables of interest that they've been looking at. Was the first condition, right, they imagine coming back from the social weekend and feeling overwhelmed by the amount of social contact.

In the second condition, they had participants imagine feeling socially isolated after their weekend trip. And they call a close friend, and they ask participants to write several sentences explaining how they would tell their friend that they need some time with other people to unwind and stop feeling socially distant. So this should increase desire to affiliate, and thus also increase desire to perceive consensus and the other downstream effects. Effects. Condition is the control condition.

And participants here experienced a no treatment control condition, so they didn't have them imagine a scenario or write anything. Participants just went straight into the facial judgment task. And I don't love that, to be honest. I really like it when they use like a neutral control task.

0:34:57 Thomas: Oh. Right. Yeah, yeah.

0:36:11 Lindsey: You can standardize like everybody's writing, everybody's imagining something. Only thing that's different is what they're priming. But

0:36:16 Thomas: Good point, think I that's come up before, huh? Oh,

0:36:18 Lindsey: Has. Yeah. Want to standardize as much as possible. The only upside to doing it this way, and this is probably why they did it, is that it makes their control condition exactly the same as what participants experienced in their first two studies. Yeah, and so those results are going to be comparable, but I me, I would have ideally wanted to add like a fourth condition if they really wanted That comparability, but. And the writing exercises, the facial judgment task, and the other measures that they used in the first two studies, the researchers also assessed voting intentions. So they had participants indicate how likely they were to vote in the 2012 election. That was. Let's start with what happened in their control condition, since that's just like a replication with one added variable. In their no treatment control condition, they replicated the effects of the first two studies. Political ideology predicted desire to share reality, which in turn predicted perceptions of consensus among the in -group, which, in turn, predicted collective efficacy for one's political party, which, in turn, and this is the new result, ultimately predicted greater intentions to vote in the 2012 general election.

0:36:32 Thomas: Okay, yeah. Yeah. Okay.

0:37:23 Lindsey: About this manipulation of desire to affiliate? How did that affect these relationships? Relationships. Of all, the manipulation worked in terms of changing the desire to share reality, but it changed that desire in ways that were dependent on political ideology. In the control condition, liberals were lower on the desire -to -share reality than conservatives, like they found in the first two studies. But when desire to affiliate was increased by asking people to imagine that they felt lonely, it made liberals look more like conservatives in terms of their desire to share reality. So essentially, liberals' desire to share reality was increased by this experimental manipulation, but conservatives' desire to share a reality didn't change in that condition because it was already elevated. Likewise, when the desire to affiliate was decreased by asking people to imagine that they felt peopled out, it made conservatives look more like liberals in terms of their desired to share realty. So conservatives' desired to to share reality decreased to look like liberals, and liberals' desire to share reality didn't change.

0:38:23 Lindsey: Yeah, the downstream consequence of this change in desire to share reality was that political ideology no longer predicted perceptions of consensus or perceived in -group efficacy or greater intentions to vote following those affiliation primes. So essentially, they were able to temporarily eliminate the relationship between political ideology and desire to share reality and all these downstream consequences by manipulating desire to affiliate, which,

0:38:22 Thomas: So, Someone needs to get out more, is that, is that how we solve this? Conservatives go, go out more, liberals go, out I don't know, I can't Keep Track Of it.

0:38:57 Lindsey: Kind of what it sounds like, isn't it? Like, that desire to affiliate is like the reason why conservatives show this difference.

0:39:06 Thomas: It's Like a symptom, though, or something that we can treat, treat

0:39:09 Lindsey: Of the story, right? Like, past research would be consistent with this being part of the story, right? That, like, the desire to share reality is part of what you're doing to sort of meet these relational needs, and connect with others is to perceive that you have this consensus. We also talked about the fact that there are epistemic needs that feed this as well.

And if we had a good manipulation for the epistetic needs part of this, that would have the same effects as their manipulation of affiliation did. So I don't think it's the whole story, but it's probably part of it.

To sum up, these three studies provide evidence that conservatism is associated with this motivation to see one's reality as shared with others in the political in -group, which has downstream consequences on actual perceptions consensus, and therefore collective efficacy of one's political party, and therefore intentions to participate in collective political action through voting. I do think that these results are potentially pretty meaningful in a practical sense.

