One Benefit of Making Summary Judgements
Those that are capable of summary judgments report higher rates of excellent mental health.
Republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to rate their mental health as excellent, according to data from the last four November Gallup Health and Healthcare polls.
Is it possible that nuanced understanding comes from insecurity? Out of fear of being incorrect the nuanced thinker refrains from assertion until they are certain of not being incorrect. The more generalized thinker is less concerned with being incorrect and happily asserts irrespective of being correct.
One thing for sure is that democratic ideology emphasize non-judgment while conservative ideology emphasize it. Many that are democratic no doubt find it compelling to join a group that is more interested in understanding then judging. Disinclination from being judged indicates insecurity about that which you are to be judge on. Well then, is it any wonder that the party of judgment has a higher rate of self reported excellent mental health? They have the confidence to judge themselves as excellent.
December 4th, 2007 at 11:13 am
or they’re all just self-absorbed assholes. You better believe that you’re smart and mentally stable - it may become self-fullfilling, after all.
December 4th, 2007 at 11:14 am
but, it is an interesting link that I might come back on occasionally (building your own traps, again, aren’t we, Steve)
December 4th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
Pay attention, it was a self-rating. People who gravitate towards the extremes in any given decisions gravitated towards the extreme when asked to make this decision? And you think that’s a significant result? It’s an artifact of the measure used. This is like research methods 101.
December 4th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Odd are you suggesting at least 40 percent of the population is the extreme?
December 4th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
No, YOU’RE suggesting that all republicans make unnuanced decisions, which implies that they would inherently take the most extreme option on a linear scale when asked to make a judgment.
December 4th, 2007 at 8:44 pm
Hmmm, making an extreme decision no so much, making an actual decision, about right.
Conservatives are more likely to make a decision without much review while a liberal is more likely to punt that decision. I should also like to come away with the language of ‘all’. I was talking more about ideology every single person that would call themselves republican.
December 5th, 2007 at 1:33 am
Extremem is probably the wrong term, unnuanced is the phrasing you used. And given that these scales ussually go something like ‘Healthy’, ‘mostly healthy’, ‘Somewhat healthy’, ‘Somewhat unhealthy’, and ‘unhealthy’, the least nuanced choices are teh ends of the scales (healthy and unhealthy). Therefore, you’d expect people who don’t like to give nuanced answers (which is how you’re characterizing republicans, in general) to give one of those answers, whereas you’d expect Democrats ( who you characterize as employing more nuance) to use the entire scale, and thus give fewer total ‘healthy’ responses.
December 5th, 2007 at 2:41 am
Interesting point.
However the scale only offered three choices. Nevertheless the argument that conservatives by definition will overlook the more nuanced option does not explain why they are choosing excellent over poor in larger numbers. That is to say that if my characterization is strictly about ignoring middle, or ‘nuanced’ options, then one would expect to conservatives give greater self reports of poor mental health when compared to democrats.
This all goes back to the point which is not that conservatives are more ‘extreme’ but comfortable making decisions in the context they find themselves in. Give a conservative a set of conditions and they are more likely to judge that scenario compared to a liberal. A liberal is more likely to challenge the context before giving a judgment.
It seems to me this distinction is often driven by confidence. Confidence to be incorrect. A conservative lays out a judgment comfortable with knowing revision may be necessary. Liberals are uncomfortable with judging until they are certain revision is not necessary.
Confident people like themselves more. No doubt in part because they judge themselves to be awesome. Personally I can’t remember the last time I didn’t judge myself to be awesome.
What about you? One the whole, would you say your awesome?
December 5th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
Heh, I’m way awesome. Of course, because I have nuance, I wouldn’t try to perform open-heart surgery on anyone, because I’m not awesome at that. By your characterisation of the summary-judgement position, it sounds like you would try it, because you’re awesome after all, and then shrug your shoulders and happily re-evaluate your position after it didn’t work.
December 5th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Sounds about right.
Of course I would also dismiss out of hands letting someone that thought they were awesome do open heart surgery on me while someone like you would consider it before ultimately deciding against it.
December 5th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
Why does your heart surgeon need to be an expert Steve?
December 5th, 2007 at 7:39 pm
I like this post because it at least has the foundation of being remotely convincing - it at least calls upon some data and doesn’t abjectly fail to intelligently interpret it (although I would advise caution in regards to possible self-assessment bias).
That said, correlation with benefits among believers is not in itself a conclusive indication of the superiority of a belief system, is it? What if individuals who believed in UFOs were found to have greater self-confidence? More to the point: what if individuals with an unshaking commitment to a particularly extreme strain of religion (for example, so-called Islamofascists) were found to have a more positive assessment of their futures than the public at large? Would this data persuade you to convert?
December 6th, 2007 at 12:17 am
He doesn’t. Someone that I trust to do the heart surgery does not need to be an expert. I only need to trust that he is capable of doing the surgery.
December 6th, 2007 at 2:36 am
And if you’re trust turned out to be misplaced, you’d just shrug your shoulders and happily re-evaluate your position after it didn’t work.
December 6th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Technically, in this case, I would be dead, but yeah thats about right.
And it turns out during your deliberation the opportunity passed, you’d just adopt an air of indifference so as to not let on you are disappointed.
December 6th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
So, lemme get this straight: if you required heart surgery within a month, and you didn’t personally know any trained heart surgeons, you would (instead of going to an expert) go to whichever of your unqualified, untrained friends you happened to trust most in that domain?
I guess they wouldn’t have to be completely untrained, though. Maybe you would go to someone who has experience euthanizing and dissecting lab rats, and hope those skills generalize to anesthesiology and heart surgery, respectively?
Incidentally, just going to an expert probably involves less deliberation.
December 6th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Who the fuck said that? I looked everywhere for the word ‘required’ in all of the comments except the last one and I couldn’t find it anywhere. Its like Jamie calling me a bigot. Just make shit up and then criticize me for the scarecrow argument. Sigh….
By the way, pulling things out of context to make a point gets so so so so so old. Impossible to have a discussion with you constantly taking things out of context merely to make me look wrong. Step aside the grown ups are trying to have an adult conversation.
December 6th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
Oh, I’m sorry, I guess we were really talking about elective heart surgery all along.
December 6th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Well lookie here. An argument you took out of context.
December 6th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
I wasn’t quoting you out of context or even quoting you at all, I was merely offering my apologies for misunderstanding the type of heart surgery to which you were originally referring.
December 6th, 2007 at 10:05 pm
I was referring to that which you were apologizing for.
December 7th, 2007 at 10:11 am
Would it make you happier if I replace ‘required’ with ‘required/desired’ within my post?
December 7th, 2007 at 11:06 am
So then you acknowledge out of context. Being able to see the problem is the first step.
December 7th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Interesting how you don’t answer my question and instead yammer nonsensically. Can you even point out where I misquoted you or quoted you out of context here?