https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nVKUfF02Sjk
And so I’ve told you a little bit about the things that distinguish liberals from conservatives, right? The conservatives are high in conscientiousness, especially orderliness, and low in trade openness. And so that means a conservative is someone who puts things in boxes, puts the boxes in order, and doesn’t like them to be messed up. Right? So they like the borders between things to remain determinate, and, and, and, what would you say? And inviolable. And I think that’s true at every level, from the conceptual all the way up to the political. I think that the fundamental political question, and I think this is why the temperaments align across these political dimensions, is whether the borders between things should be open or closed. You see this reflected worldwide right now in the arguments about immigration, right? Because the liberal types are saying, open the gates, and the conservatives are saying, wait, you don’t know what you’re inviting in. And you might say, well, who’s right? And the answer is, you don’t know. That’s the thing. Because sometimes the right answer is, open the gates, these are interesting people, we could trade with them, we could learn from each other. And sometimes the answer is, don’t bother, what’s going to come in is going to wipe you out and kill you. And really do it. I mean, so, here’s an example. This is why I think orderliness is associated with disgust sensitivity. And it’s one of the determining factors of conservative political belief. What happened when the Europeans came to North America? What happened when the Spaniards came to North America? 95% of the Native Americans died. Why? Because the Spaniards brought illness. Smallpox, measles, chickenpox. All these things that the Native Americans had absolutely no resistance to. There were hardly any diseases at all in North and South America. The Spaniards showed up within 50 to 100 years, 19 out of 20 of the Native Americans were dead. You never know what people are bringing with them. And so what that means is that, how should you respond to people who are outside of your circle of familiarity? Well, the answer is, one, they might kill you. In all sorts of ways. Two, they might bring with them things to trade, they’re of inestimable value. So you’re stuck, it’s like, how the hell are you going to reconcile that problem? And the answer is, well, we reconcile it temperamentally, roughly speaking. So half the people are temperamentally wired up to say, no, no, no, let’s keep the damn boxes closed. Took a long time to pack everything in there and to get it into order. And the liberals say, well, wait a minute, you don’t know if you’ve got things in the right boxes to begin with. The things that you’re keeping in there are getting stale and old, and maybe we need some new ideas and new people to rejuvenate the situation. It’s like, that’s political discussion. And then political discussion has to proceed, because there’s no way of solving that problem except by discussing it. So, well, how does that relate to agreeableness? We also looked at political correctness. And so here’s an interesting thing. Purely from a scientific perspective, you might ask yourself, if you talk about political correctness, one of the things that the people who tend to be labeled as politically correct say is, There’s no such thing as political correctness, it’s just a pejorative label that people who are opposed to those views impose on a set of beliefs to demonize it. Perfectly reasonable objection. And you never know, it might be true. But the thing is, psychometrically, you can solve that problem, and you solve it the same way that you solve the problem of what constitutes human personality. So this is the way we tried to solve it. You can think about it methodologically, because that’s how you should think about it. The first thing we did was collect a very large number of statements from press accounts that seemed to indicate what people generally refer to as political correctness. So we had a small team of people combing media reports to come out with opinions or attitudes that looked like they were characteristic of the differentiation between politically correct people and people who aren’t politically correct. So we got about 400 statements like that. And what you want to do is, you imagine that there’s a core set of beliefs and statements that people are defining in a particular way. You’re trying to get a handle on what that is, and even if it exists. What you do is over sample it. If you can find questions that might even tangentially be related to the phenomena in question, you include those. Because the statistics will take care of the excess. Okay, so then what you do is you take your 400 items, roughly speaking, and you get people to register the degree to which they agree or disagree with them. Get a thousand people to do that. And then you subject that to a factor analysis. And what the factor analysis does is tell you how those questions clump. Now, they might not clump. So for example, you could do a factor analysis of a set of questions, and you could find that there are 200 factors. Let’s say 400 items. 200 factors. And none of them, there’s no big set of questions that are clumping together. And then you say, well, there’s no evidence here that there is a single underlying phenomena that unifies those questions that you could reasonably characterize with a name. Well, that isn’t what we found. We found that there were two dimensions of political correctness. One of them looked like liberalism, except that the people who were politically correct, in addition to being liberal, were very high in trait agreeableness. And agreeableness has almost nothing to do with the classic liberal-conservative divide. It’s weakly related in that conservatives are more compassionate than liberals. Sorry, liberals are more compassionate than conservatives. The difference isn’t huge. And conservatives are more polite than liberals. And the difference isn’t huge. So those are the two aspects of agreeableness. If you put them together, they cancel each other out, and so on average, conservatives and liberals don’t differ in agreeableness. But political correctness did clump together into two categories. PC liberalism, we call it PC authoritarianism, the PC liberals were high in openness, high in verbal intelligence, and high in agreeableness. And the second group was PC authoritarians. And they were also high in agreeableness, but they were high in orderliness, and the correlation with that was negative in relationship to verbal intelligence. So we found that there were two categories of political correctness, that it does in fact exist, but that it’s a very unstable construct. Because factor one, which was PC liberalism, and factor two, which was PC authoritarianism, were only correlated at point one. And so what it indicates, and this is our prediction, roughly speaking from the lab, is to the degree that there’s unity, so to speak, on the politically correct left, it’ll fragment into two groups. One will be the PC liberals, and the other will be the PC authoritarians, because although they’re united by their tendency to agreeableness, they’re not united by other temperamental traits, nor in their core beliefs. It’s the PC authoritarian types, for example, who are very obsessed with language control. And it’s funny that it’s agreeableness, I’ve really been thinking about that. Again, this is a hypothesis in development, but I think what’s happening is that your temperamental proclivity allows you to lay out a kind of radical simplification on the world. That’s part of the advantage of having a temperament. So if you’re a conscientious person, the world is a place to go out there and work. If you’re an open person, the world is a place to go out there and discover new ideas and do artistic things. If you’re an agreeable person, the world is a place to go out there and establish intimate relationships. So they’re simplifying perspectives, and simplifying personalities. They’re the manner in which you’re adapted to a particular niche. I think what you see in agreeableness, in relationship to political belief, is a proclivity for people to divide the world into defenseless infants and predatory oppressors. And that that’s blasted forward onto the political landscape, and things are conceptualized along that temperamental variable. So, anyways, that’s where we’re at with regards to the analysis of political belief.