I think that we and a lot of people spend a lot time worrying about division on the left and how it affects our ability to get things done. And spend a ton of time worrying a lot about time worrying, about a related concern, about some messaging that you see sometimes from a specific portion of like lefty Twitter, that actually discourages voting in the context of what I think is a false dichotomy between voting and literally anything else that you want to do, which is fine, right?

The cards are stacked against people with left -leaning values in terms of how our election system is set up. And I totally understand the nihilism that some people experience about voting, but also do it anyway.

0:40:44 Lindsey: Like takes no time. And if you think it's pointless, then it's like two seconds of wasted time. And then you spend all the rest of your time doing whatever you want to do in terms of local organizing. But I think the clear take home of results like these is that perceptions of consensus and perceptions of collective efficacy are meaningful parts of the problem, potentially, that the left faces in terms of actually getting things done. And, to a self -fulfilling prophecy of how effective the left is at getting things is done. But these perceptions about consensus might also be fundamentally wrong. So, very brief bonus science nugget.

0:40:42 Thomas: Yeah, Yeah, Right, I, Was gonna say, yeah, that wasn't part of this science thingy, was it?

0:41:22 Lindsey: Was not. Nope. But it was a question I had, and I something that's relevant to it. So

0:41:27 Thomas: Wow. Do we need like a a musical sting, bonus science Thing, everybody, you get a science thing, You get it, science thing,

0:41:31 Lindsey: Yeah, it's like a third palp. It's Yeah, part of what contributes to this perception of lower consensus, and you brought this up at the very beginning of the the conversation, is sense that there are potentially greater ideological divisions on the left than the right. And, like, we can't get our shit together long enough to focus on what we do agree on, so that we can actually facilitate change, right? Steps toward incremental change. Was another paper that I found by Ondish and Stern.

And Stern, by the way, was the first author on this paper that we just discussed, that undermined this idea a little bit in a way that I think is interesting. So they analyzed 40 years of data from the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies that reflected the attitudes of Americans on more than 400 political issues. This was like tens of thousands of people, by the way. This massive amount of data that they're analyzing here. Political issues things included things like attitudes towards social, gun control, marriage equality, lots of things. And the take home from their findings is that the degree of consensus among U.S. liberals has actually been consistently higher than that among conservatives and moderates for like the past 40 years at

0:41:36 Thomas: Really?

0:42:47 Lindsey: Least. So this was like 70s through like the mid 2010s.

0:42:47 Thomas: Sorry, Okay, so I wonder, A, I wonder if this still holds up today. I don't know, probably. I mean, I guess the mid 2010s is not like that much different than now in terms of how liberals should be agreeing. Well, I don't know.

0:43:03 Lindsey: Yeah, I think their data went through like 2017 or something.

0:43:06 Thomas: Okay, okay. So, there's more consensus among liberals than conservatives, you're saying.

0:43:12 Lindsey: And I've got some sort of like qualifiers for that. But yes, and it seems to be consistent. Like that is a consistent difference that you see over the past 40 years. Also, this is a little more tentative, like some of their data is consistent with this and the other one is a little inconclusive, but it looks like it might be the case that the degree of consensus is actually increasing among liberals, both in an absolute sense and relative to conservatives and moderates, that like that gap is widening, but also like the absolute consensus itself might be increasing over the past little few years. That's interesting. That should give us some reason for hope in a couple of ways. Two important qualifications. In an absolute sense, consensus is generally low across all political parties. So we're not saying that consensus is high among liberals. There's a lot of disagreement. We're

0:43:13 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Because

0:43:59 Lindsey: Just saying that it's higher than what additionally, these aren't huge difference. It's only a matter of a few percentage points. But as the authors of this paper argue, even a consistent advantage of a Few percentage points could translate into really meaningful influences in society, right?

0:44:14 Thomas: Of the feedback loop.

0:44:15 Lindsey: Right. Well, I mean, in thinking about like national level elections, right, are plenty of races that are determined by pretty narrow margins. So if you have a advantage by a few points and you're using that effectively, I think that that actually can translate into moving the numbers on elections.

0:44:32 Thomas: Well, isn't that two different questions? Because if we're just talking about consensus among the left, that's totally independent of how many people live where, you know, right?

0:44:42 Lindsey: Well, that's – no, that's true. And we're always going to be hamstrung by – yeah.

0:44:46 Thomas: Electoral College.

0:44:48 Lindsey: Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? Not denying those realities, but I think the point about actual consensus is still a meaningful part of this story.

