Hat tip Chris M.
Guest Post by Paul Rosenberg
Politics makes people mean.
We always knew that, but if ever we said it, people passed it off as a trite complaint about one political party or the other. But now, thanks to a couple of researchers at the University of Michigan, we can prove it.
This new study was very cleverly set up so that the researchers could measure the empathy of Republicans and Democrats for each other, without using political questions. Here’s how they did it:
In their first experiment, the researchers recruited subjects on a cold winter day (some of them were outside, waiting at a freezing bus stop). They said that the test was on reading comprehension.
In one version of the test, they gave the subject a story to read about a left-wing, pro-gay-rights Democrat. This Democrat was, in the story, hiking through the woods on a cold winter day. In the other version the story was the same, except that it was about a right-wing, anti-gay-rights Republican. Only after the experiment did they ask the political leanings of the subjects.
In the second experiment they did the same thing, but they used thirst instead of cold. They fed the subjects salty foods and gave them no water; then they told a story about a man walking across a parched desert. Again, one version of the story featured a Democrat and the other a Republican.
You’d think that a thirsty guy would feel some level of sympathy for another thirsty guy, right? And normally, that would almost always be true, but it turned out that politics killed that natural sympathy.
Continue reading “What We Always Knew About Politics, But Couldn’t Prove”
