How Your Political Leanings Affect Your Views on Addiction
In a previous post, I shared some of Psychologist Kurt Gray’s research about vulnerable feelers and thinking doers. I also shared what this research [probably] says about views on drug addiction policy.
In this post, I’ll explain how political affiliation fits in with this line of research.
I again ask for your grace as I discuss political differences— and that you read my post on distributions. My hope is that these posts can help us understand one another.
I don’t particularly enjoy conflict or disharmony. So the idea of discussing political leanings is a little distressing to me. But, Psychology and Neuroscience Professor Dr. Kurt Gray, whose research I shared in a recent post, has uncovered some very interesting data about our political affiliations. And these data have helped me better understand why we have such different ideas about how to approach addiction clinically, pastorally, and in terms of policy.
To avoid controversy, I will obscure specific hot-button terms in this post. For example, I’ll use the terms
“Fonservatives” and “Frepubilicans”
“Fiberals” and “Femocrats.”
That should keep me out of hot water.
Now that I have protected myself from blowback, I’ll explain what Dr. Gray has discovered. I think he has found a key that unlocks why everyone sounds so sure (and so opposite) when they talk about addiction. I hope that understanding his insights could actually help us get past our tribal squabbling and do better when it comes to helping addicts and alcoholics.
First, a review of the two categories we place people in.
Dr. Gray’s research suggests we see people as being in one, but not both of these two categories. This is from Rob Henderson’s post:
Vulnerable feelers: This means someone or something is seen as able to feel pain, pleasure, fear, and other emotions. If we see someone as a vulnerable feeler, we’re more likely to want to protect them. People believe vulnerable feelers are emotional and easy to hurt, but not very skilled or able to plan. A newborn baby is a clear example of a vulnerable feeler.
Thinking doers: This means someone or something is good at planning, communicating, staying in control, and remembering things. Thinking doers are seen as capable and able to act in the world, but not very emotional. A successful CEO is a good example of a thinking doer. [CITE]
Where we all agree
Almost everyone, regardless of political affiliation, thinks babies are vulnerable feelers, i.e., they feel pain acutely and can’t fend for themselves. We almost all believe soldiers are thinking doers who don’t feel pain as acutely as others. We tend to believe the same about Asians. [Poor Rob, he’s Asian and a former U.S. soldier, we don’t worry too much about inflicting pain on a guy like him.]
Where we disagree
Where Fonservatives and Fiberals differ is on differences. By that I mean that Frebublicans tend to dismiss differences and Femocrats tend to amplify differences.
The first level of consequences for these differences is that Frepubilicas tend to believe we are all basically equal and should be treated as such. Fiberals, on the other hand, believe vulnerable feelers have almost no qualities of thinking doers, and vice versa. Thus, Fiberals see the world in terms of oppressors [thinking doers] and the oppressed [vulnerable feelers].
To see how this works out in real life, think about criminals and police officers. Fonservatives think police officers and criminals will feel similar amounts of pain if tasered or pepper-sprayed. Likewise, Fonservitives believe criminals and police officers are similar in the degree to which they can think, act, and be responsible for their choices. Thus, Fonservatives don’t see oppressors and the oppressed, they see humans. And they want to see humans held to similar standards of behavior.
This surprised me. After all, many of my teachers in High School were Fiberal Faby Foomers. They taught me that Fiberals were the group most concerned with equality. Fiberals just want to buy the world a Coke and teach it to sing in perfect harmony.
Fonservatives, on the other hand, spend their work hours overseeing factories that make Napalm and their off hours segregating schools in the South. They also really like nuking people who aren’t like them, right?
Nope.
Conservatives tend to believe we’re all pretty much the same in our experience of pain and our ability to make choices.
A trolley-load of problems and ebonics
Fiberals and Fonservatives make different choices when presented with the Trolley Problem. In the Trolley Problem, people are asked to imagine a runaway trolley headed toward a group of people. The person must choose to do nothing, or pull a switch that will change the course of the trolley to only kill one person. Many people struggle to pull the lever because it means that the resulting death didn’t just happen; they caused it.