0:44:58 Thomas: Yeah. It's just so interesting. Baffling to me how that could be true. You know, is it just, oh, I know. Is it just the fact that like the right focuses way more on a couple of major things they do agree on, whereas we've got like so many different issues that are important to us that it feels like we agree less than them?

0:45:18 Lindsey: That could be it. I think that the, uh, strategy that they use in terms of messaging is to, well, not an inference. They say that that's their strategy. Yeah.

0:45:24 Thomas: Mean, if, yeah, like if abortion to them is the most important thing in the world and they have high agreement on that, but they disagree on a bunch of other stuff, it doesn't matter as much because they just play to their strengths. Yeah.

0:45:35 Lindsey: They that's exactly right.

0:45:37 Thomas: Okay. So maybe we ought to do that more.

0:45:37 Lindsey: Yeah. Everybody agrees on CRT, right? So let's, yeah, yeah, we should do that more. Um, yeah, I means, I, I that this was really interesting because I, my intuition was the same as yours. It was the opposite that we would see more division on the left side of the political spectrum. Yeah.

0:45:40 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. And it's the same, sorry, asking everybody the same questions, right? Same set of questions. Cause I'm, yeah, it is really baffling. I'm very by that result. And I was wondering if there was some like, you know, oh, the questions that they, you know measure, there's different granularity I could imagine of agreement or disagreement. Like you could, you could focus down really hard on an issue and get more disagreement than if you ask really broad questions. But if everybody's asked, answering the same set of questions and that wouldn't really matter, I guess.

0:45:55 Lindsey: These are all like from the yeah yeah Then that's held constant. That's

0:46:20 Thomas: Yeah. Interesting to

0:46:21 Lindsey: Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think, I think that there's some potential optimism in this, right? A small advantage on consensus, I think, could translate into a meaningful advantage in terms of of outcomes. But part of how that would happen is for people to know about that consensus, and then the downstream effects that that could have on collective efficacy and participation in collective action about

0:46:37 Thomas: Know about it. Yeah. So we need to form a broader consensus among the left about the fact that we have a consensus. Yes. OK, let's let's be consensus builders. Lobsterman, let'S, you know, it's

0:46:49 Lindsey: Consensus. Yeah, that's right. I'm trying. Yeah. Right. Being, vote. Tell your friends to vote. Oh, and this is another, I think, takeaway from this. If your friends say they're not going to vote, you should ostracize them, not for its own sake, but specifically because if you ostracized them, it might increase their desire to affiliate and therefore their need to share reality and therefore their intention to vote.

0:46:59 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Wow.

0:47:17 Lindsey: So that's my take home. Yeah.

0:47:19 Thomas: I love it.

0:47:28 Lindsey: Mm.

0:47:29 Thomas: I, anyway, but even more evidence of that. Well,

0:47:32 Lindsey: Yeah, the perception of consensus here, I suggests that that's a very meaningful thing to cultivate, a very important thing to motivate. Yeah.

0:47:39 Thomas: What an action -packed science thingy, and we're including a bonus science thing to boot. Great conclusions, they're great action items. Uh Really interesting, did not expect that last result, but uh, I think I think we've kind of made sense of it there. Wow.

0:47:50 Lindsey: I was surprised by that too Mm. -hm. Yeah, good stuff, good science thingy. Yeah.

0:47:55 Thomas: Well, uh, science thinging listeners, thanks for listening to the Science Thingy, and of course, support the show at patreon.com/seriouspod. We got it, we, you know, there's only so many, uh, Lindsey's got to buy palps, you know, in the palp market, it's taking a hit like everything else, you know, inflation in the pulp market is a big problem. So Help help Dr. Lindsay Osterman continue to bring us science thingies full-time. patreon.com/seriouspod, bonus stuff, we'll bring it to you, uh, soon, and it could involve a certain diet that was mentioned on the show. We'll see. All right, thanks so much for listening, everyone. We'll see you next time.

0:48:10 Lindsey: Mm. -hmm, fresh out of palps. Yeah

0:48:39 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com slash groups slash SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.

0:49:57 Lindsey: They are showing is that conservatives are. Well, shit, okay, yeah.

0:50:04 Thomas: No one knows, actually. To this day, no one knows what the study said.

0:50:10 Thomas: They publish it and they're like, your guess is as as good as mine, I don't know, it's too fucking complicated, we can't keep track of it, somebody take this off our hands. Yeah.

0:50:19 Lindsey: All right, so all right, so conservatives to