Thursday, October 02, 2008

Two Out of Five Ain't Bad

I found this video at Jayananda's place, and despite my intentions to go to bed early last night, sat and was fascinated for the nearly 20 minutes of its runtime. Quite a feat for someone with my truncated attention span.



The speaker, Jonathan Haidt, examines the differences in the underlying morality of conservatives and liberals; I thought it was pretty illuminating. Then again, I'm a liberal, so what works for me might not work for you. But if you have a few minutes, give it a look and let me know what you think.

Rob

4 comments:

Jeff said...

That was pretty fascinating.

Rob said...

I liked the video but here's something to ponder:

Why were there so few conservatives in the AUDIENCE?

He talks about how liberals score higher on the open mindedness, willingness to try new things scale.

So automatically, liberals are more open to his talk, and learning about it. Would this talk have the same effect of fascination and curiousity on a conservative? Or would they discount it as part of liberal education brainwashing? Because I often feel that conservatism is reinforced by lack of education.

Either that or it would just make a conservative person's head explode....

What do you think? Or am I not stepping out of my moral matrix?

--*Rob

Rob S. said...

I think he covers the reason there weren't more conservatives in the audience when he puts up the description of the TED Talks in the beginning. It's loaded with words most liberals would find attractive, but most conservatives would not (according to his findings, anyway). So the audience self-selected liberal.

Rob said...

I posted it on a message board for my town that skews conservative and all the conservatives pretty much discounted it as "liberal hogwash". I have no way of knowing if they watched the whole thing, but it pretty much confirmed what I wrote above. The open minded quotient is much lower, and they do not seek a deeper understanding of what makes us tick to begin with.

--*Rob