Gray and his team changed up this classic experiment by manipulating the race of the people on the trolley tracks. When presented with the racialized trolley problem, it's the Fiberals who make the decision on the basis of race. For example, Fiberals are more likely to send the careening trolley to kill a hundred white musicians in order to protect one black person. Whereas, Conservatives show less bias in whether to sacrifice whites or blacks. And in a scenario where a single mortally wounded person must be sacrificed to save a lifeboat full of humans, Fiberals experience more distress when the mortally wounded person is black rather than white. [CITE]
Equally unequal
Fiberal’s choices on the racialized Trolley Problem make sense, given their view of the world. When they see disparities—and there are disparities in terms of educational outcomes, wealth, and health—they assume the disparities are caused by an oppressor-victim dynamic. Fiberals feel a desire to protect blacks because they see them as vulnerable feelers, exquisitely sensitive to pain. Likewise, they view whites as oppressors who are so capable at acting in the world that they have little excuse for their oppressive behavior. For Fiberals, blacks and whites are interlocking opposites. They are like Jack Sprat and his wife, one can eat only fat, the other only lean. Together, they lick the platter clean—vulnerable feelers feel all the feels, and thinking doers do all the doing. Nothing wasted, no confusing nuances or role reversals.
Fonservatives are less distressed by disparities because they view people more similarly. Thus, they believe marginalized groups have roughly similar abilities to think and act as privileged groups. It is as if Fonservitives are more comfortable letting the cookie crumble how it crumbles. This is just an analogy; there are no cookie experiments. But, one can easily imagine a Fonservitive figuring, “If your cookie falls apart, it doesn’t hurt you any more than it hurts me when that happens. Moreover, you are just as capable as I am of doing something about your crumbling cookies.”
In contrast, Fiberals are distressed when a vulnerable person’s cookie crumbles. They want to sweep away the broken cookie crumbs and give them a new cookie. In many cases, they want to provide extra cookies to the vulnerable groups—especially if extra cookies are taken from the thinking doers whom they believe won’t feel the pain of being ripped off because, you know, they’re wealthy tech billionaires, and if you prick them, they don’t actually bleed.
You can imagine why, for a liberal at the extreme tail of the distribution, fire-bombing a Tesla feels like a good idea. After all, the thinking doer who owns or makes the Tesla has been a real jerk to a bunch of vulnerable feelers—and the thinking doers don’t feel as much pain as the rest of us anyway.
What about addiction?
It’s a pretty easy extrapolation from these studies to assume that Fiberals will exaggerate the differences between addicts and non-addicts. They will see oppressors [The justice System] and the oppressed [Addicts and alcoholics]. They will favor lax enforcement because they believe addicts are vulnerable feelers who will experience the pain of punishment more acutely than others. They will also hold the addicts less responsible for their crimes because, as vulnerable feelers, addicts are presumed to be less capable of making choices or being held accountable for them. At an instinctual level, Fiberals believe the vulnerable feelers will need to be protected from thinking doers.
Fonservatives, on the other hand, will see the police and addicts as more or less the same. For conservatives, what’s good for the goose [police officer] is good for the gander [addict]. “You do the crime; you do the time” will often be their motto.
Because Fonservatives see people as generally equal in their experience of pain and in their ability to make choices, they kinda shrug their shoulders when addicts receive legal punishments: “I didn’t tell ya to get hooked on dope. So if you go to jail for distribution of controlled substances, that’s on you, pal.”
With an understanding of how Femocrats and Frebublicans differ in regard to thinking doers and vulnerable feelers, it’s pretty easy math to determine which group would be in favor of decriminalizing drugs and which would prefer harsher sentences.
Why distributions matter
Please see my post on distributions if you feel my generalizations are off base. The assertions in this current post are assertions based on distributions, which, if you remember my previous article, distributions:
Contain points on a continuum [most people are somewhere between decriminalization on one end and harsher sentences on the other]
Have a significant overlap [Some Fonservitives will feel more positive about decriminalization than some Fiberals and vice versa]
And the tails of the distributions really matter. [You will see policy impacted by the views of the extreme Fonservative or Fiberal.]
